Page 285 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

282 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

later as a naval base. Like Fao, however, Umm Qasr had its drawbacks, one of
the principal being that its approaches lay in Kuwaiti waters; for the maritime
frontier began below Umm Qasr and ran eastwards along the Khaur Abdullah,
north of the islands of Warbah and Bubiyan which were under Kuwaiti
sovereignty (see map p. 279). A further disadvantage of Iraq’s narrow coastline
was that it severely limited both the extent of her maritime jurisdiction and her
share oi the contiguous sea-bed, along with any oil deposits the latter might
contain. For this reason Iraq had strenuously objected to the attempts which
had been made by Persia and Kuwait to fix the location of the median line
between their coasts for purposes of offshore oil exploration.
For Iraq, then, the whole situation at the head of the Gulf was highly
unsatisfactory, and the temptation to make a forward move correspondingly
strong. It needed only the close connexion forged with the Soviet Union in the

spring of 1972 to make that temptation irresistible. On 7 April 1972, the
twenty-fifth anniversary of the official creation of the Baath party, the first
shipment of oil from the North Rumailah field was loaded at Fao in the
presence of the Soviet prime minister, Alexei Kosygin. Two days later Kosygin
and Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr, the Iraqi president, signed a treaty of friendship
and co-operation. It was to run initially for a period of five years and thereafter
it would be automatically renewed at five-yearly intervals. Article 8 of the
treaty bound each side, in the event of a threat to the other, to ‘hold immediate
contacts to co-ordinate their positions in the interests of eliminating the
developing danger and re-establishing peace’; while in article 9 they undertook
‘to develop co-operation in the strengthening of the defence capabilities of
each’. Taken together, these articles could be construed as constituting a
limited offensive and defensive alliance, with Iraq providing military and naval
facilities to Russia in return for a guarantee of protection. That such was their
intention was subsequently confirmed publicly by the vice-president of the
Revolutionary Command Council in Baghdad, Saddam Husain al-Takriti.
The Iraqi government clearly saw the alliance as intended to operate primar­
ily against Persia, a view evidently shared by the Persian government, which
*
responded to the news of the treaty’s signing by sending an armoured column
to attack an Iraqi border post ninety miles north-east of Baghdad. It is less
certain that the Iraqi interpretation of the treaty’s purpose was subscribed to by
the Russians, whose behaviour towards Persia since the mid-1960s, as will be
seen later, had been marked by caution and outward cordiality. As things
turned out, the first target of the Iraqi government’s new-found bellicosity was
the Iraq Petroleum Company, whose concession was revoked and its assets
nationalized by the Baathists in June 1972. The second target was Kuwait.

Relations between Iraq and Kuwait had gradually improved in the mid-1960s,
reaching their optimum point in 1968 after Kuwait had, in May of that year,

given notice of the termination of the 1961 defence agreement with Britain, and