Page 291 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

288 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

fervour had been raised to fever pitch by the triumph of Shii fundamentalism in
Persia in the winter of 1978-9- Taken in conjunction with the deterioration in
Iraq’s relations with Persia since the fall of the shah, the growing restlessness
among the Iraqi Shia has forced the Baathist regime to resort to ever more
severe measures of repression to maintain itself in power.

Outside Iraq the Baath has preached revolution, promoted subversion and
encouraged terrorism, all in the name of pan-Arabism and socialist ideals.
Baghdad has been a haven and a base for the most ruthless of the Palestinian
extremist factions, and for a number of other exponents of revolutionary
violence. At one time or another the Iraqi Baath has tried to foment sedition in
every one of the Gulf states, not stopping at assassination in its attempts to
procure its ends. It has supplied weapons, money and training to insurgents in
Oman and Dhufar, often playing the political pander between them and their
Russian or Chinese patrons. In company with the Libyan junta it has been the
most consistent, and at times the most vocal, apologist for the gruesome
Marxist dictatorship in Aden. The Baath’s policy in the Gulf has had two main
objectives: to undermine the traditional shaikhly system of government in the
Gulf states, thereby paving the way for the emergency of leftist, revolutionary
regimes similar to its own; and to win acceptance as the champion of Arabism
in the region, especially against Persian attempts at hegemony and the sup­

posed ‘neo-imperialist’ designs of the Western powers. Saudi Arabia, of course,
is seen as a major obstacle to the attainment of these ends. Iraqi antipathy to the
Al Saud goes back a long way, well beyond the days of the Hashimite monarchy
to the time of the Wahhabi incursions into Iraq at the turn of the nineteenth
century. It has both religious and political elements in it, and it has been
intensified since the Baath’s advent to power by the party’s ideological animos­
ity against hereditary and monarchical forms of government. Yet while the
Baath may keep up, as it has, a ceaseless barrage of seditious propaganda
against the Saudis, and lend surreptitious support to subversive groups within
Saudi Arabia in the hope of bringing down the ruling house, it is too tightly
constrained by its own internal and external difficulties to venture upon an
armed conflict with the Saudi kingdom. It has already alienated not only the
Saudis but the minor Gulf states as well by its alliance with the Russians, and
by its underhand attempts to foment insurrection within these states. Almost
without exception - and the only obvious one has been Shaikh Saqr ibn
Muhammad of Ras al-Khaimah - the Gulf rulers look upon the Baghdad
regime with abhorrence. Wary though they may be of the Saudis, they would

almost certainly take their side in a clash with Iraq.
What hampers the Iraqis perhaps more than anything else - and here we
return full circle to the point where we began - is their lack of naval power.
Without it they can never hope to command the Gulf, or even to make their
weight felt there. Any forward move they might make would bring them up
against the naval strength of Persia, which, however illusory it may be in rea