Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
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 geograph-
ical 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
a port on the Persian Gulf in the south—as part of a land-and-sea strategy to defend In-
dia—the British brought together ethnic and sectarian forces that would be difficult to as-
suage by normal means.
The rise of Arab nationalism following World War II led to further divisions. Iraqi of-
ficers 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, al-
most 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 re-
cover. 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 cumulat-
ive.… So while undoubtedly much of Iraq's history was authoritarian, there also were rays
archy 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 divi-
sion, 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.
