The Modern History of Iraq

Phebe Marr

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429974069
• Edición: 4
• Categoría: Politique et relations internationales
• Categoría: Politique du Moyen-Orient

The Modern History of Iraq is a remarkably readable account of contemporary Iraq, placing in historical perspective the crises and upheavals that continue to afflict the country. This text weaves together several important themes, including the search for a national identity, the struggle to achieve social and economic development, the changes in political dynamics, and the impact of foreign interventions, to provide readers with a holistic understanding of modern Iraq. Revised and updated throughout, the fourth edition features more discussion of cultural identity and media and society. In addition, this edition includes two new chapters on the events and shifts in the country of the early twenty-first century-the US intervention and withdrawal, the stabilization and subsequent unraveling of the Maliki government, the effects of the Arab uprisings, and the rise of ISIS-and their political, economic, and social consequences. Written by noted Iraq scholar Phebe Marr with new co-author Ibrahim al-Marashi, this text is essential reading for readers who seek to understand modern Iraq in the context of historical perspective.

Chapter 1

The Land and People
of Modern Iraq

THE STATE OF IRAQ IS A RELATIVELY NEW, TWENTIETH-CENTURY creation, brought into being by politicians and statesmen, but the area included within its borders is home to several of humankind’s oldest and most creative civilizations. All have shaped Iraq’s current identity. In the past, as today, diversity—of terrain, of resources, and, above all, of people—has been the chief characteristic of the territory and inhabitants that constitute contemporary Iraq. This diversity has been both a strength and a challenge. Harnessing Iraq’s rich resources, whether its fertile river valleys or the black gold under its surface, and absorbing the medley of peoples living in these valleys has been the major preoccupation of Iraq’s leaders, past and present. This is as true in the twenty-first century as in the fourth millennium BCE.

LEGACYOF THE PAST

Iraq has a rich and variegated historical legacy on which to draw in shaping its national identity and its institutions. In fact, three elements of this past have been most important in forming the collective memory and consciousness of contemporary Iraqis and shaping their institutions and practices: the civilization of ancient Mesopotamia, the Arab-Islamic heritage, and the legacy of the Ottoman Empire.

Ancient Mesopotamia

Ancient Mesopotamia’s contributions to humankind’s progress were many and varied, including the development of writing, the wheel, metalworking, literature, and science. Sumerians and their successors wrote poetry, created a mythology, and produced the world’s first epic, the story of Gilgamesh. They built the first cities on the flood plains of the Tigris and Euphrates. Sumerian mathematicians used square roots and quadratic equations and created the first accurate calendars.¹

But knowledge of this ancient civilization and its contributions was scant until the nineteenth century, when Mesopotamia’s remains were unearthed by archaeologists. Until the mid-twentieth century, ancient Mesopotamian civilization was taught in Iraq—if at all—mainly as a distant phenomenon almost unrelated to the modern country. This gradually changed in the second half of the twentieth century, however, when Iraqi artists and poets began to draw on this heritage in paintings and literature, while the government turned its attention to propagating the notion of a Mesopotamian heritage as an integral part of Iraqi tradition. But in the early decades of the modern state, Mesopotamia’s civilization played a very small role.

The Arab-Islamic Civilization

In contrast, the Arab-Islamic conquest of the seventh century has been the decisive event in shaping current Iraqi identity. Arabic eventually became the predominant language of Mesopotamia, while Islam became the religion of almost all the country’s inhabitants. It is mainly to the Islamic conquest of the seventh century that most Iraqis look for the source of their identity and the roots of their culture.

The decisive battle of Qadisiyya in 637 opened the rich territory of Mesopotamia, then under Persian control, to the invading Muslim army. However, the territory was only gradually absorbed and Islamized. Many early Islamic political struggles were fought in Iraq. Husain, the Prophet’s grandson, was killed near Karbala in 680, giving Shi‘i Islam a martyr. Iraq acquired a reputation that it retains today of a country difficult to govern.

This changed for a time, beginning in 750 with the establishment of the Abbasid Caliphate, one of the great periods in Islamic history. Iraq came into its own as the center of a prosperous and expanding empire and an increasingly brilliant civilization that drew on the traditions of its immediate predecessors, the Greeks and Persians, in forming the emerging Arab-Islamic culture. The river valleys were now given the centralized control they needed; irrigation channels were extended, and agriculture flourished. So, too, did trade and urban life. By the tenth century, Baghdad, founded by the caliph Mansur in 762 as his capital, had a population estimated at 1.5 million and a luxury trade reaching from the Baltic Sea to China.² Baghdad also had a vigorous scientific and intellectual life, with centers for translations of Greek works and scientific experiments.

This period is remembered today with pride, but it did not last. By the middle of the ninth century, decline had set in that would last for almost a millennium. The empire gradually broke up. There were incursions from nomadic groups. A succession of dynasties governed parts of Iraqi territory with increasing indifference. The once great irrigation system deteriorated, and economic hardship followed. The Mongol attack on Baghdad in 1258 by Hulagu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, and another, even more devastating attack by Timur the Lame in 1401, delivered the final blows. Baghdad never recuperated.

This decline and its heritage of poverty, backwardness, and intellectual stagnation are the central facts of Iraq’s modern history. Although the Abbasid Empire is remembered as part of a glorious past, it is the centuries of stagnation that followed that shaped the environment and character of the early period of the Iraqi state.

The Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire governed Iraq for four centuries. In patterns of government, in law, and in the outlook and values of the urban classes, the Ottomans played a role in shaping modern Iraq second only to that of the Arab Islamic conquest.

The Ottoman conquest of Iraq began in 1514 as an outgrowth of a religious war between the Sunni Ottoman sultan and the Shi‘i Safavid (Turco-Persian) shah. As the wars continued, the territory making up most of contemporary Iraq came under permanent Ottoman rule. When it first conquered Iraq, the Ottoman Empire was at the peak of its power and was able to give Iraq stable government and a uniform administration. Even though the Ottoman establishment was Sunni, it tolerated the Shi‘a—at first. Unfortunately, the Ottoman-Persian conflict, which continued off and on until 1818, created in the Ottomans’ minds a suspicion and fear of Iraqi Shi‘a as prone to side with the Persians. Soon the Ottomans came to rely on the only element in the region they believed would support them—the urban Sunnis. During these long wars, the seeds of Sunni dominance in government were sown.

As the Sunnis tightened their grip on the reins of power, the Shi‘a became alienated and strengthened their ties to Persia, especially in the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala. By the end of the nineteenth century, Persian influence in the holy cities and in much of southern Iraq was strong.³

A more important reason for Ottoman failure in Iraq was the weakness of the empire’s own central government and its deteriorating control over its provinces. As the seventeenth century began, direct administration in the river valleys ceased, and Iraq faced another long period of stagnation and neglect. In the north, new Kurdish dynasties were established in the mountains and valleys. In the center and south, there were great tribal migrations from the Arabian Peninsula that reinforced tribalism.

The long cycle of decline finally halted with the rise of the Mamluks in the eighteenth century. Although alien in tongue and stock, these Ottoman “slave” administrators established dynastic rule in the Iraqi provinces, gradually extending their control from Basra to the Kurdish foothills, giving the Tigris and Euphrates valleys some stability, a modest economic and cultural revival, and some administrative cohesion. By the end of Mamluk rule in 1831, the outlines of the modern Iraqi state had begun to take shape. This trend was continued during the nineteenth century when the Iraqi provinces were gradually reincorporated into the Ottoman Empire. In the south, the Shi‘i cities of Karbala and Najaf were brought under the authority of the Baghdad government. In the Kurdish countryside, the local dynasties were broken up one by one and made to accept Turkish rule. Even more important were the reforms brought into Iraq by Ottoman administrators. The most outstanding reformer was Midhat Pasha, appointed to the governorship of Baghdad in 1869. His short tenure (1869–1872) marks the first concerted effort to build for the future.

Midhat’s reforms fell into three general areas: administrative reorganization, settlement of the tribes, and establishment of secular education. First, Midhat introduced a new, centralized administrative system into the Iraqi provinces and extended it into the countryside, thus establishing the administrative framework of contemporary Iraq. Second, Midhat attempted to provide a regular system of land tenure with legally confirmed rights of ownership. Although urban speculators and merchants frequently bought up land at the expense of the peasants, the policy did enjoy some success. About one-fifth of the cultivable land of Iraq was given to those possessing new deeds of ownership.

Third, and most importantly, Midhat laid the groundwork for a secular education system in Iraq by founding a technical school, a middle-level school, and two secondary schools, one for the military and one for the civil service. Midhat’s new schools brought striking innovations in two directions. They were public and free and hence offered a channel of mobility to children of all classes. They introduced a variety of new subjects, such as Western languages, math, and science, hitherto unavailable in religious schools. The three-year Law College was founded in 1908, providing the only higher education in the country. These schools represented the first and most important foothold of modernization in the country.

These reforms helped create an economic revival. The telegraph and the steamship were introduced, and so was cash cropping. There was a striking change in the balance between the nomadic and settled populace. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the nomadic population declined from 35 to 17 percent while the settled rural population grew from 40 to 60 percent.⁴ Contacts with the outside world also produced a revival of local learning and letters as well as new ideas, which were spread among the literate public by the development of a press. These intellectual and educational developments produced a new urban, literate class, a native Iraqi elite. Most members of this elite were the products of the secular schools established in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the higher schooling in Istanbul, now available to Iraqis. Many went through the military academies, which were the chief vehicles of mobility for Iraq’s lower-middle- and middle-class families.

By 1914, graduates of these schools were already staffing posts in the administration, army, new secular courts, and government schools. Although tiny in number, this group was immense in its influence. From its ranks came almost every Iraqi leader of any significance in the post–World War I period, and a number continued to dominate Iraqi politics until the revolution of 1958.

Nevertheless, the successes of the Ottoman reformers should not disguise the weaknesses of the Ottoman legacy. The Ottomans were foreign, and their reforms were aimed at recasting the population into an Ottoman mold. A native elite was being trained, but it was trained in an Ottoman pattern, that of authoritarian paternalism, in which the elite knew best how to govern and need not consult the governed.

Moreover, this native elite was drawn from only one segment of the population, the urban Sunnis. It was primarily the Sunnis, whether Arab or Kurd, who attended public schools and were given posts in the army and the bureaucracy. Not surprisingly, the Sunnis came to think of themselves as the country’s natural elite and its only trustworthy leaders. Two important segments of the population, the rural tribal groups outside the reach of urban advantages and the Shi‘a, were consequently excluded from participation in government. Little wonder that they should form the nucleus of opposition to the government in the early decades of the twentieth century.

THE LAND

The state of Iraq has existed only since 1920, when three former provinces of the Ottoman Empire were combined under British aegis as a mandate.⁵ With a land area of 167,618 square miles (434,128 square kilometers) and a population of 36 million in 2016, Iraq is the largest of the Fertile Crescent countries rimming the northern edge of the Arabian Peninsula.⁶ Lying between the plateau of northern Arabia and the mountain ridge of southwest Iran and eastern Turkey, Iraq forms a lowland corridor between Syria and the Persian/Arabian Gulf.⁷ From its earliest history, Iraq has been a passageway between East and West. Its borders are for the most part arbitrarily imposed, reflecting the interests of the Great Powers during the First World War rather than the wishes of the local population.⁸ As a result, Iraq’s present borders have been continually challenged by peoples living inside and outside the country. The southern section of the border with Iran, a contributory cause of the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, has not been finally settled, and a new, UN-demarcated border with Kuwait, agreed to by Iraq in 1993 under pressure, is still contentious.

The southeastern portion of the country lies at the head of the Gulf. Iraq controls a thirty-six-mile (58-kilometer) strip of Gulf territory barely sufficient to provide it with an outlet to the sea. From the Gulf, Iraq’s border with Iran follows the Shatt al-Arab north, then skirts the Persian foothills as far north as the valley of the Diyala River, the first major tributary of the Tigris north of Baghdad. From here the border thrusts deep into the high Kurdish mountain ranges, following the Diyala River valley. Near Halabja it turns northward along the high mountain watersheds—incorporating within Iraq most of the headwaters of the major Tigris tributaries—until it reaches the Turkish border west of Lake Urmiyya. The mountainous boundary with Turkey ends at the Syrian border just west of Zakhu, Iraq’s northernmost town. This northeastern region includes difficult and unmanageable mountain terrain and a substantial Kurdish population. The loss of control by the central government over substantial portions of this region in the 1990s made Iraq’s northern borders with Turkey and Iran porous.

In the northwest, the frontier separating Iraq from Syria meanders south across the Syrian desert from the Turkish border until it reaches the Euphrates near Qa‘im. Here the borders make little pretense of following geography, jutting out into the adjacent desert and incorporating large areas of steppe. At the Euphrates, the border turns west until it reaches Jordan, also a former British mandate, and then south a short distance to the Saudi frontier. Much of this border was temporarily erased by incursions of the so-called Islamic State in 2014. From this point the border follows a line of water wells separating Iraq from Saudi Arabia until it reaches the Kuwaiti border at Wadi al-Batin, at which point it turns north again, forming a common frontier with Kuwait, until it reaches Umm Qasr on the Khaur Abd Allah channel leading to the Gulf.

The terrain included within these boundaries is remarkably diverse, making Iraq a country of extreme contrasts. The Shatt al-Arab is a broad waterway with villages on its banks, lined with date groves. To the north of the Shatt lies swampland, traditionally inhabited along the Tigris by marsh dwellers living in reed houses built on stilts and raising water buffalo and along the Euphrates by rice-growing villagers. This natural wetland area, with high reeds and hidden waterways, has often functioned as a refuge for dissidents. A massive drainage system, constructed by the c...