Understanding Iraq

The first thing a person looking at the civil war in Iraq needs to understand is that it isn't a real country.

 King Faisal of Iraq.  Born in Mecca in 1885, elected to the Ottoman parliament in 1913, practical leader of the Arab Revolt in the field during World War One, King of Syria in 1920 until French interest prevailed, and then King of Iraq.

Iraq is a creation of the British Empire.  That doesn't make it good, or bad, but it isn't a nation state.  A nation state, of course is a country (i.e., "state") where everyone in the country is part of the same nationality.  Not all countries are nation states. The US isn't.  Canada isn't. Australia isn't. But most are.  Germany is, for example, or France, Italy or Spain.

Imperial nations didn't draw borders, usually, based upon nationality, but upon convenience.  And that's how Iraq basically came about.

This is not to say that the region does not have an ancient history.  It certainly does.  It goes back to vast antiquity, and the region has played a part in every major event in the Middle East for all of recorded history.

But modern Iraq came about as a result of World War One.  The British took a region of the fallen Ottoman Empire that fell outside of Syria (which went to France) and outside of Transjordan (now Jordan), and out of that region administered by Saudi Arabia of the Emirs of Kuwait, and made a country out of it, with the capitol of that country being Baghdad. Over it, it placed a Hashamite king, a sort of consolation prize to the Hashamites who came from Mecca, but who lost the Arabian peninsula to the House of Saud, which the British Indian government backed while the British government, operating out of Cairo, backed the Hashamites. The Saudis, who spent most of World War One consolidating their their power, ended up with that instead, while the Hashamites, who were a family that stemmed from Mecca, ended up with what the British would give them, which turned out to be Transjordan and Iraq.  They'd wanted Syria, and briefly had it, but the French took that, based on a historical association with Syria.  The boundaries of the country were mostly unnatural, with perhaps the only natural one being the eastern boundary where the Arab population yielded to the Persian. The Persians and the Arabs generally dislike one another, even though the territory of what is now Iraq had given rise to the Shiite branch of Islam, the branch to which most Iranians adhere, but to which most Arabs do not.

King Faisal on left, dressed in a fashion we do not imagine for him, with his brother, the Emir of Transjordan.  Jordan remains a Hashamite kingdom to this day.

The Hashamite rule of Iraq was not a success, and in no small part this was because the country made little sense.  The north was one of the four countries which the stateless nation of the Kurds fell into. An ancient people with a strong central identity, they wanted no part of any country other than one they hoped to have themselves, a national aspiration opposed by Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Persia.  Shiites, who formed the majority in the Euphrates valley, did not share a religious identity with the Sunnis, who inhabit the desert west, as the two variants of Islam have very deep divides between the two.  The Sunnis inhabited the balance of the country, which just as easily could have been part of Syria, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, with the inhabitants of those regions being no more or less loyal to any of those other regions.  In the north the country also had remaining populations of Assyrians, the founders of Syria who were and are a declining minority everywhere they are found.  An ancient population of Catholic Arabs are also found in the country.

It was British presence in one form or another that kept the country together.  Somewhat independent starting in 1932, the country actually appeared to tilt towards the Axis early in World War Two until the British invaded it.  After the war the monarchy fell to the fascistic Baath party in a coup in 1958.  The British in turn granted Kuwait Independence in 1961, forming a bone of contention with Baathist Iraq.  Kuwait was no more a real nation that Iraq, but it was ethnically homogeneous, making it more stable in any event.

Under the Baath Party regional differences in Iraq were violently suppressed, but as memorialized here as Holscher's Third Law of History, those differences never went away.  Indeed, during Saddam Hussein's reign there were uprising of various groups.  The Kurds never ceased striving for independence.  The "Marsh Arabs", Shiites of the Euphrates valley, also attempted an uprising following our defeat of Iraq in the first Gulf War, when they acted upon the belief, which we did not discourage, that we'd come to their aid against Saddam Hussein.

The lid came off of all of this upon our invasion of Iraq following 9/11. The entire invasion was premised on the thesis that Iraq retained weapons of "mass destruction", a term coined in that era which oddly lumped generally nasty but ineffectual chemical weapons with truly horrific nuclear weapons, but the government was slow to disassociate Iraq with the Al Queda attack on the US, which Iraq was not responsible for..  By WMD, we meant chemical weapons, which Iraq was not to retain after its defeat in the first Guilf War.  It turned out, of course, that they didn't have any, or at least none could be found following our defeat of Iraq in the second Gulf War.  And as an added irony, the Sunni fundamentalist Al Queda regarded Hussein as a Communist, which he was not, and they therefore were opposed to him.

The invasion of Iraq, tremblingly done without an American declaration of war, left us in control of the country just as the internecine feuds were flamed by foreign Jihadist who entered the country to fight the US.  Often confused as one long war, the second Gulf War was actually two wars, a conventional war which we won against the Baathist regime, and a second one against irregular Islamic Jihadist. We won that one too, and then left the country a fragile, Shiite dominated, democracy.  That democracy did not want us there, and now it faces a rebellion it is ill prepared to put down.

Now a civil war has erupted, with the Sunni minority threatening to defeat the government of the Shiite majority.  It has every promise of turning into a true bloodbath as ancient rivalries and fears revive.  Its difficult at best to see how any democratic government can rule the country, and like King Faisal II, the best observation may be that "nobody can govern this country".  But do we dare ignore it?  The Sunni rebellion has close connections to a fanatic Sunni militia fighting in Syria for the recreation of a Sunni Caliphate, a sort of Islamic law empire.  It will not succeed in that goal, but that it's willing to struggle for it is something we cannot ignore.  Nor can we ignore that the present Iraqi government is not unfriendly to Iran, which as its own goals that do not squire with ours.

At the end of the day, we have to wonder if the best solution for Iraq wold be a world were there isn't one.  The country is a legal fiction, and in the north the Kurds are entitled to their own country, a result the Turks, Syrians and Iranians would not like.  In the west, the population would make as much sense being part of Syria, Jordan or Saudi Arabia, if we felt comfortable with that result, which we have good reason not to be.  In the east, the country would likely remain, but how viable it would be is questionable.  And how much we are willing to invest to achieve that result, and how much we have already invested in the country, is a sobering thought.

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