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This may be old news to some, in which case I
aploogise for repeating it. Others may find the information useful.
The Baath first came to power in 1963, in a coup
organised by the CIA They overthrew the regime run by Abd al-Karim
Qassim, a nationalist army officer.
The coup, and the reasons why the CIA supported it,
are described by journalists Andrew and Patrick Cockburn as
follows:
In early 1963, Saddam had more important things to
worry about
than his outstanding bill at the Andiana Cafe. On February 8, a mil- itary coup in Baghdad, in which the Baath Party played a leading role, overthrew Qassim. Support for the conspirators was limited. In the first hours of fighting, they had only nine tanks under their con- trol. The Baath Party had just 850 active members. But Qassim ignored warnings about the impending coup. What tipped the bal- ance against him was the involvement of the United States. He had taken Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad Pact. In 1961, he threat- ened to occupy Kuwait and nationalized part of the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), the foreign oil consortium that exploited Iraq's oil. In retrospect, it was the ClAs favorite coup. "We really had the ts crossed on what was happening," James Critchfield, then head of the CIA in the Middle East, told us. "We regarded it as a great victory." Iraqi participants later confirmed American involvement. "We came to power on a CIA train," admitted Ali Saleh Sa'adi, the Baath Party sec- retary general who was about to institute an unprecedented reign of terror. CIA assistance reportedly included coordination of the coup plotters from the agency's station inside the U.S. embassy in Baghdad as well as a clandestine radio station in Kuwait and solicitation of advice from around the Middle East on who on the left should be eliminated once the coup was successful. To the end, Qassim retained his popularity in the streets of Baghdad. After his execution, his sup- porters refused to believe he was dead until the coup leaders showed pictures of his bullet-riddled body on TV and in the newspapers. The above comes from "Out of the Ashes, The
Resurrection of Saddam Hussein", by Andrew and Patrick Cockburn, published by
Verso, 2000.
Best wishes,
Tim
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