17 July Revolution

The coup

Planning for a coup against Arif and Yahya was underway at least from March 1968, when the topic was discussed at an "officer's convention" held at the home of prominent Ba'athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr. The Ba'ath Party had previously organized a major demonstration against Arif in September 1967. On 17 July 1968 the Iraqi Ba'ath Party—led by al-Bakr as president, in collaboration with the non-Ba'athists Abd ar-Rahman al-Dawud as defence minister and Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif as prime minister—seized power in a bloodless coup, placing Arif on a plane to London. al-Bakr quickly ordered Naif and Dawud to be removed from their posts and exiled on 30 July, cementing the Ba'ath Party's control over Iraq until the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003. al-Bakr was then named prime minister and commander-in-chief of the army. According to a semi-official biography, future Iraqi president Saddam Hussein personally led Naif at gunpoint to the plane that escorted him out of Iraq.

Many details of the coup remain unclear to historians. On the day of the coup, U.S. National Security Council member John Foster assessed that the new regime's "tendencies will be towards moving Iraq even closer to [the Palestinian] Fatah, the Syrians, and the Soviets," however the U.S. Embassy in Lebanon—"the principal source of political information on Iraq after the closure of the Baghdad Embassy during the June 1967"—indicated that the Iraqi Ba'athists were "from the right-wing of the party" and bitter rivals of their Syrian counterparts. Bakr and his foreign minister expressed an interest in closer cooperation with Turkey and Iran, and the U.S. Ambassador to Kuwait reported that the Kuwaitis "expected a more convenient administration in Iraq because the former Baʿth government had recognized Kuwait’s independence." The U.S. believed that Naif and Dawud—who were, respectively, in charge of President Arif's military intelligence and personal security—initiated the plot, and that Ba'athist conspirators including al-Bakr, Hardan al-Tikriti, and Salih Mahdi Ammash were only asked to participate in order to establish a broader coalition of support for a new government. However, Wolfe-Hunnicutt states: "Though executed by Nayef, the coup was organised by Bakr and his deputy Saddam Hussein." Both the Naif and Bakr factions were motivated by opposition to Yahya. After his ouster, Arif was exiled to the U.K., and even Yahya was not executed (although he endured brutal torture in prison), possibly to avoid the negative international attention that had resulted from the bloodletting that accompanied other changes of government in Iraq's contemporaneous history. In the ensuing years, Wolfe-Hunnicutt states that Saddam "succeeded in consolidating a formidable political regime ... where so many others had failed," including co-opting Yahya's intention to nationalize the IPC with the help of the Soviet Union.

Allegations of U.S. involvement

Wolfe-Hunnicutt states there was "a significant American role in the events that brought the Ba'th to power" in 1968. Similarly, historian Netanel Avneri "reveals findings that support the claim of American involvement in the overthrow of Arif"; the Arif government's desires "to break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on Iraqi oil" and Soviet aid to Iraq gave the U.S. "a good reason to encourage the overthrow of the [Iraqi] government." Likewise, political scientist Tareq Ismael states that: "With further help from the U.S. the Ba'th returned to power in 1968." Wolfe-Hunnicutt concludes that the coup "at least initially" served U.S. interests in Iraq, and while "Certain American business groups did look with favour on the coup," there exists, "as yet, no evidence that these groups received official support from Washington," noting that "the evidence [...] suggests if the Central Intelligence Agency backed the coup, it did so [...] without proper authorisation or larger policy co-ordination." After the coup's success, "the new regime groped around unofficially for a renewed connection with the USA ... and to receive American financial aid," but when the new regime's officials, most notably defence minister al-Tikriti, attempted to re-establish relations with the U.S., "the Johnson administration repeatedly rebuffed" these overtures because of "divisions among policymakers" regarding how economic ties with Iraq might negatively affect U.S. relations with Israel. According to Gibson: "There is no evidence to substantiate claims that the United States was behind the coup."

After the coup's success, the Belgian embassy in Iraq, which hosted the U.S. interests section, reported that it was strongly rumoured that "Washington was behind the coup," noting that "Several ministers, especially the Prime Minister [Naif] were known to be 'pro-American.'" Robert Anderson—former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury during the Dwight D. Eisenhower administration and "CIA trouble-shooter" who took "the lead in Iraqi-American commercial relations" after the Ba'ath Party overthrow of Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim in 1963—maintained contact with Lutfi al-Ubaydi, "an Iraqi lawyer and politico with many friends within the Ba'th party," including serving as "an economic advisor and a close friend" to al-Bakr. Per Avneri, "While there is no evidence that Anderson operated under a government directive," Anderson maintained "continuous contact" with the U.S. State Department and Ubaydi, "an emissary of the regime that overthrew Arif." Declassified State Department records document that Anderson served as a channel of communication between the Ba'athists and the U.S. government; the Ba'athists even "sought to share its secretly made decisions about Yahya’s fate and the oil contract with France with the State Department through the medium of Anderson."

Former U.S. National Security Council (NSC) member Roger Morris wrote in The New York Times in 2003 that the coup "came with CIA backing," writing that "in the late 1960's, I often heard CIA officers—including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time—speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists." One of the coup plotters, Naif, affirmed U.S. involvement in the coup years later, writing in his memoirs "for the 1968 coup you must look to Washington"; Naif was an associate of Sa'd Salih al-Jabr, an Iraqi exile who closely worked with Anderson and Ubaydi. Similarly, the ousted Arif would tell historian Hanna Batatu that "non-Iraqi hands" were involved in the coup. Iraqi opposition politician Ahmad Chalabi described the coup "as the second stage of CIA-Ba'ath cooperation." According to Chalabi, Saddam wrote a letter to the U.S. Consulate in Basra in 1966 asking for U.S. assistance in overthrowing the Iraqi government which culminated in a 1967 meeting arranged by Ubaydi between al-Bakr and Anderson. Regarding the coup, Adnan Pachachi—who served in the Iraqi government before and after the coup—stated that "I don’t know of outside involvement, but perhaps it happened. The regime of Prime Minister Taher Yahya was pro-Nasser and unpopular with the West. It would make sense." Gibson quotes a former high-ranking CIA officer: "I do not know how the rumor got started that we were involved in the Ba'thist coup. We weren't. ... [Arif] was the best of the lot."

Aftermath

On 2 August 1968, Iraqi Foreign Minister Abdul Karim Sheikhli stated that Iraq would seek close ties "with the socialist camp, particularly the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic." By late November, the U.S. embassy in Beirut reported that Iraq had released many leftist and communist dissidents, although "there [was] no indication ... [they had] been given any major role in the regime." As the previous government had recently signed a major oil deal with the Soviets, the Ba'ath Party's rapid attempts to improve relations with Moscow were not a shock to U.S. policymakers, but they "provided a glimpse at a strategic alliance that would soon emerge." Behind the scenes, Tikriti (now Iraqi minister of defence) attempted to open a discreet line of communication with the U.S. government through a representative of the American oil company Mobil, but this overture was rebuffed by the Johnson administration as it had come to perceive the Ba'ath Party, in both Iraq and Syria, as too closely associated with the Soviet Union.

For its part, the ruling Ba'ath Party in Syria did not welcome—or initially even acknowledge—the formation of a government by the rival Ba'ath Party in neighboring Iraq. In a press release, the Syrians mentioned that al-Bakr had been appointed president, but did not mention his party's affiliation, instead referring to the incident as a military coup. The Iraqis were more conciliatory, with al-Bakr stating "They are Ba'athists, we are Ba'athists" shortly after the coup. When Hafez al-Assad seized power in Syria in 1970, this did not lead to improved relations; to the contrary, the Syrians denounced the Iraqi branch of the party as a "rightist clique".

In December, Iraqi troops based in Jordan "made international headlines" when they began shelling Israeli settlers in the Jordan Valley, which led to a strong response by the Israeli Air Force. al-Bakr claimed that a "fifth column of agents of Israel and the U.S. was striking from behind," and, on 14 December, the Iraqi government alleged it had discovered "an Israeli spy network" plotting to "bring about a change in the Iraqi regime," arresting dozens of individuals and eventually publicly executing 14 people including 9 Iraqi Jews on fabricated espionage charges in January 1969. The executions led to international criticism, with U.S. Secretary of State William P. Rogers calling them "repugnant to the conscience of the world" and Egypt's Al-Ahram cautioning: "The hanging of fourteen people in the public square is certainly not a heart-warming sight, nor is it the occasion for organizing a spectacle." Makiya credits the hangings with helping the Ba'athist government consolidate control of Iraq, stating: "The terror that, from a Ba'thist viewpoint, was premature and badly handled in 1963, worked and was skillfully deployed the second time around." Makiya recounts how the Ba'athist purge quickly expanded far beyond Iraq's marginalized Jewish community: "In 1969 alone, official executions of convicted spies (or announcements of such executions) took place at least on the following days: February 20, April 14, April 30, May 15, August 21, August 25, September 8, and November 26. The victims now were Muslim or Christian Iraqis with the occasional Jew thrown in for good measure." In total, an estimated 150 people were publicly executed in Liberation Square, Baghdad from 1969 to 1970.

On 1 June 1972, under the direction of Saddam and oil minister Sa'dun Hammadi, Iraq announced Law 69: The nationalization of the Anglo-American shares of the IPC and their transfer to the INOC. (The French and Gulbenkian shares of the consortium followed in 1973.) This followed the April 1972 signing of the 15-year Iraqi–Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Co-Operation by al-Bakr and Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin. According to Charles R. H. Tripp, the Iraqi–Soviet Treaty upset "the U.S.-sponsored security system established as part of the Cold War in the Middle East," leading the U.S. to finance Mustafa Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) rebels during the Second Iraqi–Kurdish War. From October 1972 until the abrupt end of the Kurdish intervention after March 1975, Gibson states that the CIA "provided the Kurds with nearly $20 million in assistance," including 1,250 tons of non-attributable weaponry.

While most studies credit the nationalization measures pursued by Muammar Gaddafi's Libya after September 1969 with setting the precedent that other oil-producing states would subsequently follow, Iraq's nationalization of the IPC was the largest such expropriation attempted since Iran's 1951 nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC), which the U.S. and U.K. successfully thwarted. The U.S. pursued a similarly reactionary policy towards Iraq's nationalization, believing that its Western allies would agree to embargo Iraqi oil to ensure that the nationalization failed and that its allies in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC)—namely Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait—would announce a commensurate increase in production. However, the U.S. position was an extreme outlier relative to international opinion and none of the U.S.'s traditional allies, including the U.K., were willing to countenance such measures. To the contrary, OPEC took decisive steps to ensure the success of Iraq's nationalization. The IPC consortium broke down and signed an agreement to resolve its outstanding disputes with Iraq on 1 March 1973, leading to celebrations in Baghdad. Wolfe-Hunnicutt observes: "Within a decade, all Middle Eastern producers followed Iraq's lead in seizing control of their oil resource from the major multi-nationals."