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Iraq
FOREIGN POLICY
Iraq's relations with other countries and with international
organizations are supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
In 1988 the minister of foreign affairs was Tariq Aziz, who had
served in that post since 1983. Aziz was a member of the RCC and
an influential leader of the Baath Party. Before becoming minister
of foreign affairs, he had been director of the party's foreign
affairs bureau. Aziz, Saddam Husayn, and the other members of
the RCC formulated foreign policy, and the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs bureaucracy implemented RCC directives. The Baath maintained
control over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and over all Iraqi
diplomatic missions outside the country through its party cells
that operated throughout the ministry and in all embassies abroad.
In 1988 Iraq's main foreign policy issue was the war with Iran.
This war had begun in September 1980, when Saddam Husayn sent
Iraqi forces across the Shatt al Arab into southwestern Iran (see
The Iran-Iraq Conflict , ch. 1). Although the reasons for Saddam
Husayn's decision to invade Iran were complicated, the leaders
of the Baath Party had long resented Iranian hegemony in the Persian
Gulf region and had especially resented the perceived Iranian
interference in Iraq's internal affairs both before and after
the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They may have thought that the revolutionary
turmoil in Tehran would enable Iraq to achieve a quick victory.
Their objectives were to halt any potential foreign assistance
to the Shias and to the Kurdish opponents of the regime and to
end Iranian domination of the area. The Baathists believed a weakened
Iran would be incapable of posing a security threat and could
not undermine Iraq's efforts to exercise the regional influence
that had been blocked by non-Arab Iran since the mid-1960s. Although
the Iraqis failed to obtain the expected easy victory, the war
initially went well for them. By early 1982, however, the Iraqi
occupation forces were on the defensive and were being forced
to retreat from some of their forward lines. In June 1982, Saddam
Husayn ordered most of the Iraqi units to withdraw from Iranian
territory; after that time, the Baathist government tried to obtain
a cease-fire based on a return of all armed personnel to the international
borders that prevailed as of September 21, 1979.
Iran did not accept Iraq's offer to negotiate an end to the war.
Similarly, it rejected a July 1982 United Nations (UN) Security
Council resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire. Subsequently,
Iranian forces invaded Iraq by crossing the Shatt al Arab in the
south and by capturing some mountain passes in the north. To discourage
Iran's offensive, the Iraqi air force initiated bombing raids
over several Iranian cities and towns. The air raids brought Iranian
retaliation, which included the aerial bombing of Baghdad. Although
Iraq eventually pushed back and contained the Iranian advances,
it was not able to force Iranian troops completely out of Iraqi
territory. The perceived threat to Iraq in the summer of 1982
thus was serious enough to force Saddam Husayn to request the
Nonaligned Movement to change the venue of its scheduled September
meeting from Baghdad to India; nevertheless, since the fall of
1982, the ground conflict has generally been a stalemated war
of attrition--although Iran made small but demoralizing territorial
advances as a result of its massive offensives in the reed marshes
north of Basra in 1984 and in 1985, in Al Faw Peninsula in early
1986, and in the outskirts of Basra during January and February
1987. In addition, as of early 1988 the government had lost control
of several mountainous districts in Kurdistan where, since 1983,
dissident Kurds have cooperated militarily with Iran.
Saddam Husayn's government has maintained consistently since
the summer of 1982 that Iraq wants a negotiated end to the war
based upon the status quo ante. Iran's stated conditions for ceasing
hostilities, namely the removal of Saddam Husayn and the Baath
from power, however, have been unacceptable. The main objective
of the regime became the extrication of the country from the war
with as little additional damage as possible. To further this
goal, Iraq has used various diplomatic, economic, and military
strategies; none of these had been successful in bringing about
a cease-fire as of early 1988 (see Introduction).
Although the war was a heavy burden on Iraq politically, economically,
and socially, the most profound consequence of the war's prolongation
was its impact on the patterns of Iraq's foreign relations. Whereas
trends toward a moderation of the Baath Party's ideological approach
to foreign affairs were evident before 1980, the war helped to
accelerate these trends. Two of the most dramatic changes were
in Iraq's relationships with the Soviet Union and with the United
States. During the course of the war Iraq moved away from the
close friendship with the Soviet Union that had persisted throughout
the 1970s, and it initiated a rapprochement with the United States.
Iraq also sought to ally itself with Kuwait and with Saudi Arabia,
two neighboring countries with which there had been considerable
friction during much of the 1970s. The alignment with these countries
was accompanied by a more moderate Iraqi approach to other Arab
countries, such as Egypt and Jordan, which previously Iraq had
perceived as hostile.
Data as of May 1988
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