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riddled with factionalism, which in turn breeds cliques and conspiracies,
rebellion and repression. Despite their pan-Arabism, the Syrian and Iraqi
wings of the Baath are at daggers drawn, not least over their rival claims to
ideological purity. Though the Baathist government in Baghdad gained power

through the army, it has attempted in recent years to present itself at home and
abroad as essentially a civil regime. Its motives for doing so have been twofold:
firstly, to give the outward appearance of conforming to Baathist dogma, which
holds that the armed forces should be the military arm of the party, i.e. a
‘people’s army’ at the vanguard of the revolutionary struggle but subordinate
to the party hierarchy; and, secondly, to make the dogma a reality so far as the
party’s actual control of the Iraqi armed forces is concerned. Hence the
repeated purges of the latter’s ranks. Yet the fact remains that the Baath seized
power by force of arms and it is dependent upon the same force of arms to stay
in power. All its cosmetic efforts to give the illusion of civil rule cannot disguise
this fact, or invest the regime with the political legitimacy it has lacked from its
inception.
Supreme authority in Iraq is wielded by a tightly knit group of army officers
and civilians, the Revolutionary Command Council, which also incorporates
the ruling apparatus, or regional command council, of the Iraqi Baath. The
chairman of the RCC and president of the country was until recently Ahmad
Hasan al-Bakr, a former major-general. The former vice-president, and

secretary-general of the Iraqi Baath, who succeeded him as president in July
1979, is Saddam Husain, a civilian. Both men come from Takrit, a town on the
Tigris about too miles north of Baghdad, in the heart of the Sunni ‘triangle’. So
also do the sixteen other members of the Baath’s regional command council.
Almost from the outset Saddam Husain al-Takriti’s power in the government
equalled, if it did not supersede, that of al-Bakr, and it was he who was largely
responsible for the conclusion of the alliance with the Soviet Union in 1972.
The alliance, and the compact with the Iraqi communist party which followed
it, was a measure of the regime’s sense of insecurity, for the Baathists at heart
look upon communism with distaste as a threat to Arab nationalism and to

Islam. What they gained from the Russian alliance they were to lose in large
measure from their compact with the Iraqi communists; for the compact not
only alienated many of their pan-Arab Sunni supporters but it also gave
encouragement to the communists themselves and to the non-Sunni sections of
the population, who saw in the communist party a vehicle for the expression of
their disaffection with the Sunni supremacy. The uncomfortable suspicion
that communist influence was penetrating ever deeper into the ranks of the
disaffected was one of the reasons for the execution of a score of communists by
the junta in the first half of 1978, and for the eventual expulsion of the
communists from the government a year later. The latter measure, in particu-
ar, was indicative of the acute anxiety felt by the junta over the mounting civil
isobedience being manifested by the Shii community, whose sectarian