Bryan R. Gibson, Sold Out? US Foreign Policy, Iraq, the Kurds, and the Cold War, New York: Palgrave, 2015, 284 pp., (ISBN: 978-1137487117).
Contemporary scholars, policy analysts, and foreign policy officials on Middle Eastern politics still seek to better comprehend how Iraq and Syria have turned into failed states and fragmented nations along sectarian identities. Perhaps one of the most uttered historical accounts has been the post-Ottoman scramble of the region at the hands of British and French colonial powers, particularly via the infamous 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement. Bryan R. Gibson’s book brings a more recent historical narrative to our attention by unpacking how the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped the domestic politics of Iraq on the one hand and influenced the international relations of the Middle East in general on the other. Even though the book focuses on the US foreign policy toward Iraq between the years of 1958 and 1975 within the global context of the Cold War and it does not necessarily intend to explain the current regional instabilities, Gibson’s detailed analysis of the Cold War rivalry in and over Iraq sheds light on our understanding of global and regional dimensions in the current Iraqi and Syrian crises.
The major argument of the book is that “whenever US officials in Washington believed that Baghdad was developing closer relations with Moscow, they took steps to counter Soviet influence, often relying on covert interventions” (p. xiv) and in this context “the United States moved from being an unsophisticated observer of events in 1958–59 to becoming a direct protagonist in Iraq during 1972–75 through its own covert program to support Iraq’s Kurdish rebels” (p. xiii). Gibson illustrates his argument through a comprehensive historical analysis of each US administration’s approach to Iraq between 1958 and 1975. During the Eisenhower administration, the Iraqi revolution which overthrew the Hashemite monarchy in 1958 led to fears that the new regime under Abd al-Karim Qasim would become a pro-Soviet ally since Qasim did not hesitate to make alliance with the Iraqi Communist Party (IPC). Thus, pan-Arab nationalism under the leadership of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser was tentatively seen as a regional counterforce against the potential spread of Soviet communism. However, interestingly, Britain approached the Qasim regime in Iraq as a potential alternative to Nasser since Nasser’s anti-colonial and anti-British discourse was against the British national interests in the region, especially via the economic significance of the Suez Canal as Britain’s major oil route. In this way, Gibson also shows how American containment policy against the Soviet Union and British national interests in the region contradicted each other in certain periods. This was also the case with Iran under the rule of pro-Western Shah and Israel as both were antagonistic to the pan-Arabist agenda of Nasser.
During the Kennedy administration, Gibson argues that the US came to the point of supporting the first short-lived Ba’th regime (February–November 1963), its purge of communist party members, and its ruthless war against the Soviet-backed Kurds. As the Iraqi Kurds were pursuing autonomy from Baghdad, the Soviet military and financial assistance to the Kurds was a political move against the Ba’th attack on the Iraqi communists. However, the main principle of the US in the Kurdish question was primarily non-intervention since it was seen as an internal issue of Iraq. According to Gibson, this is because it took some time until the United States realized that the Kurdish question was another of the Cold War’s political and military conflict zones, as the primary focus of the US was on other proxy zones of struggle with the USSR such as Cuba, Vietnam, and Laos. Thus, Gibson argues that the US missed the earlier opportunities of making the Kurds one of its major allies in the region until 1972.
Under the rule of Arab nationalist and anti-communist Arif brothers and later al-Bazzaz (1963–1968), the Johnson administration had friendly relations with Baghdad. As Gibson argues, “although Britain, Israel, and Iran all saw the new Arif regime as too cozy with Nasser, whom each despised for their own reason, the United States was content with Arif’s friendly relationship with Nasser, so long as Iraq maintained a neutralist stance in the Cold War and was committed to anticommunist policies domestically” (p. 101). During the second Ba’th rule after 1968, the US began to believe that Baghdad was becoming a Soviet orbit, especially after the 1972 Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation with the USSR, which led to the Nixon administration’s Kurdish intervention. Gibson states that “the CIA operation to finance and arm the Kurds is a perfect example of a superpower intervention; the United States was actively encouraging a rebellion in order to bring about a change in Iraqi policy and advance its own interests” (p. 144). Accordingly, Gibson claims that the Kurdish War in 1974–75 was a significant Cold War conflict within which two superpowers got directly involved.
In general, Gibson exhibits a historiography of modern Iraq from the US foreign policy perspective within the context of the Cold War which he considers this foreign policy mostly reactive, rather than proactive, to the real and imagined Soviet threats as they arose. His argument is situated within the idea that Third World interventions during the Cold War played a major role in undermining the later political order and economic progress in the Middle East. Most particularly, as Gibson puts, “America’s competition with the Soviet Union over Iraq and the broader Middle East would contribute to Saddam Hussein’s rise to power and, ultimately, the destabilization of Iraqi politics today” (p. 199).
There are two major strengths of this book. First, it is able to draw a larger picture by connecting the issues of the Cold War, American foreign policy, the Middle East, Arab nationalism and the Kurdish question together. Second, it offers a rich historical account supported by declassified primary materials and interviews. However, the book remains limited in four particular ways. First, Gibson does not particularly explain his logic of periodisation which ends in 1975. However, the Cold War ended and the Iraqi Kurds achieved de-facto autonomy from the tyranny of Saddam Hussein with the US-led establishment of no-fly zone in 1991. The narrative of the book would be much more comprehensive if the analysis could be at least extended until the end of the Cold War. Second, while the book takes Iran and Israel into account for the Cold War’s Kurdish question within the context of American foreign policy, it pays relatively less attention to the role played by Turkey as a member of NATO, a close ally of the US and a country with a large Kurdish population. Third, the book mostly takes the Cold War as a static era which neglects certain implications of détente between the late 1960s and 70s in the Soviet-US competition over Iraq. If détente did not have any influence on the superpowers’ rivalry in Iraq, then the question of why that would be the case needs to be explained as well. And finally, while the book successfully reflects how and under what conditions the US approached Iraq and the Kurds; it fails to give any agency to the Kurds in their politics of ally-making. Instead, they are depicted as another Cold War card to be played in the hands of superpower state actors.
Despite these shortcomings, it is a well-written book which sheds light on the recent history of Iraq and the Kurds within the context of the Cold War.