Ba'athist Iraq

Ba'athist Iraq, officially the Iraqi Republic (1968–1992) and later the Republic of Iraq (1992–2003), was the Iraqi state between 1968 and 2003 under the rule of the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party. This period began with high economic growth, but ended with the country facing severe levels of socio-political isolation and economic stagnation. By the late 1990s, the average annual income had decreased drastically due to a combination of external and internal factors. UNSC sanctions against Iraq, in particular, were widely criticized for negatively impacting the country's quality of life, prompting the establishment of the Oil-for-Food Programme. The Ba'athist period formally came to an end with the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and the Ba'ath Party has since been indefinitely banned across the country.

Led by Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr, the Ba'ath Party came to power in Iraq through the bloodless 17 July 1968 Revolution, which overthrew Iraqi president Abdul Rahman Arif and Iraqi prime minister Tahir Yahya. The Ba'athists had previously assumed power for a brief period after the 8 February 1963 Revolution, but were forced into exile by Nasserists within their ranks following the November 1963 coup d'état. By the mid-1970s, Saddam Hussein, through his post as chief of the party's intelligence services, became the country's de facto leader, despite al-Bakr's de jure presidency. Under Saddam's new policies, both the Iraqi economy and citizens' standard of living grew, and Iraq's standing within the Arab world increased significantly. As land reforms were introduced, the country's wealth was distributed on a more equal basis. However, several internal factors were imminently threatening Iraq's stability; the Ba'athist government, which was secular, Arab nationalist, and dominated by Sunni Muslims, was drawn into an escalating conflict with the religious separatism among Shia Muslims in the south and the ethnic separatism among Kurds in the north. The then-ongoing Second Iraqi–Kurdish War, in particular, was increasingly becoming a cause of great concern for the government, in light of the fact that Kurdish rebels were enjoying extensive support from Iran, Israel, and the United States. After the Iraqis suffered a major defeat to the Iranians in the 1974–1975 Shatt al-Arab clashes, Saddam met with Iranian monarch Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and, with the ratification of the 1975 Algiers Agreement, ceded parts of Iraqi territory in exchange for Iran's termination of support for the Kurds. With the Kurdish rebellion subsequently disadvantaged, the Iraqi military was able to successfully reassert the federal government's control over Iraqi Kurdistan.

In 1979, al-Bakr resigned from the presidency, citing health reasons, though it has been alleged that Saddam coerced him into stepping down. Nonetheless, al-Bakr was succeeded by Saddam, who became the fifth Iraqi president—a position he would hold for the next two and a half decades. Saddam's seizure of power occurred during a wave of Shia-led anti-government protests, which were violently suppressed by the Ba'ath Party. Alarmed by the Iranian Revolution, which had overthrown the Pahlavi dynasty and established a theocratic Shia republic, Saddam adopted an aggressive foreign policy stance towards Iran's new theocratic leader Ruhollah Khomeini, who had begun calling for the establishment of a similar Shia theocracy in Saddam's secular Iraq; there were fears among the Iraqi leadership that the Iranians would leverage the religious zeal among Iraq's Shia-majority population in order to destabilize the country. Rapidly deteriorating relations culminated in the Iraqi invasion of Iran in September 1980, triggering the eight-year-long Iran–Iraq War. Saddam and his government had miscalculated the effects of the Iranian Revolution, and had gone through with the invasion under the impression that Iran had been militarily weakened by ongoing internal post-revolutionary chaos. For the duration of the conflict, the state of the Iraqi economy deteriorated and Iraq became dependent on foreign loans (primarily from other Arab countries) to fund the war effort. The Iran–Iraq War ended in a stalemate in 1988, when both sides accepted UNSC Resolution 598 after suffering over a million casualties combined.

Claiming a decisive victory over the Iranians, Iraq emerged from the conflict under a steep economic depression while owing millions of dollars to foreign countries. Kuwait, which had loaned money to Iraq during the conflict, began demanding repayment, although Iraq was not in a position to do so. The Kuwaiti government subsequently increased the country's oil output, greatly reducing international oil prices and further weakening the Iraqi economy, while continuing to exert pressure on the Iraqi leadership for repayment of the loans. Iraq, on the other hand, demanded that the Kuwaitis reduce their oil output, as did OPEC. In 1989, Iraq accused Kuwait of slant drilling across the Iraq–Kuwait border in order to steal Iraqi petroleum, and demanded compensation. Failed bilateral negotiations resulted in the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, triggering the Gulf War. Iraq continued to occupy Kuwait until February 1991, when a 42-country UNSC military coalition embarked on an extensive campaign to force all Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, pursuant to UNSC Resolution 678. In an attempt to weaken Saddam and the Ba'ath Party after the conflict, the international community sanctioned Iraq, cutting it off from all global markets. Consequently, the Iraqi economy worsened for the remainder of the 1990s, but began to gradually rebound by the early 2000s, primarily due to the fact that many countries had started to ignore sanctions enforcement. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, the United States' Bush administration began building a case for invading Iraq and overthrowing Saddam's regime. Their rationale asserted that Iraq still possessed weapons of mass destruction and that Saddam had friendly links with al-Qaeda, both of which were found to be false claims during and after the Iraq War. In December 2003, nine months after the invasion, American troops captured Saddam near Tikrit and turned him over to Iraq's new Shia-led government. After almost two years in custody, Saddam's trial for crimes against humanity began in 2005. In December 2006, after sentencing him to death, the Iraqi tribunal executed Saddam for crimes against humanity with regard to the 1982 Dujail massacre, in which 142 Shia Muslims were killed by the Iraqi government in response to an assassination attempt against Saddam by the Iranian-backed Islamic Dawa Party.