In Iraq on 8th February 1963 the Socialist Party of Arab Resurrection (the Bacth Party) carried out an armed coup. It overthrew the regime of cAbdalkarīm Qāsim and came to power. Its short reign turned out as an unsuccessful experiment and ended on 18th November of the same year in a countercoup staged by the army. A difficult period followed in which the Bacth leadership worked to overthrow the existing military regime and restore its former position. The Bacthists returned to power by accomplishing two coups, one on 17th July and the other on 30th July 1968. In both instances, they prevailed by stratagem rather than through force. In the first they deposed the president by allying themselves with his closest aides. In the second they got rid of their inconvenient temporary allies. The two distinct groups which in an odd alliance finally carried out the first coup were the Bacth Party and a small group of dissatisfied supporters of the regime whose leaders were cAbdarrazzāq an-Nāyif and Ibrāhīm ad-Dā’ūd. The two men who held the fate of the regime in their hands belonged to a group of younger moderate Arab nationalist officers within the army.
After the June War of 1967 the issue at stake was the return of territories occupied by Israel. The purposely ambiguous UN Resolution 242 became a controversial issue as each party stressed another part of the resolution. As the Israelis refused the equation “land for peace” and the withdrawal from all territories, the Arab states at Khartoum decided to adopt a unified position. The Arab states agreed to unify efforts to “eliminate the effects of aggression” – not eliminate Israel. Although they pledged not to negotiate with Israel, they looked to the superpowers – the USA and USSR – to resolve the dispute. The USA was all too willing to sit back and wait for the Arab states to come around. After all, the Arab States wanted their land back and all they had to do to get it back was to sign peace treaties with Israel. To re-engage the Americans, Egypt engaged Israel in the so-called War of Attrition artillery duels and aerial dogfights across the Suez Canal (solely within its own occupied territory). The US Department of State made an attempt to break the impasse announcing the Rogers Plan in December 1969. Both sides at first turned down the plan, but the escalation of war during the first half of 1970 and the threat of superpower involvement may have changed the situation. In July 1970 Egypt and Israel accepted the Rogers Plan.
The coup of the 17th July 1968, although not entirely the work of the Bacth, shortly brought the Bacth Party to full power and inaugurated another distinct change in the structure and orientation of government in Iraq. This time the Bacthists, having learned well the lessons of 1963, managed to stay in powerand to institute the kind of regime they had failed to achieve in 1963. To the surprise of many they brought a long period of stability achieved by draconian means. The regime established a one-party state that eventually developed an impressive institutional structure, and gradually concentrated power in the hands of one man, Ṣaddām Ḥusayn, to a degree not seen since the last days of the monarchy. The Bacth also reached a temporary settlement of the Kurdish problem that appeared more likely to remain intact than previous solutions, although it took a bitter and costly war to achieve. The party made a renewed and reasonably successful effort at economic and social transformation, going well beyond the achievements of previous regimes.
The passage of Resolution 242 by the UN Security Council from the 22nd November 1967 was a major diplomatic achievement in the Arab-Israeli conflict. It emphasised “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war” and contained the formula that has since underlain all peace initiatives – land for peace. In exchange for withdrawing from Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian territory captured in the 1967 war, Israel was promised peace by the Arab states. The resolution provides the basis on which the peace talks between Israel and the Arabs could be conducted.
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