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Insurgency, State Formation, Counterinsurgency
Historians of the Cold War have produced an important corpus of work investigating how the United States cultivated working relationships with anticommunist but illiberal regimes.1 This historiography suggests an approach to understanding the involvement of John F. Kennedy's administration with the Arab Bath Socialist Party's first regime in Iraq, which lasted from 8 February 1963 until its overthrow by Iraqi army officers on 18 November of the same year. Prior to its seizure of power, the Iraqi branch of the trans-state, Pan-Arab Bath Party was a clandestine organization of primarily young, educated civilians and a much smaller military element. With fewer than 1,000 full members and a narrow base of popular support, the party was able to achieve and maintain power only with the backing of non-Bathist army officers. The Bathists' most important link to the Iraqi army was through a retired Nasirist officer, Abd al-Salam Arif. The Bathists therefore permitted him to serve as president and as nominal head of state. Another former officer, Ahmad Hasan al-Bakr--a Bathist--served as prime minister. Both were members of the secret National Council of the Revolutionary Command, which exercised ultimate authority over the government and was dominated by Bathists. In a war against Kurdish insurgents and a campaign to deracinate the Iraqi Communist Party (ICP), the regime resorted to a level of violence and intrusiveness that was extraordinary by the standards of previous Iraqi governments.2
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.3 The U.S. involvement with the first Iraqi Bathist regime therefore must be reconstructed largely from National Security Council and Department of State records. Even among these, a significant number of documents have been classified or otherwise restricted. Nonetheless, the available archival sources, supplemented by memoirs, Iraqi government publications, and the Iraqi press, make it possible to recover important aspects of the Kennedy administration's policies toward the Bathist regime.
Kennedy administration officials viewed the Iraqi Bath Party as a modernizing--even democratizing--anticommunist movement. They regarded the Bathists' ascent...