Sandra Mackey, a journalist and
Middle Eastern expert who has written much on the history and contemporary
politics of the Islamic world, presented ‘The Reckoning’ at a critical time. It was published in 2002, one year before the US launched its invasion of Iraq. The book is a highly useful, detailed, authoritative summary of the history of Iraqi politics right up to the first rumblings of potential invasion presented by the Bush Administration.
In one
sense, Iraq is the most ancient of lands. It was the ‘cradle of civilization’ that generated the first city-states of Sumeria, the first regional empires ruled by Assyria and Babylon, and then became an important center, first of Sassanian Persia and then of the Islamic Caliphate in the Middle Ages. However, unlike
modern Egyptians, modern Iraqis do not have a natural sense of great historic pride that can relate itself to the ancient history of the
country and that could help provide a vital sense of cohesion. The reason for this is that many Iraqis cannot trace their ancestral habitation of ‘their country’ much beyond a couple of centuries. Only a small minority, such as the Assyrian Christians, can claim a nebulous descent from the Semitic peoples that dominated the Middle East in ancient times.
A basic truth about Iraq is that the very term ‘Iraqi’ is somewhat of an abstraction. The boundaries of the modern state were drawn at Versailles in 1919 when the victorious allies carved up the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and treated themselves to protectorates in this strategic, oil-rich region. Iraq became a British protectorate, although a short-lived dynasty of Arab kings constituted a strained ‘national’ government. The ‘lines in the sand’ that defined Iraq cut through the tribal homeland of the Kurds to the north, who, although Sunni Muslim, are an Indo-European people more closely related ethnically to the peoples of Iran and the Armenians than they are to the Semitic Arabs. South of Baghdad, the boundaries of Iraq encompass the heartland of Shi’ite Islam, which can trace its origins to the seventh century AD. The Shi’ites are Arabs, but they have sharply different concepts of religious politics from their Sunni neighbors who occupy a triangular middle portion of the country, between the Shi’ite south and the Kurds to the north. The Sunni Arabs, making up less than half of the population of Iraq, constitute the newest element in this variegated ethnic and cultural stew. Most Sunni Arabs are descended from Arabs who moved into the land between the great rivers relatively recently, and they have deeply tribal and clan loyalties that are much stronger than any sense of being ‘Iraqi.’
With no tradition of democratic government, of consent to the will of a majority under rule of law, the three major elements of the country’s population have a tendency toward violent interaction with each other, and the problems posed by this basic situation created great difficulties for the British mandate in the first half of the twentieth century. In 1958, the monarchy was destroyed by revolution, and a decade of near chaos ensued that ended only when the Baath Party gradually took control. By the close of the 1970’s, in equally bloody internal politics, Saddam Hussein took control as a dictatorial President, emulating Joseph Stalin in his political methods. Saddam’s power base lay rooted in the complex network of clannish and tribal loyalties in the Sunni minority, which was able effectively to dominate the country during the long dictatorship of Saddam. The regime of Saddam was unquestionably one of the most brutal in modern history, but there is an implicit suggestion that only a strong dictator could hold such a conglomeration of conflicting elements together, as Tito did for the disparate small groups in Yugoslavia.
Unlike some authorities who have written on Iraq, Mackey does not,in her book, take an explicit position either for or against an invasioon of Iraq and the toppling off Saddam. She prefers to take a somewhat more detached view. However, she does make clear, as she concludes this detailed survey of Iraqi politics, that the ‘road to Baghdad’ will be an immensely difficult one for Americans to follow, if they choose to take it. Violent political energies will be released that will be very difficult, if not impossible, to channel or dissipate. In the light of actual events that happened, after the spring of 2003, can we wish that more members of the Bush Administration had paid closer attention to the expert assessments made by people like Sandra Mackey?
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