War Stories Read Free Page A

drunken automobile accident on April 4, 1939, the British were glad he was gone. But much of what his father had tried to do in the way of uniting a dispirit country had also been undone.
    Ghazi’s son, Faisal II, was only three years old when he ascended the throne, so Emir Abdul al Ilah—a pro-British Hashemite—was appointed as regent. But just two years later, in April 1941, he wasforced to flee for his life by yet another nationalist military coup. That was enough for the British, who were now fighting for survival against Hitler. On June 1, 1941, the British army landed in force at Basra, marched unopposed into Baghdad, and reinstalled Abdul al Ilah as regent.
    The end of World War II brought an end to British occupation, but not to Iraq’s internal discord. In January 1948, Communist agitators aligned with nationalists to create a series of street protests against a new treaty with Britain. Distrustful of the army, whose senior officers were predominantly Sunni nationalists, the regent called on the police to open fire. Hundreds were killed. The government collapsed, and even though the Treaty of Portsmouth was abrogated, those who hated the monarchy and the British had a grievous wrong to remember. By the end of the year, they would have another: the defeat of the Arab armies—including a twenty-thousand-man Iraqi contingent—at the hand of Israel in the Jewish state’s war of independence.
    By May 1953, when the eighteen-year-old Faisal II appeared before the Iraqi parliament to swear an oath to “safeguard democratic principles” and become Iraq’s third constitutional monarch, the days of British influence—and the Iraqi monarchy—were numbered. Despite growing oil wealth, a commensurate increase in the standard of living, and a burgeoning intellectual community, the country was increasingly torn by internecine conflict and a potentially violent nationalist movement fueled in large measure by external forces.
    In February 1955, Faisal II agreed to join the so-called Baghdad Pact, an anti-Communist alliance that also included Turkey, Pakistan, Iran, and, of course, Great Britain. The king was immediately branded a “lackey of Western imperialism” by the communist press, as well as by Shi’ite opponents of the regime, and Gamal Abdul Nasser—the Egyptian army colonel who had overthrown King Farouk in Cairo. Itwas the final straw for the anti-imperialist nationalists in the Iraqi army officer corps. They began to plot in earnest—not only against the pro-Western administration in Baghdad but against the monarchy as well.
    Early on the morning of July 14, 1958, General Abd al-Karim Qasim ordered the army out of the barracks and to surround the palace. Before noon, Faisal II, Abdul al Ilah (the former regent), and the palace guards were all dead. Iraq’s thirty-seven-year-long experiment with constitutional monarchy was over for good.
    For the next decade (1958–1968), those who ruled from Baghdad described themselves to the world as an “Arab republic.” But with the exception of a brief period under civilian governance in 1963, the country was run by a succession of military dictatorships. And since the process of electing deputies to parliament had died with Faisal II, the preferred methods for changing governments became assassinations and coups.
    General Qasim barely survived the first such attempt at a change of government when a Baath Party hit team, which included a low-level party apparatchik named Saddam Hussein, tried to gun down the dictator on October 7, 1959. The second time around the Baathists were better organized. On the evening of February 9, 1963, in a scene foreshadowing what would happen forty years later, the new leaders of Iraq broadcast footage of General Qasim’s bullet-riddled body on national television.
    Nine months later, on November 18, 1963, the Baathist National Council of Revolutionary Command was