International Journal of Contemporary Iraqi Studies - Volume 12, Issue 2, 2018

A survey of the history of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), from it formation to the rise of Saddam Hussein, is presented. The heydays of the party were in the two decades following the end of World War II when communist activities played a central role in the political, economic and cultural transformations of Iraq. The ICP’s influence has declined sharply in recent times and today it appears on the verge ceasing to exist as an effective political force.

Although the activities of the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) were primarily centred in the major cities, the party did not neglect the countryside. During the 1940s and 1950s, the ICP’s cadres played a central role in forming peasant associations in several regions of the country particularly in Kurdistan and the Middle Euphrates. Communist-led peasant movements tended to focus on legal rights and economic demands, scoring some impressive gains for Iraq’s most destitute classes. These activities also helped spread general notions of social and political justice, democracy, citizenship, class-consciousness and socialism. This form of activist education would play a significant role in the success of the anti-Monarchic revolution of 1958 and the subsequent agrarian reform programmes.

The 1948 Wathba protests in Iraq crystallized the communist party’s success in mobilizing ordinary citizens around democratic ideals, against the neo-feudal politics of the British-controlled monarchy. This mobilization bore fruit in the 1958 revolution, but is often overlooked by historians who focus on the failure of a communist revolution. The inclusive, cross-sectarian democratic movement is remembered, but not revived in post-Ba`thist Iraq today.

This article analyses how the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP) altered its political strategies in post-war Iraq. After the decline of the political presence, the ICP formed large alliances with small parties in the third round of local and national elections, opting to support candidates on a national scale; in doing so, the ICP achieved significant breakthrough. The party’s election strategy not only led to the ICP’s success but also to the overall stabilization of Iraqi party politics. After the rise of ISIS, the ICP overcame its ideological differences with Sadrist factions that similarly stood alongside the masses; pursuing large-scale demonstrations, the ICP found further opportunities to carry out its political activities. The ICP has thus been adroit in adapting its political strategies according to political and social circumstances. As Islamist groups have seized political power and religious sentiment has spread, the ICP might be seen as pursuing the best of strategies that remain available to it.

This article examines much of the violence of the past two decades in Iraq through the prism of performative politics. This draws attention to its spectacular nature, its repertoires and aesthetics, where blood becomes the common referent in a theatre of state power and resistance. Beyond the spectacle, however, violence is performative in that it possesses causal power. Violence has shaped the ways in which conflicts have been understood and organized, reproducing and reinforcing particular identities, institutions and attitudes in Iraq. Performative violence became a spectacle of horror and, through that horror a technology for the demarcation of whole categories of Iraqi citizen whose blood Islamic State and others licensed themselves to shed. Both nascent state forces and those resisting them, as well the foreign powers active in the Iraqi theatre, had every interest in making manifest their competence and their potential in the use of violence. Regardless of the identity of the parties involved, or the ends they were pursuing, violence has thus become a key technology of power. To perform it has been to assert the right to power in the political landscape of Iraq.

This article presents rarely seen glimpses into life in the barracks of the Iraqi Army during the Gulf War (1990–91). We analyse fifteen diaries of Iraqi soldiers found in the Kuwait Dataset of the Iraqi Ba’th Party Archives, which was first opened to researchers in July 2015. These diaries shed new light on the mind-sets, ideological frameworks, morale and daily lives of Iraqi rank-and-file soldiers. We ask the following questions: did Iraqi soldiers support the invasion and occupation of Kuwait and accept Saddam Hussein’s rationales for the war? How did Iraqi soldiers view the United States and its coalition partners? These diaries also provide clues about why so many retreating soldiers rose up against Saddam in country-wide protests one week after Iraq’s defeat in the war. Although diaries from the US Civil War and the First and Second World Wars have been thoroughly examined by historians and literary scholars, few diaries of soldiers from the modern Arab world have been studied. This article fills an important gap in knowledge about the experiences of soldiers in modern authoritarian regimes and about the Gulf War.

This article traces the dialectics of exile and return in some of the late poems Saadi Youssef, the most important Iraqi poet in the last half century and one of the pioneers of modern Arabic poetry. It pays particular attention to the effects the Anglo-American invasion of 2003 and the disintegration and dismemberment of Iraq on Youssef’s poetic discourse and the ways in which he attempts to reconstruct and represent a vanishing homeland and articulate his relationship to its landscape. It addresses Youssef’s poetic conversations with Muḥammad Mahdīal-Jawāhirī (1899–1997), another great Iraqi poet who, like Youssef, lived much of his life exiled from Iraq.

The Ba‘thification of Iraq: Saddam Hussein’s Totalitarianism, Aaron M. Faust (2015) Austin: University of Texas Press, 320 pp., ISBN: 9781447305577, h/bk, $55.00, p/bk, $29.95

Islamic Traditions of Refuge in the Crises of Iraq and Syria, Tahir Zaman (2016) London: Palgrave, Series: Religion and Global Migrations, 225 pp., ISBN: 9781137550057, h/bk, $59.99

Iraq: A History, John Robertson (2016) London: One World Publishers, 400 pp., ISBN: 978-1780749495, p/bk, $24.99

The Glubb Reports: Glubb Pasha and Britain’s Empire Project in the Middle East. 1920–1956, Tancred Bradshaw (2016) Britain and the World, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 208 pp., ISBN: 9781137380104, h/bk, $100.00

The Emergence of Modern Shi’ism: Islamic Reform in Iraq and Iran, Zackery M. Heern (2015) London: One World Publication, 220 pp., ISBN: 9781780744964, p/bk, $30.00