The History of a Fractured Land

IRAQ IS AN ARTIFICIAL COUNTRY with only a recent national history. Although Reider Visser, a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, insists that a divided Iraq is a historical myth, his own data show that Mesopotamia was only united for sixty-eight years of the more than 1,300-year period of Islamic rule in the Middle East between 600 CE and the creation of Iraq by the British after World War I. Although Visser is correct that periodic uprisings during the long era of Islamic rule were not Kurdish or Arabic nationalist in nature (modern nationalism only became a powerful force in the twentieth century as a response to Western colonialism in non-Western areas that began in the latter half of the nineteenth century), he does admit that, during that extended period, sporadic revolts in Kurdish areas and sectarian Shi'i–Sunni conflict arose. Almost all of Iraq's tribal and ethno-sectarian groups place loyalty to their group above allegiance to the nation. Without an iron-fisted ruler there is little chance that Iraq will remain unified in the long term.

Thus, Iraq is likely to be partitioned (into autonomous regions or independent states) one way or another. It can be partitioned by full-blown civil war or it can be partitioned by a peacefully negotiated settlement. In fact, to some extent, Iraq is already partitioned into autonomous areas, with local forces providing security and governance. This unratified partition is dangerous. It is in the interest of the United States to help facilitate a peacefully negotiated partition, to be ratified by all of Iraq's heterogeneous groups, and then rapidly withdraw its military forces from that land.

The Ottoman Empire and Before

Iraq has only been a country since the victorious British, after World War I, artificially drew lines on a map and combined three disjointed former provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire — Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra — into the new League of Nations–mandated British protectorate of Mesopotamia (the name Iraq evolved later). And as Edwin Black, the author of a history of Iraq, implies, the lack of unity among these provinces preceded even the Ottoman Turks' conquest of Mesopotamia during the Safavid Persian Empire in 1534.

For centuries ahead, Mesopotamia would be a mere grouping of outpost provinces, once again ruled from afar by a foreign people — this time the Ottomans. As before, devoid of national identity or cohesion, Mesopotamian society distilled down to its basic units — the clan and the tribe against everyone and anyone.

The violent conflict between the Sunni and Shi'i versions of Islam — which are based on different views of who should have succeeded Mohammed as head of the faith and which can trace their deep roots back to the religion's youth in the 600s CE — raised its ugly head in Mesopotamia. According to Gareth Stansfield, associate professor of Middle East politics at the University of Exeter, this original schism of Islam into Sunni and Shi'i factions was a defining moment in Iraq's history. Yet he also notes correctly that the modern-day Shi'i–Sunni cleavages are not based on sectarian differences alone; they also derive from Sunni political and economic dominance over the Shi'a during the Ottoman Empire and in every Iraqi government up until the U.S. deposed Saddam Hussein, and from the more religious nature of the Shi'i community compared to that of the Sunnis (today there are no secular Shi'i political parties).

In the early 1500s, Ismail I, the shah of Safavid Persia, demanded that the predominant Sunni sect in that nation convert to Shi'ism. Ismail then forced Sunnis in Mesopotamia — all three regions of which the Persians conquered to safeguard the holiest Shi'i religious shrines in Najaf — into a similar conversion. The Sunni Ottoman Turks frowned on this development and invaded Mesopotamia, displaced the Safavid Persians, and ruled the three Mesopotamian regions from around 1535 until the British took over from the defeated Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Middle Eastern specialist Charles Tripp, who wrote a history of Iraq, concurs with Edwin Black that the Ottoman provinces of what is now Iraq had no national identity before the British created the country not all that long ago (in terms of ethno-sectarian heritage):

It would be fanciful to assume that in the years leading up to the British occupation of Mesopotamia, the future state of Iraq was somehow prefigured in the common experiences of these provinces. In many respects, the central political relationship with the Ottoman state was broadly similar to that of the other Arab provinces. ... From the perspective of the government in Istanbul, the three Mesopotamian provinces were neither treated administratively as a unit, nor accorded any form of collective representation that set them apart from other regions of the empire.

Even Peter Sluglett — a professor of Arab Middle East history at the University of Utah who believes that most of Iraq's current ethno-sectarian tensions are rooted not in long-term grievances, but rather in Saddam's setting the groups against each other and the U.S. occupation exacerbating such recently induced tensions — admits that the Sunni elite argued in the early 1920s "that however faintly Iraq might resemble an independent Arab state, it was at least 'more Arab' in its administration and certainly more of a coherent entity than the three provinces had been under Ottoman rule."

The Ottoman Empire grew very weak centuries before it collapsed after losing the Great War. In fact, the empire was so weak that it relied on local rulers in fragmented Mesopotamia. For example, from 1733 until the early 1800s, local rulers governed the province of Baghdad without interference from Istanbul, the Ottoman capital, and refused to send more than token tribute to the Ottomans. By the early 1800s, the provinces of Mesopotamia, although nominally still under Ottoman rule, were so autonomous that they were subject to a struggle for power raging between the pasha of Baghdad, the Persians, the British, the Indians, and occasionally the fanatical Wahhabi religious armies from Arabia. During the later Ottoman era, the Kurds wanted to be independent. The Shi'a in southern Mesopotamia simply ignored the Sunni Ottoman institutions.

In the 1820s, a new sultan, Mahmud II (Mahmud the Reformer), came to power in the Ottoman Empire. He wanted to bring Western ideas into the decaying empire and also to reconquer the autonomous provinces of Mesopotamia. Daoud Pasha, the ruler of Baghdad, was amassing wealth and power comparable to the sultan's, yet he refused to send taxes and tribute to the sultan, and he failed to defend Karbala (in modern-day southern Iraq) from Wahhabi armies. The sultan demanded a huge tribute from Daoud, and Daoud declined to provide it. In 1831, the sultan's armies took Baghdad and deposed Daoud. Mahmud next turned to Karbala — an independent Shi'i city run by Persians and criminal gangs...