Iraq's Armed Forces: An Analytical History (Middle Eastern Military Studies)

268 Pages·2008·1.78 MB·English

by  Ibra al-Marashi

Iraq’s Armed Forces
This book provides the first comprehensive study of the evolution of the
Iraqi military from the British mandate era to post-Baathist Iraq.
Ethnic and sectarian turmoil is endemic to Iraq, and its armed forces
have been intertwined with its political affairs since their creation. This
study illustrates how the relationship between the military and the political
center in Iraq has evolved, with the military bringing about three regime
changes in Iraq’s history before being brought under control by Saddam
Hussein, up until the 2003 war. The instability that followed is partly due
to the failure to create a new military that does not threaten the region, yet
is still strong enough to deter rival factions from armed conflict. The
reconstitution of the armed forces will be a prerequisite for an American
withdrawal from Iraq, but this book argues that immense challenges lie
ahead, despite the praise from the Bush administration for the progress of
the new Iraqi Army.
This book will be of great interest to students of Middle East studies,
military and strategic studies, and contemporary history.
Ibrahim Al-Marashiis a visiting scholar at the Annenberg School for Com-
munication at the University of Pennsylvania. Sammy Salama is a Middle
East expert with the Monterey Institute of International Studies, California.
Series: Middle Eastern military studies
Series editor: Barry Rubin
Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, Israel
The Israeli Military and the Origins of the 1967 War
Army command vs. political leadership, 1963–1967
Ami Gluska
Israeli Counter-Insurgency and the Intifadas
Dilemmas of a conventional army
Sergio Catignani
Israel and its Army
From cohesion to confusion
Stuart A. Cohen
The Palestinian Military
From the mandate to the Palestinian authority
Hillel Frisch
Iraq’s Armed Forces
An analytical history
Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Sammy Salama
Iraq’s Armed Forces
An analytical history
Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Sammy Salama
First published 2008
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2008.
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© 2008 Ibrahim Al-Marashi and Sammy Salama
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical,
or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including
photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalog record for this book has been requested
ISBN 0-203-92876-8 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-40078-3 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-92876-8 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-40078-7 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-92876-9 (ebk)
Contents
List of illustrations vii
Preface viii
Acknowledgments x
Notes on transliteration xii
List of abbreviations xiii
1 Introduction 1
PART I
The mandate army 11
2 Creation, conscription and cohesion 1921–1936 13
PART II
Praetorian Iraq 43
3 Iraq’s military moderator regimes 1936–1941 45
4 Dismantling the military moderator regime
1941–1958 64
5 Military coups and the ruler regimes 1958–1968 77
PART III
The totalitarian military 105
6 The Baathification of the military 1968–1980 107
7 The totalitarian military and the Iran–Iraq War
1980–1984 129
vi Contents
8 The reassertion of the Iraqi officers 1984–1988 153
9 Wars, coups, sanctions and collapse 1988–2003 174
PART IV
The mandate army redux 197
10 The US and the Iraqi Army 199
11 Conclusion 225
Appendices 232
Glossary 236
Bibliography 237
Index 247
Illustrations
Maps
2.1 The 1920 Iraqi insurgency 18
8.1 The Iran–Iraq War 162
9.1 The 1991 uprising 183
Tables
2.1 Notable Iraqi officers during the mandate army eras
1921–1958 16–17
5.1 Officers who participated in coups during the military
ruler regimes 1958–1968 80–1
7.1 The growth of the Iraqi armed forces 1980–1987 143
8.1 The Iraqi military high command 1985 159
9.1 The military high command 1994 189
9.2 Select list of various officers purged, arrested or executed
during the totalitarian military 1968–2003 190
9.3 Iraqi land forces in 2002 192
A.1 List of selected coups; actual, attempted and alleged 232–4
Preface
As an Iraqi-American my relationship with the Iraqi military was an
unconventional one. I grew up with stories of my mother’s uncle who
served in the Iraqi military of the 1960s. She would proudly remember his
arrival to her home upon taking leave from his post at the Habbaniyya air
base near Falluja. She would recall the way his crisp pale green military
uniform made him seem even taller, the way he would turn on the radio
and dance for her and her sisters in spite of his snug-fitting jacket. The
Iraqi military of Baathist Iraq was a different story however. It was this
military that some of my relatives fled Iraq to escape military service and
others were compelled to join only never to return from the front. It was a
military I grew up learning about as a young child, piecing together an
image of the Iraqi armed forces from the news coverage of the Iran–Iraq
War that my father watched on our wooden paneled TV. It was a military
I watched as a teenager during the 1991 Gulf War on the same outdated
wooden paneled TV.
It was not until I became a Ph.D. student, that my relationship with the
Iraqi military changed. When part of my research on Iraq’s security forces
was plagiarized by the British government prior to the 2003 Iraq War, I
went from watching the news on military affairs on Iraq to being part of
this news. As the story about my article circulated, I joined the throngs of
news pundits commenting on the Iraqi military. Looking back at those
transcripts of my media appearances, where I discussed topics such as the
“elite Republican Guards,” I wondered if I really contributed to the
public’s knowledge of the Iraqi military, or just added to the sound bites
that made up the terminological fog that pundits and government officials
alike produce during war time.
During my first trip to Iraq in 2004, I first came face-to-face with the
final remains of Iraq’s armed forces. In my unpublished memoir of
growing up as an Iraqi-American I describe my first experience of meeting
unemployed officers from the former Iraqi military struggling to survive in
the “new Iraq,” or passing by a row of destroyed tanks on the way to
Basra. Years after the 2003 Iraq War, I still have an attachment to the
Iraqi military, but not as a confused child, nor as a media pundit, but
Preface ix
merely as a concerned Iraqi who wonders if the new Iraqi Army can keep
my ancestral home together.
For the last five years my co-author Sammy Salama and I have been
scouring through literally thousands of documents produced by the Iraqi
military dating back to the Iran–Iraq War. These files have emerged from a
variety of sources. Some were given to us directly by acquaintances who
served in the Iraqi military. These documents ranged from the books they
used in military school to their discharge papers. Some of the Iraqi military
documents were also made public by an archive at Harvard University.
Those documents provided an unprecedented insight into the internal
workings of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and a window into the machinations
of how the Baath Party managed the Iraqi military. When compiling the
research for this history, I hoped to use this material, interspersed with
oral histories of former Iraqi soldiers and officers. The study of the Iraqi
documents and the interviews yielded enough material to serve as their
own work, which will be published in the future. Nevertheless, having
examined these sources, they helped us gain a perspective of what it would
have been like to be a soldier on the front lines or one of the privileged
elite officers in the Republican Guards.
As a historian of Iraq, I had hoped that after the 2003 Iraq War I would
be able to conduct archival research in Baghdad for this book. Unfortu-
nately most of Iraq’s archives were damaged after the war, denying me
opportunity of delving into my country’s past. Researching the Iraqi mili-
tary was also hampered by more mundane constraints, such as border
crossings. My efforts during a visit to Iraq to take a suitcase filled with
books by Iraqi authors on the military were thwarted as some of the
material was considered sensitive to the country I was entering and was
confiscated at the border post. Thus, the history of the Iraqi military now
lies in London. Most of the material on the Iraqi military during the
mandate era and the 1950s and 1960s can be found in the libraries of the
School of Oriental and African Studies and Oxford’s Middle East Centre
and in Kew’s Public Record Office. Fortunately, other British archives can
be also accessed via electronic data bases made available by the UPA Col-
lections offered through Lexis Nexis and Thomson Gale Middle East
Online Series, ensuring that at least some parts of Iraq’s history cannot be
damaged by the ravages of war.
We hope that this volume will contribute to a greater understanding of
the military that endured the longest war of the twentieth century (the
Iran–Iraq War) and fought the world’s superpower on two separate occa-
sions, and whose future survival in the twenty-first century remains in
question.
Ibrahim Al-Marashi