It Was Never a Country

Before World War I, the “Sick Man of Europe” – the Turkish-based Ottoman Empire – accepted a military aid/training package from Germany. Big mistake. When the war rolled around, the Ottomans were clearly on the wrong side; what little was left in their true holdings was being divided up, even before the war came to an end. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, on May 16, 1916, the Sykes-Picot accord was entered into, a “secret convention made during World War I between Great Britain and France, with the assent of imperial Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French- and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Syke s of Britain and François Georges-Picot [above] of France.” Modern day Iraq was carved up in that agreement between French and British interests – the French got the areas around Mosul, British got control of Baghdad and Basra.

After the war, on “11 November 1920 it became a League of Nations mandate under British control with the name ‘State of Iraq’… Britain imposed a Hāshimite monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of Iraq without taking into account the politics of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds and the Assyrians to the north. During the British occupation, the Shi'ites and Kurds fought for independence.” Wikipedia. The “State of Iraq” was no more of a single nation that we would have been by joining Mexico, Central America and the present-day United States into one country. It didn’t work then, and it most certainly doesn’t work now.

A brutal dictatorship – under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni minority control – repressed all dissent; the Sunnis didn’t even know they were just a minority until the United States toppled that regime in 2003. The Shiite claims that the Qur’an is a mystical book capable of interpretation only by the highest of religious scholars has long driven an angry and impassioned wedge between them and Sunnis who believe that the Qur’an is the literal word of Allah that must be read directly by all faithful Muslims. Shiites claim a majority stake in Iraq and Iran, but they only represent 15% of global Muslims; most of the rest are Sunni. The Kurds Assyrians in the north of Iraq are separated from the Sunnis and Shiites in the south more for ethnic and cultural reasons than by faith (there are many religions among the these northerners, including Islam).

The “why can’t we all get along” constitutional system of government imposed by the United States after its 2003 conquest essentially assumed that the majority Shiites could participate fairly in a government with Kurds and Sunnis, two factions who lived in mortal terror at the thought of Shiite dominance. Indeed, Iraq has never eschewed the sectarian violence that was punctuated with Shiite “death squads” and Sunni suicide bombs as well as battles over oil rights.

In the north – in the Kurdish region 300 miles north of Baghdad, the locals are claiming the oil drilling rights and selling oil exploration/extraction rights to foreign oil companies over the central government’s strong objections. “In Baghdad, central government officials reacted with rage to the news that DNO [a Norwegian oil company] was drilling. These officials considered the Kurds' sale of Iraqi oil rights to be illegal and warned that it threatened to polarize further a country already fracturing along ethnic and religious lines.” FastCompany.com (April 5^th). Secular friction remains in the headlines today, and as U.S. forces pull out, the future of Iraq – and our forced experiment in democracy forcing incompatible peoples under one government – would have to be described as “very much in doubt.” But as bad as an oil dispute might be, the “friction” usually takes a deadlier form.

Recent disputed elections have further destabilized Iraq. Sectarian violence has escalated on April 2^nd as gunmen (disguised as Iraqi troops) opened fire on innocent civilians, and suicide bombs have exploded like firecrackers on April 4th. The “soldiers” killed 24 civilians – Sunnis – execution style. The suicide bombers – car bombs mostly planted outside diplomatic buildings in Baghdad – killed a further 35 people. The April 4^th Los Angeles Times states the obvious: “The slayings reignited fears of the sectarian fighting in 2006 and 2007… There have been increasing concerns that insurgents will take advantage of Iraq's political turmoil to further destabilize the country, nearly a month after parliamentary elections failed to give any candidate a decisive win… Many fear a drawn-out political debate could spill over into violence and complicate American efforts to speed up troop withdrawals in the coming months.” But sooner or later, U.S. forces will withdraw… Afghanistan anyone?

I’m Peter Dekom, and sometimes the best intentioned plans just don’t work.