Baathism in practice: agriculture, politics, and political culture in Syria and Iraq

In the wake of Egyptian-Israeli negotiations at Camp David in 1978 and the Baghdad Summit reactions in November of that year to those negotiations, the rulers of Syria and Iraq announced their intention to unite their two countries. While unifying Arab ranks in the face of Sadat's 'sell-out' to the US and Israel was a strong motivation for the Baathists in Syria and Iraq to bury the hatchet in their smoldering feud, there were for both sides additional incentives. Both regimes saw in unification protection against Islamic fundamentalists aroused by events in Iran, while for his part Syrian President Hafiz al Assad deduced that union with Iraq would cover his Eastern flank while Syrian forces were bogged down in Lebanon and dug in along the frontier with Israel. Moreover, with the treasury nearly depleted and the Syrian lira drifting downward as a result of skyrocketing inflation since 1975, Assad seized the opportunity to lay claim to some of the Iraqi oil money. The union with Iraq also paved the way for resumption of Soviet arms shipments to Syria, which had been held in abeyance by the Soviets as long as the Syrians refused to cooperate with Iraq, a country in which the Soviets then enjoyed greater influence. For Iraq, union with Syria held out the possibility of manipulating Syrian internal politics. It also represented the final act in the long-drawn-out drama of Iraq overcoming its isolation in the never-ending Arab Cold War.1 Unification of Syria and Iraq was not indicative of an idea whose time had come. Instead it was the result of converging factors that made it mutually advantageous for both sides temporarily to link their fates. The prospects for long term political or even more limited forms of unification were never promising, for despite being ruled by two branches of what is ostensibly the same Baath Party, Iraq and Syria have fundamentally different political cultures. Their ruling parties are, therefore, far from being as similar as their shared name would suggest. Iraq, cut off from the West by the Great Syrian Desert and from the East by mountains and the Shatt al Arab, remains a much more traditional polity, based as it is on a society that has yet to be fundamentally and completely transformed through contact with the West and indigenous development. In contrast Syria, as a Levantine state, has long been exposed to outside forces, so her citizens tend to be more cosmopolitan, freewheeling, and eager to deal with foreigners in the hope of benefitting from them. As a result the Baath Party in Syria, confronting a more developed society and polity, does not attempt to keep as tight a grip on the political