The regime lasted for five more years, until the rise to power of the Ba'ath in July 1968. Now the Ba'ath was much better organized than before, and the party dominated the new regime entirely. For the first time since the monarchy, a regime of institutions was actually created. The Ba'ath party branches and cells were established all over Iraq, which led to an effective and centralized government which imposed its authority over all organizations. Such as professional and trade unions. The party ruled over the army, and not vice versa. The two key figures in the regime were Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr and Saddam Hussein. Both Sunnis of provincial background, from the town of Tikrit, north of Baghdad and both men with modest lower middle class backgrounds. Saddam Hussein was the real strong man of the regime. And he became president in 1979. And what is very characteristic of the Saddam Hussein regime, aas this predominance of men from the town of Tikrit, not just Sunnis, not just members of the Ba'ath party, but Sunnis from one particular town in, in Iraq in the northern provincial town of Tikrit. In 1987, for example, one-third of the senior Ba'th party leadership was composed of people from Tikrit. The regime was socialist and secular. That meant that the economy was state-controlled, oil was nationalized in the early 1970s, and the state bureaucracy was a major employer, giving many a vested interest in the political status quo. There was a common sectarian interest between being a Sunni and a member of the Ba'ath. Secular politics, trying to push religion to the margins of politics, served the interests of the Sunni minority. After all, if politics in a country like Iraq were to be religious, surely the Shiite majority would dominate. The Sunni Arab minority in power therefore had no particular interest in pushing the issue of religion, but rather marginalizing religion as much as possible. Secularism served the particular sectarian interest of the minority. But the Ba'ath encountered increasing religious opposition, especially from the Shiites, to the secularizing tendencies of the Ba'ath regime from the late 1960s onwards. And the regime assumed a more religious character of its own, to defend itself against this kind of criticism. It enforced religious observance on Ramadan, for example. Even Saddam himself exhibited a more religious observance. The Islamic revolution in Iran, in 1979, added to the regime's anxiety about the possible effects of Khomeini's Shiite revolution on the Shiite population of Iraq. It was this fear of the revolutionary fervor of Shiite Iran that drove Saddam Hussein to launch a war against Iran which lasted for eight destructive years, from 1980 to 1988. So now Hussein launched his war against Iran in the expectation of rapid victory. But the war dragged on for eight years at huge cost. And with hundreds of thousands of casualties on both sides. An issue that Iraq never really found a solution to aside from its Shiite majority, was the question of the Kurdish minority in Iraq. And the Kurdish opposition to the central government in Iraq. Between 1961 and 1975 the Kurds fought the regime for greater autonomy, only to be constantly repressed by all the various governments in power. In 1975, following an agreement between Iran and Iraq. The Iranians ceased all their support for the Iraqi Kurds and their struggle collapsed. But the Kurdish struggle here resumed during the Iran-Iraq war, with renewed Iranian support. And in the closing phases of Iraq's war with Iran, mainly during the year of 1988, the Kurds were ruthlessly crushed by the Iraqi regime. The Anfal Campaigns, as they were called, included the killing of tens of thousands and mass deportations of Kurds from thousands of villages that were destroyed. And other atrocities like the gassing of the people of Halabja in March 1988 in which some 5,000 people perished. Iraq's basic problem of collective identity was never really resolved. Shi'is, Sunnis, and Kurds never fully shared the Arab identity of the Iraqi state. Shi'is after all, saw Arabism as just another means of Sunni domination. The Kurds weren't Arabs at all, and therefore Arab nationalism hardly appealed to them. The attempt to promote a particular Iraqi identity resting on the glorious past of ancient Babylon, was very artificial. And neither Sunni Arabs nor Shiites or Kurds were particularly attracted. And therefore, whether it was Arabism, or Iraqiness, or Islam, which could not possibly unite both Sunnis and Shi'is all were problematic in one way or another. And Saddam therefore ruled by the ruthless suppression of the secret police in the creation of a state described by an Iraqi author, Kanan Makiya as the Republic of Fear. With a state ruled with an iron fist of gruesome repression. And this only came to an end by the external intervention of the United States in 2003.
