A primer on Iraq’s troubled history

My last post, which I wrote soon after the troubles began in Iraq, noted that the treasure and blood we poured out into the sands of Iraq had not brought stability, peace, and freedom to that land, nor even a reliable source of oil.

Since that post, the situation in Iraq has continued to deteriorate. We may be witnessing the end of Iraq, and the outbreak of a larger conflict. Given those dire possibilities, I think it’s a good time to review how we arrived at this point.

As nations go, Iraq is young. Iraq prior to World War I was not a nation, but three backward provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire sided with Germany during the war, leading Great Britain to invade the region. A major goal was the securing of the oil assets there. By the end of the war, Britain controlled most of Iraq.

With the defeat of the Ottomans and the collapse of their empire, the Middle East was divided up by France and Britain as spoils of war. Britain got Iraq.

Needless to say, the people of the region weren’t happy to trade one imperial power for another, and soon resistance to British rule began. Arab nationalism was strong, and rebellion broke out in 1920. The British responded with force, but were unable to quell the resistance. In 1932, the British set up a monarchy, but still retained military bases and oil rights.

From that time to the rise of Saddam Husain, Iraq lurched from monarchy to military juntas, to the rise of the Baaths, a fascist party modeled on the Nazi party of Germany. Though uneducated, Saddam Husain rose quickly in the Baath party by his willingness to use brutal methods. In 1979 he was appointed president, a position he maintained by destroying his opposition.

He was helped by the ethnic and sectarian differences in the country. Saddam, an Islamic Sunni, favored his own people with positions within the government, even though the majority of Iraqis were Shiites. The split between the two sects of Islam was made centuries ago over the successor to the prophet Muhammad. The Kurds are Sunni, but ethnically different from the Arab Sunni. The Kurds want to join with other Kurds in neighboring Iran and Turkey to form a greater Kurdistan.

The point of this very brief history of Iraq is to point out that Iraq is an artificial nation, cobbled together by the British and held together by force by successive dictators. Prior to our invasion in 2003, Iraq had little or no history of representative government. To think we could simply impose a democracy on such a country with its history and divisions was folly.

The Shiites, freed from Sunni domination and being a majority, elected a Shiite dominated Parliament and a Shiite prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki. Maliki favored his own religious group at the expense of the Sunnis. Now we have a radical Sunni movement in the The Islamic State that threatens to drag us and the region into more war.

Peace seems as far away as ever.