17 July Revolution

17 July Revolution
Part of the Arab Cold War
Date 17 July 1968 Location Iraq Result Overthrow of Abdul Rahman Arif Establishment of Baathist government
Belligerents
Iraqi government Arab Socialist Union	Iraqi Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party Iraqi Armed Forces Iraqi Army Iraqi Navy Iraqi Air Force
Commanders and leaders
Abdul Rahman Arif President of Iraq Tahir Yahya Prime Minister of Iraq	Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr Regional Secretary Saddam Hussein Deputy Secretary Ibrahim Al-Daoud Commander of the Presidential Guard Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif Deputy Head of Military Intelligence
Units involved
Presidential Guard	10th Armoured Brigade Jihaz Haneen

Part of a series on
Ba'athism
Organisations Arab Ba'ath 1940–1947 Arab Ba'ath Movement 1940–1947 Ba'ath Party 1947–1966 Ba'ath Party (pro-Iraqi) 1968–2003 Ba'ath Party (pro-Syrian) 1966–present
People Zaki al-Arsuzi Michel Aflaq Salah al-Din al-Bitar Abdullah Rimawi Wahib al-Ghanim Fuad al-Rikabi Salah Jadid Hafez al-Assad Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr Saddam Hussein Bashar al-Assad Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri
Literature On the Way of Resurrection The Battle for One Destiny The Genius of Arabic in Its Tongue
History Ba'athist Iraq Ramadan Revolution November 1963 coup d'état 17 July Revolution Iran–Iraq War Gulf War UN sanctions Iraq War De-Ba'athification Ba'athist Syria Syrian Committee to Help Iraq 1963 / 1966 coup d'états Corrective Revolution Civil War
Regional organisations Algeria pro-Iraq pro-Syria Bahrain pro-Iraq pro-Syria Egypt pro-Iraq pro-Syria Iraq pro-Iraq pro-Syria Jordan pro-Iraq pro-Syria Kuwait pro-Iraq Lebanon pro-Iraq pro-Syria Libya pro-Iraq Mauritania pro-Iraq pro-Syria Palestine pro-Iraq pro-Syria Sudan pro-Iraq pro-Syria Syria pro-Iraq pro-Syria Tunisia pro-Iraq pro-Syria Yemen pro-Iraq pro-Syria
Splinter groups Arab Socialist Revolutionary Ba'ath Party 1960–1962/63 Socialist Lebanon 1965–1970 Arab Revolutionary Workers Party 1966–present Democratic Socialist Arab Ba'ath Party 1970–present Sudanese Ba'ath Party 2002–present
Related topics Arab nationalism Arab socialism Nasserism Pan-Arabism Chavism
Politics portal Socialism portal

The 17 July Revolution was a bloodless coup in Iraq in 1968, led by General Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, which brought the Iraqi Regional Branch of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party to power. Both Saddam Hussein, later President of Iraq, and Salah Omar al-Ali, later a Ba'athist dissident, were major participants in the coup. The Ba'ath Party ruled from the 17 July Revolution until 2003, when it was removed from power by an invasion led by U.S. and British forces. (The 17 July Revolution is not to be confused with the 14 July Revolution, a coup on 14 July 1958, when King Faisal II was overthrown, ending the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq and establishing the Republic of Iraq.)

While the exact circumstances leading up to the coup are shrouded in mystery, it appears that the non-Ba'athists Abd ar-Razzaq an-Naif and Ibrahim Al-Daoud—who were, respectively, in charge of President Abdul Rahman Arif's military intelligence and personal security—initiated the plot, and that Ba'athist conspirators including al-Bakr, Hardan al-Tikriti, and Salih Mahdi Ammash were only asked to participate in order to establish a broader coalition of support for a new government. Many of the plotters were reportedly "fond of President 'Arif"; however, the coup was motivated by rumors that Arif's Nasserist (and former Ba'athist) Prime Minister, Tahir Yahya, who was increasingly dominating Arif's "weak" government due to the political climate engendered by the costly Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, planned to formally usurp all power for himself. After his ouster, Arif was sent on a plane to the United Kingdom, and even Yahya was not executed, because "the new group ... didn't want world opinion to say theirs was just another Iraqi blood bath." However, on 30 July al-Bakr arranged for the exile of both an-Naif and Al-Daoud, and assumed the position of Prime Minister from an-Naif, solidifying the Ba'ath's control over Iraq for the next thirty-five years—as al-Bakr's deputy, Saddam Hussein, "succeeded in consolidating a formidable political regime ... where so many others had failed," including co-opting Yahya's intention to nationalize the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC) with the help of the Soviet Union.^[1]

See also

• 1969 Baghdad hangings
• List of modern conflicts in the Middle East
• Ramadan Revolution

References

External links

• See Memorandum From John W. Foster of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Special Assistant (Rostow): The Iraqi Coup and Memorandum From John W. Foster of the National Security Council Staff to the President's Special Assistant (Rostow): A Clearer Picture of the Iraqi Coup from the United States Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) for early U.S. reactions to the coup.
• For contrasting British and American assessments of the new government, see Saddam Hussain and Memorandum Prepared in the Central Intelligence Agency: Some Notes on Iraqi Politics from the National Security Archive and FRUS.
• Gibson, Bryan R. (April 2013). "U.S. Foreign Policy, Iraq, and the Cold War 1958-1975" (PDF). briefly discusses the completely false claim that the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) supported the coup in a footnote on page 169.