Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Iraq, because of the 2003 American invasion, is deep into a political evolution that cannot
but affect the entire Arab world. This is because of Iraq's vast oil reserves (the second in
the world behind Saudi Arabia); its large population of over 31 million; its geographical
position at the juncture of the Sunni and Shiite worlds; its equidistance between Iran, Syria,
and Saudi Arabia; and its historical and political significance as the former capital of the
Abbasid Dynasty. Furthermore, Iraq is bedeviled by three legacies: almost half a century
of brutal military dictatorship under various rulers, culminating in Saddam, that warped its
political culture; a grim and violent history, ancient and modern, that extends far beyond the
recent decades of dictatorship, and which has encouraged a harsh and suspicious national
character (however essentialist this may sound); and severe ethnic and sectarian divisions.
Iraq has never been left alone. Once again, Freya Stark: “While Egypt lies parallel and
peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-
of history's bloodiest migration routes, pitting man against man and breeding pessimism as
a consequence. Whether Iraq was being attacked from the Syrian desert in the west or the
plateau of Elam in Iran to the east, it was a constant victim of occupation. From as early
as the third millennium
B.C
., the ancient peoples of the Near East fought over control of
Mesopotamia. Whether it was the Achaemenid Persian kings Darius and Xerxes who ruled
Babylon, or the Mongol hordes that later swept down to overrun the land, or the long-run-
ning Ottoman rule that ended with the First World War, Iraq's has been a tragic history of
occupation.
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Furthering this bloodshed, Mesopotamia has rarely been a demographically cohesive
country. The Tigris and Euphrates, which run through Iraq, have long constituted a frontier
zone where various groups, often the residue of these foreign invasions, clashed and over-
lapped. As the French orientalist Georges Roux painstakingly documents in
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 Baby-
lonians. And this was to say nothing of the many pockets of Persians who lived amid the
annies 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 his-
against group in a densely populated river valley with no protective boundaries, led ulti-
mately 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.
