After being ruled for nearly six hundred years by the Ottoman Turks, Iraq was carved out of the Ottoman Empire by the French and British after world war I. It was formed out of three former Ottoman regions: Mosul (in the north), Baghdad (in the middle) and Basra (in the south). On November 11th, 1920 it became a League of Nations mandate under British control with the name "State of Iraq".
The British government laid out the political and constitutional framework for Iraq's government and supported the traditional, Sunni leadership (such as the tribal sheiks) over the growing, urban-based nationalist movement. Britain imposed a Hashemite monarchy on Iraq and defined the territorial limits of Iraq without taking into account the aspirations of the different ethnic and religious groups in the country, in particular those of the Kurds to the north.
In the south of Iraq were the Shi'a Muslims with traditional allegiance to Persia left over from the Safavids, a native Iranian dynasty from Azarbaijan that ruled from 1501 to 1736, and established Shi'a Islam as Iran's official religion. The safavids united its provinces under a single Iranian sovereignty and acted as a bridge to modern Iran.
In the 1930's, oil was discovered in the region and Iraq was off to the races with the western world. Everybody got this straight so far??
There are many factions and sub sets of divisions within the Iraqi population and ages old running feuds with suppressed ethnic, religious and tribal scores to settle. On his blog, Michael Yon puts forth the idea that Iraq has been in the midst of a smoldering civil war long before the U.S lead coalition ever set foot in Iraq and that perhaps this purge by indigenous blood can be the only way to settle the strife.
Criminal activity, no matter how intense, does not constitute a civil war. Nor do the actions of "Jihadists" who came to Iraq to fight. Nor do the bombs that explode to settle scores for old tribal, ethnic or religious frictions constitute civil war per se. But all these elements accelerate the smoldering fire of the decades old civil war in Iraq. The Civil War did not start subsequent the invasion; it was already underway. The former Iraqi regime had slaughtered unknown thousands of civilians and buried many of them in mass graves that are still today being discovered and catalogued. If anything, the previous Civil War has merely changed shape, the advantage has clearly shifted, and now that Americans and Europeans are in the combat zone, the war gets more complicated.
Another view, put forth by Gareth Stansfield on the ezine Prospect, states that only a hard federalism can avert a civil war amongst the squabbling factions. But that is only a stop gap measure to moderate an inevitable three way ethnic/religious split that has been dying to happen for generations. Unity out of diversity, or university, does not seem to be an option that any of the participants want to negotiate.
The partitioning, or rather radical decentralisation, of Iraq is under way. This should not necessarily be seen as a problem. Historical Iraq was a place of three semi-independent parts-Kurdish north, Sunni centre and Shia south-within the loose framework of the Ottoman empire. It is the centralised Iraq-starting with Britain's creation of the modern state in 1921-23 and reaching its nadir in nearly three decades of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship; that has failed and should be allowed to die.
There are, however, powerful forces refusing to contemplate partition or "hard federalism." The radical Shia movement led by Muqtada al-Sadr, emerging as one of the most powerful groups in Iraq, rejects federalism as a divide-and-rule tactic and defends Iraqi identity in traditional nationalist terms. Opposition among the Arab Sunnis who have traditionally dominated the state is even stronger. Whether radical Islamists, ex-Ba'athists or secularists, Arab Sunnis see federalism as undermining everything they have stood for in nearly a century of Iraqi history.
But such political machinizations are a moot point to the dead. My condolences to Mohammed & his family, over at Iraq the Model, on the death of his brother-in-law, a doctor who went back to Iraq to help rebuild his country.
