On the face of it, the Soviet Union has signed a 15-year treaty of peace, friendship and cooperation with Iraq as part of its rather vague concept of collective security in Asia. But this cannot be the whole story. It is more likely that Moscow has decided to spread its bets in the Arab world so that it is not unduly dependent on Egypt for its influence, in the process it has once again placed itself in a position where it can hope to turn the traditional rivalry between Cairo and Baghdad to its advantage.
Broadly, three main factors seem to have persuaded the Kremlin to establish specially close relations with Iraq despite the near isolation of the present regime from other Arab countries.
The Soviet Union is deeply interested in securing a share in the exploitation of oil resources in the Arab world, partly to weaken the hold of western companies and partly to ensure supplies for itself in view of the anticipated gap between domestic production and consumption in coming years. According to some western estimates, this gap may be as large as 100 million tons by 1980.
Even if this does not turn out to be the case, the Soviet Union has good reasons to take a hand in the development of West Asian oil resources. Most of its new discoveries of oil have been made in Siberia. Since it will be highly uneconomical to transport supplies from there to the main centres of consumption in the Russian republic by the land route, it will be much more profitable for it to sell the Siberian output to Japan and meet its own additional requirements through imports from West Asia.
Significant
It is significant that the Soviet Union has agreed to help not only Iraq but also Libya and Iran. Despite Col. Gaddafy’s fulminations against “atheistic” communism and his role in the suppression of the pro-communist coup in Sudan, Moscow came to his rescue when he faced a western boycott in the wake of his takeover of the British Petroleum Company. Similarly, the Kremlin has been more than willing to co-operate in the economic field with the Shah of Iran in spite of his generally pro-western orientation, his ambitions in the Persian Gulf and his feud with Iraq.
It is no secret that the Soviet Union is highly suspicious of President Sadat. Since it does not quite know how far he will go in undermining Soviet presence in Egypt and other Arab countries if he is able to survive and achieve a modus vivendi with Israel, it finds it necessary to cultivate other countries.
The distrust between the two dates back to the “liberalisation” measures which President Sadat decreed soon after assuming power in 1970. It was seriously accentuated last year when he released members of the fanatically fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood, reached an agreement on a union with anti-communist Libya and Syria, which had also experienced a relative swing to the right, and eliminated all prominent pro-Soviet elements from the government, the security agencies and the Arab Socialist Union, the country’s only political organisation. On top of it, he played a leading role in helping President Numeiry stage a come-back and crush the pro-communist coup.
Finally, the Soviet Union seems to have concluded that it will be risky for it to depend primarily on the Arab-Israeli conflict for its influence in the Arab world and more rewarding to concentrate its efforts on countries like Iraq and Yemen which are not directly involved in the dispute with Tel Aviv.
Staggering
Otherwise, it would not have turned down President Sadat’s desperate appeals for sophisticated equipment, specially surface-to-surface missiles or insisted on resumption of direct talks with Israel under the auspices of the special UN representative, Dr. Gunnar Jarring. Again, it would not have revealed for the first time that its military supplies to Egypt have reached the staggering figure of $ five billion and said in so many words that the Egyptian armed forces are far from ready to take on Israel in another all-out war.
The Kremlin has indeed gone so far as to drop hints that it is not totally averse to the idea of improving its relations with Tel Aviv. It is difficult to say whether or not secret talks have taken place between Mrs. Golda Meir and some Soviet representative. Both sides have denied reports to this effect. But the Soviet Union is allowing many more Jews to migrate to Israel than ever in the past. It has also permitted two journalists to visit that country in the past one year. An article by one of them contains so many references to forces of peace and friendship in Israel that it could not possibly have been published in so well known a Soviet journal as New Times unless the intention was to let the Arabs, specially the Egyptians, know that Moscow, too, has another string to its bow.
Some of the factors which could have persuaded the Soviet Union to play down the importance of the Arab-Israeli conflict are well known. For instance, Cairo cannot win in a war with Tel Aviv. Israel’s superiority is so decisive that it is naive for Mr. Heykal, editor of Al Ahram, even to suggest that Egypt can liberate 100 square kilometers across the Suez in Sinai and hold it. In the event of fresh hostilities Moscow cannot intervene directly on its side because of the risk this would involve of an armed confrontation with the United States.
This is not all. The Soviet Union can now afford to pursue a more even-handed and cautious policy. Having more or less achieved its twin objectives of weakening western influence in West Asia and extending its own, it is really not necessary for it either to take undue risks by way of direct clash with the United States or to go on pouring more and more highly sophisticated weapons into Egypt without thought of payment. All that it has to do is to protect its present gains in the shape of certain facilities in Egypt and Syria and to get into the profitable oil business. In other words, it has no great interest in rocking the status quo. Its gradual modification as a result of the forces at work – even conservative regimes have asked for a share in the profits of the oil companies – can serve its purpose fairly well.
After all it was not till 1966 that the Soviet Union came to believe that it could use the Arab-Israeli conflict to its advantage. Though since the mid-fifties it had pursued a policy favouring the Arabs, it had not favoured an intensification of their dispute with Israel. On the contrary, it had consistently taken the view that this would distract their attention from the more important struggle against the West. Three developments in 1965 and 1966 led it to revise its stand on this issue.
It was only in 1965 that President Nasser ended his persecution of Egyptian communists and allowed them to join the Arab Socialist Union in their individual capacity. Left-wing Baathists seized power in Syria in February 1966 and the new government, which included several communists, adopted a most bellicose line on the question of Israel, both in terms of propaganda and encouragement and support to Palestinian guerillas.
Opening
Moscow could not obviously let down the new Syrian regime because it offered the former a kind of opening in the Arab world, which it had been looking for with great keenness. Unlike in 1958 when the Syrian Baathists agreed to the merger of their country with Egypt to avoid the risk of a communist take-over, the Kremlin could in the new context afford to bring Cairo and Damascus close to each other on the basis of an anti-Israel programme. That is precisely why it persuaded them to sign a defence pact.
The situation is altogether different now. The communists no longer occupy important positions in Damascus. Pro-Soviet elements have been purged in Cairo. Above all, the outcome of the six-day war in June 1967 convinced the Soviet leaders that they had made a big blunder in abandoning their previous policy and in trying to use the Arab-Israeli conflict for their own ends.
They could not say so publicly and they could not fail to attend to the immediate task of re-establishing their credibility which had been greatly reduced as a result of their refusal to become directly involved in the 1967 war. They had to rearm Egypt and Syria, specially the former which had suffered enormous losses in terms of military hardware as well as territory. Having done so, they think they can afford to return to the pre-1966 policy.
The Times of India, 12 April 1972