Iraqi politics and regional policies, 1945–49

Abstract

The changes which took place in the Middle East in the last days of World War II, including the establishment of the Arab League and the crystallization of the Arab world as an international system, made Iraq aware of the need to formulate its regional policy. Iraq's geopolitical location on the fringes of the Arab world, as well as its lax internal structure, provided the basis for its interest in establishing cooperative relations with its stronger non-Arab neighbors, Turkey and Iran. It also strengthened the Iraqi trend toward achieving dominance in Syria and the Fertile Crescent and a status of leadership in the Arab world. An explicit expression of that trend was provided by Iraq's efforts toward domination or takeover of Syria, as well as by Nuri al-Said's initiative, raised during World War II, to establish a Fertile Crescent Federation. Between 1945 and 1949 that is, from the formation of the Arab League to the initiation of the process which was to turn the inter-Arab Middle Eastern arena into one more front of the Cold War between the Communist Bloc and the West Iraq's regional foreign policy swung back and forth between various trends, and exhibited a wealth of internal contradictions. The aim of the present article is to present the main trends of Iraq's regional foreign policy, and to examine their internal political background, during the years 1945-49. The Alexandria Conference in October 1944, and the foundation of the Arab League in January 1945, inaugurated a new stage in the interArab arena. The idea of establishing the Arab League was a component of the plans brought forward in late 1942 and early 1943 by Nuri al-Said, then Prime Minister of Iraq, who planned to exploit the conditions of World War II in order to promote the unification of the Fertile Crescent and to bring Syria into a union or federation with Iraq. Egypt's entrance into the inter-Arab arena made it into a dominant force in the area. Its size, political and cultural importance, and the human resources at its disposal, relative to the poverty, backwardness, and weakness of the other Arab countries, as well as the backing of the powerful British representation in Cairo, all helped Egypt become the strongest member of the Arab League. In this way, the moves initiated by Nuri al-Said in 1942-43, and intended to remove the obstacles preventing the