The Consequences of the Iran-Iraq War for Iraqi Politics

Abstract

In the last analysis, the foundations of political power in Iraq lie in the degree of personal trust that exists amongst those who hold high office in the state. This has been both the cause of the particular nature of political developments in Iraq and has, quite naturally, been enhanced by the form of those developments since the creation of the state. Such trust is founded in the first place on the deeply rooted and highly resilient social facts of family, clan and tribal origins, expanding beyond this to those who share similar provincial origins with the clan members. It is a symptom of largely communal, parochial politics which have tended first to resist and then to move in on the apparatus of the modern state. Its practitioners have used the bonds of personal confidence to construct within the bureaucratic machinery of army, party and governing administration a network of greater indigenous social and cultural meaning. These personal links are the ones which reassure both ruler and the immediate circle of his intimates, giving substance to a mediation of power unavailable in the alien notions of collective national purpose and impersonal authority suggested by the administration of a modern state.