Samuel Helfont, Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California
Ba‘thist Iraq played an often unacknowledged but central role in shaping the post-Cold War international order. As this statement makes clear, the primary thrust of this paper is to internationalize and indeed globalize the history of Ba‘thist Iraq during the immediate post-Cold War period. Of course, other issues, especially conflicts in the Balkans and Africa, along with NATO expansion into Eastern Europe also shaped global politics in this period. The fact that this paper focuses on Iraq specifically, is not an attempt to negate these other influences; but rather to highlight the often-overlooked impact of Iraq on the international system.
The connection between Iraq and world order has its origins in the Gulf Crisis of 1990. In the United States, the George H.W. Bush administration’s initial reaction to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2, 1990 was restrained. According to one journalist, the sentiment among senior administration officials was: “Hey, too bad about Kuwait, but it’s just a gas station, and who cares whether the sign says Sinclair or Exxon?” (Goodgame, 1991) Senior members of the administration later claimed this depiction misrepresented their ideas. (PBS Front Line, 1996) However, recent work by diplomatic historians has shown it was largely accurate. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney observed that the world needed Kuwaiti oil, but not Kuwait. In that sense, whether Iraq or Kuwait sold the oil on the open market did not really affect American interests. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Colin Powell, did not think the United States should “go to war over Kuwait.” At one point he even asked, “Does anybody really care about Kuwait?” (Engel, 2017, p. 386)
Obviously, the United States eventually decided that a war to expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait was important. Indeed, to do so, Washington organized an unprecedented effort to pass a string of binding U.N. Security Council resolutions. It then deployed hundreds of thousands of troops to the Gulf and led the largest international military coalition since World War II. So, what changed? The answer to that question can be found in the zeitgeist at the end of the Cold War.
A year prior, in 1989, Francis Fukuyama famously declared the end of history on the pages of The National Interest. Following, G.W.F. Hegel, Fukuyama argued that history evolves to correct for contradictions in political systems. The victory of liberal democracy in the Cold War, he asserted, resolved the last of these. Thus, the philosophical concept of history had ended. (Fukuyama, 1989) Yet, as influential as Fukuyama was, he struck a chord with his readership because his arguments articulated a broader sentiment that was already widely held. In fact, Bush proceeded Fukuyama in arguing that liberal democracy had superseded all other political systems when he made a similar claim in his inaugural address. (Bush, 1989) Such thinking mixed and coalesced with what the historian Mark Mazower has called the “millenarian expectations” of the period. (Mazower, 2012, p. xi)
When seen through the lens of this historical moment, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait seemed less like a regional dispute between two oil-rich Arab states, and more like a major challenge to global order, or even a threat to the evolution of history itself. Bush and his National Security Advisor, Brent Scowcroft, stated that the administration’s initial assessment focused too much “on the price of oil” and on regional security. (Bush and Scowcroft, 1999, pp. 317-8) Bush then clarified the stakes: “What we’re doing is going to chart the future of the world for the next hundred years,” he proclaimed. “It’s that big.” (Engel, 2017, p. 396)
Bush went public with this reasoning on September 11, 1990, in a widely publicized speech to Congress. He linked the end of the Cold War to the Gulf Crisis, explaining that the “crisis in the Persian Gulf, as grave as it is, also offers a rare opportunity to move toward an historic period of cooperation.” He stated explicitly that a “new world order” was one of the objectives of the coming conflict. Channeling the ideas discussed above, he argued that the crisis would birth “a new era—freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice, and more secure in the quest for peace. An era in which the nations of the world, East and West, North and South, can prosper and live in harmony.” (Bush, 1990b)
Although Bush publicly announced that a “new world order” was one of the objectives of the Gulf War, the official orders that he provided the military in the then classified National Security Directives 45 and 54 said nothing about world order or the post-Cold War. The generals focused on narrow military objectives, which at times, were unaligned with the idealism of a new world order or the end of history.
The U.S. Air Force, in particular, based its campaign on a concept of strategic bombing that was at odds with the internationalist rhetoric promising “to minimize undeserved suffering.” (Boutros-Ghali, 1996, pp. 21-3) The Air Force wanted to win the conflict through striking strategic targets to implode the Iraqi state. (Winnefeld, Niblack, and Johnson, 1994, pp. 65-70) As planned, the air campaign attacked Iraq’s leadership and destroyed much of the state’s infrastructure and essential systems. Following the war, a U.N. team led by Under-Secretary-General Martti Ahtisaari claimed “nothing that we had seen or read had quite prepared us for the particular form of devastation which has now befallen the country.” It claimed the war “wrought near-apocalyptic results upon the economic infrastructure of what had been, until January 1991, a rather highly urbanized and mechanized society.” (Boutros-Ghali, 1996, p. 187) Other independent studies came to largely the same conclusion. (Helfont, 2021, p. 28) Even the Gulf War Air Power Survey, which was commission by the U.S. Air Force and largely sympathetic to it, discussed how strategic bombing had “contributed to” around “70,000-90,000 postwar civilian deaths.” (Gulf War Air Power Survey, Volume Two, 1993, pp. 304-5)
The humanitarian crisis in Iraq was exacerbated when the Ba‘thists brutally suppressed mass uprisings that occurred in the wake of the war. Then, following the war, the United Nations maintained economic sanctions on Iraq. The official reason for doing so was to enforce compliance with the Gulf War’s cease fire agreement, especially the requirement for the Iraqi regime to give up its weapons of mass destruction programs. Despite this official justification, the Bush administration did not want Saddam Hussein to remain in power, and it clearly saw the sanctions as a way to weaken his hold on Iraq. (Helfont, 2021, pp. 31-2) When the Ba‘thists rejected American-sponsored aid programs designed to weaken their grip on power, the Iraqi people were caught in a geopolitical game of chicken between Washington and Baghdad.
The Ba‘thists played that game masterfully. They understood the propaganda value inherent in what they called the disparity between “the new world order and the disaster of the Iraqi children.” (Helfont, 2021, pp. 31-2) The Iraqis ran sophisticated international influence operations to make the maintenance of sanctions and the resulting Iraqi suffering politically problematic in foreign capitals. (Helfont, 2018, pp. 229-245) Then, they combined these efforts with more traditional economic and geopolitical manipulation. Iraq had one of the worlds largest oil reserves. According to the U.N.-commissioned retrospect on its oil-for-food program in Iraq, the Ba‘thist regime, “was willing to forego revenue from oil sales or to overpay for imports to reward or encourage certain foreign politicians, journalists, and businesses to exert influence in its favor, most especially in advocating a lifting of the sanctions.” (Volcker, Goldstone, and Pieth, 2005, p. 39) Thus the Ba‘thists developed a powerful combination of bottom up and top down pressure in key states to end sanctions on Iraq whether or not it complied with U.N. resolutions.
The effects of these forces can be seen in the evolution of international attitudes toward Iraq. In the early 1990s, Iraq remained a test case for the post-Cold War order. Most key actors in the international system were keen to enforce U.N. resolutions and show the effectiveness of sanctions as a substitute for war. In 1992, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations made clear that for Iraq to “return to the international community as a full-fledged member” it “must immediately and fully implement all of the Council’s demands.” (U.N.S.C Records. 1992, pp. 52-3) At the same time, France’s ambassador argued “My Government cannot today accept an easing or lifting of sanctions […] a resolution is not divisible; it must be implemented in full, not according to the proportion that is to the liking of the Iraqi authorities.” (U.N.S.C Records. 1992, p. 34) Of course, the sad irony was that these resolutions were meant to address illicit Iraqi weapons programs which the regime had, for the most part, already given up, even if it had not come clean about them to the U.N. inspectors.
A number of confrontations between Iraq and the United States in the mid-1990s exacerbated the humanitarian crisis and drove a wedge into the unity of the U.N. Security Council. Then, in 1998, Baghdad ceased cooperation with U.N. weapons inspectors. By this point, France and Russia had made clear their displeasure with the American-led approach to Iraq. Although both states acknowledged that Iraq had not fully complied with U.N. resolutions, they considered the American approach to be too ridged and wanted to bring Iraq back into good standing within the international community. Both states stood to benefit significantly from oil contracts that Baghdad had offered them, and both were experiencing significant bottom-up political pressure from their populations to relieve the suffering of innocent Iraqi civilians. Washington and London considered any concession to Iraq not just as challenge to their policy but to the world order they were trying to build around the example of Iraq. If the Security Council could not enforce its resolutions, a rules-based system would decay into the law of the jungle. Thus the Americans and British argued that they were simply enforcing existing Security Council resolutions when they caried out air strikes on Iraq in December 1998. In a sign of just how poisonous the issue became for relations between permanent members of the Security Council – and thus for a liberal post-Cold War order built on cooperation and the rule of law – Moscow recalled its ambassadors to London and Washington for the first time since World War II. ( Jeffries, 2013, p. 587) The American-Russian relationship never returned to the hope and promise of the early 1990s.
Iraq was supposed to provide a test case for a new world order in which a united international community could use tools such as Security Council resolutions, sanctions, and limited military actions to enforce a rules-based system. Yet, by the end of the 1990s, both Russia and France considered the international regime that they had helped construct to contain Iraq to be morally bankrupt and politically inviable. Both states began to defy the Security Council openly – for example by sending unapproved aid to Iraq in defiance of the Security Council’s Sanctions Committee. (Van Walsum, 2004, p. 192) In July 2001, the British Joint Intelligence Committee stated that despite Baghdad’s flouting of U.N. resolutions, the Ba‘thist regime was able to rebuild its international economic and diplomatic ties. It argued that “Saddam judges his position to be the strongest since the Gulf War.” (United Kingdom Joint Intelligence Committee, 2001)
Saddam’s belligerence and his flouting of international norms was supposed to unite the world. By the turn of the 21st century, Iraq divided the world. The United States and United Kingdom felt that France and Russia had undermined the rules-based system and the international norms that were supposed to underpin the post-Cold War order. The French and Russians thought the Americans were treating the United Nations as a tool of American interests and that Washington was far too callous toward Iraqi suffering. To much of the developing world, the new world order looked like a neo-imperial system knit together by the fear of being crushed into despair like Iraq. The only thing upon which all sides could agree was that the new world order had failed.
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Samuel Helfont is assistant professor of strategy and policy in the Naval War College Program at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey California. He is the author of Compulsion in Religion: Saddam Hussein, Islam, and the Roots of Insurgencies in Iraq (Oxford, 2018) and holds a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from Princeton University.
