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Sovereign Creations: Pan-Arabism And Political Order In Syria And Iraq
 0801431689, 9780801431685

Table of contents :
Contents
Tables
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable
Part I Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954
1 Prelude: The Postwar Settlement
2 Foundations of the Iraqi State
3 Foundations of the Syrian State
Part II Radical Unionism: 1954-1967
4 New Cleavages
5 The Struggle for Syria: 1954-1957
6 The Road to Unity: 1957-1958
7 The Fall of the Hashemites in Iraq
8 Nasser and Qasim
9 Renewed Unionism: 1963-1964
10 The Closing of an Era: 1964-1967
11 Legacies of the Praetorian Era
Part III The Post-Unionist State in Iraq and Syria
12 Saddam's State
13 Assad's State
Conclusion
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Sovereign Creations

Malik Mufti

Sovereign Creations PAN-ARABISM AND POLITICAL ORDER IN SYRIA AND IRAQ

Cornell University Press Ithaca and London

Copyright O 1996 by Cornell University

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. First published 1996 by Cornell University Press. Printed in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mufti, Malik. Sovereign creations : pan-Arabism and political order in Syria and Iraq / Malik Mufti, p. cm. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-8014-3168-9 (alk. paper) 1. Syria—Politics and government. 2. Iraq—Politics and government. 3. Panarabism. 4. Arab countries—Politics and government. I. Title. DS98.2.M84 1996 320.9567—dc2o 95-50407

© The paper in this book meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences— Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.

Contents

List of Tables

vii

Acknowledgments Abbreviations

viii ix

Introduction: The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

Part I

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

1 Prelude: The Postwar Settlement 2 Foundations of the Iraqi State 3 Foundations of the Syrian State Part II

19 22 43

Radical Unionism: 1954-1967

4 New Cleavages

63

5 The Struggle for Syria: 1954-1957 6 The Road to Unity: 1957-1958

65 82

Contents

VI

7 The Fall of the Hashemites in Iraq 8 Nasser and Qasim

121

9 Renewed Unionism: 1963-1964 10 The Closing of an Era: 1964-1967 11 Legacies of the Praetorian Era Part III

99 143 168

182

The Post-Unionist State in Iraq and Syria

12 Saddam's State 13 Assad's State

197 231

Conclusion

253

Bibliography

265

Index

277

Tables

1. Composition of the Iraqi elite: 1920-1936 25 2. Infrastructural development in Iraq: 1950-1970 185 3. School enrollment ratios in Iraq: 1950-1970 185 4. Infrastructural development in Syria: 1945-1970 188 5. School enrollment ratios in Iraq: 1950-1980 203 6. Infrastructural development in Iraq: 1950-1980 204 7. Pan-Arab unity projects involving Syria and Iraq: 1946-1970 256 8. Pan-Arab unity projects involving Syria and Iraq: After 1970 258 9. Syrian and Iraqi trade with Arab countries as percent of total trade 263

Acknowledgments

I begin by thanking Stanley Hoffmann and Jorge Dominguez, whose counsel proved invaluable as I struggled in the early days of this project to put together a coherent argument. I am also grateful to Nadav Safran, who pointed me in this direction to begin with, as well as several other people who read parts or all of the manuscript at various stages of its development and whose comments and criticisms improved it greatly: Michael Barnett, Houchang Chehabi, Robert Devigne, Leila Fawaz, F. Gregory Gause III, Frances Hagopian, Peter Hall, Steven Heydemann, Robert Keohane, Yuen Foong Khong, Eberhard Kienle, Gayane Karen Merguerian, Theda Skocpol, Bassam Tibi, Steve Yetiv, and two anony­ mous reviewers for Cornell University Press. I also express my gratitude to the Committee on International Peace and Security of the Social Science Research Council for its generous financial and institutional support in awarding me an SSRC-MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in International Peace and Security. In this re­ gard special thanks are due once again to Steve Heydemann, this time wearing his administrative hat at the SSRC, for steering me safely through a thicket of practical obstacles. In addition, for his confidence in this book and for his help in the final alterations that made it fit for publication, I thank Roger Haydon at Cornell University Press. Finally, I honor my parents, whose love and support—in this en­ deavor as in all others—I could not have done without. M. M.

Abbreviations

A bbreviations are u sed in th e notes to identify a source after th e initial com plete reference:

APD

al-Watha’iq al-'Arabiyya [Arab Political Documents], 1963-1980. Beirut: Al­ ja m ia al-Amerikiyya fi Beirut, n.d.

BFOD U nited Kingdom, Public Records Office, Foreign Office Docum ents FO 371 (1958-1960). CDAU Yawmiyyat wa Watha’iq al-Wihda al-lArabiyya [Chronology and Documents of Arab Unity], 1979-1985. Beirut: M arkaz Dirasat al-W ihda al-‘Arabiyya, 1980-1986. CSS

U nited N ations, Compendium of Social Statistics.

GFSY

International M onetary Fund, Government Finance Statistics Yearbook.

ISA

Iraq, Annual Abstract of Statistics.

MECS Middle East Contemporary Survey SSA

Syria, Statistical Abstract.

UNSY U nited N ations, Statistical Yearbook. USDD The Declassified Documents Reference System. W ashington, D.C.: Carrollton Press (later Research Publications International), 1975- . Microfiche. YNAS

U nited N ations, Yearbook of National Accounts Statistics.

Introduction: The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

Pan-Arabism is an ideal that ignited passions and dominated politics in the Middle East throughout the 1950s and 1960s. It is an ideal, moreover, that has reemerged periodically in subsequent years. What explains both the persistence of pan-Arab initiatives and their near complete failure? What does the drive toward integral unity say about the domestic and foreign imperatives of the governments that pur­ sue it? Very few books in English focus primarily on such questions, and none traces the evolution of unionist behavior over an extended period of time.1Among the reasons for this lack of interest are the observation that past attempts to unify Arab states have ended in failure and the suspicion that their protagonists were insincere all along. Both observa-1 1. Two exceptions—Yehoshua Porath's In Search of Arab Unity: 1930-1945 (London, 1986) and Malcolm Kerr's The Arab Cold War: Gamal cAbd al-Nasir and His Rivals, 19581970 (London, 1971)—both cover relatively short spans of time, the former a fifteenyear period before most Arab states (including Syria) even became independent. Numerous scholars have of course taken into account the effects of pan-Arabism on various aspects of regional politics. For an insightful discussion of its role in Arab intellec­ tual life, see Fouad Ajami, The Arab Predicament: Arab Political Thought and Practice since 1967 (Cambridge, 1981). For its effects on interstate relations, see, to take just two examples, F. Gregory Gause III, "Sovereignty, Statecraft and Stability in the Middle East," Journal of International Affairs 45 (Winter 1992), 441-469; and Michael Barnett, "Institutions, Roles, and Disorder: The Case of the Arab States System," International Studies Quarterly 37 (September 1993), 271-296.

2

Introduction

tion and suspicion are valid, but I suggest that the unity projects are worth studying nonetheless because they reveal a great deal about the constraints encountered by Arab leaders as they embarked on the difficult task of state building as well as the fateful strategies they formulated in response. "Unity projects" refers to voluntary agreements between independent Arab governments. It does not include forcible "mergers" such as Iraq's annexation of Kuwait in 1990. Nor does it include agreements entered into by actors who do not represent their country's top leadership such as opposition movements or second-echelon officials hoping to supplant their superiors. Nor, finally, does it include unions of entities not previously independent (such as the establishment of the United Arab Emirates in 1971). I have been able to identify a total of seventeen pan-Arab unity projects defined in this way—ten involving Syria and Iraq as well as seven others: Libya-Egypt (1972), Libya-Tunisia (1974), Libya-Morocco (1984), Libya-Sudan (1988), and North Yemen-South Yemen (1972, 1979, 1990). There is of course nothing surprising about a powerful country with expansionist ambitions seeking to unite with vulnerable neighbors. What requires explanation is the weaker partner's voluntary acquies­ cence. My central argument is that there is an inverse relationship between the stability of a regime (the particular individual or collection of individuals in power at a given time) and the likelihood that it will consider ceding its country's sovereignty to more powerful foreign actors. It is the inability of ruling elites to consolidate their hold on power that has pushed them in a pan-Arab direction in search of legiti­ macy and support. Conversely, as the development of political institutions has reduced domestic instability in a number of Arab countries, the desire of their leaders to pursue unity projects has subsided. Thus my analysis has as its subject a secular transformation in regional politics: the story of pan-Arabism is the story of the emergence and consolidation of sover­ eign and efficacious states in the Arab world. I intend to investigate this evolution by focusing on two countries with rich histories of insta­ bility and unionism—Syria and Iraq—to see how the creation of political order at home related to the articulation of national interest abroad. It might be evident from this introduction that I intend to treat panArabism primarily as an instrument of policy makers rather than as a popular ideological objective in its own right. This is not to deny that

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

3

the arbitrary division of the Middle East by Western powers after World War I unleashed pan-Arab sentiment as a potent force in the region's political culture, claiming the allegiance of individuals at both the mass and elite levels while undermining the legitimacy of the Ottoman Em­ pire's various successor states. But the mere existence of transnational feelings fails to explain why Syria engaged in so many unity schemes over the years while Jordan did not, although pan-Arabism permeated the political culture of both countries equally. Nor does it explain why unity projects took place at certain times but not at others; why, for example, Syria and Egypt established the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958 and not in 1957 or 1959. While acknowledging, therefore, that pan-Arab sentiment has—at times and to varying degrees—been a reality that political elites take into account in their calculations, I have chosen to focus on the question: under what conditions do Arab rulers decide to tap into this sentiment? The answer lies at the intersection of two broad subfields of political science: international relations and comparative politics.

The International Relations Argument

A major cleavage in international relations theory centers on the ques­ tion of whether external factors or internal ones are more salient in the shaping of foreign policy. Proponents of aussenpolitik typically treat all polities as functionally similar entities interacting in an international environment where the distribution of power is the primary determi­ nant of behavior. Proponents of innenpolitik, by contrast, point to spe­ cific characteristics of a polity such as its historical legacies, cultural attitudes, economic relations, or prevailing form of government to ex­ plain its foreign policy behavior.2 Another way of expressing this dis­ tinction would be to say that the first approach privileges one general type of actor in international affairs—the rational, unitary state reacting to external threats and opportunities—while the second posits a wide variety of actors, including civilizations, classes, and political factions as well as states. Stephen Walt applied the first approach to Middle Eastern politics 2. The two notions are discussed in Fareed Zakaria, "Realism and Domestic Politics: A Review Essay," International Security 17 (Summer 1992), 177-198.

4

Introduction

in his important 1987 book. The Origins of Alliances.3 In a modification of Kenneth Waltz's neorealist balance-of-power theory, which he called balance-of-threat, Walt argued that states react primarily to external threats—operationalized in terms of aggregate power, offensive power, geographic proximity, and aggressive intentions—in the international system. Armed with this conceptual apparatus, he looked at thirty-six alliances involving eighty-six separate alliance choices that took place in the Middle East from 1955 to 1979 and came up with findings that confirmed neorealist expectations: external threats turned out to be the most frequent cause of alliances; balancing against prevailing threats rather than bandwagoning with them was the usual response; and nonsystemic factors such as regime ideology and transnational penetra­ tion ("the manipulation of one state's domestic political system by another") played a minimal role.4 Walt's focus on external factors is particularly useful when describing how the emergence of regional threats (pre-1967 Egypt, post-1967 Israel) generated countervailing coalitions and created opportunities for super­ power involvement. It also helpfully highlights continuities in regional relations that cannot be explained by ideology or domestic politics: the close ties between Jordan and Iraq that have withstood drastic regime changes in the latter country, for example, or the long-standing rivalry between Egypt and Iraq. Walt's analysis falls short, however, in ex­ plaining the unity projects that dominated inter-Arab relations during the decade following 1955. Walt did not distinguish between alliances involving sovereign states on the one hand and formal unity agreements on the other, viewing the distinction as simply a stylistic one. A closer look at the eight unity projects he identified, however, suggests otherwise; as a category, they do not fit into his theoretical framework. By Walt's own account, only three of the eight cases were alignments formed in response to external threats.5 As he himself demonstrated, moreover, in two of those three cases (the tripartite union of 1963 and the bilateral union later in the 3. Stephen Walt, The Origins of Alliances (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987). 4. Ibid., p. 46. 5. Ibid., p. 150. Confusingly, Egypt is identified here as the external threat that pro­ voked the 1963 tripartite union with Syria and Iraq in which it itself participated. More­ over, one of the eight unity plans mentioned by Walt, that between the UAR and Iraq in July 1958 (p. 80), is not a proper case because the two governments never actually agreed to unite (see Chapter 7 below).

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

5

same year), the rulers of Syria and Iraq were responding not to external threats but to domestic challenges, albeit supported by Jamal cAbd alNasser,6 Finally, Walt described only one of the eight unity plans as an instance of balancing: the Iraqi-Jordanian federation of 14 February 1958, a panicked response to the creation of the UAR two weeks earlier. Even in this case, however, the operative threat was not external attack but domestic rebellion.7 Pan-Arab unionism clearly had more to do with internal struggles and transnational penetration than with imbalances of power—or threat—in the international environment. If unity projects played as significant a role in Arab politics as I suggest, therefore, subsuming them under the broader rubric of interstate alliance behavior obscures an important gap in Walt's explanatory framework. That is why his analysis illuminates the second half of the period covered better than it does the first (1955-1967), when unionism was most intense. The source of the problem is evident: Walt's application of neorealist theory to a set of situations in which one of its key assumptions—that unitary states are the central actors in international politics—does not hold. Rational states, after all, do not voluntarily cede their sovereignty away, as Syria and Iraq appeared to do so often during the 1950s and 1960s. Rather, the unity projects are best understood not as alliances between states but as elite alignments cutting across state boundaries. Could it be, then, that pan-Arabism is better explained by the regional integration theories that looked hopefully to a post-World War II Eu­ rope where transnational alignments gradually eroded state sover­ eignty? Even in their most optimistic phase, however, theorists such as Ernst Haas and Karl Deutsch insisted on four crucial conditions without which political integration would be impossible: a prolonged period of complex economic interaction to generate "spillovers" and interdependence; the existence of effective state institutions capable of adapting to new needs and demands; political pluralism (or, in Deutsch's case, a broadening of elites); and elite value complementar­ ity.8 Only the last of these conditions prevailed in the Arab world during the heyday of unionism. In the words of two analysts: " 'Arab 6. Ibid., pp. 83-84. 7. Ibid., p. 287. 8. Robert Keohane and Joseph Nye, Jr., "International Interdependence and Integra­ tion," in Handbook of Political Science, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson W. Polsby (Reading, Mass., 1975), 8:379-380.

6

Introduction

Union' . . . is dearly unlikely from the perspective of integration the­ ory."9Walt's neorealist framework fails to account for pan-Arabism not because the state in Syria and Iraq had already been transcended by the 1950s and 1960s but rather because it had not developed enough. This argument lies at the heart of the assaults on neorealism mounted from the innenpolitik camp. Steven David, for example, has argued that unlike their counterparts in the developed world, who typically form alliances to balance only against external threats. Third World leaders engage in "omnibalanting" against both external and internal threats.101 Why the distinction? Because omnibalandng "theory rests on the as­ sumptions that leaders are weak and illegitimate and that the stakes for domestic politics are very high—conditions that are much more common in the Third World than elsewhere."11Replacing unitary states with embattled elites as the primary protagonists of Third World align­ ments makes it possible to explain otherwise surprising foreign policy behavior: "Since the dominant goal of Third World leaders is to stay in power, they will sometimes protect themselves at the expense of the interests of the state."12 Although David did not deal specifically with pan-Arabism, the rele­ vance of his approach for unity projects is evident. In this book I hope to demonstrate that when Arab leaders acted in a manner inconsistent with state interests by agreeing to cede national sovereignty to foreign partners, they did so precisely because of their inability to establish themselves as the autonomous and legitimate representatives of the state. To present the argument more formally, Arab governments will be shown to have initiated unity projects for one of two categories of motives: expansionist,- to incorporate the prospective partner or at least bring it under one's sphere of influence; and defensive, to ward off domestic or foreign threats to the regime. 9. Ibid., p. 380. 10. Steven R. David, "Explaining Third World Alignment," World Politics 43 (January 1991), 233-256; and Choosing Sides: Alignment and Realignment in the Third World (Baltimore, 1991). 11. David, "Explaining Third World Alignment," p. 236. 12. Ibid. Similar arguments are made by Barry Buzan, "People, States, and Fear: The National Security Problem in the Third World," in National Security in the Third World: The Management of Internal and External Threats, ed. Edward E. Azar and Chung-in Moon, pp. 14-43 (Aldershot, 1988); and Mohammed Ayoob, "Unravelling the Concept: 'National 5000111/ in the Third World," in The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World, ed. Bahgat Korany, Paul Noble, and Rex Brynen, pp. 31-55 (Basingstoke, 1993).

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

7

It is theoretically possible that two regimes overestimate each other's vulnerability and initiate expansionistically motivated unity attempts before one side or the other realizes its error. But this is a rare occur­ rence; the only possible exception is the murky 1974 unity accord be­ tween Tunisia and Libya. Usually, unity agreements occur when at least one of the sides is acting defensively. This can happen in one of three ways: (1) A vulnerable regime seeks to neutralize domestic opponents by agreeing to unite with an expansionist partner. (2) Both sides respond to domestic challenges by resorting to defen­ sive unionism. The challenges must be domestic because external threats would necessitate only an alliance between the threatened parties, not a formal union. Often, the ruling elites in both coun­ tries are fighting off opponents who are supported by a third (expansionist) power. (3) A regime facing a dangerous external threat may be obliged by an expansionist potential ally to agree to a unification accord as a condition for its support. Only the third of these scenarios contradicts my contention that panArab unionism is related to the domestic vulnerability of regimes. Evi­ dence presented in subsequent chapters will demonstrate, however, that most unity pacts involving Iraq and Syria can be explained by the first two models. But why is defensive unionism an attractive strategy for elites trying to consolidate their hold on power? Unity projects can provide’many benefits for a beleaguered regime, especially during its earliest and most vulnerable days. First, they mobilize popular pan-Arab sentiment on behalf of the regime, especially if it is confronting challengers es­ pousing rival ideologies (such as communism). Second, they provide justification for administrative reshuffles that neutralize domestic oppo­ nents. On several occasions, for example, Syrian leaders agreed to put their armed forces under Egyptian or Iraqi command in order to dilute the power of ambitious Syrian officers. Third, they enlist the support of the prospective partner's local clients: unionist governments in Syria and Iraq were rewarded with the backing of Nasser's partisans as they battled their communist foes during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Fourth, they make available to the unionist regime all the military.

Introduction

8

intelligence, and financial resources of the prospective partner. Thus, Iraq's 1964 unity accord with Egypt justified the arrival of Egyptian troops to prop up cAref's regime. Finally, unity projects may be neces­ sary to counter attempts by challenger elites to push for union with a foreign patron of their own. By its very nature, however, defensive unionism is a short-term solution to the problem of regime consolidation. Having neutralized its domestic rivals, the ruling elite quickly begins to chafe at the atten­ tions of its prospective partner. Throughout the unity discussions, typically, it has argued for as loose an association as possible, a "federa­ tion" or "confederation" that preserves maximum national sovereignty while still providing the benefits outlined above. As soon as the danger at home subsides, it finds a reason to pull out of the discussions alto­ gether. Indeed, only two pan-Arab unity projects ever got beyond the talking stage: the UAR from 1958 to 1961 (itself the unintended outcome of a series of blunders by Syrian leaders; see Chapter 6 below) and the latest Yemeni experiment initiated in 1990. Because of its focus on regime instability as a catalyst of alliance behavior, then, David's omnibalancing theory appears to explain panArab unionism much better than Walt's balance-of-(extemal-)threat ap­ proach. Unfortunately, it also explains pan-Arab unionism better than some of the case studies David himself put forward. Anwar Sadat's turn to the United States in the early 1970s in an effort to regain Sinai from Israel, for example, can be described as balancing against interned threats only through the most circuitous logic: "The Israeli threat stemmed not from Israel itself but from the effect of the continuing Israeli occupation of Egyptian land on various Egyptian groups."13 However much domestic unhappiness it generated, Israel's occupation of Sinai surely remained a primarily external problem for Sadat. His response to it—aligning with Washington—is therefore readily explica­ ble by Walt's framework. Once again, theory has been misapplied: omnibalancing describes pan-Arab unionism during the 1950s and 1960s better than it does the more conventional regional relations characterizing subsequent de­ cades. David's depiction of Third World states as "artificial constructs" that if anything are getting weaker obscured the likelihood of state formation and, consequently, of progressively more "state-like" foreign 13. David, Choosing Sides, p. 185.

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

9

policy behavior as well.14 Taking to heart J. P. Nettl's dictum that the state be treated "as a conceptual variable/' I shall attempt to correct this deficiency by tracing the evolution of "stateness" in two countries, Syria and Iraq, where the problems identified by David were most acute.15 This approach will enable me to show that the emergence of stronger state institutions in both countries during the 1970s has indeed given rise to a newer style of foreign policy, one aimed at securing and enhancing national sovereignty and thus one that conforms more and more closely to the behavior predicted by neorealists. My aim, then, is not to disprove either Walt's or David's theory but to add a dynamic component that applies each to its proper historical context. The historidzed approach to international relations theorizing proposed here links the development of foreign policy behavior to the development of domestic political institutions. Since I argue that the transition from foreign policies driven primarily by internal considera­ tions (à la David) to foreign policies driven primarily by external consid­ erations (à la Walt) mirrors the formation of stronger states in Iraq and Syria, it is necessary now to turn to the comparative politics component of my thesis.

The Comparative Politics Argument

In the comparative study of domestic politics as well, a divide separates those who ascribe considerable autonomy and efficacy to the state from those who view it more as simply an arena for competing social forces. An extreme version of the "weak state" argument by Elie Kedourie, for example, dismissed Arab polities altogether as mere "imitation states"—unconvincing simulacra of their Western counterparts—be­ cause "the very notion of a state is quite difficult to fit into the political thought that is traditional to the Middle East, namely, Muslim political thought."16 Although adopting a far more nuanced approach, Joel 14. Ibid., p. 12: "With anticolonial nationalism dissipating in the wake of decoloniza­ tion, identification with the group over the state is getting stronger with time." See also pp. 193-194. 15. J. P. Nettl, "The State as a Conceptual Variable," World Politics 20 (July 1968), 559592-

16. Elie Kedourie, "The Nation-State in the Middle East," Jerusalem Journal of Interna­ tional Relations 9 (1987), 1.

10

Introduction

Migdal nevertheless also found Egypt and Syria to be typical of Third World polities characterized by "fragmented social control" in which "for the near future, at least, the prospects for building cohesive states, which can apply their rules and policies effectively, are not bright."17 Other scholars, by contrast, have preferred to focus on differences in levels of state strength between Arab polities. Gabriel Ben-Dor identi­ fied Egypt as having a stronger state than Lebanon because of its geographical isolation, social homogeneity, and longer history of func­ tioning bureaucratic institutions.18 And Lisa Anderson explained the fact that Tunisia has a more autonomous and efficacious state apparatus than Libya by the divergent colonial policies of France and Italy respec­ tively.19Surprisingly few studies, however, have considered the evolu­ tion of initially weak Arab states into stronger ones.20 Once again, a more dynamic, historidzed approach is necessary.21 My account of the major stages in the political development of Syria and Iraq since their creation—monarchy, praetorianism, Bonapartism—will parallel and I hope undergird my account of the transition toward increasingly "state­ like" foreign policy behavior in the two countries. I begin by discussing the Hashemites, a family whose aspiration to lead a unified Arab state was betrayed by the allies after World War I and who as a result found themselves in charge of territories with arbitrarily drawn borders and no sense of historical continuity: Syria, Iraq, Transjordan. The Hashemite dilemma was to found new states 17. Joel S. Migdal, "Strong States, Weak States: Power and Accommodation," in Under­ standing Political Development, ed. Myron Weiner and Samuel P. Huntington (Boston, 1987), p. 429. See also Migdal's Strong Societies and Weak States: State-Society Relations and State Capabilities in the Third World (Princeton, 1988). 18. Gabriel Ben-Dor, "Stateness and Ideology in Contemporary Middle Eastern Poli­ tics," Jerusalem Journal of International Relations 9 (1987), 10-37. 19. Lisa Anderson, The State and Social Transformation in Tunisia and Libya: 1830-1980 (Princeton, 1986). 20. Among the exceptions: Gause, "Sovereignty, Statecraft and Stability"; Roger Owen, State, Power and Politics in the Making of the Modem Middle East (London, 1992); I. William Zartman, "State-Building and the Military in Arab Africa," in The Many Faces of National Security in the Arab World, ed. Bahgat Korany, Paul Noble, and Rex Brynen, pp. 239-257 (Basingstoke, 1993); and several of the essays in the four-volume series edited by Giacomo Ludani entitled Nation, State and Integration in the Arab World, particu­ larly Volume 3, Beyond Coercion: The Durability of the Arab State, ed. Adeed Dawisha and I. William Zartman (London, 1988). 21. This is the stated ambition of the essays in State Power and Social Forces: Domination and Transformation in the Third World, ed. Joel S. Migdal, Atul Kohli, and Vivienne Shue (Cambridge, 1994).

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

ii

in those territories—to create, virtually from nothing, the political insti­ tutions of an effective centralized authority as well as to foster a sense of national identity—while simultaneously keeping their dream of panArab leadership alive. I will argue that the Hashemites sought to escape the contradictions of their situation by adopting a foreign policy style characterized by expansionist unionism and attempt to show that they failed because of the combined opposition of Western powers and vested interests in the countries they targeted for union. After their monarchies fell, Syria and Iraq both fell prey to praetorianism: an extended period of violent and virtually nonstop jockeying for power by coalitions of civilians and soldiers in "the absence of effective political institutions capable of mediating, refining, and moderating group political action."22 State building was put on hold as each new junta scrambled to avoid falling victim to yet another coup. The foreign policy style characteristic of this period in Syrian and Iraqi history was, because of the tactical benefits outlined above, defensive unionism. Favorable external circumstances contributed to the rise of defensive unionism as an attractive policy option during the 1950s and early 1960s. One such factor was the emergence in Egypt of Jamal cAbd al-Nasser, whose popularity and geographical remoteness combined to make him an ideal unity partner for Syrian and Iraqi rulers. Another factor was that the Americans, fearing what they perceived to be rising Soviet influence in the Arab world, turned to radical pan-Arabism as the only viable alternative to communism. Accordingly, they provided the unionist initiatives of Nasser and the Bacthists with diplomatic, financial, and intelligence support and made sure that local opponents such as Israel did not cause undue trouble for them. Contrary to the widespread perception that anti-Zionism and antiAmericanism dominated the foreign policies of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Iraqi regimes during this period, then, I intend to show that Israel was relatively low on their list of priorities and that the United States often actively supported their pan-Arab policies. It should be stressed, however, that the role played by external actors such as the Americans remained primarily reactive: they could help foil Hashemite ambitions and help promote radical unionists in Syria and Iraq, but the underlying impetus for both the rise and fall of pan-Arab initiatives arose from 22. Samuel P. Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, 1968), p. 196.

12

Introduction

indigenous sources such as the sentiments of the Arab masses and the calculations of thèir contending leaders. If my central argument is correct and pan-Arab unionism is primarily a response to regime instability, a decline in unionist behavior can be expected when the need for such a response abates, in other words, when regimes attain a certain degree of stability. Since around 1970, the frequency of successful coups has decreased dramatically across the Arab world for a variety of reasons: accumulated experience in preventing coups, improved technologies of surveillance and repres­ sion, and greatly expanded financial resources resulting from the oil boom. Arab regimes have come to exhibit unprecedented longevity as a result; the most recent Bacthist leaderships of Iraq and Syria, for example, came to power in 1968 and 1970 respectively. But as Charles Tilly has pointed out, the broader political and institutional transforma­ tions associated with state building in Europe were generated as by­ products of precisely such consolidation of central control by ruling elites.23In Syria and Iraq as well, the development of regime stability— the capability to prevent coups—has entailed the development of state strength, defined here in terms of three characteristics: autonomy, effi­ cacy, and legitimacy. Autonomy means that the state has sufficient coercive and financial resources at its disposal to provide ruling elites with a reasonable degree of insulation from external pressures, enabling them to implement policies that do not simply reflect the interests of foreign governments or domestic groupings. Efficacy refers to the ruling elite's ability to deploy state power as it seeks to manage and transform society. Follow­ ing Michael Mann, state power may be broken down into two compo­ nents: despotic powèr (military or police activities) and infrastructural power, "the capacity of the state actually to penetrate civil society, and to implement logistically political decisions throughout the realm," in other words, to carry out functions such as popular mobilization, civil administration, tax collection, public investment, welfare allocation, and so on.24 Legitimacy means that the state (as opposed to a specific 23. "Conclusion" in The Formation of National States in Western Europe, ed. Charles Tilly (Princeton, 1975), p. 633. See also Tilly's "War Making and State Making as Organized Crime" in Bringing the State Back In, ed. Peter B. Evans, Dietrich Rueschmeyer, and Theda Skocpol (Cambridge, 1985), pp. 169-191. 24. Michael Mann, "The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results," in States in History, ed. John A. Hall (Oxford, 1986), p. 113.

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

13

regime) enjoys general societal consent and support. It captures the normative element in state building and identity formation. Despite differences in ideology and personality, almost all Iraqi and Syrian rulers who survived their initial consolidation struggles have tried to promote the autonomy, efficacy, and legitimacy of the state institutions they controlled precisely so as to remain in power. In Syria and Iraq, then, the decline in defensive unionism was a consequence of increased regime stability associated with the emer­ gence of stronger states. It should be pointed out that the two do not necessarily coincide: it is possible, for example, to have stable regimes in weak states. In polities characterized by underdeveloped and frag­ mented civil societies, low urbanization, economies dominated by an easily controlled and monopolized revenue base (such as the export of a natural resource), and—perhaps most important—considerable isolation from the outside world, "sultanistic" regimes may emerge that not only manage to survive through the exercise of despotic state power alone but actually view the development of infrastructural power as a threat because it entails the creation of civilian and military bureau­ cratic classes with aspirations and ambitions of their own.25 Sultan Sacid ibn Taimur, the Omani ruler (1932-1970) who banned radios and eyeglasses, restricted travel both outside and within his country, and allowed only three small primary schools and one medical clinic to operate, summed up the political philosophy of sultanism when he told his British adviser: "This is why you lost India, because you edu­ cated the people."26 But sultanism was never an option for the rulers of modem Syria and Iraq because their polities were so exposed and vulnerable to outside pressures, whether from colonialist powers such as Britain and France or from neighboring states with hegemonic or expansionist designs of their own. To resist such pressures, those ruling elites had no alternative but to develop the infrastructural as well as despotic powers of govern­ ment institutions and to pursue modernizing social and economic poli­ cies that would promote the legitimacy of and thereby strengthen the states they controlled. 25. The concept of sultanism was discussed by Juan Linz, "Totalitarian and Authoritar­ ian Regimes," in Handbook of Political Science, ed. Fred I. Greenstein and Nelson Polsby (Reading, Mass., 1975), 3:259-263, and further elaborated by H. E. Chehabi and Juan Linz in their unpublished draft manuscript "Sultanistic Regimes." 26. Quoted in Peter Mansfield, The Arabs (Middlesex, Eng., 1985), p. 345.

14

Introduction

I label this moment in Syrian and Iraqi history "Bonapartist" because it is characterized above all by elite decision-making autonomy.27 Do­ mestically, the consolidation of stable regimes preceded the emergence of integrated national civil societies that could articulate demands of their own, leaving rulers extraordinarily free to pursue political and socioeconomic development as they saw fit. Externally, this autonomy was reflected in a new foreign policy style dominated no longer by defensive unionism but by the aggressive assertion of national interest. As the state grew stronger in Syria and Iraq, its foreign policy became more "state-like" as well. But how does one measure the development of state strength in Syria and Iraq? "Proving" state formation—tracing and tabulating the myriad transformations that culminate in a centralized political authority, an integrated national economy, and a shared political culture—would be a daunting task under any circumstances. It is rendered even more difficult by the notorious unreliability of statistical data made available by the Syrian and Iraqi governments as well as their reluctance to divulge information for security reasons, a reluctance which in the case of Iraq has gone to the extreme that whole categories of economic and social indicators have been suppressed since the early 1980s. Even if adequate and reliable data were to become available, any comprehen­ sive treatment of state formation in Syria and Iraq would require at least a separate book for each country and is certainly beyond the scope of a single volume focusing primarily on the relationship between interdite conflict and unionist foreign policy. Nevertheless, because I link the decline of unionist behavior to in­ creased regime stability and, as its corollary in Syria and Iraq, the emergence of strong states, it is necessary to provide some evidence of this last process. Accordingly, I punctuate my narrative with brief digressions that assess the progress—or lack of it—in state formation during each of the three phases of Syrian and Iraqi history, using whatever data are available to generate indicators for the various com­ ponents of state strength. For example, the extent of the state's coercive abilities—the size and skill of its security services vis-à-vis private armed groupings or foreign 27. Although I am aware of the tension that characterizes Marx's efforts to reconcile class analysis with his depiction of dictatorial autonomy in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I have been inspired primarily by his insights on the latter phenomenon in formulating my notion of Bonapartism.

The Arab State as a Conceptual Variable

15

enemies—is one measure of state autonomy. Another is the share of total government revenues provided by taxes: a state that depends on its citizens for funding is less autonomous than one that enjoys access to a revenue source of its own (such as oil). State efficacy, its ability to transform society, can be gauged by the expansion of state institutions; the ratio of government expenditures in Gross Domestic Product; the public sector's share of development investment; and, as a particularly good indicator of surveillance and extraction capabilities, the proportion of income taxes in total taxes.28 Legitimacy, the third and most norma­ tive component of state strength, is much harder to ascertain. Neverthe­ less, some indication may be given by expanding student enrollment in public schools where loyalty to the national authority can be incul­ cated; the dissemination of television sets which facilitate state propa­ ganda; and the sheer passage of time, leaving fewer and fewer people alive who can remember when they were not citizens of sovereign countries.29 These digressions (at the conclusions of Chapters 2 and 3, in Chapter 11, and in Chapters 12 and 13) by no means constitute an exhaustive catalog of all facets of state formation. Nor do they claim to demonstrate a definitive transition from state weakness to state strength in Syria and Iraq. They do, however, provide, if not accurate absolute values, at least trends over time in the indicators outlined above. That should suffice to substantiate my contention that a discernible shift in state strength has indeed taken place in Syria and Iraq over the years, one that in turn can account for the parallel shift in foreign policy behavior. is no accident that both the exploitation of pan-Arabism and the subsequent assertion of state identity manifested themselves with the greatest frequency and intensity in Syria and Iraq. No other Arab coun­ tries have taken part in as many unity projects, and nowhere else has the attempt to impose central authority on a resistant society been pursued with more ferocious determination.30Syria and Iraq fall within •

It

28. Whereas a rise in the overall tax ratio would indicate decreased state autonomy, therefore, a rise in income taxes (relative to other, easier to collect taxes such as excise and customs duties) suggests greater state efficacy. See Charles Tilly's Coercion, Capital, and European States, AD 990-1992 (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), pp. 87-89, for a discussion of taxation as an indicator of state formation. 29. For a discussion of the legitimacy problems of Arab states, see Michael C. Hudson, Arab Politics: The Search for Legitimacy (New Haven, 1977).

i6

Introduction

a distinctive subset of Arab polities; they lack three attributes which, alone or in various combinations, have mitigated the pan-Arab probléma­ tique elsewhere: the historical continuity that endows states such as Egypt and Morocco with a measure of legitimacy and thus stability; the social and economic insulation that made "sultanism" a viable option in countries such as Oman and Libya for so long; and, at least since 1920 in Syria and 1958 in Iraq, the existence of a monarchy which by its very nature usually rules out defensive unionism (but not expansionist unionism) as a foreign policy option for countries such as Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and the Persian Gulf statelets. Still, although Syria and Iraq have been chosen as case studies be­ cause their histories are so rife with regime instability and pan-Arab unionism, the relevance of my conclusions should extend further. All the key elements in the equation—the post-Ottoman legacy of colonial partition, transnational identifications; the difficulties of establishing centralized political authority—are present in every Arab polity to a greater or lesser degree. Although Syria and Iraq have accounted for the lion's share of pan-Arab unity projects, Morocco, Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, Sudan, Yemen, and Jordan have all been involved in such en­ deavors as well.3031 More generally, my treatment of states and state interests not as immutable concepts but as the products of historical processes should encourage both international relations theorists who argue about the sources of foreign policy and comparative politics theorists who dis­ agree about levels of state strength to consider a more dynamic ap­ proach that envisions the transformation of polities from weaker states to stronger ones with a corresponding evolution of foreign policies that increasingly reflect raisons d'état. 30. The argument that domestic violence is an integral part of state formation is made by Youssef Cohen, Brian R. Brown, and A. F. K. Organski, "The Paradoxical Nature of State Making: The Violent Creation of Order," American Political Science Review 75 (Decem­ ber 1981), 901-910. 31. Libya's predilection for unity schemes may owe more to Mu'ammar Qaddafi's ideological zeal than to the defensive regime-protecting considerations outlined above, but a definitive explanation requires research that lies beyond the scope of this book.

p a rt i

Hashemite Unionism: 1 9 2 0 -1 9 5 4

A nd it should be considered th at nothing is m ore difficult to handle, m ore doubtful of success, n or m ore dangerous to m anage, th an to p u t oneself at the head of introducing new orders. —N iccolô M achiavelli Let us, w e the A rabs, have a new A rab order, a u n ited A rab states, or one A rab state. Let us defend its bor­ ders, n o t the borders draw n u p by th e colonialists, bypassing those A rabs w ho are m otivated by tribal affiliation and arrogance, after they had flooded th e natio n w ith th eir oil an d bragged about th eir seats w hich w ere restored a t the h an d s of the foreigner and w ith lances stained w ith th e blood of their brothers. —King H ussein of Jordan (1992)

i

Prelude: The Postwar Settlement

Toward the end of 1914 Hussein ibn cAli, Grand Sharif of Mecca, con­ fronted a situation rife with opportunity and peril. Ottoman Turkey had just concluded an alliance with Germany and declared war on Britain, France, and Russia, a declaration coupled with a call to jihad for Muslims everywhere, from North Africa and the Balkans to the seventy million believers in India. For this call to be credible, it needed the endorsement of Sharif Hussein, patriarch of the Hashemites (clan of the Prophet himself) and custodian of the holy shrines in Mecca and Medina. But Hussein saw in the looming international crisis an opportunity to break free of the Ottoman yoke at last and lead the Arab nation to independence. Britain, meanwhile, abandoned its earlier aloof attitude toward the Hashemites and, in an exchange of letters with Hussein's son Faisal known as the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (July 1915 to January 1916), promised to support Arab independence in a state incorporating what are today Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, and all the Gulf states. Exempted from the British offer were the colony of Aden and those "portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo"1—taken by the Hashemites to mean Maronitedominated Lebanon but in British interpretations to include Palestine as well. 1. Quoted in Walter Laqueur, ed., The Israel-Arab Reader: A Documentary History of the Middle East Conflict (New York, 1969), p. 16.

20

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

After discreet inquiries assured him that Arab nationalists in Syria and elsewhere would back a Hashemite-led uprising, Sharif Hussein severed all communications with Istanbul and launched the Arab Revolt on 10 June 1916 by firing a symbolic rifle shot at the Turkish barracks in Mecca. It turned out to be the correct decision, for Germany and its Ottoman ally lost the war. Britain and France recognized Hussein as king of Hijaz in January 1917, and he looked forward to the creation of a greater unified Arab state once the Turks laid down their arms. Unfortunately for Arab aspirations, however, Britain was not as good as its word. The secret Sykes-Picot agreement of March 1916 carved up the Fertile Crescent into British and French zones of direct control. Following the fall of Damascus to British troops on 1 October 1918, therefore, the British allowed Faisal into the city but did little to back his demand for full Arab independence at the Paris peace talks. In September 1919 Prime Minister David Lloyd George pulled British forces out of Syria, saying: "For us, the friendship of France is worth ten Syrias."2 Abandoned by his British allies and under pressure from his nationalist partisans, Faisal tried to find a formula that would salvage some autonomy for Syria while satisfying Paris. He failed. Arab nation­ alists convening in Damascus in March 1920 declared Syria (including Lebanon, Palestine, and Transjordan) independent and appointed Fai­ sal king of the new state. A contingent of Iraqis simultaneously pro­ claimed Iraq's independence with Faisal's brother ‘Abdallah as its king. Both statements called for a "political and economic federation" to be established between the two states.3 But Britain and France rejected the Damascus declarations and ar­ ranged for a rapid settlement by the League of Nations Supreme Coun­ cil. On 5 May 1920, the decision was revealed at San Remo: Syria and Lebanon became French mandates while Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq went to the British. French troops captured Syria on 25 July, putting an end to Faisal's brief reign. He had to be satisfied with the throne of Iraq instead, given to him by a British government seeking to legiti­ mize its colonial presence there. His brother ‘Abdallah similarly had to make do as ruler of Transjordan, hastily put together from the rem­ nants of the mandatory division of spoils. The Hashemites endured a 2. Quoted in Daniel Pipes, Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition (New York, 1990), P- 25 3. *Ali Jawdat al-Ayyubi, Dhikrayat cAli Jawdat: 1900-1958 (Beirut, 1967) pp. 88-89.

Prelude: The Postwar Settlement

21

final humiliation when Ibn Sa'ud's followers invaded Mecca in 1924 and drove King Hussein out of Hijaz. Transplanted from their ancestral domain and installed by the British in Iraq and Transjordan, Faisal and ‘Abdallah could not rely on the usual foundations of royal authority: popular legitimacy and networks of power relationships acquired over time. As new rulers, they had to create both out of nothing. In large part because of this dilemma, neither brother—nor for that matter any of their descendants—ever came to terms with the post-Ottoman disposition of borders or their lot in it. For the Hashemites, pan-Arabism has never been simply a question of ideals and still less of short-term tactical considerations; it constitutes their best avenue for escaping the constraints of parochial interests as well as the designs of foreign powers and so for achieving the sover­ eignty that lies at the heart of their dynastic ambitions. That is why the Hashemites have so earnestly and persistently sought to dissolve the borders of the post-Ottoman Arab world.

2

Foundations of the Iraqi State

Hashemite state building in Iraq entailed a contradiction that was never resolved: Faisal and his heirs wanted to transform Iraq into the launch­ ing pad for an irredentist campaign that would unite all of Asiatic Arabia and free it of Western colonial control; to survive against their domestic and regional enemies, however, they depended on the very colonial influence they hoped to eliminate. Their policies reflected this contradiction. The Hashemites seesawed back and forth between an expansionist unionism that failed because of Western opposition and thus served only to highlight their own lack of autonomy and an inwardlooking development program that laid the foundations for a strong state but at the cost of undermining the pan-Arab basis of their claim to rule. The experience of Iraq's Hashemites illustrates both the logic of expansionist unionism and the difficulties such a policy encountered in the context of weak state institutions and preponderant British influ­ ence. In the end, their unionist schemes failed to rescue the Hashemites from the contradictions of their state-building program.

Faisal in Iraq

British troops made their first appearance in Iraq in November 1914, landing in the port of Basra as part of an attempt to avert pro-Ottoman (and hence pro-German) uprisings in the Muslim territories stretching

Foundations of the Iraqi State

23

from the Persian Gulf «ill the way to India. Within months they had driven the Turks out of Mesopotamia, and at the end of the war the Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul were placed under a British mandate. The heavy-handedness of the occupation, however, provoked a pop­ ular rebellion in June 1920 that lasted three months and cost the British four hundred lives and £40 million to suppress. Bringing together tribal chieftains, Shici clergy, and Sunni urban notables, the rebellion had obvious nationalist overtones and convinced the British that their pres­ ence in Mesopotamia had to be mediated through an "Arab façade."1 A team of experts led by Winston Churchill meeting in Cairo in March 1921 accordingly decided to merge the three former Ottoman provinces into a unified state with Faisal as king. They also drew up plans to create an Arab Iraqi army alongside the four-thousand-man Assyrian Levies that had heretofore acted as London's primary instrument of local control. Iraq was not an entirely artificial concept. The area between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers had been known by that name for centuries, and the nationalists who met in Damascus earlier in 1920 demanded independence for an Iraqi state within "its well-known frontiers from the north of Mosul province to the Persian Gulf."12Nevertheless, Britain fused together three very disparate provinces when it created the new state: Baghdad lay in the heartland of the Sunni Arabs who would come to dominate Iraq; Mosul, with its large Kurdish and Turkoman communities, had cultural and economic ties to Turkey and Syria that were at least as close as the ones to Baghdad; and Basra was an Arabic­ speaking but overwhelmingly Shi£i province that traditionally looked east to Persia for trade, rather than north across desolate marshlands to Baghdad. In the words of one scholar: "The different schemes of weights and measures in the different towns of Iraq, the wide variation in the prices of the same commodity by reason of the dissimilar market­ ing conditions, and the extensive use of different currencies attested to the latent economic disunity."3 1. Reeva S. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a Nationalist Ideology (New York, 1986), p. 4. 2. Ayyubi, Dhikrayat, p. 89. 3. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study

24

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

Social fragmentation exacerbated the problem. Iraq was home to 2,849,000 people in 1920. By religion 56 percent were Shici and 36 percent Sunni Muslims, while 8 percent were non-Muslims (including Christians, Jews—one-third of Baghdad's population—and the Yazidis of Jabal Sinjar, west of Mosul).*4 Some 75 percent of the people spoke Arabic. Most of the rest were Kurds, although smaller communities of Turkomans, Armenians, Assyrians, and others dwelt in Iraq as well. Perhaps most important, the majority of the population—Sunnis, Shicis, and Kinds alike—was split into waning and feuding tribes. Except for the Sunni Arabs, none of these groupings unambivalently welcomed the creation of Iraq. Many Shicis favored either direct British control or outright secession from a state they believed (conectly) was sine to be dominated by Sunnis. The Kurds appealed to London for autonomy, as did the Assyrians, and the Jewish community petitioned to be granted British citizenship. Iraq's neighbors tried to fish in these muddy waters: during the first years after his coronation on 23 August 1921, Faisal had to rely on British assistance to deter Iranian subversion among the Shica, Saudi raids from the south, and Turkish incursions in Kurdistan. Many years later, the monarch would still be expressing his frustration with the fragmentation and unruliness of Iraqi society in the following much-quoted words: "In Iraq there is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic ideal, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giv­ ing ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever. Out of these masses we want to fashion a people we would train, educate, and refine."5 This ambition brought Faisal into a three-sided power struggle that would dominate Iraqi politics until his death in 1933. In one comer stood all the tribal sheikhs and communal leaders who feared the consolidation of central authority in Baghdad and looked to London for a counter­ weight. In another comer stood the British, playing off the monarchy against both urban and rural notables to maximize their own hegemony over the country. And finally there was the king, dependent on British of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of Its Communists, BaHhists, and Free Officers (Princeton, 1978), pp. 16-17. 4. Mohammad A. Tarbush, The Role of the Military in Politics: A Case Study of Iraq to 1941 (London, 1982), pp. 9, 14. 5. Quoted in Simon, Iraq between the Tvoo World Wars, pp. 3-4.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

25

protection against domestic and foreign foes yet at the same time trying to mobilize popular support against the colonial stranglehold. Faisal's immediate power base consisted of several hundred Sunni Arabs from lower-middle-class backgrounds who had been sent in their youth to study in the military academies of Istanbul. After serving as Ottoman army officers, many ended up as military leaders in Sharif Hussein's Arab Revolt. These "Sharifians" stayed loyal to Faisal when he arrived in Iraq for two reasons. First, they shared his pan-Arab aspirations. Inspired during their student days by the ideals of militaris­ tic nationalism taught by their German and Turkish instructors, they had been active in secret Arab nationalist societies such as Al-£Ahd (the Covenant), whose original twenty-six members in 1913 included five future prime ministers of Iraq: Nuri al-Sacid, Yasin al-Hashemi, Taha al-Hashemi, cAli Jawdat al-Ayyubi, and Jamil al-Madfa£i. These men supported Faisal's endeavor to transform Iraq into the Prussia of the Arab nation. Equally important, however, the Sharifians remained loyal to Faisal because as scions of lower-middle-class families from towns such as Baghdad and Mosul they had no power base of their own. Unconnected to the urban and rural elites and therefore with no stake in protecting their interests, the Sharifians realized that their only hope for social advancement lay in the expansion of Faisal's central state apparatus. This convergence of ideals and interests made it inevitable that the Sharifians would dominate the top political and military positions under the monarchy. As Table 1 makes clear, that is precisely what happened. Table 1. Composition of the Iraqi Elite: 1920-1936

Religion (% of total) Sunni (36%) ShiH (56%) Other (8%) Birthplace Baghdad Other urban Rural Former Ottoman or Sharifian officers TOTAL

Prime ministers

Cabinet ministers

Top 62 officers

11 (100%) 0 0

42 (71%) 14 (24%) 3 (5 %)

59 (95 %)

8 (73%) 2 (18%) 1 (9%)

34 (58 %)

42 (68%) 18 (29%) 2 (3%)

6 (55%) 11

21 (36%)

10 (17%) 15 (25%)

59

1 (2%) 2 (3%)

50 (81%) 62

S ou rce : T aibush, R o le o f the M ilita r y , pp. 46-48 and 78-82. Tarbush selected a sam ple of 62 of a total of 84 Iraqi officers w ith the rank of com m ander or above in 1936.

26

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954.

Faisal and the Sharifians wanted to implement a nation-building pro­ gram consisting of three major components: centralizing all coercive authority in the government's hands by building up a national army and eliminating alternative centers of power; forging a sense of Iraqi and Arab identity through the establishment of a national education system; and laying the groundwork for a pan-Arab foreign policy. Before progress could be made on any of these fronts, however, Iraq's government needed to win a measure of political and economic autonomy from Britain. Faisal put up a great deal of resistance to a proposed Anglo-Iraqi treaty that gave Britain almost unlimited control over Iraq's fiscal, military, and foreign affairs and provided for the stationing of British troops throughout the country. Both sides deployed local allies in the struggle over the treaty: Faisal by discreetly inciting the nationalist opposition and Britain by mobilizing its clients, including various tribal sheikhs, urban notables, and leaders of minority commu­ nities such as the Christians and Jews. British pressure forced a reluctant Faisal to sign the treaty on 10 October 1922, but he continued to encour­ age agitation against its ratification by the National Assembly. A standoff lasting several months ensued, prompting a frustrated Winston Churchill to warn darkly: "Faisal should be under no delusions in this matter. He will be a long time looking for a third throne."6 Faisal's unwillingness to grant oil concessions to the British-owned Turkish Petroleum Company—a move that would have ceded control of an important potential revenue source—further fueled resentment in London. In the end, Iraq's leadership was forced to succumb. Turkey had been pressing its claim on Mosul province, where most of Iraq's known oil reserves were located, by carrying out armed incursions and instigating Kurdish revolts through much of 1923 and 1924. Britain now threatened to support Turkey's claim in the League of Nations unless Faisal proved more forthcoming. Iraq's National Assembly conse­ quently ratified the treaty on 10 June 1924, and on 24 March 1925 the oil concession was granted as well. Nine months later the League Council awarded Mosul province in its entirety to Iraq. Despite these setbacks vis-à-vis Britain, however, the Hashemites did make some headway in their domestic efforts to establish a centralized national authority. 6. Quoted in Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: 1914-1932 (London, 1976), p. 77.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

27

Conscription

A major obstacle to Faisal's centralizing agenda was the multiplicity of alternative power centers. As part of its strategy of keeping both the monarchy and the urban nationalist opposition in check, for example, London had given Iraq's tribal chieftains privileges (including tax ex­ emptions and legal autonomy) that put them beyond Baghdad's author­ ity. Although Faisal tried to counter by sponsoring rival sheikhs loyal to himself in each tribe, he still complained as late as 1933 that "the state is far weaker than the people. If the country were free of arms the problem would be easier, but there are in the kingdom in excess of 100,000 [privately owned] rifles, compared to 15,000 in the govern­ ment's hands."7 Partly to affirm the state's domestic authority, then, and partly to create a force capable of deterring foreign incursions, the cabinet drafted a universal military conscription bill in March 1927. By the time it reached parliament in May, the bill had generated great enthusiasm among Arab nationalists but intense opposition among other sectarian and ethnic communities. The Shici minister of education resigned in protest, for example, and when it was suggested that tax penalties might be imposed on resisters, some tribal leaders threatened to secede from Iraq altogether. Even prominent Sunni clerics began "suddenly to discuss the desirability of a republic."8 London viewed the proposal with disfavor as well, fully aware that Faisal and the Sharifians wanted a powerful army so as to increase their autonomy. A formal note in early 1928 informed Baghdad that in Britain's "judgement conscription is not in present circumstances essential and it should be possible for the Iraqi government to maintain and pay for a sufficiently efficient army on the voluntary system."9 Henry Dobb, the British high commissioner in Baghdad, expressed his concerns more bluntly in a 14 June 1928 letter to London: "What the King, Nuri [Sacid] and Yasin [Hashemi] want to do is, on the one hand to rouse anti-British feeling or demonstrations sufficiently to pass conscription and frighten the British Government into relaxing all con7. Quoted in Ayyubi, Dhikrayat, p. 358. 8. Batatu, Old Social Classes, p. 328. See also Tarbush, Role of the Military, p. 91. 9. Quoted in Tarbush, Role of the Military, p. 92.

28

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

trol, and on the other hand to smother the agitation when they have gained their ends and return bowing and smiling to a comfortably relaxed British alliance."10* Although Faisal's efforts would be frustrated for several more years as a result of British opposition, a series of Kurdish uprisings culminat­ ing with a major revolt in 1932 (put down only after the intervention of British planes) strengthened his argument for an expanded army. An even more decisive incident may have been the crisis that began on 18 June 1932 when the Assyrian Patriarch issued a call demanding autonomy for his people. Skirmishes with government forces ensued until in August 1933 an army detachment commanded by Colonel Bakr Sidqi finally moved in and crushed the rebellion with great brutality. Many Iraqis resented the Assyrians because of the role played by their Levies in enforcing British rule, so the suppression of their revolt led to a surge in the popularity of the army and made Bakr Sidqi a national hero.11It also induced parliament to pass the conscription law in 1934, almost doubling the size of the armed forces to twenty thousand men within two years.

Education

The architect of Iraq's education policy was Satic al-Husri, a former Ottoman educator who joined the Hashemites in Damascus in 1919 and then followed Faisal to Iraq. He served as director of general educa­ tion from 1921 to 1927 and remained influential thereafter as a professor at the Higher Teachers Training College until 1937. For him, as for so many of his contemporaries, "German nationalism, with its emphasis upon language and history as unifying factors, was the perfect model for Arab nationalism, even though al-Husri rejected all racial theories. He sought a leading Arab state like Germany's Prussia around which 10. Quoted in Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, p. 148. xi. Bakr Sidqi received his orders to attack from Prime Minister Rashid cAli al-Kilani, one of the more extreme Iraqi nationalists. By all accounts, however. King Faisal (who was traveling in Europe at the time) opposed the massacres and returned at once to urge restraint. See, for example, the memoirs of ‘Ali Jawdat al-Ayyubi (Dhikrayat, pp. 211-212) and Naji Shawkat (Sira wa Dhikrayat Thamanina cAman: 1894-1974 [Baghdad, 1974]/ PP- 247-248)-

Foundations of the Iraqi State

29

to reunite the Arabs."12 In accordance with this nationalist agenda, Husri's educational policy sought to instill a sense of common identity in the Iraqi people by stressing Arab history and culture, promoting standard Arabic over regional dialects, and trying to suppress particu­ laristic identities such as those of the Shicis, Kurds, Christians, and Jews. Britain, which had restricted funds for education and closed down all secondary schools during the years up to 1921 to prevent the emer­ gence of a nationalist urban intelligentsia, actively opposed Husri's policies. After 1923, however, its influence in this field waned and Husri, along with his successors Fadhil Jamali and Sami Shawkat, pressed ahead with their militaristic brand of national education, im­ porting in the process large numbers of foreigners (particularly Palestin­ ians) to teach Arab history and culture. Enrollment in state secondary schools rose from 229 in 1921 to 13,969 by 1940 as a result, and the number of students in state colleges grew from 99 to 1,218 during the same period.13 Husri's chief accomplishment was to inculcate into the political and military elites of the country a permanent commitment to the vision of a strong and integrated Iraq destined one day to lead the entire Arab world. As Sami Shawkat wrote: "Prussia sixty years ago used to dream about uniting the German people. What is to prevent Iraq from dream­ ing about uniting the Arab lands now that it has achieved its dream of becoming independent?"14Despite some trepidation at the xenophobic extremes to which Husri and Sami Shawkat often went, Faisal and his advisers appreciated their efforts at laying the ideological foundations for Hashemite pan-Arabism. Faisal's Pan-Arab Foreign Policy

Faisal's tireless attempts to chip away at the restrictive provisions of the 1922 Anglo-Iraqi treaty culminated on 30 June 1930 with a revised 12. Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, p. 33. For an extended analysis of Husri's ideological legacy see Bassam Tibi's Arab Nationalism: A Critical Inquiry, trans. Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett (New York, 1990). 13. Batatu, Old Social Classes, p. 34. 14. Sami Shawkat, Hadhihi Ahdafuna: Man Amana biha fahua minna (Baghdad, 1939), p. 3. An admirer of European fascism, Shawkat lectured students on the "profession of death" and once justified the nationalization of foreign and minority-owned schools by saying: "We have purified the soil of our country from poisonous, lethal thickets and weeds; and eliminated all the insects and scorpions and snakes, and prevented them

30

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

accord that finally granted Iraq formal independence, although it also provided for a continued British military presence and stipulated that the two countries enter into a "close alliance" in which "there shall be full and frank consultation between them in all matters of foreign policy which may affect their common interest."*15Parliament ratified the new treaty in November of the following year and on 3 October 1932, Iraq entered the League of Nations as a sovereign state at last. Independence allowed Faisal to devote more energy to pan-Arabism, the third component of his overall strategy. His efforts focused on Syria.16Ever since the French imposed their mandate on that country, they periodically hinted at a possible Hashemite restoration, mainly as a ploy to frighten the local oligarchs into a more compliant stance. One such occasion arose in the wake of the nationalist disturbances that swept Syria from 1925 to 1927. Following discussions held in February 1928, France allowed Faisal to sponsor a monarchist party in Syria as well as a newspaper in Damascus to serve as its mouthpiece.17 In the fall of 1931, Faisal traveled to Paris for talks with French officials who led him to believe that they backed his unionist aspirations. Foreign Minister Philippe Berthelot told him that France now realized it had made a mistake when it expelled him from Damascus in 1920 and would not object to a restoration if the Syrian people desired it. Later, Minister for the Colonies Paul Reynaud toasted Faisal at a reception as "King of the Arabs" and hinted that he might be offered the throne of Syria in the near future.18 Subsequently, however, the French pro­ tested that they had been misunderstood, and it is evident that they never seriously considered reinstituting Hashemite rule. In any case, Iraqi hopes suffered a setback when most of the monarchist candidates failed in Syria's parliamentary elections of December 1931. Despite the obstacles posed by France and Britain, Faisal never lost sight of his pan-Arab goals. He could not afford to do so because only through unionism could he hope to escape file terrible constraints from laying and hatching their eggs in the holy and pure soil of our country and so polluting it with their poisons and plagues" (ibid., pp. 38-39). 15. Quoted in Majid Khadduri, Independent Iraq, 1932-1958: A Study in Iraqi Politics (London, i960), p. 311. 16. Though apparently not exclusively: according to ‘Ali Jawdat al-Ayyubi, Faisal tried in 1933 to win British approval for an Iraqi annexation of Transjordan (Dhikrayat, p. 212, n. 1). 17. Porath, In Search of Arab Unity, p. 6. 18. Ibid., p. 10.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

31

attendant upon being a king who depended on a foreign power for survival; who ruled a country where the majority of the population— Shi£is and Kurds—rejected Arab nationalism, the basis of his claim to legitimacy; and who lacked any other rationale to justify his rule even in the eyes of fellow Sunni Arabs.

King Ghazi: 1933-1939

Faisal died in Switzerland on 8 September 1933. His death deprived Iraq of a talented ruler whose experience and acumen enabled him to manipulate the ambitions of his followers without permitting them to endanger state security. Now those ambitions were left unchecked and the rivalries of powerful personalities such as Nuri Sacid and Yasin alHashemi came out into the open. Politicians finding themselves out of office took to inciting disturbances by disgruntled tribal chiefs or army officers in an attempt to bring down the government of the day and thereby create new cabinet openings. Faisal's son Ghazi sought military allies too as he tried in his turn to break free of London's control, prompting the British ambassador to comment: "What was difficult to a Government presided over b y . . . King Faisal has become impossible to a Government whose head is the youthful champion of the Iraqi army. The cabinet has already approached me privately with a view to using my influence to control the young King's military enthusiasm and to prevent him from turning to his old friends in the army for political advice."19 But Ghazi lacked his father's dexterity in containing the opportunism of the men he sought to lead. A particularly egregious example of such opportunism occurred in March 1935 when Yasin al-Hashemi and his partisans provoked a Shici tribal rebellion against the government of Jamil al-Madfa‘i. The ploy paid off and Hashemi became prime minister on 15 March, but he had activated forces that quickly spun beyond his control. Thus, when it became clear that the new cabinet had no inten­ tion of carrying out serious reform, the embittered Shicis escalated their agitation for free elections and proportional representation into a fullscale tribal revolt in May. Bakr Sidqi, now a general, brought the rebel19. Quoted in Tarbush, Role of the Military, p. 72.

32

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

lion under control by the end of the month but only after much violence and hundreds of casualties. Once again, his stature in Baghdad soared. A second major revolt in June 1935—this time by Yazidi tribesmen protesting the implementation of conscription—was also suppressed with considerable loss of life. Several smaller uprisings during 1935 and 1936 met a similar fate. These episodes constituted a decisive turn­ ing point for two related reasons. First, they marked the end of the tribes (or at least the non-Kurdish ones) as important armed elements in Iraqi politics, leaving the army with a monopoly on coercive power throughout most of the country. Second, the army now emerged as a powerful political actor in its own right. It was Sidqi, after all, not King Ghazi or Yasin al-Hashemi, who saved the state from its tribal opponents in 1935. Hashemi failed to grasp this fact. Emboldened by the elimination of his rivals and confident of British support, he dreamed of becoming Iraq's strongman, with Ghazi as a mere figurehead. A motley coalition of elements who feared his dictatorial ambitions gravitated toward Bakr Sidqi as a result, among them King Ghazi himself as well as a group of liberals known as the Jamacat al-Ahali who advocated parliamentary reform, social justice, and an independent (though not pan-Arab) for­ eign policy. Bakr Sidqi mounted a coup on 29 October 1936 that made him com­ mander in chief of the armed forces and drove Hashemi and Nuri Sacid into exile.20 For a brief moment, Iraq faced the possibility of a more open and popular political system: Ghazi seemed set on a resolutely anti-British course, and the inclusion of three Ahali ministers in Hikmat Sulaiman's new cabinet meant that for the first time the interests of the emerging national middle class were prominently represented. Rather than reflecting the success of Hashemite political development, how­ ever, Sidqi's coup actually served to reveal its limitations. The expansion of the state's coercive powers had far outpaced its ability to institutional­ ize the norms of legal-rational authority. There was nothing to prevent Sidqi from making himself dictator of Iraq. He marginalized Ghazi's 20. Despite British suspicions, there is no evidence that Ghazi colluded in Baler's takeover. Taha al-Hashemi, the prime minister's brother, argued in his memoirs that the king did not have advance knowledge of the coup but gladly accepted it as a fait accompli in light of Yasin's ouster (Mudhakkirat Taha al-Hashemi: 1919-1943 [Beirut, 1967], p. 148). Yasin al-Hashemi died of a heart attack in Lebanon in 1937.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

33

court and instituted a reign of terror, cracking down on all dissent and restricting freedom of the press. Pan-Arabism emerged as an early point of contention between the new regime and the king. Bakr Sidqi was a Kurd and Hikmat Sulaiman's seven-man cabinet included two Shicis, one Kurd and one Turk (the prime minister himself), leaving Sunni Arabs in a minority of three.21 These were not men for whom the Hashemite project had any reso­ nance. Although Sidqi liked to indulge in public tirades against "British imperialism," and Sulaiman continued to pay occasional lip service to the idea of a loose Fertile Crescent federation, the new government's cabinet program revealed its true attitude toward pan-Arabism: "With­ out abandoning the policy of Arab solidarity, developed to a point of exaggeration by our predecessors who should have taken care of the many ties which unite us with other powers of the Middle East [i.e., Turkey], we will try to avoid giving a uniquely sentimental and mystical character to our relations with the Arab community."22 Even the British began to show concern. Initially, after receiving assurances from Sulaiman that he intended to respect the provisions of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, they had adopted a relatively tolerant attitude toward the new regime. Now they worried about the marked antiArab trend in Iraqi politics, viewing it as unrealistic and potentially destabilizing: "Bakir Sidqi and Hikmat Sulaiman are pro-Turks, and it is to be feared that they may strive after a re-alignment away from Arab influence like Ibn Sacud and towards Turkey, and even attempt to recast the essentially Arab-Moslem country on modem Turkish lines."23 Indeed, Sidqi systematically promoted Kurds and Turkomans in the army until, according to a contemporary rival, they constituted some 90 percent of all high-ranking officers.24His often-expressed admiration for the Turkish leader notwithstanding, however, this was no Iraqi Atatürk: Sidqi made no attempt to create national political institutions like Kemal's Republican People's Party. Instead he concentrated power increasingly in his own hands, for example forcing the Ahali ministers to resign en bloc and flee abroad in June 1937. His tiny base of support 21. Tarbush, Role of the Military, pp. 145-146. 22. Quoted in Ahmad A. R. Shikara, Iraqi Politics, 1921-41: The Interaction between Domestic Politics and Foreign Policy (London, 1987), p. 131. 23. Foreign Office memorandum quoted in Tarbush, Role of the Military, p. 141. 24. Salah al-Din al-Sabbagh dted in Tarbush, Role of the Military, p. 258, n. 85.

34

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

dwindled still further because of his reckless habit of humiliating top aides, often by seducing their wives. Sidqi's high-handed, arbitrary, and cruel behavior generated more and more resentment until on 11 August 1937—just ten months after seizing power—the dictator was shot dead in Mosul. Bakr Sidqi's regime was an aberration. Iraq, with a 75 percent Arab population, could hardly be transformed into a Kurdish or Turkish state. Nevertheless, in one crucial respect a precedent had been set: for many years thereafter the army would remain a key player in the political arena. Sidqi was overthrown by men who belonged to the first cohort of officers to be influenced by the pan-Arab teachings of Satic al-Husri and Sami Shawkat. Led by four colonels known collectively as the "Golden Square," they showed no inclination to withdraw to the barracks as they began clamoring for a return to nationalist policies at home and abroad. Ghazi appears to have enjoyed good relations with the Golden Square, and his foreign policy took a more assertively pan-Arab turn after 1937. Prime Minister Nuri Sacid floated Faisal's Fertile Crescent unity plan once again and found a responsive audience in Syria, especially among the politicians of the traditionally pro-Iraqi dty of Aleppo, who urged Ghazi and Nuri in March 1939 to bring about a union of the two countries under the leadership of the young Iraqi monarch.25 Ghazi's primary interest, however, lay to the south. He initiated a pro­ paganda campaign in 1938 calling for unification with Kuwait and backed an influential group of Kuwaiti pan-Arabs who forced Emir Ahmad alJabr to establish an elected assembly (majlis). Agitation in the majlis against the British presence and for closer ties to Baghdad led Jabr to dissolve it on 21 December 1938, provoking a fresh barrage of hostile propaganda from Ghazi's radio station. British suspicions that the Ger­ man legation in Baghdad played a role in this campaign against their oil-rich protectorate were further fueled when Iraqi newspapers took to describing Kuwait as a "Sudeten" territory.26One Iraqi politician visiting London was told by a high-ranking official at the Foreign Office that King Ghazi seemed not to realize that he was playing with fire, and it was to be feared that he might one day bum his fingers.27 25. Porath, In Search of Arab Unity, p. 44. 26. Shikara, Iraqi Politics, pp. 154-155. 27. Tawfiq al-Suwaidi, Mudhakkirati: Nisf Qqm min Tarikh al-cIraq wal-Qadiyya al-cArabiyya (Beirut, 1969), p. 326.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

35

Matters came to a head in March 1939 when violent disturbances broke out during an attempt to topple the emir. Ghazi deployed Iraqi forces on the border and apparently ordered some units to cross it.28 A combination of British pressure and Saudi troop deployments in support of the emir deterred Ghazi from taking further action, however, and without Iraqi intervention the uprising soon fizzled. Only days later, on 3 April 1939, the young king perished in a mysterious car crash that many have blamed on Britain.

K ilani's Revolt

Ghazi's death left the four colonels with even greater power. They played a major role in selecting Prince cAbd al-Ilah as regent for the infant Faisal II over another prince favored by a rival faction of more inward-looking officers. In October they gained a new ideological guru in the person of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the pro-German Mufti of Jerusa­ lem who arrived in Baghdad after the British expelled him from Pales­ tine. Under his influence, and following Nazi victories in Scandinavia and the Low Countries during the summer of 1940, the colonels and their civilian allies led by Prime Minister Rashid cAli al-Kilani decided to reorient Iraq away from Britain and toward the Axis powers. Agents of Kilani and the Mufti met with German officials in Ankara and Berlin during the summer of 1940 and apparently agreed that following antiBritish uprisings in Transjordan and Palestine, Germany would support the creation of a unified Arab state led by Iraq that, though remaining formally neutral in the war, would accord preferential mineral exploita­ tion rights to Germany and Italy.29 This was a major departure in Iraqi foreign policy and led to a split with cAbd al-Ilah and Nuri Sacid, who foresaw great dangers in antago­ nizing London. Urged on by the British, cAbd al-Ilah sacked Kilani and replaced him on 3 February 1941 with the more moderate Taha alHashemi, whose mandate was to curb the Golden Square. On 1 April, however, the colonels staged a coup that reinstated Kilani and forced the regent to flee to Jordan with his entourage. Nine days later, the 28. Shikara, Iraqi Politics, p. 155; Hashemi, Mudhakkirat, p. 300. 29. Khadduri, Independent Iraq, pp. 183-185. According to Taha al-Hashemi (Mudhak­ kirat, p. 471), the draft agreement envisaged Iraq's incorporation of Kuwait as well.

36

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

National Assembly was made to replace cAbd al-Ilah with another Hashemite prince, Sharif Sharaf, who would oversee the transition to a constitutional monarchy under a three-member regency.30 Kilani initially tried to placate London but found himself pushed by Hajj Amin and the colonels in an increasingly pro-Axis direction. Hitler authorized arms shipments on 10 April and soon German aircraft were arriving in Syria (now in Vichy hands) on their way to Iraq. The British response was swift: troop landings in Basra on the twenty-eighth fol­ lowed four days later by aerial bombardment of Iraqi positions. Dogtights between German and British aircraft became a common occur­ rence in May, but although the Germans managed to get three or four trains full of military supplies to Iraq via the Mosul railway, the Axis intervention came too little and too late to save the rebels. On 30 May 1941, as the British closed in on Baghdad, Kilani, his cabinet, the Golden Square, and Hajj Amin all fled to Iran. Kilani's regime did not represent a broad-based popular movement. Most of the participants came from the same political and military elite that had dominated Iraq since 1920. They were neither more panArab nor more anti-British than the Hashemites and their Sharitian supporters. It was only in their assessment of Iraq's ability to break free of British control that they differed, and in that regard the rebels succumbed to a grievous case of wishful thinking. By bringing matters to such a head, however, Kilani and the colonels severely compromised all Hashemite claims to the mantle of pan-Arab leadership. cAbd al-Ilah and Nuri returned to Baghdad by force of British bayonets at a time when the entire Arab world was being swept by a rising tide of popular fury against the continued presence of the colonial powers and their acquiescence in the Zionist settlement of Palestine. It became much harder to maintain the delicate balance Faisal had tried to strike between Baghdad's pan-Arab aspirations and its relationship with Britain.

Iraqi U nionism after 1941

Hashemite pan-Arabism in Iraq never recovered from the fatal loss of legitimacy in 1941. cAbd al-Ilah and Nuri confronted a formidable 30. Naji Shawkat (Kilani's defense minister), Sira wa Dhikrayat, p. 475.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

37

dilemma: to continue promoting pan-Arabism might only highlight their continued dependence on Britain and so play into the hands of the radical opposition; to abandon it altogether, however, would undermine the rationale for their rule. It was a paradox, and the Hashemites responded paradoxically, intensifying the unionist campaign abroad while revising the education curriculum at home so that it emphasized Iraq's Mesopotamian past and other aspects of its particular history.31 Kuwait being off limits, Syria once again emerged as the main object of Baghdad's attentions. Here, however, the Iraqi Hashemites collided with the ambitions of their Jordanian cousins. King cAbdallah, facing problems of legitimacy and authority that were if anything even more acute than was the case in Iraq, had made a plan to reunite Greater Syria (Syria, Transjordan, Lebanon, and Palestine) the central pillar of his foreign policy since the mid-i920S. Although his periodic attempts to interest Syrian leaders in this plan encountered little success, they nevertheless posed an obstacle to Iraq's competing expansionist ambi­ tions. Nuri tried to bring Transjordan's king around by reformulating the Fertile Crescent plan in 1942 so that it stipulated the creation of Greater Syria under ‘Abdallah as a first stage, followed by the establishment of a broader federation with Iraq. Worried about losing his throne to his Iraqi cousins, however, ‘Abdallah rejected the two-stage proposal in early 1943. Nuri's scheme foundered altogether when Egypt (already eyeing a hegemonic regional role for itself) and Saudi Arabia (worried that the Hashemites' ultimate objective was to reconquer Mecca) suc­ ceeded in pushing through an alternative proposal for a "league" of all independent Arab states which left their sovereignty intact. Nuri made one last attempt to salvage his plan, traveling to Damascus in January 1944 and reaching a verbal agreement with Syria's leaders that the two countries would federate no matter what the other Arabs did.32 It appears he was deceived, however, and on 6 October 1944 seven Arab states signed a protocol in Alexandria establishing the Arab League. Now the Iraqis tried a different tack, suggesting a direct bilateral 31. Amatzia Baram, Culture, History and Ideology in the Formation of BaHhist Iraq, 196889 (New York, 1991), pp. 87-88. As part of this process the Iraqi authorities deported Satic al-Husri, along with over a hundred of the teachers he had brought with him from Syria and Palestine (Simon, Iraq between the Two World Wars, pp. 162-164). 32. Porath, In Search of Arab Unity, pp. 267-268.



Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954.

Hashemite union. During visits by £Abd al-Dah to Amman in February 1946 and 'Abdallah to Baghdad in September 1946, the two sides dis­ cussed an arrangement whereby they would maintain separate identi­ ties and internal administrations while going ahead with military and economic integration, including a customs union and a single cur­ rency.33Instead they ended up signing a watered-down Treaty of Broth­ erhood and Alliance on 15 April 1947. 'Abdallah meanwhile pursued his own expansionist agenda by annexing the West Bank (captured during the war against Israel) on 1 December 1948. A second Iraqi initiative in 1950-1951 proposed the establishment of a federation with 'Abdallah as its first king and Iraq's Faisal II as his successor. Once again, Transjordan's king remained aloof. 'Abdallah's assassination on 20 July 1951 created a rare opportunity for the Iraqis. Nuri dispatched a team to sound out Jordanian circles on the question of unity and funneled funds to Amman in an effort to enlist support.34 His efforts appeared to have failed when 'Abdallah's son Talai ascended to the throne and the new government publicly rejected the idea of a union with Iraq, but the king's abdication one year later because of mental illness revived Nuri's hopes. As before, the Iraqi blandishments elicited some response, particularly among Palestinians on the West Bank, who felt no attachment to Amman and hoped that a larger federation would prove more effective against Israel. Also as before, however, Jordan's political elite (rallied by Talal's wife. Queen Zein, and backed by Britain and Saudi Arabia) rebuffed the Iraqi offer, establishing instead a regency council until Talal's son Hussein reached the age of eighteen and (on 2 May 1953) ascended to Jordan's throne in his turn.35 Hashemites never found the formula that could legitimate royal rule in a strange land. They failed completely in their primary foreign Ir a q ' s

33. See Khadduii, Independent Iraq, pp. 343-344; and Pipes, Greater Syria, p. 87. 34. Many details of this episode were revealed during the political trials following the 1958 coup in Iraq. See Mahkamat al-Sha(b: Al-Muhadarat al-Rasmiyya li-Jalasat al-Mahkama al-'Askariyya al-cUlya al-Khassa [The People's Court: Official Proceedings of the Sessions of the Special Higher Military Court], henceforth Mahkama, 22 vols. (Baghdad, 19591962), 4:1569-1749. 35. Author's interview, (3 August 1991, Amman) with Akram Zu'aitar, who acted as Iraq's primary liaison in Jordan during this period and whose links to Baghdad extended back to the 1930s when he was one of the Palestinians brought in to propagate panArab ideals. See the memoirs of Khalil Mardam, Syria's ambassador in Baghdad at the

Foundations of the Iraqi State

39

policy objective—to use Iraq as a launching pad for a resumption of their pan-Arab quest—because of the combined opposition of Britain, France, the United States, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and even Transjordan. As a result, after almost four decades of Hashemite rule, Iraq's borders remained unchanged. On the domestic front, the results were somewhat more mixed. Until the early 1950s, the struggle to assert political and military autonomy vis-à-vis Britain abroad and local chieftains at home monopolized the energies of Iraq's new rulers. The new state's socioeconomic interven­ tions during this period were limited primarily to manipulating tariffs in order to encourage private industry and investing in social overhead capital: the construction of buildings, roads, bridges, and, above all, irrigation and flood control works to regulate the discharge of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Nevertheless, physical infrastructure re­ mained inadequate in 1950, and direct "attempts by the government to control economic life were still of minor importance."*36 In 1952, however, the major constraint—finance—began to ease after an agreement with foreign companies more than tripled Iraq's share of oil revenue. This development had two important consequences for state formation. First, it enhanced the financial autonomy of the Iraqi state: the share of taxes in total government revenues fell from an annual average of 64.2 percent in 1932-1952 to 31.1 percent in 19531955, while that of oil revenues rose from 15.5 percent to 63.0 percent. Iraq's government no longer had to depend as much on its citizens (or on Britain) to finance its activities; now it had a major income stream of its own. Second, as revenues rose in absolute terms from 28 million Iraqi dinars in 1950 to 90 million in 1955, so did the state's efficacy: its ability to intervene in and transform Iraqi society.37 Government expenditures as a ratio of Gross Domestic Product rose from 14.9 percent in 1950 to 21.2 percent in 1955, reflecting an expansion of state activity that would accelerate during the final years of the time, for an extended account of this episode: Taqarir al-Khalil al-Diblomasiyya (Beirut, 1982), pp. 65-116. 36. Edith Penrose and E. F. Penrose, Iraq: International Relations and National Development (London, 1978), p. 150. 37. For oil revenues see SaHd Himadeh, AI-Nizam al-Iqtisadi fil-eIraq (Beirut, 1938), p. 483 for 1927-1937; UNSY, 1951 to 1958 (New York, 1951-1958), for 1938-1955. For taxes and total government revenues see: Himadeh, Al-Nizam al-Iqtisadi ß-Hraq, pp. 472, 492, 531; UNSY 1951, pp. 498 - 499; UNSY 1953, p. 471; UNSY 1956, p. 519; UNSY 1938, p. 486.

40

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

monarchy.38 Major capital works such as dam construction were over­ seen by the Development Board, a planning agency set up in 1950 to which the government allocated 70 percent of oil revenues.39 Iraq's road, railway, and airline networks expanded, and the development of communications tightened the bonds of national integration still further: the number of telephone subscribers per 1,000 population grew from 0.3 in 1927 to 3.5 in 1950 and 5.9 in 1955.40 In education, the government elbowed out private schools with parochial or sectarian orientations and imposed a standardized curriculum that promoted the authority and legitimacy of the state. As a result, the proportion of all students at the primary level who attended government schools rose from 69 percent in 1930 to 94 percent by 1955.41All these activities were reflected by the dramatic growth in the public sector's average annual share of gross fixed capital formation (GFCF) from 5 percent in 19211930, to 35 percent in 1931-1950, and 49 percent in 1953-1955.42 There was even a modest rise in the proportion of income taxes in total taxes (an indicator of the state's surveillance and extraction capabilities) from an annual average of 2.4 percent before World War II (1928-1935) to 10.9 percent after the war (1946-1955).43 Still, the growth of state strength in Iraq during the period under review should not be overstated. Despite the expansion of government education, for example, only 16 percent of primary school-age and 6 percent of secondary school-age children were actually enrolled in school in 1950.44 Similarly, the number of people who paid income taxes remained very low: 25,914 individuals (0.4 percent of the total population) in 1955, 38. GDP: UN, YNAS 1958 (New York, 1959), p. 106; UN, YNAS 1965 (New York, 1966), p. 172. Government expenditures: UNSY 1955, p. 507; UNSY 1998, p. 486. 39. Ferhang Jalal, The Role of Government in the Industrialization of Iraq: 1950-1965 (Lon­ don, 1972), p. 15. 40. Subscribers: ISA 1927-1955 (Baghdad, 1935), p. 59; ISA 1952, p. 242; ISA 1956, p. 136. Population: ISA 1978, p. 25; World Bank, World Tables [1980] (Baltimore, 1980), pp. 90-91. 41. ISA 1927-1955, pp. 33-38; ISA 1956, pp. 74, 77. 42. Jalal, Role of Government, p. 5; Kadhim A. Al-Eyd, Oil Revenues and Accelerated Growth: Absorptive Capacity in Iraq (New York, 1979), p. 90. Figures for 1951 and 1952 are unavailable. 43. 1928-1935 income taxes: Himadeh, Al-Nizam al-Iqtisadi fil-'Iraq, pp. 492, 529, 531; 1946-1955 income taxes: Iraq, Iraqi National Accounts 1947 (Baghdad, 1950), p. 56; ISA 1950, p. 284; ISA 1951, p. 303; ISA 1952, p. 255; ISA 1954, p. 124; ISA 1955, p. 127; ISA 1956, p. 203. Total tax revenues: Himadeh, Al-Nizam al-Iqtisadi fil-cIraq, pp. 492 and 531; UNSY 1951, pp. 498-499. 44. CSS 1967 (New York, 1968), p. 356.

Foundations of the Iraqi State

41

most of them living in Baghdad.45It would be many more years before the reach of the state extended to every nook and cranny of Iraqi society. As the midpoint of the decade rolled around, therefore, the most that could be said was that the groundwork for both state formation and nation building had been laid. With the necessary financial resources only just becoming available, the bulk of the task still lay ahead. Rather, the main legacy of Faisal and his heirs was to establish an authority in Baghdad that achieved a virtual monopoly on violence and began the process of integrating the various fragments of Iraqi society into a national unit through military conscription and education. They also succeeded in implanting the idea of Iraq's "Prussian" pan-Arab destiny into the national psyche. Those preliminary accomplishments in state formation, however, gave rise to two further developments that would pose an ever-increasing threat to Hashemite rule. First, Iraq's newly cohering social classes began to demand greater political say, inevitably at the expense of royal decision-making auton­ omy, even as Faisal's Sharifians gradually merged with leading tribal landlords to form a landed upper class that remained narrowly based and impervious to entry from below.46 Discontent among the middle and lower classes was articulated by the National Democratic Party (NDP) of Kamil al-Chadirji (one of the Ahali ministers during the early days of Bakr Sidqi's regime) and the illegal Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) respectively. The ICP in particular developed a significant following, for example organizing a major strike in Mosul in July 1946 that was suppressed only when police shot dead at least ten workers. A subse­ quent government crackdown in 1947 led to the arrest of the entire leadership and the execution of party secretary Yusuf Salman Yusuf along with two other Central Committee members. Nevertheless, the ICP continued to lead popular uprisings such as the one in January 1948 that scuttled a proposed revision of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty. Opposition agitation reached a new peak during the months follow­ ing the signing of a new oil concession agreement on 3 February 1952. Demands were heard for abrogation of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, national­ ization of the oil industry, limitations on land ownership, universal direct suffrage, and constitutional checks on royal authority. When the 45. ISA 1956, p. 203. 46. See David Pool, "From Elite to Class: The Transformation of Iraqi Political Leader­ ship," in The Integration of Modem Iraq, ed. Abbas Kelidar (New York, 1979), pp. 63-87.

42

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

harsh suppression of a student strike at Baghdad's Faculty of Pharmacy in November led to widespread disturbances during which antiroyalist slogans were heard for the first time, the state cracked down again. A new military cabinet imposed martial law on 23 November 1952 and arrested activists from all opposition movements, legal or otherwise. Despite the ineptitude of the government's handling of such epi­ sodes, it is noteworthy that the 1952 opposition demands reflected classic bourgeois concerns and signaled a qualitative change from the tribal issues encountered by King Faisal I. In a clear indication that Hashemite state building was beginning to bear fruit, neither the NDP nor the ICP questioned the integrity or legitimacy of the Iraqi state (although in another illustration of the Hashemite dilemma, this meant that they had little interest in pan-Arabism either).47 They merely wanted to deploy the institutions and resources of that state in support of their socioeconomic programs. The second consequence of early state formation was that the devel­ opment of despotic power outstripped the development of other politi­ cal institutions capable of controlling the armed forces and protecting the monarchy from the ambitions of officers such as Bakr Sidqi and the Golden Square. To escape such domestic pressures as well as the heavy hand of Britain, Iraq's Hashemites intensified their unionist cam­ paign during their final six years in power. 47. Although both parties paid lip service to pan-Arab causes, the ICP (partly owing to Soviet pressure) denounced the attack launched by Arab armies on the new state of Israel in 1948 and demanded their withdrawal: "To remain silent on the criminal Palestine War is the biggest service one could do for imperialism today. It is the duty of every true patriot today to demand an immediate end to this great crime, on the basis of full independence for Arabs and Jews and the right of both peoples to determine their own fates, each in its own section of Palestine" (ICP declaration quoted by Fikrat Namiq ‘Abd al-Fattah, Siyasat *Iraq al-Kharijiyya fil-Mantiqa al-’-Arabiyya: 1953-1958 [Baghdad, 1981], p. 188). The ICP leadership was dominated by people who did not belong to Iraq's Sunni Arab political elite. Of the twenty-one members of the ICP Central Committee between 1949 and 1955, nine (42.8 percent) were Shi'is; six (28.6 percent) Kurds; one Jew; one Christian; and four (19.0 percent) Sunni Arabs. For a brief period during the winter of 1948-1949, a Jew (Sasson Shlomo Dallai) became secretary general of the party (Batatu, Old Social Classes, pp. 700, 996,1046). About 30 percent of all those arrested as subversives during the 1948 anti-British riots were Jews (Abbas Kelidar, "Aziz al-Haj: A Communist Radical," in The Integration of Modem Iraq, ed. Abbas Kelidar [New York, 1979], p. 184).

3

Foundations of the Syrian State

Unlike Iraq, Syria did not enjoy a period of relative isolation after independence during which it could focus on developing the institu­ tions of a central state. Part of the reason was geographical: while Iraq remained largely at peace with its neighbors once the early border questions had been settled, Syria fought (and lost) a war with a vigorous new Zionist neighbor just two years after independence and endured a constant state of low-intensity border conflict for some time thereafter. In addition to diverting a great deal of its leaders' energies, the conflict with Israel forced Syria to maintain alliances with other Arab states, which often came at a price for Syrian sovereignty. Institutional differences, however, provide an even more important explanation for the low level of state building in postindependence Syria. France's expulsion of King Faisal and his Sharifians in 1920 de­ prived Syria of a centralizing monarch assisted by a cohesive and likeminded political elite. As a result, Syria at independence remained dominated by urban oligarchs whose concerns were largely regional and who resisted the emergence of central authority. This unfortunate legacy—exacerbated by divisive French policies during the mandate— led to three crucial consequences: first, the prevalence of numerous and usually conflicting appeals to identity such as sectarian secessionism (especially among the cAlawi and Druze communities), Syrian national­ ism, Greater Syrian nationalism, and pan-Arabism; second, extreme political instability, manifested in five successful military coups in as

44

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

many years; and third, vulnerability to foreign influence and inter­ ference. Each of those pathologies existed in Iraq as well, of course, but the presence of a king there mitigated their virulence to an extent that is made apparent by the different "cures" developed in Baghdad and Damascus. Iraq's Hashemite rulers sought to enhance the domestic and international autonomy of their state by expanding its borders and augmenting its resources. The pan-Arabism of Syria's leaders, by contrast, offered the country's sovereignty to foreign patrons who could help them overcome their domestic rivals. The French Mandate: 1920-1946 In 1920 France took over a country that was both a fragment of its historical domain and an agglomeration of highly disparate elements. It was a fragment because the lands traditionally known as Syria encom­ passed four territories (Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan) that were shared out between Britain and France after World War I, a compact area bounded by deserts to the south and east, the Mediterranean Sea to the west, and Turkish-speaking Anatolia north of the Taurus Mountains. It was also an agglomeration because the new state was neither economically integrated—Aleppo in the north had strong eco­ nomic ties to what became southern Turkey and northern Iraq; Damas­ cus, Syria's other major urban center, looked to Beirut and Palestine for trade and commerce—nor politically centralized. Palestine and Joirdan came under British control, while France added sizable Muslim-populated areas to the previously autonomous Maro­ nite heartland to create an independent greater Lebanon in August 1920. During the next two years, France tried to fragment Syria still further, creating independent states in Aleppo, Damascus, and the cAlawi region around Latakia, as well as autonomous units in Alexandretta in the north, the Jazira in the northeast, and Jabal Druze in the south. Most of these areas were ultimately reintegrated (it proved too difficult and costly to maintain separate administrations), but Lebanon remained independent and Alexandretta was ceded to Turkey in June 1939. As the creation of ‘Alawi and Druze statelets indicates, France also tried to divide and rule using Syria's ethnic and sectarian cleavages.

Foundations of the Syrian State

45

Although Arabic-speakers constituted 85 percent of the population, they belonged to a variety of sectarian groups: Sunnis (60 percent of the total population), cAlawis (11.5 percent). Druze (3.0 percent), Isma'ilis (1.5 percent), and Christians (9.9 percent). The main non-Arab communities were Kinds (8.5 percent) and Armenians (4.2 percent), with smaller numbers of Circassians, Jews, and others.1 Armenians and Circassians played a particularly prominent role in the Troupes Spéciales (analogous to the Assyrian Levies in Iraq), but France tried to pit all of Syria's minority communities against the Sunni Arabs, who constituted the core of its traditional political elite. France attacked the local oligarchs (for the most part urban absentee landlords) by another route as well, seeking to destroy their economic base through agrarian and tax reforms aimed at creating a stronger independent peasantry. Although those efforts generally failed, they galvanized Syria's political elites into articulating a response that tran­ scended dty and regional lines for the first time and constituted the genesis of Arab nationalism in Syria: "The important point is that na­ tionalism would not have spread so quickly had these towns not had a unified and cohesive local upper class which came to regard the national idea as a viable and useful substitute for 'Ottomanism,' an ideology which after 1918 no longer served its interests."12Syria's urban elites felt no need as yet to distinguish between pan-Arab and specifi­ cally Syrian nationalism because their goal was neither to expand Syria's borders nor even to end the mandate but merely to "shift the local balance of power such that mutual recognition and cooperation between the French and the nationalist elite might then be possible. [They]. . . rebelled in order to re-establish the basis upon which the politics of urban notables could once again thrive."3 In practice, accordingly, the "nationalist" leadership (organized in a proto-party known as the National Bloc) displayed little interest in panArabism and did not hesitate, for example, to renounce Syria's claims to Lebanon in return for a favorable treaty with Paris in 1936. The 1. Philip S. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism, 19201945 (Princeton, 1987), p. 15. 2. Ibid., p. 19. For overviews of nationalist currents predating the mandate era see Muhammad ‘Izzat Darwaza, Nash’at al-Haraka al-'Arabiyya al-Haditha (Sidon, 1950), and (Abdallah Hanna, Min al-Ittijahat al-Fikriyya fi Suriyya wa Lubnan: Al-Nisfal-Awmal min alQam al-Hshrin (Damascus, 1987). 3. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 94.

46

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

National Bloc also responded negatively to unionist overtures from Hashemite Iraq and Transjordan throughout the mandate period de­ spite some domestic support for such initiatives. A group of younger and more radical pan-Arabs met in the Lebanese town of Qama’il in August 1933, f°r example, and established a League of National Action (cUsbat al-cAmal al-Qawmi) to agitate for Arab unity under the Hashemites. King Faisal's death just two weeks later, however, followed by a skillful policy of co-optation by the National Bloc (several League leaders received top government positions), soon took the wind out of this movement.4Similarly, nothing came of efforts by pro-Hashemites such as the Druze chieftain cAbd al-Ghaffar al-Atrash, who petitioned Lon­ don in 1938 for the incorporation of the Jabal Druze region in southern Syria into Transjordan, or the popular nationalist leader cAbd al-Rahman al-Shahbandar, who visited Amman in 1939 and hailed 'Abdallah with the words: "Long live the living King of Syria and Transjordan."5 ‘Abdallah's unionist efforts provoked Western opposition as well, prompting one British diplomat to comment in 1942: "It is very difficult to know what place we can find for him in the post-war Near East, and if he plays the fool and gives us an excuse to eliminate his dynasty, so much the better."6 As late as 1947, American officials, responding to a Saudi request that Washington "intervene in this matter immedi­ ately," notified London that the United States government was "dis­ turbed" by ‘Abdallah's unionist campaign in Syria.7 Still, although Syria's urban oligarchs cared primarily about perpetu­ ating their role as indispensable middlemen between colonial power and local society—a role they had played since Ottoman days—and despite their largely instrumental attitude toward nationalist ideology, the mere process of organizing nationwide anti-French manifestations such as the Great Revolt of 1925-1927 (in which more than six thousand people died) or the national strike of January-March 1936 helped lay the foundations for a centralized authority capable of claiming for the first time the allegiance of Syria's diverse communities. When a combi­ nation of postwar fatigue, popular agitation, and British pressure finally brought the French occupation to an end in April 1946, therefore, the rudiments of a coherent and unified national polity based in Damascus 4. 5. 6. 7.

See ibid., pp. 400-433. Porath, In Search of Arab Unity, p. 28; Pipes, Greater Syria, p. 75. H. M. Eyres of the Foreign Office, quoted in Porath, In Search of Arab Unity, p. 214. Pipes, Greater Syria, p. 75.

Foundations of the Syrian State

47

had already been established. All that remained was to develop political institutions capable of governing that polity.

The First C ivilian Interregnum: 1946-1949

France had to resign itself in the end to dealing with the National Bloc oligarchs who inherited the reigns of power after independence. For many of them, the first instinct was to revert to the parochialism of earlier days once their common foe had gone. Thus the centralized national army actually decreased in size from seven thousand soldiers in 1946 to twenty-five hundred two years later,8 and the National Bloc quickly disintegrated into regional offshoots, including the National Party of Shukri al-Quwwatli and Sabri al-£Asali, the Republican Party of Jamil Mardam (both based in Damascus), and the People's Party of Rushdi al-Kikhia and Nazim al-Qudsi (based in Aleppo). Nevertheless, a central government did exist in Syria. Damascene oligarchs such as President Quwwatli and Prime Minister Mardam remembered how they had been marginalized by King Faisal and his retinue during the brief monarchy of 1920 and had no intention of surrendering Syria's independent status or the privileged position of Damascus as its capital dty to the Hashemites. Once in power, there­ fore, they rebuffed renewed unionist approaches from Transjordan and Iraq by declaring that Syria "has no desire (to join) any union . . . that would encroach upon the rights and privileges which she has gained and which are (commonly) enjoyed by sovereign states."9Other groups that supported this stance included the Communist Party, active since the mid-i92os; the Muslim Brotherhood, with a strong following among the conservative Sunni merchants of Syria's major urban centers; and Akram Hawrani's Youth Party, founded in 1943 to challenge Hama's powerful landed interests. All three based their appeal for popular support on ideologies that had very little to do with pan-Arabism. Ranged against them stood three parties that advocated some form of geographical revisionism: the People's Party, the Syrian Social Na8. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 629. 9. Syria's acting foreign minister, responding in parliament on 23 November 1946 to the latest unity call by King ‘Abdallah. Quoted in Muhammad Khalil, ed.. The Arab States and the Arab League: A Documentary Record, Vol. 2: International Affairs (Beirut, 1962), p. 29.

48

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

tionalist Party (SSNP), and the Bacth Party. Initially by far the largest and most influential, the People's Party articulated the resentment of Aleppo's oligarchs at the loss of their trading links with Iraq and at the political ascendancy of their Damascene rivals. Both concerns made it receptive to Iraqi approaches, and in November 1948 the party launched a new unionist campaign by sending an envoy to Baghdad to explore the possibilities for a federation. The SSNP and the Bacth were cut from a completely different cloth, each representing one version of the more extreme nationalism arising from Syria's lower-middle-class intelligentsia. Antun Sacada created the SSNP in 1932 with some of his students at the American University of Beirut to work for a Greater Syria that incorporated Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Transjordan, Sinai, Iraq, and even Cyprus.101Although heav­ ily influenced by the fascist movements of Europe, the SSNP advocated a geographically based nationalism that refused to differentiate on the basis of race, language, or religion (thus rejecting on principle any broader pan-Arabism) and therefore proved particularly attractive to members of the region's ethnic and sectarian minorities. It supported King ‘Abdallah's Greater Syria plan. The Ba‘th Party established by Michel cAflaq and Salah al-Din Bitar in 1947 had European fascist roots as well, but it espoused a nationalism that rested solidly on Arab identity.11Although "Unity, Liberty, Social­ ism" became the party slogan, ‘Aflaq stressed that "unity is higher in the hierarchy of values than socialism," and it is clear from his writings that "liberty" referred to national emancipation from colonial rule rather than individual freedom, whereas "socialism" seemed to mean little more than populär mobilization against the foreign enemy.12 Indeed, ‘Aflaq denounced communism for its rejection of private property, its hostility to nationalism and religion, and the elements "Marx imparted into it from his vindictive Jewish soul."13 The incompatibility of a purely geographic Greater Syrianism with pan-Arabism and the efforts of both parties to seek recruits from the 10. See Labib Zuwiyya Yamak, The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: An Ideological Analysis (Cambridge, Mass., 1966). 11. Sami al-Jundi, subsequently a leading Ba'thist, described himself and his friends during the 1940s as "racists who admired Nazism" and considered translating Mein Kampf into Arabic (Al-BaHh [Beirut, 1969], p. 27). 12. Michel cAflaq, Ma'rakat al-Masir al-Wahid (Beirut, 1958), p. 33. 13. Michel ‘Aflaq, Fi Sabil al-BaHh (Beirut, 1963), p. 71.

Foundations of the Syrian State

49

same small pool of educated middle-class youth soon turned the SSNP and the Bacth into violent enemies. Initially at least, the Bacthists tried to outbid the SSNP by allying with the People's Party and supporting Hashemite unity calls as well. Thus they accused Quwwatli and his Damascene colleagues in 1946 of creating "artificial difficulties and ob­ stacles" to ‘Abdallah's Greater Syria plan and drafted a memo to the president two years later urging him to conclude a union with Iraq as soon as possible.14 Syria's dismal performance in the 1948 war against Israel severely weakened the National Party and finished off Jamil Mardam's Republi­ cans as a political force, creating a new opportunity for the People's Party to assume power and press ahead with its Syrian-Iraqi federation plan. The defeat had a second and far more serious consequence, however: it caused Syria's army officers to grow disillusioned with civilian leadership and led some of them to think about taking power into their own hands.

H usni al-Zacim

Chief of Staff Husni al-Zacim mounted Syria's first military coup on 30 March 1949, following months of postwar economic dislocation and political turmoil. He received encouragement from a variety of sources, including senior army officers who had come under heavy civilian criticism following the defeat; Akram Hawrani, who viewed the army as his vehicle to national leadership; and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which apparently feared a takeover by pro-Soviet ele­ ments.15 Although Zacim lasted less than five months, during that time he pioneered many of the tactics employed by each would-be dictator who succeeded him, from the predawn execution of the coup to the consolidation of his grip on power. Brute repression and widespread 14. Najah Muhammad, Al-Haraka al-Qaxomiyya al-'Arabiyya fi Suriyya min Khilal Tarikh Tandhimatiha al-Siyasiyya ('48-67), vol. 1 (Damascus, 1987), p. 105; Muhammad Jamil Baihum, Al-Wihda al-'Arabiyya bain al-Madd ival-Jazr: 1868-1972 (Beirut, 1973), p. 21. 15. See the memoirs of Nazir Fansa (Zacim's brother-in-law and one of his top aides), Ayyam Husni al-ZaHm: 137 Yawman Hazzat Suriyya (Beirut, 1983), p. 38; and Miles Copeland (an American intelligence operative in the Middle East), The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (London, 1969), pp. 41-42.

50

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

arrests took care of the immediate danger, but the new regime con­ fronted a victorious Israel in difficult armistice negotiations abroad while at the same time trying to neutralize its opponents at home. For Za'im (as for so many of his successors), the solution to both problems lay in the cultivation of foreign allies. An Iraqi emissary arrived in Damascus one day after the coup to meet the new government and offer any assistance that might be needed.16Two days later, Zacim's foreign minister told the Iraqi ambas­ sador that "there is a desire among educated opinion in Syria for the unification of Syria and Iraq—without Transjordan—on the basis of internal autonomy for each region."17By raising the question of unity, Zafim hoped to realize three objectives: to win domestic support for his regime among pan-Arabs, to strengthen his hand in the armistice negotiations with Israel, and to frighten Saudi Arabia and Egypt into competing with Iraq for his favors. He achieved some success on all three counts. Both the People's Party and the Bacthists welcomed Zacim's unionist moves, the latter going so far as to send the dictator a message of support on 4 April.18 Iraq reacted more cautiously, saying it accepted "in principle" the idea of unity provided it proceeded through "legal" constitutional channels, a caution that reflected Iraq's distrust of Zacim's objectives and its preference for dealing with its traditional allies in the People's Party.19 Iraqi distrust intensified during the discussions following Zacim's call for a joint defense treaty against Israel on 9 April, when it quickly became clear that the two sides were working at cross purposes: Baghdad wanted to station Iraqi troops on Syrian territory, ostensibly to deter Zionist aggression but in fact primarily to establish a military presence in Syria as a first step toward unification; Damascus resisted the idea for precisely that reason, pressing instead for the immediate announcement of a defense treaty in order to put pressure on Israel. Iraqi prime minister Nuri Sacid finally ruled out a defense pact on 14 April on the grounds that no treaty was possible until constitutional 16. See Majid Khadduri, "The Scheme of Fertile Crescent Unity: A Study in InterArab Relations," in The Near East and the Great Powers, ed. Richard N. Frye (Cambridge, Mass., 1951), pp. 137-177. 17. Fansa, Ayyam Husni al-ZaHm, p. 109. 18. Muhammad, Al-Haraka al-Qawmiyya, p. 186. 19. Fansa, Ayyam Husni al-ZaHm, p. 109.

Foundations of the Syrian State

51

government returned to Syria.20He did, however, travel to Damascus two days later to argue for an immediate union between the two coun­ tries. The Syrians resisted, drowning Nuri's proposal in a sea of counter­ suggestions such as a looser economic association that included Leba­ non as well.21 By this time, Zacim's unionist posturing had elicited the intended regional response: envoys laden with diplomatic and financial inducements began arriving from both Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and on 23 April, following a secret visit by Za'im to Cairo, both countries recognized his regime.22 There was no longer any reason to continue the charade with Bagh­ dad. Fortified by his new Arab alliances as well as by the ratification of a financial treaty with France, Zacim abandoned pan-Arabism and adopted a hostile stance toward both Iraq and Transjordan, threatening at one point to invade and annex the latter. Both the People's Party and the Bacth moved into opposition as a result, and when they raised objections to Zacim's increasingly dictatorial behavior—for example, having himself "elected" president of Syria by 99.4 percent of the elec­ torate23—party leaders such as Kikhia, Qudsi, and £Aflaq were thrown in jail. Even Hawrani began to scheme against his erstwhile ally when he found himself shunted aside. But Zacim turned out to be an incompetent dictator. Having lost the support of all the major political parties, he proceeded to alienate his military colleagues as well, purging or transferring officers at will and relying more and more on his Circassian praetorian guard. Finally, on 14 August 1949, a second military coup organized by Colonel Sami alHinnawi brought an end to Zacim's rule as well as to his life.

Sami al-H innawi

Unlike Za£im, Hinnawi had no dictatorial ambitions and immediately handed power to a civilian cabinet dominated by the People's Party. For 20. See ibid., pp. 112-118, for a summary of the defense treaty talks. 21. See the memoirs of Za'im's foreign minister ‘Adil Arslan, Mudhakkirat al-Amir lAdil Arslan: Al-Juz* al-Thani, 1946-1950, ed. Yusuf Ibish (Beirut, 1983), 2:817. 22. Henceforth, according to Patrick Seale: "Fluctuations on the Damascus gold market announced the arrival of aircraft from Saudi Arabia" (The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War Arab Politics, 1945-1958 [New Haven, 1965], p. 47, n.i). 23. Muhammad, Al-Haraka al-Qaumiyya, p. 191.

52

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

the first time since independence, as a result, Syria had a government committed to unity with Iraq. Two subsequent developments further bolstered the unionist trend. On 29 September 1949, Sabri al-£Asali convinced his National Party to reverse course and come out publicly in favor of unity as well.24 And in the parliamentary elections of 15 November, which were relatively free by Syrian standards, the People's Party secured 43 of the assembly's 114 seats, while independents allied with it won a further 20 seats.25Clearly there was considerable popular support for the unionist position. Foreign Minister Nazim al-Qudsi took the first step soon after the coup, informing his Iraqi counterpart of Syria's desire for a federation.26 During subsequent bilateral discussions, the two sides staked out what would become classic negotiating positions for future unity schemes. Damascus (the defensive partner) demanded considerable autonomy within the proposed federation, asking that its republican regime be preserved and that it be exempted from the provisions of the AngloIraqi Treaty. Baghdad (the expansionist partner) sought a much tighter union governed by a centralized leadership and a federal cabinet, with joint "diplomatic representation, a customs and monetary union, and the merging of the two armies under a unified command."27 Within Syria, meanwhile, a major domestic realignment got under way. The National Party's conversion to pan-Arabism arose partly from an opportunistic desire to cash in on a popular cause, but it also reflected the concern felt by Syria's traditional oligarchy in Damascus as well as in Aleppo about the rise of radical new political movements such as the Youth Party and the Ba£th. Particularly worrisome was the tendency of younger politicians to engage in intrigues and conspiracies with army officers: Akram Hawrani, after all, had played a major role in both Za£im's and Hinnawi's coups. Representatives of the old order such as Rushdi al-Kikhia and Sabri al-£Asali hoped that an association with Iraq would neutralize the military threat to their continued domi24. Seale, Struggle for Syria, p. 78. 25. The National Party won thirteen seats; the Ba‘th, one; Akram Hawrani's Youth Party, one; the SSNP, one; and the Muslim Brotherhood, four (Muhammad, Al-Haraka al-Qavmiyya, p. 210). 26. See the testimony of Ahmad Mukhtar Baban, an Iraqi participant in the 1949 talks, at his trial after the 1958 coup (Mahkama, 4:1495-1497). 27. Khadduri, "Scheme of Fertile Crescent Unity," p. 162. According to Baban, Qudsi even suggested at one point that the proposed federation be expanded to include other members as well (Mahkama, 4:1496).

Foundations o f the Syrian State

53

nance.28 For that reason, Hawrani and the Bacthists denounced the unity plan as an imperialist conspiracy. In fact, none of the major foreign actors viewed a Syrian-Iraqi federa­ tion with favor: Saudi Arabia as always opposed any development that might enhance Hashemite power; Egypt countered this latest challenge to its regional standing with an alternative proposal in October 1949 for a multilateral Arab collective security pact; Israel suspected any amalgamation of Arab forces; France suspected a British conspiracy to wrest Syria away altogether; Britain believed (correctly) that Iraq's lead­ ers sought unity in order to increase their autonomy; and the United States feared for its oil fields—a fear expressed by a State Department report on the subject: "There would . . . be no contribution to United States interests in giving encouragement to the movement and any suggestion of intervention by this Government in favor of union would undoubtedly incur deep resentment among peoples of the Near East, particularly in Saudi Arabia where US strategic interests are of vital importance."29 King ‘Abdallah opposed the proposal as well, telling a Syrian envoy that Transjordan was a more logical partner for Syria.30Dissident voices could be heard even within Iraq: Kamil al-Chadirji of the National Democratic Party confessed in his memoirs that many opposition lead­ ers, both in the NDP and in the pan-Arab Independence Party, hoped for a collapse of the unity talks because they feared success would strengthen Nuri Sacid and the ruling Sharifian elite.31 Of all the federation plan's opponents, however, none played a more decisive role in scuttling it than the Syrian military. Fully aware of the civilian government's hostile attitude toward them, top officers convened soon after Hinnawi's coup and resolved to prevent unity with Iraq at all costs.32When the Syrian parliament approved the wording of an oath of office that called for pan-Arab unity without mentioning Syria's republican regime, therefore, the army decided to move. Two 28. Khalid al-‘Azm, Mudhakkirat Khalid al-cAzm, 3 vols. (Beirut, 1972), 2:218. 29. "The Political Union of Syria and Iraq," State Department paper (25 April 1950), in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C., 1978), pp. 1209-1210. 30. See the memoirs of the Syrian diplomat Najib al-Armanazi, ‘Ashar Sanawat filDiblomasiyya: Fi Samim al-Ahdath al-'Arabiyya wal-Dawliyya (Beirut, 1963), p. 129. 31. Kamil al-Chadirji, Mudhakkirat Kamil al-Chadirji wa Tarikh al-Hizb al-Watani al-Dimuqrati (Beirut, n.d.), pp. 442-444. 32. cAzm, Mudhakkirat, 2:220.

54

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

days later, on 19 December 1949, the third military coup in less than nine months overthrew the People's Party government. Its first communiqué explained that the action aimed at thwarting those who "conspire with certain foreign circles against the well-being of the army and the integ­ rity of the state and its republican institutions."33

Adib al-Shishakli

For a while it appeared that Colonel Adib al-Shishakli intended to emulate his immediate predecessor by handing power back to the civil­ ians and withdrawing to the barracks. Aided and advised by his friend and fellow townsman Akram Hawrani, however, Shishakli and his protégés (younger officers such as cAbd al-Hamid Sarraj, Amin alNafuri, and Ahmad cAbd al-Karim) instead entered into a bitter power struggle with the People's Party that led to the rise and fall of six cabinets within a year. Although the army succeeded in keeping Syria independent, the unionists continued to wield a decisive majority in parliament and could not be ignored entirely. A paralyzing stalemate ensued. Thus Nazim al-Qudsi of the People's Party managed to form a cabinet on 4 June 1950 but had to appoint a Shishakli ally as defense minister and made little progress toward his stated goal of federation with Iraq, a task made all the more difficult by Sabri al-£Asali's decision to renounce unionism and move his Na­ tional Party back to its earlier anti-Hashemite stance.34 Similarly, Shis­ hakli eventually brought Qudsi down, but he in turn could not extin­ guish lingering pro-Iraqi sentiment among the population. When Syria appealed for Arab assistance following border clashes with Israel in May 1951, for example, only Iraq responded, sending troops who marched through Damascus amid much popular acclaim and renewed calls for unity. Macruf al-Dawalibi of the People's Party brought matters to a head 33. Ibid., pp. 226-227. 34. Qudsi's verbal commitment to pan-Arabism often varied to suit his audience. Thus he assured W ashington's envoy in Damascus that Saudi king "Ibn Saud should have no misgivings on question of any Syrian interest in union, whether with Iraq or Jordan. This country is proud of its independent policy and alert to any scheme which would retard its further development" (telegram from Cavendish Cannon, 16 November 1950, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1950, 5:1220).

Foundations of the Syrian State

55

on 28 November 1951, putting together a cabinet that included antimili­ tary and pro-Hashemite elements. Dawalibi himself advocated land reform, wealth redistribution, and (most alarming for the United States) a closer relationship with the Soviet Union. A State Department memo­ randum warned: "This is bad news for the West."35 When the new prime minister tried to appoint a more compliant armed forces chief of staff as his first act in office, therefore, Shishakli—strongly backed by the CIA—struck again, mounting his second coup on 29 November.36 Shishakli decided to hold on to power this time. He shut down parliament and dissolved most political movements—first the People's Party, the National Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the commu­ nists, then in April 1952 the Bacth and even Hawrani's party as well. He also purged the army of all potential rivals, transferring officers with party affiliations to the govemorates and going so far as to exile some of his own protégés (such as Sarraj and cAbd al-Karim) to the Syrian mission in Paris. At the same time, however, Shishakli became the first Syrian leader to make a serious attempt at state building. He expanded the army to twenty-five thousand men by 1953, created a Central Bank, required merchants to keep records so that income taxes could be collected more effectively, increased inheritance taxes, and raised the government's share of national income 13 percent per year from 1949 to 1953.37 He also established the Arab Liberation Movement (ALM, modeled on Atatùrk's Republican People's Party) on 24 August 1952 to serve as an institutional vehicle for mass mobilization. Finally, Shishakli articulated a new vision of Syria's role in the Arab world, one that legitimized his inward-looking policies without formally abandoning pan-Arabism. 35. United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1951, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C., 1982), p. 1083. 36. For an account of the dose links between Shishakli and the CIA, see Miles Cope­ land, The Game Player: Memoirs of the CIA's Original Political Operative (London, 1989), esp. pp. 98-99. These links intensified after the second coup, as a declassified cable from Secretary of State Acheson to the U.S. legation in Damascus suggested: "It is in interest West aid Shishikli [sic] in efforts he may make to establish pro-West stable and progressive govt in Syria. Such aid d d hurt as well as help him and consequently shld be adroit, unobtrusive and as substantial as possible but most importantly speedy" (Telegram dated 14 December 1951, in United States Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: 1951, 5:1090-1091). 37. Raymond A. Hinnebusch, Authoritarian Power and State Formation in Ba'thist Syria: Army, Party, and Peasant (Boulder, 1990), pp. 50-51; Gordon H. Torrey, Syrian Politics and the Military: 1945-1958 (Columbus, 1964), p. 212.

56

Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

Syria needed to focus on developing its economic and military prowess, to become a "fortress of steel," he told the Aleppo Staff College in May 1952; only then could it assume its destined role as the "Prussia of the Arab states."38 But the progressive centralization of power in Shishakli's hands— he became both president and prime minister in July 1953—provoked Syria's opposition parties to make common cause against him. At a secret conclave in Homs the People's and National parties, the Bacthists (merged now with Hawrani's movement), and the communists all agreed to coordinate their efforts to bring the dictator down, apparently with some Iraqi support and funding.39Their first move was a student strike in Aleppo on 4 December 1953, followed by two months of nationwide disturbances. Shishakli finally imposed martial law after crushing a Druze revolt in January 1954, but when a military uprising spread from the Aleppo garrison to other army units on 25 February, he decided to step down without a fight and left for exile. In the end, Shishakli failed because he lacked two crucial attributes of a successful and long-lived dictatorship: an effective institutional apparatus (the ALM failed to attract either popular support or elite participation) and absolute ruthlessness.40With his ouster, Syria's first experiment in inward-looking state building came to an end. S t a t e formation in Syria labored under several disadvantages as com­ pared to that in Iraq: the particularly debilitating and divisive effects of French administration, a longer period of mandatory rule, the ab­ sence of a monarch who could transcend internecine rivalries, the chal­ lenge posed by the Zionist project in Palestine, and the lack of oil revenues. Whenever after independence the squabbling elites of Da­ mascus and Aleppo managed to tear themselves away from their do­ mestic and international struggles to confront socioeconomic questions, therefore, they found themselves hobbled by an extremely weak admin­ istrative apparatus. The establishment of autonomous statelets within Syria—Aleppo until 1925, Latakia and Jabal Druze up to World War II—had created 38. Quoted in Seale, Struggle for Syria, p. 124. 39. Ibid., pp. 137-138. 40. As Patrick Seale (ibid., p. 143) observed: "Shishakli's temperament was not combat­ ive." Shishakli emigrated to Brazil but was murdered on 27 September 1964 by a Druze assassin, apparently in revenge for his suppression of the 1954 Druze revolt.

Foundations of the Syrian State

57

a welter of disparate administrative, legislative, and fiscal systems, including separate taxation regimes and separate budgets.41 Different regions "employed different sets of weights and measurements and different currencies, and they showed a relatively wide variation in the price of the same commodity, suggesting different marketing conditions in each."42 Monetary policy, though centralized, remained under French control with the Syrian pound based entirely on the franc. It was not until the inauguration of the Central Bank on i August 1956 that Syria finally attained "an independent and centralized monetary system of its own, as well as the administrative machinery with which to direct it."43 With no resources of its own, the Syrian state had to rely on the revenue-generating capacity of its citizens to finance its activities: fully 90 percent of total government revenues came from taxation in 1946 and the proportion still stood at 83 percent in 1955.44These high ratios reflected the lack of alternative revenue sources rather than any devel­ opment of the state's extractive capabilities. Thus indirect taxes such as customs duties (the easiest taxes to collect) accounted for the bulk of revenues while income taxes (a better indicator of state efficacy) rose from just 5.1 percent of total taxes in 1946 to a still low 9.4 percent in 1955.45 An International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) report in 1955 found that despite Shishakli's reforms, income tax evasion remained widespread and added: "Even the application of other comparatively simple taxes is hindered by lack of trained person­ nel and modem procedures and equipment."46 As a result, the Syrian state's ability to transform society remained very limited. The public sector's share of gross fixed capital formation averaged 19 percent during the early 1950s and declined to 11.8 percent in 1954 and 16.9 percent in 1955 (compared with an annual average of 49 percent for 1953-1955 in Iraq), perhaps as a result of the dislocations related to Shishakli's overthrow.47 Modest improvements in the coun41. Sa'id Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria (Beirut, 1936), pp. 333-334. 42. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. 17. 43. Edmund Y. Asfour, Syria: Development and Monetary Policy (Cambridge, Mass., 1959)/ P- 55 44. SSA 1956 Pam ascus, 1957), pp. 332-333, 335, 340-341. 45. Ibid. 46. International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), The Economic De­ velopment of Syria (Baltimore, 1955), pp. 280-281. 47. Asfour, Syria, p. 73; SSA 1961, p. 391.



Hashemite Unionism: 1920-1954

fay's physical infrastructure failed to overcome glaring deficiencies: in 1955 there was still no adequate transportation system connecting the granaries of the northeast with the primary port of Latakia, no direct rail link between Damascus and Aleppo, and no electricity for 80 percent of the population.48 Education presented a somewhat brighter picture. During the first decade of independence the number of students attending primary schools more than doubled while those attending secondary schools almost quadrupled, leading to total enrollment ratios in 1955 of 35 percent for primary school-age and 11 percent for secondary schoolage students.49 These are significantly higher than Iraq's enrollment ratios for that year (16 and 6 percent respectively). The Syrian state, however, lagged behind in monopolizing education: the proportion of all students enrolled at the primary level who attended government schools in 1955 was 77 percent (compared to 94 percent in Iraq), while at the secondary level it stood at just 53 percent (77 percent in Iraq).50 Reliance on the private sector was most pronounced in the economic sphere, where government participation consisted primarily of provid­ ing tariff protection for domestic industries. This situation led the 1955 IBRD report to conclude: "A characteristic feature of Syria's rapid eco­ nomic development is that it has been almost wholly due to private enterprise.. . . The Syrian economy has now probably reached a stage in its development at which the government must undertake a more important promotional role."51 As in Iraq, but with far more limited resources, Syria's rulers stood in mid-decade with the real work of expanding the powers of their state still before them. Nevertheless, hère too the foundations at least of a state had been laid by the mid-1950s. If only to defend their newfound privileges against foreign encroachments. Damascene oligarchs and military offi­ cers cooperated to uphold the principles of territorial sovereignty and central authority. The challenge that confronted each ruler in turn now became how to maintain control of the state. Two initial approaches— both uninterested in pan-Arabism—ended in failure: the parliamentarianism of Quwwatli and the National Party because it could not satisfy the ambitions of rival oligarchs in Aleppo and elsewhere; and the mili48. 49. 50. 51.

IBRD, Economic Development of Syria, pp. 14, 122; Asfour, Syria, pp. 33-34. SSA 1963, pp. 80-83; UN/ CSS: 1967, p. 357. SSA 1963, pp. 80-83; 1956, pp. 74-77. IBRD, Economic Development of Syria, p. 23.

Foundations of the Syrian State

59

tary dictatorships of Zacim and Shishakli because they could not find a way to prevent further coups by other ambitious officers. The root problem lay in the weakness of the Syrian state; in the fact that the despotic institutions required to overthrow a government came into being before the infrastructural institutions needed to stabilize and legitimize it had a chance to develop, forcing civilian and military rulers alike to cast about for support wherever they could find it. Hence the turn to unionism, not the expansionist unionism of the Hashemites but a defensive variant in which embattled elites bartered their country's sovereignty for the support of foreign patrons. Because the ultimate Objective was to secure one's hold on power, however, defensive union­ ism was never meant to culminate in any real loss of sovereignty. Its opportunistic nature was amply illustrated by the short-lived pro-Iraqi posturing of Husni al-Zacim and ‘Asali's wing of the National Party, but even the People's Party failed to bring about a union on the two occasions when it held power: after Hinnawi's coup in the fall and winter of 1949 and during Qudsi's premiership in the summer of 1951. Still, Iraq's proximity and its unpopular alliance with Britain made it an unattractive partner for most Syrian politicians. It was only after Egypt entered the Arab arena in 1954 that defensive unionism in Syria came into its own.

p a r t ii

Radical Unionism: 1 9 5 4 -1 9 6 7

P erhaps th e least th a t fidelity to o u r nation an d to tru th an d to history requires of us is to rise above calling th ings by o th er th an their tru e nam es. So let us call alliances alliances, an d call only u nity unity. —M unif Razzaz It w as done in a m inute, in a foolish m inute. —Faris al -Khuri

4

N ew Cleavages

The year 1954 was a watershed for the Middle East. It inaugurated a fifteen-year period during which domestic instability, regional rivalry, and superpower competition all reached levels of intensity rarely seen before or since. Not coincidentally, it also marked the beginning of pan-Arabism's golden age: Syria and Iraq were involved in six unity accords between 1954 and 1964, as well as several other schemes that never reached the stage of agreement. Unionism during this phase is best explained by the turbulence of Syrian and Iraqi domestic politics so it might be helpful to elaborate at the outset what is meant by "domestic politics." There is no doubt that the 1950s and 1960s witnessed important socioeconomic transformations that weakened the political power of certain social forces in both countries (for example, the big landlords) while strengthening that of others (particularly the urban petty bour­ geoisie). The political manifestation of these changes was conflict be­ tween "conservatives" (the original postindependence ruling elites: in Syria, the People's and National parties as well as the Damascene military officer faction; in Iraq, the Sharifians) and "radicals," a broad category that requires further elaboration. On the left stood the representatives of the nascent national bourgeoi­ sie and industrial working class whose concerns focused on domestic economic development and redistribution. In Syria, they were led by Khalid al-cAzm's parliamentary grouping and the Syrian Communist Party; in Iraq, by Kamil al-Chadirji's National Democratic Party and

64

Radical Unionism: 1954-1967

the Iraqi Communist Party. On the right flank of the radical coalition were pan-Arab nationalists who drew most of their support from the lower middle class and the lumpenproletariat: the Bacth Party, of course, but also Nasserist groups such as the Arab Nationalist Movement. They too advocated land reform and redistribution but never managed to articulate a coherent socioeconomic agenda beyond a vaguely defined statism. One might think therefore that a review of Syrian and Iraqi domestic politics during this period would concentrate on the social and economic issues that pitted conservatives, leftists, and nationalists against each other. Many reviewers have done precisely that. One of my central arguments, however, is that socioeconomic arguments did not play a significant role in Syrian and Iraqi domestic politics. Matters rarely got to that stage. The decisive struggles of the 1950s and 1960s were not about land reform or nationalization or working conditions. They were about power: getting it and keeping it. What made that objective problematic was the absence of institutions that could smooth the transition to a new political order after the defeat of the conservatives, first in Syria, then in Iraq. To make matters even more difficult, ruling elites in both countries had to contend with popu­ lations that still felt little loyalty to their central governments and were therefore vulnerable to political manipulation by foreign actors. In such an environment, defensive unionism emerged as the predominant de­ vice employed by beleaguered regimes struggling for survival. Regime instability, then—not socioeconomic change and not ideological zeal on the part of elites—accounts for the frequency of pan-Arab unity projects during the 1950s and 1960s.

5

The Struggle for Syria: 1954-1957

Shishakli's ouster in early 1954 coincided with a momentous regional development: Jamal cAbd al-Nasser's decision to challenge the Hashemites for the mantle of pan-Arab leadership. Just as Syria's myriad fac­ tions prepared to resume their internecine power struggles, a potential patron emerged who, unlike the Hashemites in Baghdad and Amman, seemed not only credibly populist and anticolonialist but also suffi­ ciently far removed to pose no real threat to his would-be suitors' freedom of action. At the same time, the introduction of the Cold War into the Middle East prompted American decision makers to conclude that radical Arab nationalism, particularly as exemplified by Nasser, constituted the only effective alternative to rising communist influence.1 Although the subsequent competition for influence in Damascus re­ flected regional and global balance-of-power considerations, however, the fact that alignments between the various Syrian factions and Egypt or Iraq took the form of unity proposals can be explained only by the dynamics of domestic interdite rivalry within Syria. The Strategic Context

Nasser and the other military officers who overthrew Egypt's monarchy on 22 July 1952 concentrated on domestic issues during their first two 1. See Malik Mufti, "The United States and Nasserist Pan-Arabism," in The Middle East and the United States: A Historical and Political Reassessment, ed. David Lesch (Boulder, 1996).

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Radical Unionism: 1954-1967

years in power, repressing political rivals while simultaneously imple­ menting land reform and measures aimed at attracting foreign invest­ ment. By July 1954, however, Nasser felt confident enough to announce that Egypt was now ready to assume a leadership role in the Arab world, a move informed by his realization that regional influence trans­ lated into superpower support. It was Nasser's particular insight, one that underlay the whole of his statecraft, that pan-Arabism was the vehicle through which he could gain such influence. Initially at least, policy makers in Washington found nothing objec­ tionable in Egypt's bid for Arab leadership. In fact, they supported it: CIA intelligence and propaganda experts worked hard "dreaming up ways to popularize Nasser's government in Egypt and the Arab world" during the early 1950s.2 The Americans believed that Nasser fit their vision of an ideal leader for the emerging Third World: reformist yet anticommunist; nationalist but willing to cooperate with the United States, in this case by making peace with Israel and thereby removing one major obstacle to American plans for a regional anti-Soviet security regime. But it was not to be. Washington's special relationship with Cairo ultimately fell afoul of other, more important alliances. If the Americans reacted to Nasser's anticolonialism with equanimity and even sympa­ thy, the same could hardly be said of the British or French, who still maintained colonial outposts throughout the Middle East. Alarmed by the prospect of eviction from the region, they cast about for ways to counter Egypt's influence: France by providing covert military assis­ tance to Israel; Britain by promoting Iraq as a rival claimant to Arab leadership. Washington's sensitivity to the regional interests of its Euro2. Wilbur Crane Eveland (an American intelligence operative in the region at the time). Ropes of Sand: America's Failure in the Middle East (London, 1980), p. 103. Nasser's American advisers went to great lengths to make him seem credible: "While the 'straights' in Washington were increasingly displeased with the anti-American content of Nasser's public utterances and the anti-American propaganda that poured out of Radio Cairo, . . . can you guess who was writing a goodly portion of the material? We were. . . . We took pains to make it subtly counter-productive, of course, and we included a lot of patent nonsense, but we kept virtually in control of its production. We even had Paul Linebarger, perhaps the greatest 'black' propagandist who ever lived, come to Egypt to coach the Egyptian-American team that turned out the stuff" (Copeland, Game Player, p. 167). For a hostile Egyptian account of Nasser's links to the CIA, see Muhammad jalal Kishk, Thawrat Yuliyu al-Amerikiyya: eAlaqat cAbd al-Nasser bil-Mukhabarat al-Amerikiyya (Cairo, 1992).

The Struggle for Syria: 1954-1957

67

pean allies would place more and more strain on the American-Egyptian connection as time went by. Even more damaging to the special relationship was the alarm that it generated among Israeli leaders. Viewing it as a threat to their national security, they resorted to several often clumsy stratagems to subvert it, culminating in late 1954 with the capture of a ring of Israeli agents who had been sabotaging American targets in Egypt in hopes that Arab nationalists would be blamed.3Israel's efforts to drive a wedge between Cairo and Washington suffered an embarrassing failure as a result. Eventually it came up with an approach that was as effective as it was blunt: Israeli troops attacked and destroyed an army garrison in Gaza on 28 February 1955, killing thirty-eight Egyptians in the first major engagement between the two countries since Israel's war of indepen­ dence. Nasser's immediate request for American arms was rebuffed, and six months later, on 27 September 1955, Egypt announced that it was purchasing weapons from the Soviet bloc. By the fall of 1955, therefore, relations between Washington and Cairo entered a new and more complex phase. Egypt became adept at playing the superpowers off against each other to maximize its bar­ gaining position with both. And the United States sought to balance its various commitments while trying to forge a common stance against the Soviets. When Nasser overplayed his Russian card or went too far in threatening Western interests, Egyptian-American relations deterio­ rated; when his brand of nationalism seemed effective against commu­ nism in the Arab world, Nasser's stock in Washington would rise again. Britain, meanwhile, tried to counteract the erosion of its regional dominance by engineering an Iraqi-Turkish military accord that was signed on 24 February 1955 and which it joined one month later. This ostensibly anti-Soviet alliance, soon to be known as the Baghdad Pact, was in reality designed to perpetuate Britain's presence in the Middle East by bolstering the position of its chief client, Iraq, as a challenger to Egypt. Baghdad's Hashemite rulers, for their part, saw a new opportunity to project their influence beyond Iraq's borders and thereby regain a pan-Arab leadership role that was credible and independent of Britain. None of this was lost on any of the regional actors, of course, and those who feared a revival of Hashemite 3. Nadav Safran, Israel: The Embattled Ally (Cambridge, Mass., 1978), p. 351.

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Radical Unionism: 1954-1967

power—Egypt and Israel foremost among them—quickly rallied against the Pact. Another factor in the regional equation was Saudi Arabia, where the ruling Sacud family harbored deep suspicions about the intentions of the Hashemites they had expelled from the Hijaz after World War I. King Sacud and his associates feared the creation of a Hashemite Fertile Crescent made up of Iraq, Jordan, and Syria that might serve as a springboard for an irredentist campaign to recapture the Hijaz. To avert such an eventuality, the Saudis weighed in with all their financial and diplomatic resources against any and all plans (including the Baghdad Pact) that sought to bring the countries of the Fertile Crescent closer together. These then were the ingredients that made inter-Arab politics be­ tween 1954 and 1958 such a volatile arena for all concerned: a Hashemite leadership in Iraq that aspired to nationalist legitimacy but needed British support to attain it; a British government that was willing to promote the Hashemites for its own ends but not to the extent that they became a genuinely autonomous force in the Arab world; Egypt and Saudi Arabia determined to foil British and Iraqi ambitions; and, in the middle, an American administration trying to balance its commit­ ments to London, Riyadh, and Cairo. It was Syria's great misfortune to be the site where these contradictory interests played themselves out until the overthrow of Iraq's Hashemite monarchy in 1958 re­ arranged the entire Middle Eastern balance of power once again.

The D ecline of Iraqi Influence in Syria

With Shishakli's overthrow, the first serious attempt at constructing the ideology and institutions of a specifically Syrian nationalism came to an end. Politics reverted to its usual pattern: a flux of shifting alliances in which each faction tilted back and forth between Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt as it tried to outmaneuver its rivals. No less than seven cabinets rose and fell during the next three years, each one first a product then a victim of the endless factional power struggles. Sabri al-cAsali formed the first of these cabinets on 1 March 1954. It consisted primarily of two conservative groupings, the People's Party and cAsali's pro-Iraqi wing of the National Party, and immediately came under attack from radicals led by the Bacth and the communists. True to

The Struggle for Syria: 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 7

69

form, the pro-Iraqis responded by turning once again to their traditional patrons in Baghdad for support. cAsali and some of his top aides held secret talks with an Iraqi envoy, Fadhil al-Jamali, twice during this period—on 2 May and again on 8 June—in the Lebanese resort town of Brummana. A proposal to federate Syria and Iraq topped the agenda on both occasions, but as Jamali's account of the discussions indicates, the Syrians were primarily interested in Iraqi support against their domestic rivals.4 'Asali was particularly worried that Syrian army offi­ cers funded by Saudi Arabia would move to topple his government. He wanted a formal undertaking from Baghdad that it would intervene militarily to avert such a development. At the very least, cAsali argued, Iraq would have to provide him with the financial resources necessary to counter Saudi influence within the Syrian army. Jamali pushed the Syrians for a clarification of their stance: what kind of a federation did they envision joining in return for such assis­ tance? When they replied with vague statements about economic and military integration, Jamali pressed further: "I said the important thing for us was the leadership of the federation. We could not join any federation which did not have the king of Iraq as its head."5 At that point cAsali accepted Iraq's condition. Nothing came of these talks in the end. A combination of Ba£thist and communist pressure, culminating in an electrical workers' strike in Homs, finally forced ‘Asali's cabinet to resign on 11 June and the federation scheme never saw the light of day. Still, the Brummana episode was notable in one respect: although it was by no means the last time embattled Syrian rulers would turn to an expansionist neighbor with offers of unity in exchange for assistance against their domestic rivals, never again would the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq be the object of such an offer. Frustrated by the failure of their diplomatic overtures, the Iraqis changed tactics and authorized a coup attempt by a group of their own partisans in the Syrian army led by Colonel Muhammad Safa. The discovery of Safa's inept plot, however, and the arrest of its ringleaders on 19 June 1954 marked the decisive end of Hashemite influence in Syrian politics. Iraq had failed to bring Syria under its sway even when 4. See Jamali's cables to Baghdad of 3 May and 9 June 1954, presented as evidence at his trial in the fall of 1958 (Mahkatm, 3:969-970, 1127-1128). 5. Ibid., p. 970.

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Radical Unionism: 1954-1967

the circumstances were most opportune—when pro-Hashemite politi­ cians still wielded power in Damascus and before the rival brands of pan-Arabism espoused by Nasser and the Bacth had emerged to capture the imagination of the Arab masses. Now, those favorable circum­ stances disappeared as well. There were several reasons for the Hashemite failure in Syria. Cer­ tainly vested interests in the status quo played a critical role. Syrian officers in particular feared the loss of autonomy and status sure to follow their integration into the much larger Iraqi military. Even for pro-Iraqi officials, moreover, greed and ambition rather than pan-Arab sentiment often constituted the primary motivation. As a prominent Iraqi politician once explained to his king: "The problem in Syria is that the Syrian leaders are with us before they attain power, whereas after attaining it they change."6What was the point of unity once a govern­ ment managed to consolidate its hold on power in Damascus, especially if the bountiful flow of funds was going to cease as a result? Still, during the early 1950s Iraq's territorial contiguity and prepon­ derant power might well have surmounted the obstacles to unity posed by vested interests and opportunism had it not been for two additional factors: the determined opposition of Britain, which continued to block any initiative that promised to enhance the autonomy of Hashemite Iraq at its expense, and the lack of resolve displayed by the Iraqi rulers themselves. cAbd al-Ilah and Nuri Sacid, having been installed in power by British arms, found it exceedingly difficult to defy the British and chart a foreign policy course of their own. As long as Britain retained its hegemony in a Middle East ruled by traditional monarchs and oligarchs, Baghdad's dependence on London remained an embarrassing but tolerable fact of life. When radical nation­ alists led by Jamal cAbd al-Nasser seized power in Egypt and proclaimed their desire to rid the Arab world of colonialism and its "lackeys," however, the Hashemites' position became untenable. It would take Nasser's triumph at Suez two years later to seal their fate altogether, but already by 1954 the Iraqi Hashemites and their brand of pan-Arab­ ism had been fatally compromised by the association with Britain. As radical nationalism swept the region, the advantages of advocating union with Iraq began to evaporate. Egypt and Saudi Arabia had tradi6. See Tawfiq al-Suwaydi's testimony during his trial in the winter of 1958 (Mahkama, 6:2505).

The Struggle for Syria: 1954-1957

71

tionally pried Syrian politirians away from Baghdad's embrace with bribes. Now, for the first time, the Syrian public was presented with a militant alternative to the pan-Arabism of the Hashemites. One of the first politicians to recognize the implications of this new trend was the astute opportunist Sabri al-'Asali, who abandoned his pro-Iraqi stance for good after the foiling of Safa's coup attempt. A dramatic manifestation of the new political climate came in the relatively free parliamentary elections of September-October 1954, when anti-Hashemite parties made significant gains. Independents of various stripes as usual won the lion's share (64) of the 141 parliamen­ tary seats while the People's Party remained the single largest grouping with 27 seats. This result, however, marked a decline from the party's previous strength of 43. Its traditional rival, the now staunchly antiIraqi National Party, stayed level at 14 seats, but the Bacthists increased their representation from 4 to 13 seats. Most alarming for Washington, the Syrian Communist Party managed to get a deputy in parliament for the very first time. Opposition from both parliament and the military (assisted by a vigorous Egyptian media campaign) brought down two pro-Iraqi gov­ ernments in subsequent months. Finally, the ever-resourceful Sabri alcAsali succeeded in putting together a more radical cabinet on 13 Febru­ ary 1955, consisting of three ministers from the National Party, three from a large parliamentary grouping led by the ambitious Damascus millionaire Khalid al-cAzm, one Ba£thist, and two other independents. cAzm became foreign minister as well as acting defense minister, but his sights were set even higher. His relentless maneuvering to become president would remain a central feature of Syrian politics during the ensuing three years. The Rise o f Egyptian Influence in Syria

cAsali's cabinet took power just as a series of regional developments were coming to a head. Iraq and Turkey inaugurated the Baghdad Pact eleven days later, on 24 February, and Egypt was emerging from its post-coup isolationist phase just in time to mount a diplomatic cam­ paign against it. A key figure in this campaign was Mahmud Riyad, one of Nasser's ablest lieutenants, who arrived in Damascus in February as the new Egyptian ambassador.

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Radical Unionism: 1954-1967

Riyad found a receptive audience for his anti-Pact message in Damas­ cus. The Syrian military had made it clear to cAsali and cAzm that it wanted an unambiguous reorientation of foreign policy away from Iraq, and they lost no time in complying.7 Syria and Egypt signed an accord on 2 March 1955 that denounced the Baghdad Pact and called for the establishment of a joint military command and increased economic cooperation between the two countries. Coming just two days after Israel's Gaza raid, the accord met with public acclaim throughout the region. Jordan and Lebanon resisted popular pressure to join, but Saudi Arabia's adherence on 5 March seemed to signal the birth of a viable alternative to the Baghdad Pact. In fact, Egypt's counterpart never amounted to much. Its significance is that it highlighted Nasser's early success in drawing Syria away from Iraq's—and therefore Britain's— orbit. A crude attempt by Turkey to counter Egyptian influence by massing its troops on the Syrian border later in the month only served to inflame nationalist passions still further, compelling even the People's Party to denounce this action and hail the new alliance with Egypt. Within Syria, the various elements of the governing coalition now began to jockey for position against each other. Three main groupings can be identified. First, there was Shukri al-Quwwatli, a veteran nation­ alist leader and former president known for his opposition to the Hashemites and his dose relationship—often fortified by generous finandal disbursements—with the Saudi regime. Saudi and Egyptian support helped Quwwatli defeat cAzm for the presidency on 18 August 1955, and he devoted most of his energies thenceforth to warding off ‘Azrn's intrigues. Quwwatli's main military ally was Chief of Staff General Shawkat Shuqayr. A second major grouping in the ruling coalition was the Bacth Party, led by Michel cAflaq, Akram Hawrani, and Salah al-Din Bitar. Its for­ tunes rose dramatically after the assassination of a popular nationalist officer in April 1955 provided the excuse to wipe out its old nemesis, the Syrian Sodal Nationalist Party. A campaign of persecution drove the SSNP across the border into Lebanon and finished it off as an effective political force in Syria, thereby eliminating an important rival to the Ba£th, particularly within the armed forces. The Bacth Party was very outspoken in its calls for unity with Egypt. 7. cAzm, Mudhakkirat, 2:316-317.

The Struggle for Syria : 1 9 5 4 - 1 9 5 7

73

Michel cAflaq later claimed: "We had a hand in preparing the draft of the Egyptian-Syrian-Saudi pact, conceiving it as a first step toward a federation of the three countries."8 cAflaq and his colleagues were also instrumental in pushing through a parliamentary resolution on 5 July that called on the government to begin federation talks with Egypt as soon as possible. As an "anticolonialist" pan-Arab movement that repudiated Iraq and Jordan because of their British ties, after all, the Bacth could hardly remain aloof when Nasser put himself forward as a nationalist alternative. Comfortably distant and posing as yet no demands on their ambitions, Egypt seemed to the Bacthists an ideal partner with which to counter the unionist blandishments of the Hashemites. Finally there was Khalid al-cAzm, the wealthy and ambitious Damas­ cus politician who served as foreign minister in cAsali's cabinet. The politics of this intelligent and cultured sdon of one of Syria's most notable families reflected that oligarchical background: along with the sizable bloc of independent deputies he led in parliament, cAzm repre­ sented the interests of the Syrian national bourgeoisie. It is ironic, therefore, that he would soon come to be feared in the West as the man who wanted to turn Syria into a Soviet satellite. At firstcAzm tried to play the unionist game as well, calling even more vociferously than the Bacthists for closer ties with Egypt throughout the spring and summer of 1955. Parliament's upcoming selection of a new head of state undoubtedly played a role in this stance, as the Egyptian ambassador Mahmud Riyad suggested: "It appears he believed that advocating a unionist policy would help him win the presidency."89 In addition, however, £Azm was genuinely interested in getting Cairo to foot the bill for Syria's cash-strapped economy. That is why his "unity" plan called for some financial and military integration (including a unified military budget), but otherwise left the sovereignty of each side intact. That was as far as his unionism went. All the rest was pure demagoguery, designed to capitalize on nationalist fervor among the Syrian populace and uttered with the absolute conviction that no actual union would ever take place. Nasser, predictably, was underwhelmed 8. Quoted in Seale, Struggle for Syria, p. 224. 9. Mahmud Riyad, Mudhakkirat Mahmud Riyad: Al-Amtt al-Qawmi al-'Arabi—Bain alInjaz wal-Fashal, vol. 2 (Cairo, 1986), p. 107.

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by cAzm's offer. Moreover, he apparently entertained an intense per­ sonal dislike for its author.101When cAzm arrived in Cairo on 30 March to push his plan, therefore, he was accorded a cool reception and left four days later with nothing to show for his pains. Nasser and Mahmud Riyad skillfully played each of Syria's leading personalities off against the others, lending support when one seemed to lose ground and withholding it when he became too powerful. There are indications that the Syrians quickly realized the threat to their autonomy inherent in such a situation. After a combination of events forced Sabri al-£Asali to resign in September 1955, for example. Presi­ dent Quwwatli and General Shuqayr tried to counter Egyptian influence by engineering the appointment of a new cabinet drawn mainly from the People's Party. The new government proved unable to buck the nationalist trend, however, and when Nasser's Czech arms deal was announced the ensuing public euphoria forced it to conclude a mutual defense agreement with Egypt on 20 October. Radical student demonstrations finally brought this government down as well in June 1956, whereupon Egyptian pressure succeeded in overriding Quwwatli's objections and restored Sabri al-£Asali to power at the head of a cabinet that included two Ba£thists along with Khalid al-£Azm once again. The Egyptian noose around President Quwwatli's neck tightened one more notch on 7 July when his ally Gener