Three years ago, the United States undertook an invasion – a war of choice, not necessity – of Iraq, a country about which most Americans, and most American policymakers, knew very little. Saddam Hussein had been properly demonized by officials and most of the U.S. media, of course, but even if he had possessed the fabled weapons of mass destruction, he still posed no real threat to the United States or to his neighbors. And, of course, the monstrous caches of WMD, like the links to al-Qaeda, turned out to exist only in the fevered imaginations of domestic neoconservatives and other war-whoopers.
Now that U.S. troops are in the country, we are subject to what Colin Powell called the Pottery Barn rule – if you break it, you own it. It is hardly my preference – and hardly inevitable despite what most conventional thinkers might believe – but it looks as if the United States is going to be in Iraq for a good long time, or more likely a bad long time. So I’ve been reading as much about that artificial country as I can for the last several years.
Understanding Iraq, which surveys the history of the region from the earliest days of human settlement to the present, is the best short introduction I have found to Iraq and the challenges the United States is likely to continue to face as it tries to bring something resembling democratic governance to a country that has never, in thousands of years, known anything like democracy. William Polk, who has spent extended periods of time in Iraq since 1947, has taught at Harvard and done policy planning for the State Department. In 1965, he founded the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Chicago, and he is widely regarded as one of the foremost scholars on the region.
Concise Yet Sweeping
In a concise yet sweeping historical overview, he takes us from early hunter-gatherers through the Sumerian, Babylonian, Assyrian, Akkadian, Persian, Alexandrian, Parthian, Muslim, Genghis Khan, Ottoman, British, revolutionary-Ba’athist, and American dominations. While Iraqis may not know their history very accurately, Polk maintains, they literally live on its remnants and are formed by it.
What is now Iraq was part of Mesopotamia, the “fertile crescent” formed by the Tigris and Euphrates rivers that became what historians call the “cradle of civilization,” where archeological evidence suggests agriculture and later cities first emerged. The region’s history inculcated certain attitudes that have persisted no matter who wielded political power.
The Sumerian word “lugal” meant “big man,” and “the cult of the ‘great man,’ once firmly fixed, has endured in the minds of Iraqis ever since.” Legal codes first emerged in Babylon (Hammurabi’s is the most famous, but it wasn’t the first or the only one) and Iraqis have always embraced rigid codes of conduct. Saddam Hussein – or Husain , as Polk prefers to spell it and which he explains in a foreword – invoked ancient rulers constantly to reinforce his power and demonstrate his reverence for the concept of the “great man.”
This doesn’t suggest fertile soil for democracy or a deeply rooted desire for freedom. Indeed, many Iraqis today, though they don’t yearn for Saddam himself, compare the stability of his rule favorably with the chaos of U.S. occupation.
British Iraq
Polk’s discussion of British rule, directly from 1918 to 1933 and indirectly until 1958, is most relevant to the current situation. The British invasion in 1914 was based on bad intelligence and little knowledge of the region. Sound familiar?
The British expected the Iraqis to be grateful for their good administration, but “[t]he Iraqis did not want Britain to run their country,” and a vast insurrection emerged against the 133,000 British troops (number sound familiar?). The anti-guerrilla campaign eventually cost six times as much as the entire World War I campaign in the Middle East. When the ground war became a stalemate, the British used air power, as the United States is doing now. Its effectiveness was limited.
The revolt that eventually (inevitably?) emerged in 1920 horrified the British government:
“This was no tribal revolt. It was a national war of independence. Tribesmen did much of the fighting, no doubt, but they were led by respected men of religion, both Sunni and Shias, doctors, teachers, merchants, journalists, and even those ‘tame’ Iraqis who were being trained to be government officials.”
Interestingly, T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia”), who had actually spent time in the Middle East, understood the problems better than most of those deputed to solve them. In August 1920, he wrote a letter to the London Sunday Times:
“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. … We are, today, not far from a disaster.”
Lawrence compared British rule unfavorably with the despotic Ottoman regime:
“Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied and killed an average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armored cars, gunboats, and armored trains. We killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely populated.”
He also noted the unsustainable costs of the occupation.
Foreign Rule
The British replaced their first governor with a second one. Sound familiar? Then they decided to create a quasi-independent state under mandate from the League of Nations – and couldn’t understand why many Iraqis distrusted their intentions:
“As a sort of fig leaf to cover the nakedness of whatever Iraq was to be, the new civil commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, decided to set up a handpicked, provisional ‘Council of State.’ In a move that again was to presage American actions eighty-four years later, he appointed the Iraqi members.”
The British decided to work through the Sunnis, as had the Turks, without thinking much about the consequences, rejecting offers from Shia clergy to negotiate a settlement:
“Cumulatively, his [Cox’s] early moves would alienate the Shia community both from the British government and, subsequently, from the Iraqi government. The trend it set in motion has had profound implications down to our times.”
Looking for a leader, the British chose Faisal, from Mecca, whom the French had deposed as king of Syria, and who was little known in Iraq:
“So just as the Americans in 2003 focused first on Ahmed Chalabi and then on Iyad al-Allawi, neither of whom had been in Iraq for decades, the British imported Faisal.”
Then the British decided to have the Iraqis write a constitution. Sonorous phrases were borrowed from as far away as New Zealand, but when serious revolt emerged in the 1930s, it proved to be a scrap of paper. In practice, the British controlled who ruled by having indirect elections:
“One of the reasons that Iraqis reacted so sharply against the American-controlled Iraq Provisional Authority of 2004 was that in it they – but not the American authorities who were ignorant of Iraqi history – heard an echo of this early British system.”
On to the Americans
Polk takes us through the Saddam era to the U.S. invasion, the cluelessness of the first U.S. administrator in Iraq, Gen. Jay Garner, and the arrogance of proconsul L. Paul Bremer. Polk says that “staying the course” in Iraq is a slogan, not a policy, but one that could cost several thousand more American and tens of thousands of Iraqi lives, while “the society that survives will be wounded, distorted, and far less than now likely to achieve a reasonably free and peaceful future.”
How might the United States leave? Polk discusses an Iraqi version of “Vietnamization” – training Iraqis to handle things – that is proving even more difficult than it was in Vietnam: “The best America might gain, if the process could be drawn out for several years, is a fig leaf to hide defeat.” So what might be less harmful?
“The better form of ‘getting out,’ the second variety, involves choosing rather than being forced. Time is a wasting asset; the longer the choice is put off, the harder it will be to make. The steps required to implement this policy need not be dramatic, but the process needs to be affirmed.”
Polk does note something I have not read elsewhere. “Still undeveloped,” he writes, “is a vast sea of oil believed to be under what has recently been nicknamed ‘the Sunni triangle’ around Baghdad.” Making a deal with the Sunnis to develop that field, so that Sunnis, Shia, and Kurds will all have independent oil revenues, might be the most constructive thing the United States could do.
Whatever you think about the Iraq war, this small, readable book will help you better understand what’s at stake.
