Ali Salih al-Sa'di

Ali Salih al-Sa'di ( Arabic: علي صالح السعدي; 1928 – September 19, 1977) was an Iraqi politician. He was General Secretary of the Iraqi branch of the Baath Party from the late 1950s until the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état. From February 8, 1963 (Ramadan Revolution) until the November 1963 Iraqi coup d'état, he was Deputy Prime Minister under Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, Minister of the Interior and as Commander of the National Guard (Al-Hars al-Qawmi).[1]

Ali Salih al-Sa'di
علي صالح السعدي
Ministry of Interior (Iraq)
In office
February 1963 – 9 June 1963
Personal details
Born1928
DiedSeptember 19, 1977
Alma materBaghdad University

Career
Delegations attending the 1963 unity talks between Egypt, Syria and Iraq in Cairo. From left to right: Kamel el-Din Hussein of Egypt, N/A, Anwar Sadat of Egypt, Abdel Hakim Amer of Egypt, an Iraqi officer, Ziad al-Hariri of Syria, Nahid al-Qasim of Syria, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, and Ali Salih al-Saadi of Iraq

Ali Salih as-Sa'di was born into an Arab-Kurdish family. In 1955 he graduated from Baghdad University with a degree in economics and joined the Baath Party in Iraq. On July 14, 1958, military leaders under Abd al-Karim Qasim overthrew the Hashemite monarchy.[2] Prominent members of the Baath Party violently opposed Qasim, forcing them into exile. In 1959, Saddam Hussein was injured in an attempt to assassinate Qasim and went into exile via Syria (then part of the United Arab Republic) to Cairo, Egypt.[3][4] Ali al-Sa'di remained in Baghdad as General Secretary of the Iraqi branch of the Ba'ath Party.

Ramadan Revolution
Main article: Ramadan Revolution
See also: CIA activities in Iraq

The Iraqi Ba'ath Party overthrew and executed Qasim in a violent coup on February 8, 1963; long suspected to be supported by the United States Central Intelligence Agency (CIA),[5][6] however pertinent contemporary documents relating to the CIA's operations in Iraq have remained classified by the U.S. government,[7][8] although the Ba'athists are documented to have maintained supportive relationships with U.S. officials before, during, and after the coup.[9][10] Al-Sa'di himself is quoted as saying that the Ba'athists "came to power on a CIA train."[11] Initially, many of Qasim's Shi'ite supporters believed that he had merely gone into hiding and would appear like the Mahdi to lead a rebellion against the new government; to counter this sentiment and terrorize his supporters, Qasim's dead body was displayed on television in a five minute long propaganda video called The End of the Criminals that included close-up views of his bullet wounds amid disrespectful treatment of his corpse, which is spat on in the final scene.[12][13]

As the secretary general of the Ba'ath Party, al-Sa'di was effectively the new leader of Iraq; through his control of the National Guard militia (commanded by Mundhir al-Wanadawi), al-Sa'di exercised more power than the Prime Minister—prominent Ba'athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr—or the largely ceremonial president, Abdul Salam Arif.[14][15] The nine-month rule of al-Sa'di and his civilian branch of the Ba'ath Party has been described as "a reign of terror" as the National Guard, under orders from the Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) "to annihilate anyone who disturbs the peace," detained, tortured, or executed thousands of suspected Qasim loyalists. Furthermore, the National Guard—which developed from a core group of perhaps 5,000 civilian Ba'athist partisans but increased to 34,000 members by August 1963, with members identified by their green armbands—was poorly-disciplined, as militiamen engaged in extensive infighting, creating a widespread perception of chaos and disorder.[14] Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett describe the Ba'athists as having cultivated a "profoundly unsavory image" through "acts of wanton brutality" on a scale without prior precedent in Iraq, including "some of the most terrible scenes of violence hitherto experienced in the post-war Middle East".[16]

It has long been suspected that the CIA (and other U.S. government agencies) provided the Ba'athist government with lists of communists and other leftists, who were then arrested or killed by the National Guard under al-Wanadawi's and al-Sa'di's direction.[17] Gibson emphasizes that the Ba'athists compiled their own lists, citing Bureau of Intelligence and Research reports.[18] On the other hand, Citino and Wolfe-Hunnicutt consider the allegations plausible because the U.S. embassy in Iraq had actually compiled such lists, were known to be in contact with the National Guard during the purge, and because National Guard members involved in the purge received training in the U.S.[19][20] Furthermore, Wolfe-Hunnicutt, citing contemporary U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, notes that the assertions "would be consistent with American special warfare doctrine" regarding U.S. covert support to anti-communist "Hunter-Killer" teams "seeking the violent overthrow of a communist dominated and supported government",[21] and draws parallels to other CIA operations in which lists of suspected communists were compiled, such as Guatemala in 1954 and Indonesia in 1965-66.[22] Between 300 and 5,000 communist sympathizers were killed in street fighting in Baghdad, along with 80 Ba'ath Party members.[14]

Al-Sa'di was in favor of a radical socialist course, which was not universally accepted in the Iraqi branch of the Baath party.[23] In the first decade of its existence, it focused on pan-Arab slogans, only vaguely mentioning socialism.[23] Such a policy was also opposed by those officers who supported the new government, although they did not belong to the Baath party, but opted for pan-Arabism and the union with Egypt.[23]

Partisan maneuvers and overthrow

In October 1963, at the all-Arab Sixth Congress (National Congress) of the Baath Party in Damascus, al-Sa'di managed to get founders Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar voted out of office. On November 11, al-Sa'di and his supporters called an "extraordinary party conference" to expel al-Bakr and other rivals from the party.[24] Bakr-loyal Ba'ath officers arrested them, after which on November 13 National Guard members loyal to al-Sa'di bombed targets in Baghdad and rampaged through the capital for five days. al-Bakr summoned President Arif, who as commander-in-chief of the army restored peace and order with the military coup of November 18, 1963.[25] Despite having collaborated with al-Bakr to remove al-Sa'di, Arif purged Ba'athists, including al-Bakr, from his new government.[14][26]

References
  1. DeFronzo, J. (2009). The Iraq War: Origins and Consequences. Westview Press. p. 71. ISBN 9780813343914.
  2. R., Bidwell (2012). Dictionary of Modern Arab History. Routledge. p. 60. ISBN 9781136162985.
  3. Makiya, Kanan (1998). Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition. University of California Press. p. 118. ISBN 978-0-520-92124-5.
  4. Karsh, Efraim; Rautsi, Inari (2002). Saddam Hussein: A Political Biography. Grove Press. pp. 15–22. ISBN 978-0-8021-3978-8.
  5. For sources that agree or sympathize with assertions of U.S. involvement, see:
    • Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Brandon; Middle East Studies Pedagogy Initiative (MESPI) (July 20, 2018). "Essential Readings: The United States and Iraq before Saddam Hussein's Rule". Jadaliyya. CIA involvement in the 1963 coup that first brought the Ba'th to power in Iraq has been an open secret for decades. American government and media have never been asked to fully account for the CIA's role in the coup. On the contrary, the US government has put forward and official narrative riddled with holes–redactions that cannot be declassified for "national security" reasons.
    • Citino, Nathan J. (2017). "The People's Court". Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US-Arab Relations, 1945–1967. Cambridge University Press. pp. 182–183. ISBN 978-1-108-10755-6. Washington backed the movement by military officers linked to the pan-Arab Ba'th Party that overthrew Qasim in a coup on February 8, 1963.
    • Jacobsen, E. (2013-11-01). "A Coincidence of Interests: Kennedy, U.S. Assistance, and the 1963 Iraqi Ba'th Regime". Diplomatic History. 37 (5): 1029–1059. doi:10.1093/dh/dht049. ISSN 0145-2096. There is ample evidence that the CIA not only had contacts with the Iraqi Ba'th in the early sixties, but also assisted in the planning of the coup.
    • Ismael, Tareq Y.; Ismael, Jacqueline S.; Perry, Glenn E. (2016). Government and Politics of the Contemporary Middle East: Continuity and Change (2nd ed.). Routledge. p. 240. ISBN 978-1-317-66282-2. Ba'thist forces and army officers overthrew Qasim on February 8, 1963, in collaboration with the CIA.
    • Little, Douglas (2004-10-14). "Mission Impossible: The CIA and the Cult of Covert Action in the Middle East". Diplomatic History. 28 (5): 663–701. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2004.00446.x. ISSN 1467-7709. Such self-serving denials notwithstanding, the CIA actually appears to have had a great deal to do with the bloody Ba'athist coup that toppled Qassim in February 1963. Deeply troubled by Qassim's steady drift to the left, by his threats to invade Kuwait, and by his attempt to cancel Western oil concessions, U.S. intelligence made contact with anticommunist Ba'ath activists both inside and outside the Iraqi army during the early 1960s.
    • Osgood, Kenneth (2009). "Eisenhower and regime change in Iraq: the United States and the Iraqi Revolution of 1958". America and Iraq: Policy-making, Intervention and Regional Politics. Routledge. pp. 26–27. ISBN 9781134036721. Working with Nasser, the Ba'ath Party, and other opposition elements, including some in the Iraqi army, the CIA by 1963 was well positioned to help assemble the coalition that overthrew Qasim in February of that year. It is not clear whether Qasim's assassination, as Said Aburish has written, was 'one of the most elaborate CIA operations in the history of the Middle East.' That judgment remains to be proven. But the trail linking the CIA is suggestive.
    • Sluglett, Peter. "The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq: A Study of Iraq's Old Landed and Commercial Classes and of its Communists, Ba'thists and Free Officers (Review)" (PDF). Democratiya. p. 9. Batatu infers on pp. 985-86 that the CIA was involved in the coup of 1963 (which brought the Ba'ath briefly to power): Even if the evidence here is somewhat circumstantial, there can be no question about the Ba'ath's fervent anti-communism.
    • Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Brandon (2021). The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. Stanford University Press. p. 119. ISBN 978-1-5036-1382-9. Weldon Matthews, Malik Mufti, Douglas Little, William Zeman, and Eric Jacobsen have all drawn on declassified American records to largely substantiate the plausibility of Batatu's account. Peter Hahn and Bryan Gibson (in separate works) argue that the available evidence does support the claim of CIA collusion with the Ba'th. However, each makes this argument in the course of a much broader study, and neither examines the question in any detail.
    • Mitchel, Timothy (2002). Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity. University of California Press. p. 149. ISBN 9780520928251. Qasim was killed three years later in a coup welcomed and possibly aided by the CIA, which brought to power the Ba'ath, the party of Saddam Hussein.
    • Weiner, Tim (2008). Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA. Doubleday. p. 163. ISBN 9780307455628. The agency finally backed a successful coup in Iraq in the name of American influence.
  6. For sources that dispute assertions of U.S. involvement, see:
    • Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 58. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7. Barring the release of new information, the balance of evidence suggests that while the United States was actively plotting the overthrow of the Qasim regime, it did not appear to be directly involved in the February 1963 coup.
    • Hahn, Peter (2011). Missions Accomplished?: The United States and Iraq Since World War I. Oxford University Press. p. 48. ISBN 9780195333381. Declassified U.S. government documents offer no evidence to support these suggestions.
    • Barrett, Roby C. (2007). The Greater Middle East and the Cold War: US Foreign Policy Under Eisenhower and Kennedy. I.B. Tauris. p. 451. ISBN 9780857713087. Washington wanted to see Qasim and his Communist supporters removed, but that is a far cry from Batatu's inference that the U.S. had somehow engineered the coup. The U.S. lacked the operational capability to organize and carry out the coup, but certainly after it had occurred the U.S. government preferred the Nasserists and Ba'athists in power, and provided encouragement and probably some peripheral assistance.
    • West, Nigel (2017). Encyclopedia of Political Assassinations. Rowman & Littlefield. p. 205. ISBN 9781538102398. Although Qasim was regarded as an adversary by the West, having nationalized the Iraq Petroleum Company, which had joint Anglo-American ownership, no plans had been made to depose him, principally because of the absence of a plausible successor. Nevertheless, the CIA pursued other schemes to prevent Iraq from coming under Soviet influence, and one such target was an unidentified colonel, thought to have been Qasim's cousin, the notorious Fadhil Abbas al-Mahdawi who was appointed military prosecutor to try members of the previous Hashemite monarchy.
  7. Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Brandon (2021). The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. Stanford University Press. p. 117. ISBN 978-1-5036-1382-9. What really happened in Iraq in February 1963 remains shrouded behind a veil of official secrecy. Many of the most relevant documents remain classified. Others were destroyed. And still others were never created in the first place.
  8. Matthews, Weldon C. (9 November 2011). "The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq's First Ba'thist Regime". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 43 (4): 635–653. doi:10.1017/S0020743811000882. ISSN 1471-6380. S2CID 159490612. Archival sources on the U.S. relationship with this regime are highly restricted. Many records of the Central Intelligence Agency's operations and the Department of Defense from this period remain classified, and some declassified records have not been transferred to the National Archives or cataloged.
  9. Matthews, Weldon C. (9 November 2011). "The Kennedy Administration, Counterinsurgency, and Iraq's First Ba'thist Regime". International Journal of Middle East Studies. 43 (4): 635–653. doi:10.1017/S0020743811000882. ISSN 0020-7438. S2CID 159490612. [Kennedy] Administration officials viewed the Iraqi Ba'th Party in 1963 as an agent of counterinsurgency directed against Iraqi communists, and they cultivated supportive relationships with Ba'thist officials, police commanders, and members of the Ba'th Party militia. The American relationship with militia members and senior police commanders had begun even before the February coup, and Ba'thist police commanders involved in the coup had been trained in the United States.
  10. Wolfe-Hunnicutt, B. (2015-01-01). "Embracing Regime Change in Iraq: American Foreign Policy and the 1963 Coup d'etat in Baghdad". Diplomatic History. 39 (1): 98–125. doi:10.1093/dh/dht121. ISSN 0145-2096.
  11. Jacobsen, E. (2013-11-01). "A Coincidence of Interests: Kennedy, U.S. Assistance, and the 1963 Iraqi Ba'th Regime". Diplomatic History. 37 (5): 1029–1059. doi:10.1093/dh/dht049. ISSN 0145-2096.
  12. Makiya, Kanan (1998). Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Updated Edition. University of California Press. pp. 58–59. ISBN 9780520921245.
  13. Citino, Nathan J. (2017). "The People's Court". Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US–Arab Relations, 1945–1967. Cambridge University Press. pp. 220–222. ISBN 978-1-108-10755-6.
  14. Ahram, Ariel Ira (2011-01-26). Proxy Warriors: The Rise and Fall of State-Sponsored Militias. Stanford University Press. pp. 75–77. ISBN 978-0-8047-7359-1.
  15. Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 59–60, 77. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.
  16. Farouk–Sluglett, Marion; Sluglett, Peter (2001). Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship. I.B. Tauris. pp. 83, 85–87. ISBN 9780857713735.
  17. Farouk–Sluglett, Marion; Sluglett, Peter (2001). Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship. I.B. Tauris. p. 86. ISBN 9780857713735. Although individual leftists had been murdered intermittently over the previous years, the scale on which the killings and arrests took place in the spring and summer of 1963 indicates a closely coordinated campaign, and it is almost certain that those who carried out the raid on suspects' homes were working from lists supplied to them. Precisely how these lists had been compiled is a matter of conjecture, but it is certain that some of the Ba'th leaders were in touch with American intelligence networks, and it is also undeniable that a variety of different groups in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East had a strong vested interest in breaking what was probably the strongest and most popular communist party in the region.
  18. Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. p. 59. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.
  19. Citino, Nathan J. (2017). "The People's Court". Envisioning the Arab Future: Modernization in US–Arab Relations, 1945–1967. Cambridge University Press. pp. 220–222. ISBN 978-1-108-10755-6.
  20. Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Brandon (March 2011). "The End of the Concessionary Regime: Oil and American Power in Iraq, 1958-1972" (PDF). pp. 84–85.
  21. Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Brandon (March 2011). "The End of the Concessionary Regime: Oil and American Power in Iraq, 1958-1972" (PDF). pp. 84–85. One study from 1961 or 1962 included a section on "the capability of the U.S. Government to provide support to friendly groups, not in power, who are seeking the violent overthrow of a communist dominated and supported government." The study went on to discuss providing "covert assistance" to such groups and advised that, "Pinpointing of enemy concentrations and hideouts can permit effective use of 'Hunter‐Killer' teams." Given the Embassy's concern with the immediate suppression of Baghdad's sarifa population, it seems likely that American intelligence services would be interested in providing support to the Ba'thist "'Hunter‐Killer' teams."
  22. Wolfe-Hunnicutt, Brandon (2021). The Paranoid Style in American Diplomacy: Oil and Arab Nationalism in Iraq. Stanford University Press. pp. 111–112. ISBN 978-1-5036-1382-9. The CIA had long employed the method of targeted assassination in its global crusade against Communism. In 1954, a CIA team involved in the overthrow of Guatemalan leader Jacobo Arbenz compiled a veritable "Handbook of Assassination," replete with precise instructions for committing "political murder" and a list of suspected Guatemalan Communists to be targeted for "executive action." In the 1960s, the Kennedy administration made this rather ad hoc practice into a science. According to its special warfare doctrines, covertly armed and trained "Hunter-Killer teams" were a highly effective instrument in the root-and-branch eradication of Communist threats in developing nations. In what became known as the "Jakarta Method"—named for the systematic CIA-backed purge of Indonesian Communists in 1965—the CIA was involved in countless campaigns of mass murder in the name of anti-Communism.
  23. Tripp (2009). History of Iraq. Warsaw: Book and Knowledge. p. 211. ISBN 9788305135672.
  24. "العباسية نيوز | علي صالح السعدي". www.alabasianews.com. Archived from the original on 2022-03-05. Retrieved 2022-03-04.
  25. Dougherty, Beth K.; Ghareeb, Edmund A. (2013-11-07). Historical Dictionary of Iraq. Scarecrow Press. ISBN 978-0-8108-7942-3.
  26. Gibson, Bryan R. (2015). Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War. Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 77, 85. ISBN 978-1-137-48711-7.
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