ABSTRACT
Abdulkarim Qasim was Iraq’s first republican Prime Minister, following the
overthrow of the pro-Western Hashemite monarchy in 1958. This revolution set
in motion the sequence of nationalist republican and more or less authoritarian
regimes that have ruled Iraq until the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime in
April 2003. Saddam’s Iraq was in many ways only an extreme example of the
dynamics that shaped the country’s politics under his predecessors. Iraqi foreign
policy under Saddam, too, in several ways reflected the challenges and
determinants that had shaped Iraqi foreign policy since 1958 – indeed in some
respects since the days of the monarchy. The fragility of state cohesion and
legitimacy; the largely futile and often counter-productive means which the
leadership employed to shape Iraq according to their vision – cracking down
hard on any dissenting voices; the domestic and trans-border identity questions
of the Kurds and the Shia; the external vulnerabilities deriving from these
questions as well as from the looming presence of Persian Iran and the problem
of secure access to the Gulf’s shipping lanes; and the historical/nationalist
grievance over the British-imposed border with Kuwait which underlay that
access question: all of these help explain the Iraqi foreign policy environment.
Iraq also, of course, was part of the Arab world, themes from which strongly
impacted on this environment; indeed, Qasim ruled at a time when Arab
nationalism and pan-Arabism were reaching their most potent form, swept along
by Gamal Abdul-Nasser’s charismatic leadership.
