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Ancient Iraq
, since antiquity, north, south, and
center have usually been in pitched battle. Rulers of the first city-states, the
southern Sumerians, fought the central-Mesopotamian Akkadians. They both
fought the north-inhabiting Assyrians. The Assyrians, in turn, fought the
Babylonians. And this was to say nothing of the many pockets of Persians who
lived amid the native Mesopotamians, forming another source of strife.
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Only
the most suffocating of tyrannies could stave off the utter disintegration to which
this frontier region was prone. As the scholar Adeed Dawisha notes, “The
fragility of the social order was [throughout history] structural to the land of
Mesopotamia.”
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And this fragile order, which pitted group against group in a
densely populated river valley with no protective boundaries, led ultimately and
seemingly inexorably to a twentieth-century tyranny straight out of antiquity: a
tyranny which, the moment it was toppled, led to several years of bloodcurdling
anarchy with atrocities that had an ancient aura.
For Iraq is burdened by modern as well as by ancient history. Mesopotamia
was among the most weakly governed parts of the Ottoman Empire; another case
of a vague geographical expression—a loose assemblage of tribes, sects, and
ethnicities further divided by the Turks into the
vilayets
of Kurdish Mosul, Sunni
Baghdad, and Shiite Basra, going from north to south. When the British tried to
“sculpt” a polity between the Tigris and Euphrates following the Turkish
collapse they created a witches’ brew of Kurdish separatism, Shiite tribalism,
and Sunni assertiveness.
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To connect the oil fields of Kurdistan in the north
with a port on the Persian Gulf in the south—as part of a land-and-sea strategy to
defend India—the British brought together ethnic and sectarian forces that would
be difficult to assuage by normal means.
The rise of Arab nationalism following World War II led to further divisions.
Iraqi officers and politicians were pitted against each other: those who saw Iraq’s
problematic identity as best subsumed beneath the rubric of a single Arab nation
stretching from the Maghreb to Mesopotamia, versus those who strove against
heavy odds for a united Iraq that, despite its geographic illogic, would quell its
own sectarian passions. In any case, almost four decades of fractious, unstable,
and feeble democracy since 1921, interspersed with revolts and semi-
authoritarianism in the name of the royal palace, came to an abrupt end on July
14, 1958, when a military coup deposed Iraq’s pro-Western government. King
Faisal II, who had ruled for the past nineteen years, and his family were lined up
against a wall and shot. The prime minister, Nuri al-Said, was shot and buried;
afterward his corpse was disinterred, then burned and mutilated by a mob. This
was not a random act, but one indicative of the wanton and perverse violence
that has often characterized Iraqi political life. In fact, the killing of the entire
Hashemite royal family, like that of the killing of the family of Czar Nicholas II
in Russia in 1918, was a deeply symbolic crime that presaged decades of state-
inflicted murder and torture from which Iraq will take more years to recover. The
line of East Bloc–style tyrannies began with Brigadier Abd al-Karim Qasim and
ended with Saddam Hussein, each dictator more extreme than the next; only thus
could a state of such disparate groups and political forces be held together.
Nevertheless, as Dawisha writes, “Historical recollection is neither linear nor
cumulative.… So while undoubtedly much of Iraq’s history was authoritarian,
there also were rays of democratic hope.”
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As Iraq struggles to avoid slipping
back into either tyranny or anarchy under the burden of primordial loyalties, it is
worth keeping in mind that from 1921 through 1958 it did know a functioning
democracy of sorts. Moreover, geography itself is subject to different
interpretations. With all of Mesopotamia’s proclivity for human division, as
Marshall Hodgson makes us aware, such a state, in fact, is not wholly artificial,
and does have a basis in antiquity. The very panel of cultivation generated by the
Tigris and Euphrates makes for one of the Middle East’s signal demographic and
environmental facts.
Still, any Iraqi democracy that emerges in the second decade of the twenty-
first century is going to be uncertain, corrupt, inefficient, and considerably
unruly, with political assassinations possibly a regular part of life. In short, a
democratic Iraq, despite prodigious petroleum wealth and an American-trained
military, will be a weak state at least in the near term. And its feuding politicians
will reach out for financial and political support to contiguous powers—
principally Iran and Saudi Arabia—and, as a consequence, become to some
extent playthings of them. Iraq could become again a larger version of civil war–
wracked Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s. Because the stakes are so large in Iraq
—those in power will have corrupt access to the incredible oil wealth—the
infighting, as we have seen, will be severe and persistent. A pro-Western outpost
in the heart of the Arab world requires the state to be internally strong. There is
little sign of that yet.
A weakened Mesopotamia would seem to represent an opportunity for another
demographic or natural resource hub of the Arab world to assume prestige and
leadership. But it is difficult to see in what direction that will come. The Saudis
are by nature nervous, hesitant, and vulnerable, because of their own immense
oil wealth coupled with a relatively small population that, nevertheless, is
characterized by hordes of male youth prone to both radicalization and a
yearning for democratization—the same cohort that we have seen spark
revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt. The post-Mubarak era in Egypt, which has the
Arab world’s largest population, will feature governments whose energies,
democratic or not, will be devoted to consolidating control internally, and
attending to the demographic challenges that are associated with the headwaters
of the White and Blue Niles being located in the two Sudans and Ethiopia.
(Ethiopia, with 83 million people, has an even larger population than Egypt,
while both northern and southern Sudan have over 40 million. Struggles over
water use will increasingly burden all these governments in the twenty-first
century.) It is the very weakness of the Arab world that Turkey and Iran, with
their appeals to the larger Muslim
Umma
, will seek to take advantage of.
This weakness is not only expressed by post-invasion Iraq, but by Syria, too.
Syria is another critical geographic pole of the Arab world—both in medieval
and modern times. Indeed, it laid claim to being the Cold War era’s
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