The Iraqi Population

75 percent of the Iraqi people are Arab, 20 percent are Kurds, while Turkomans, Assyrians, Armenians, Yazidis, Mandwees, Chaldaeans, and Jews make up the rest.

Majority of Iraqis are Muslims. The Islamic component, however, is further split into two main sects, Sunni and Shiite, with the Shiite by far the majority. Because most Iraqi governments did not encourage birth control and the Shiites have traditionally had the highest birthrate, their numbers are between 60 and 65 percent of the population. All but a few of the three million Kurds are Sunni, and thus the Sunni Arabs, who historically have been the dominant religious and ethnic group, constitute a deciding minority vis-à-vis the Shiites majority.

The Arabs migrated to Iraq from the Arabian Peninsula as early as the first century AD and intermarried with the local population, the descendents of the area’s ancient civilization. Within time, Arabic culture and language became the predominant elements, incorporating within the Iraqi social fabric. As for the ancient languages that preexisted in Iraq prior to the Arab migration, all but for a few continue to exist. 

Shiite Muslims hold the fundamental beliefs of the Sunnis. But, in addition to these tenets, the distinctive institution of Shiites Islam is the Imamate, a much more exalted position than the Sunni imam, who is primarily a prayer leader.

The Kurds represent by far the largest non-Arab ethnic minority in Iraq. They are the overwhelming majority in provinces such as Sulaymaniyah, Irbil, and Dahuk. The Kurds also live in Kirkuk and Khanaquine, Iraq's richest oil producing areas. Ranging across northern Iraq, the Kurds are part of the larger Kurdish population (numbering close to 16 million) that inhabit the wide arc from eastern Turkey and the northwestern part of Syria through Soviet Azerbaijan and Iraq to the northwest of the Zagros Mountains in Iran. Although the largest numbers live in Turkey (approximately 10 million), it is in Iraq that they are most active politically.

The Yazidis are of Kurdish stock but are distinguished by their unique religious fusion of elements of paganism, Zoroastrianism, Christianity, and Islam. They live in small and isolated groups, mostly in the Sinjar Mountains west of Mosul. They are impoverished cultivators and herdsmen who have a strictly graded religious-political hierarchy and tend to maintain a more closed community than other ethnic or religious groups.

The Turkomans, who constitute somewhat less than 2 percent of the population in Iraq, are village dwellers in the northeast living along the border between the Kurdish and Arab regions. A number of Turkomans live in the cities of Irbil and Khanaquine, and compose the majority in Kirkuk. The Turkomans, who speak a Turkish dialect, have preserved their language but are no longer tribally organized. Most are Sunnis who were brought in by the Ottomans to repel tribal raids. There are, however, some Shiite Turkomans.

The Assyrians are considered to be the third largest ethnic minority in Iraq, representing nearly one percent of the population. Descendants of ancient Mesopotamian peoples, they speak Aramaic. The Assyrians live mainly in the major cities and in the rural areas of northeastern Iraq where they tend to be professionals and businessmen or independent farmers. They are Christians, belonging to one of four churches: the Chaldaean (Uniate), Jacobite (Syrian Orthodox), Nestorian, and the Syrian Catholic.

Other minorities are the Mandaeans, an ancient community that lives mostly in villages near the Tigris and the Euphrates Rivers, working either as fishermen or boat builders. Some Mandaeans moved to the cities to become goldsmiths and merchants. Predominately they are Baptists, have their own religious practices, and use Aramaic as a language for religious communication.

The Armenians migrated to northern Iraq from Armenia and Anatolia to escape persecution during the Ottoman era. The Jews are ancient inhabitants of Iraq and there are a few Jews families still living Iraq. However, many of them had migrated to Israel in 1948 to escape persecution.

The history of Iraq can be divided into four segments: ancient Mesopotamia (6000 BC- 636 AD), the Islamic period (636-WWI), the Western colonialization and the emergence of the modern nation-state of Iraq (WWI-2003), and post-Saddam Iraq (2003-present)

Ancient Mesopotamia

 The term Iraq means “the shore of a great river and the grazing land surrounding it.” It refers to the great alluvial plain of the two rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates. The Greeks referred to it as Mesopotamia, meaning “the land between two rivers.” It was in Mesopotamia that humanity’s first cities were born, writing began, the first codified legal systems were established, and vital cultural brew was stirred which Western civilization later emerged.

By 6000 B.C., Mesopotamia was settled by migrants from the Turkish and Iranian highland. The first settled communities relied upon  cultivation and the range of developing technologies that went with it. Mud-brick villages were built on geographically favored sites.

The common need to maintain an effective irrigation system led to a degree of social organization and developing technology. The most successful settlements grew into sacred cities, such as the Sumerian cities of Eridu, Ur, Uruk, and Nippur on the central Mesopotamian plain. By about 4000 BC religious commitment was stimulating innovations in architecture, imaginative methodology and social organization. The world’s first cities were founded as rich cultural and political centers where the first loyalty was to the community as a whole and not to the tribe or clan. 

It was in Mesopotamia that the Sumerians developed the first form of writing (pictograms) or simplified pictures on clay tablets. From the earliest pictogram writings, the Sumerians gradually created cuneiform, a way of arranging impressions stamped on clay by the wedge-like section of a chopped-off reed. Through writing, the Sumerians were able to pass on complex agricultural techniques to successive generations. Sumerian writing then was used for centuries as a tool of commerce, defining contracts or recording shipments and receipts.

Another important Sumerian legacy was the recording of literature. The most famous Sumerian epic and the one that has survived is the epic of Gilgamesh. The story of Gilgamesh, who actually was king of the city-state of Uruk in approximately 2700 B.C., is a moving story of the ruler's deep sorrow at the death of his friend and of his consequent search for immortality. Other central themes of the story were a devastating flood and the tenuous nature of man's existence. The epic of Gilgamesh reflects the intellectual sophistication of the Sumerians, and it serves as the prototype for all Near Eastern stories.

We can trace the Sumerian influence on other cultures by learning about the Sumerian mythology and its continuation within the Greek and the Old Testaments’ narratives. Gilgamesh and other Sumerian works that prefigured biblical tales and Greek mythology, for example, are depicted as Homer’s Odysseus and the Old Testament’s Noah and great flood.

In about 1850 BC a Sumerian man called Abram (later Abraham) left his home in Ur, in southern Iraq and traveled to the land of Canaan, today’s Israel. This figure later became the father of both the Israelites and the Arabs. 

The Sumerians were pantheistic. Their gods personified local elements and natural forces. In exchange for sacrifice and adherence to an elaborate ritual, the gods of ancient Sumer were to provide the individual with security and prosperity. A powerful priesthood emerged to oversee ritual practices and to intervene with the gods. Sumerian religious beliefs also had important political aspects. Decisions relating to land rentals, agricultural questions, trade, commercial relations, and war were determined by the priesthood because all property belonged to the gods. The priests ruled from their temples, called ziggurats, which were essentially artificial mountains of sun baked brick, built with outside staircases that tapered toward a shrine at the top.

Because the well-being of the community depended upon close observation of natural phenomena, scientific activities were occupying much of the priests' time. For example, the Sumerians believed that a number represented each of the gods. The number sixty, sacred to the god An, was their basic unit of calculation. The minutes of an hour and the degrees of a circle were Sumerian concepts. The Sumerians also knew square roots and cubes and quadratic equations and created the first accurate calendars and the system of telling time that we use today. 

The period from 3360 B.C. to 2400 B.C. witnessed the emergence of kings as a new political development that replaced the previous priestly rulers and exercised distinct political rather than religious authority. An important feature of this period was the emergence of warring Sumerian city-states, which fought for control of the river valleys in lower Mesopotamia.

The period from 2400 B.C. to 2200 B.C. witnessed the conquering of Sumer by Sargon I, king of the Semitic city of Akkad in approximately 2334 B.C. Sargon was the world's first empire-builder, sending his troops as far as Egypt and Ethiopia. He attempted to establish a unified empire and to end the hostilities among the city-states. Sargon's rule introduced a new level of political organization that was characterized by an even more clear-cut separation between religious authority and secular authority. To ensure his supremacy, Sargon created the first conscripted army, a development related to the need to mobilize large numbers of laborers for irrigation and flood-control works.

The military success of the Akkadians and their king Sargon against the Sumerians led to the establishment of Babylon as the capital of lower Mesopotamia. Babylon was to flourish for almost two thousand years from about 2225 BC to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 331 BC. The biblical scribes of the Old Testament reckoned that the Euphrates, on which Babylon was sited, ran through the Garden of Eden.

At the start of the history of Babylon stood the figure of Hammurabi (2123-2081 BC), a conqueror and lawgiver who ruled for forty-three years. Hammurabi’s rule encompassed a huge area covering most of the Tigris-Euphrates river valley from Sumer and the Persian Gulf in the south to Assyria in the north. Under Hammurabi Iraq was forced into unity and disciplined by his famous Code.

Hammurabi’s code was the world’s most comprehensive legal code, which included laws dealing with farming, the responsibilities of professional men, and the buying and selling of slaves. The Code, not the earliest to appear in the Near East but certainly the most complete, dealt also with land tenure, rent, the position of women, marriage, divorce, inheritance, contracts, control of public order, administration of justice, and labor conditions. In politics, the code was evidence of a pronounced separation between religious and secular authority than had existed in ancient Sumer.

Beginning in approximately 1600 B.C., Indo-European-speaking tribes invaded and settled in Iran and Europe. One of these groups was the Hittites that allied themselves with the Kassites, a people of unknown origins. Together, they conquered and destroyed Babylon. Hittite power subsequently waned, but, in the first half of the fourteenth century B.C., the Hittites reemerged, controlling an area that stretched from the Mediterranean Sea to the Persian Gulf. Their military success was attributed to their monopoly in iron production and to their use of the chariot. In the twelfth century B.C., the Hittites were destroyed, and no great military power occupied Mesopotamia until the rise of Assyria in northern Iraq.

Assyria emerged as a powerful state near today’s city of Mosul in northern Iraq. The Assyrians were a Semitic race, at first colonists from Babylonia and its subjects. Later, around 1300 BC, they rose up and conquered Babylon. The state of Assyria grew around four cities watered by the Tigris: Ashur, Arbela (Arbil), Kalak (Nimrud), and Nineveh (Mosul). A famous figure in Assyrian history was King Sargon II (721-705 BC), who took power via a palace coup d’etat and then consolidated the conquest of Babylonia.

Esarhaddon seized the throne in 681 BC and annexed Egypt, rendering Assyria the undisputed master of a vast empire. His son, Ashurbanipal (669-626 BC), was the last of the great Assyrian kings. The Babylonian king Nabopolassar (625-604 BC) ended the Assyrian control of Babylonia and created the Chaldaean empire. When he died his son Nebuchadnezzar II, the villain of the Old Testament Book of Daniel, succeeded him.

Nebuchadnezzar defeated an Egyptian force that was conspiring with the Assyrians, and brought Israel (after the siege of Jerusalem in 586 BC) and Syria under his control. Enjoying his protection, Babylonian merchants became in charge of all the trade in the region. It was during the Chaldaean period that the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the world’s Seven Wonders were created.    

In 538 B.C. Cyrus the Great of Persia defeated Babylonia and ended 2,000 years of the Semitic-speaking rule of Mesopotamia. He also ended the Jewish exile and had the Israelites return home. For the next 1,176 years, the Indo-European people of Iran ruled Mesopotamia.

Between 520 and 485 B.C., the efficient and innovative Iranian leader, Darius the Great, reimposed political stability in Babylon and ushered in a period of great economic prosperity. His greatest achievements were in road building, which significantly improved communication among the provinces, and in organizing an efficient bureaucracy. Darius's death in 485 B.C. was followed by a period of decay that also led to Babylonian rebellion in 482 B.C. The Iranians violently quelled the uprising, and the repression that followed severely damaged Babylon's economic infrastructure.

Also during this period and under the rein of the Achaemenids dynasty in Iran, large numbers of Iranians were incorporated to Mesopotamia's ethnically diverse population. The flow of Iranians into Iraq initiated an important demographic trend that continued throughout much of Iraqi history. Another important effect of Iranian rule was the disappearance of the Mesopotamian languages and the widespread use of Aramaic, the official language of the Achaemenids Empire.

By the fourth century B.C., nearly all of Babylon opposed the Achaemenids. In 331 B.C, when the Iranian forces stationed in Babylon surrendered to Alexander the Great of Macedon, all of Babylonia hailed him as a liberator. Alexander quickly won Babylonian favor when, unlike the Achaemenids, he displayed respect for such Babylonian traditions as the worship of their chief god, Mardukh. Alexander also proposed ambitious schemes for Babylon. He planned to establish one of the two seats of his empire there and to make the Euphrates navigable all the way to the Persian Gulf, where he planned to build a great port.

Alexander's grandiose plans, however, never came true. Returning from an expedition to the Indus River, he died in Babylon, most probably from malaria contracted there at the age of thirty-two. In the politically chaotic period after Alexander's death, his generals divided up his empire.

The Hellenization of the area included the introduction of Western deities, Western art forms, and Western thought. Business also revived because one of the Greek trade routes ran through the new cities. Cultural interchange between Greek and Mesopotamian scholars was responsible for the saving of many Mesopotamian scientific, especially astronomical texts.

In 126 B.C., the Parthians, an intelligent, nomadic people who had migrated from the steppes of Turkistan to northeastern Iran, captured the Tigris-Euphrates river valley. Having previously conquered Iran, the Parthians were able to control all trade routs between the East and the Greco-Roman world. For the most part, they chose to retain existing social institutions and to live in cities that already existed. Mesopotamia was immeasurably enriched and the population was enormously enlarged, chiefly by Arabs, Iranians, and Aramaeans. With the exception of a short period of Roman occupation under Trajan (A.D. 98- 117) and Septimius Severus (A.D. 193-211), the Parthians ruled until a new force of native Iranian rulers, the Sassanids, conquering the region in A.D. 227.

The Sassanid occupation of Mesopotamia lasted until A.D. 636. For the most part, they neglected Mesopotamia, especially the canals and irrigation ditches vital for agriculture. Such neglect allowed the rivers to flood, and parts of the land had become sterile. By the time their empire fell to the Muslim Arab warriors, Mesopotamia was in ruins, and Sumero-Akkadian civilization was entirely extinguished.

The Arab Conquest and the Islamic Period

The appearance of the word Arab for the first time was on an inscription of the Assyrian king Shalmaneser III who in 853 BC defeated an alliance of states in which King Ahab of Israel was supported by Jundibu the Arab by providing him with camels. Thereafter many Assyrians and Babylonian inscriptions referred to the nomadic people of the desert as Aribi or Arabu. The Arabs themselves first used the term in an inscription in the Nabataean script that records the deeds of a certain Arabian ruler.

An important figure in Arabian society that established the foundations for a powerful Islamic empire was the Prophet Mohammad. Events in Arabia changed rapidly and dramatically when Mohammad began gathering adherents for his monotheistic faith to convert Arabia to Islam.

Islamic forays into Iraq began during the reign of Mohammad’s first successor, Abu Bakr. In 634 an army of 18,000 Arab tribesmen reached the perimeter of the Euphrates delta. Abu Bakr died in 634 and was succeeded by another friend of Mohammad, Omar, who continued the military campaign in Iraq. In May 636 at Qadassiyah, a village south on the Euphrates in southern Iraq, the Arabs engaged the Iranians and soundly defeating their army. From Qadassiyah, the Arabs pushed on to the Sassanid capital at Ctesiphon, toppled the Sassanid Empire, and Iraq became part of the Islamic empire.

The Islamic conquest was made easier because both the Byzantine Empire and the Sassanid Empire were culturally and socially bankrupt. The native populations had little to lose by cooperating with the conquering power.

Omar ordered the founding of two garrisoned cities to protect the newly conquered territory: Kufa, named as the capital of Iraq, and Basra, which was also to be a port. Omar also organized the administration of the conquered Iranian lands. The Arabic language replaced Persian as the official language, and it slowly filtered into common usage. Iraqis then intermarried with Arabs and converted to Islam. Some of the Iraqi tribes who previously converted to Judaism or Christianity, continued with their faith.

The most critical problem that faced the young Islamic community revolved around the succession of Omar’s successor and Islam’s third caliph, Othman, who encountered opposition during and after his election to the caliphate. Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law (by virtue of his marrying the Prophet daughter, Fatima), had been the other contender. Economics was the key factor for most of the members of the opposition, but this, too, acquired religious overtone.

Groups of malcontents left Iraq and Egypt to seek redress at Medina, the Muslim capital in the Hijaz. Othman promised reforms, but on their return journey the rebels intercepted a message to the governor of Egypt commanding that they be punished. In response, the rebels besieged Othman in his home in Medina, eventually slaying him. Ali, who had not taken part in the siege, was chosen as the fourth Caliph. Ali then moved his capital to Kufa in Iraq.

Maawiya, a kinsman of Othman and the governor of Syria, refused to recognize Ali, and he demanded the right to avenge his relative's death. While praying in a mosque at Kufah, Ali was murdered in 661. The ambitious Maawiya induced Ali's eldest son, Hassan, to renounce his claim to the caliphate. Hassan died shortly thereafter when he was poisoned.

Subsequently, Maawiya was declared caliph. Thus began the Umayyad Dynasty, which had its capital at Damascus. Yazeed, Maawiya's son and his successor in 680, was unable to contain the opposition that his strong father had vigorously quelled. Hussein, Ali's second son, refused to pay homage to Yazeed and led the Shiites, mostly Iraqis, in a revolt against the Umayyad Empire. At Karbala, in Iraq, Hussein was killed on the tenth of the lunar month of Muharram (October 10, 680) by a force of nearly 4,000 Umayyad troops. This date continues to be observed as a day of mourning for all Shiites. Ali's burial place at Najaf and Hussein’s at Karbala in southern Iraq are holy places of pilgrimage for Shiites, many of whom feel that a pilgrimage to both sites is equal to a pilgrimage to Mecca.

The transfer of power after Ali’s death from Iraq to Damascus in Syria aroused envy among Iraqis. The desire to regain preeminence prompted numerous rebellions in Iraq against Umayyad rule.

In 747, another rebellion that was led by the descendents of Abbas, the Prophet’s uncle, was able to topple the Umayyads and conqure Iraq. In 750, the head of the victorious rebellion, Abu al-Abbas, moved to Kufa and established the Abbasid Dynasty. The Abbasids presented themselves to the Iraqi people as divine-right rulers who would initiate a new era of justice and prosperity.

During the reign of the Abbasids’ second caliph, al-Mansur, Baghdad was built. And during the Abbasid’s fifth caliph, al-Rashid, and the seventh caliph, al-Mamoon, Baghdad became the center of a global power where Arab and Iranian cultures mingled to produce a blaze of philosophical, scientific, and literary glory. This era is remembered throughout the Arab world as the pinnacle of Islamic past.

However, the Sunni-Shiites split had weakened the effectiveness of the empire and its Islamic religion as a single unifying force and as a sanction for a single political authority. Although the intermingling of various linguistic and cultural groups contributed greatly to the enrichment of Islamic civilization, it also was a source of great tension and contributed to the decay of Abbasid power.

In 869, the Shiites’ Twelfth Imam was born. Because his followers feared he might be assassinated by the Abbasid caliph, the Twelfth Imam was hidden from public view and was seen only by a few of his closest deputies, until he disappeared in about 939. Since that time, the greater occultation of the Twelfth Imam has been in force and will last until God commands the Twelfth Imam to manifest himself on earth again along with return of Christ. The Shiites believe that during the occultation of the Twelfth Imam, he is spiritually present. Some believe that he is materially present as well, and he is besought to reappear in various invocations and prayers. His name is mentioned in wedding invitations, and his birthday is one of the most jubilant of all Shiite religious observances.

Gradually, the Iranians began to break away from Abbasid control and a series of local dynasties appeared. The same process was repeated in the West. Spain broke away in 756, Morocco in 788, Tunisia in 800, and Egypt in 868. In Iraq there was trouble in the south. In 869, a state of black slaves known as Zanj was founded. The Zanj brought a large part of southern Iraq and southwestern Iran under their control and in the process enslaved many of their former masters, until their rebellion was finally put down in 883.

In addition to the cleavages between Arabs and Iranians and between Sunnis and Shiites, the growing prominence of Turks in the Abbasid military and in political affairs gave cause for discontent and rivalry at court. The Abbasid caliphs began importing Turks as slave-warriors (Mamluks) early in the ninth century.

The Mamluks gradually began to occupy high positions at court. By the tenth century, the Turkish commanders, no longer checked by their Iranian and Arab rivals at court, were able to appoint and depose caliphs and the political power of the caliphate became fully separated from its religious function. The Mamluks, however, continued to permit the caliphate to continue because of the importance of the office as a symbol for legitimizing claims to authority.

In 945, after subjugating western Iran, a Shiite military family known as the Buwayhids occupied Baghdad. The Buwayhids continued to permit Sunni Abbasid caliphs to ascend to the throne. However, the humiliation of the caliphate at being manipulated by Shiites, and by Iranian ones at that, was immense.

The Buwayhids were ousted in 1055 by another group of Turkish speakers, the Seljuks. The Seljuks were the ruling clan of the Oghuz Turks, who lived north of the Oxus River. Their leader, Tughril Beg, turned his warriors first against the local ruler in Iran. He moved south and then west, conquering but not destroying the cities in his path. In 1055 the caliph in Baghdad gave Tughril Beg the title of "King of the East." Because the Seljuks were Sunnis, their rule was welcomed in Baghdad. They treated the caliphs with respect, but the latter continued to be only figureheads.

One Seljuk, Malek Shah, extended Turkish rule to the countries of the eastern Mediterranean, Asia Minor, and to parts of Arabia. During his rule, Iraq and Iran enjoyed a cultural and scientific renaissance.

This success is largely attributed to Malek Shah's brilliant Iranian vizier (prime minister), Nizam al-Mulk, one of the most skillful administrators in history. An astronomical observatory was established in which Omar Khayyam did much of his experimentation for a new calendar, and religious schools were built in all the major towns. Abu Hameed al-Ghazali, one of the greatest Islamic theologians, and other eminent scholars were brought to the Seljuk capital at Baghdad and were encouraged and supported in their work.

After the death of Malek Shah in 1092, Seljuk power disintegrated. Petty dynasties appeared throughout Iraq and Iran, and rival claimants to Seljuk rule dispatched each other. Between 1118 and 1194, nine Seljuk sultans ruled Baghdad; only one died a natural death. The last Seljuk sultan of Iraq, Tughril (1177-94), was killed by one of the leader of a newly emerging Turkish dynasty, the Khwarizm shahs, who lived south of the Aral Sea. Before his successor could establish Khwarizm rule in Iraq, however, Baghdad was overrun by the Mongol horde in 1258, reducing it to ruins.

The Mongols were led by Hulaku Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, who killed the last Abbasids’ caliphs. They looted Baghdad, beheaded its intellectuals, destroyed what was left of Iraq’s canal network, and blotted out all traces of Abbasid culture. Life in the cities deteriorated, swamps and marshes overtook the irrigated lands, trade routes moved elsewhere. The power of marauding nomadic tribes increased and Baghdad lost central control of the region, a trend that continued into the twentieth century.

After the death of the last great Mongol khans, Abu Said in 1335, a period of political confusion ensued in Iraq until a local petty dynasty, the Jalayirids, seized power. The Jalayirids ruled until the beginning of the fifteenth century. Jalayirid rule was abruptly checked by the rising power of another Mongol, Tamerlane (or Timur the Lame, 1336-1405), the prince of Samarkand. In 1401, Tamerlane sacked Baghdad and massacred many of its inhabitants. Tamerlane killed thousands of Iraqis and devastated hundreds of towns. Like Hulaku, Tamerlane had a penchant for building pyramids of skulls. Despite his showy display of Sunni piety, Tamerlane's rule virtually extinguished Islamic scholarship and Islamic arts everywhere except in his capital, Samarkand. By the end of the Mongol period, the focus of Iraqi history shifted from the urban-based Abbasid culture to the tribes of the river valleys, where it remained until the twentieth century.

The turbulence continued until the Ottoman Turks unified the Islamic territories, excluding Persia, which remained separate and was ruled by the Shiites Safavids. The Ottoman rule continued until World War I. The Ottoman Empire expanded into the region of Iraq in the sixteenth century, and for the next 200 years, Iraq became one of its military playing field.

The Ottomans, fearing that Shiite Islam would spread to Anatolia (today’s Turkey), sought to maintain Iraq as a Sunni-controlled buffer state with the Shiites Safavids in Iran, especially when in 1509 the Safavids, led by Ismail Shah, conquered Iraq. Thus, in 1535 the Ottomans, led by Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent, conquered Baghdad from the Safavids. The Safavids reconquered Baghdad in 1623 under the leadership of Shah Abbas, but they were expelled in 1638 after a series of military maneuvers by the Ottoman Sultan, Murad IV (4^th).

The major impact of the Safavid-Ottoman conflict on Iraqi history was the deepening of the Shiite-Sunni rift. Both the Ottomans and the Safavids used Sunni and Shiite Islam respectively to mobilize domestic support. Thus, Iraq's Sunni population suffered immeasurably during the brief Safavid reign (1623-38), while Iraq's Shiites were excluded from power altogether during the longer period of Ottoman supremacy (1638-1916).

During the Ottoman period, the Sunnis gained the administrative experience that would allow them to monopolize political power in the twentieth century. The Sunnis were also able to take advantage of new economic and educational opportunities while the Shiites, frozen out of the political process, remained politically impotent and economically depressed.

By the seventeenth century, the frequent conflicts with the Safavids had sapped the strength of the Ottoman Empire and had weakened its control over its provinces. In Iraq, tribal authority once again dominated. The history of nineteenth-century Iraq is a chronicle of tribal migrations and of conflict.

The cycle of tribal warfare and of deteriorating urban life was temporarily reversed with the reemergence of the Mamluks. In the early eighteenth century, the Mamluks began asserting authority apart from the Ottomans. Extending their rule first over Basra, the Mamluks eventually controlled the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys from the Persian Gulf to the foothills of Kurdistan. For the most part, the Mamluks were able administrators, and their rule was marked by political stability and by economic revival. The greatest of the Mamluk leaders, Suleyman the II (1780-1802), made great strides in imposing the rule of law. The last Mamluk leader, Dawood (1816-31), initiated important modernization programs that included clearing canals, establishing industries, training a 20,000-man army, and starting a printing press.

The Mamluk period ended in 1831, when a severe flood and plague devastated Baghdad, enabling the Ottoman sultan, Mahmood II, to reassert Ottoman sovereignty over Iraq. It was during this period that the languages of a new kind of politics emerged to regulate power and defined authority and administrative duty, and a distinct political society began to form in the three provinces of Mousl, Baghdad, and Basra, owing much to the Ottoman reforms and drawing upon existing hierarchies of wealth and status.

The reforms, the emergence of private property, and the tying of Iraq to the world capitalist market severely altered Iraq's social structure. Tribal sheikhs traditionally had provided both spiritual leadership and tribal security. Land reform and increasing links with the West transformed many sheikhs into profit-seeking landlords, whose tribesmen became impoverished sharecroppers. Moreover, as Western economic penetration increased, the products of Iraq's once-prosperous craftsmen were displaced by machine-made British textiles.

The expansion of the world’s capitalist market, however, did not lead to capitalist development in Iraq. This under-development resulted from an unequal exchange between the advanced capitalist countries and the periphery. The outcome of increased trade with Europe led to the growth of a dependant agrarian bourgeoisie in Iraq. This class was producing for the world market by using pre-capitalist methods of production and abundant cheap labor.

The most deeply ingrained conflict was the competition between the tribes and the cities for control over the food-producing flatlands of the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers. The centralization policies of the Ottoman government constituted a direct threat to the nomadic structure and the fierce fighting spirit of the tribes. In addition to tribal-urban conflicts, the tribes fought among themselves. The cities also were sharply divided, both according to occupation and along religious lines. The various guilds resided in distinct, autonomous areas, and Shiite and Sunni Muslims rarely intermingled.

The tribes had their own laws and did not follow the Ottoman Sharia (Islamic law). They were nomadic as well as settled, sharing communal, egalitarian, and warlike characteristics, and were continually shadowed by the possibility of war with neighboring tribes or with the central authorities. The tribes had internal variations as well as different external relations with other social groups. There were no fixed social characterization of the tribes simply because they were tribes. These characteristics differed from tribe to tribe, depending on their economic and internal social organization, as well as their locations within the larger power structure.

After the establishment of steam navigation between Bombay and Basra in 1860s, especially after the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1870s, Iraq started to witness dramatic change as trade with Europe increased. The route to Europe was reduced from 14,000 miles to 10,000, effecting sea trade and agriculture in Iraq. This helped in the secularization of society and the rationalization of the economy and the emergence of the Iqta system.

The Iqta system (Arabic for feudalism) was founded on the exploitation of the peasantry by a feudal class composed of tribal chieftains, town merchants, and government officials. Iqta was distinctive of the tribal communities in both the south and Kurdish north. In the south, it was limited to the fertile irrigated zone of lower Iraq, the locus for agriculture expansion. In larger cities entrepreneurial class of merchants and city landowners managed to establish control and improve production by modernizing production.

Iqta was organized around production for a capitalist market. It did not achieve the production levels of advanced capitalist agriculture. Mainly, it was based on large estates and exploitative sheikh-sharecropper relations. It increased output through extensive expansion of agricultural lands, and by intensification of peasant exploitation, blocking economic growth in agriculture.

 Western Colonization and the Emergence of the Iraqi Nation-State

British interest in Iraq significantly increased when the Ottomans granted concessions to Germany to construct railroad lines from Konya in southwest Turkey to Baghdad in 1899 and from Baghdad to Basra in 1902. The British feared that a hostile German presence in Iraq would threaten vital lines of communication to India via Iran and Afghanistan, menacing British oil interests in Iran and perhaps even India itself.

In 1914 when the British discovered that Turkey was entering the war on the side of the Germans, British forces from India landed at al-Faw Peninsula in southern Iraq and moved rapidly toward Basra. By March 1917 the British captured Baghdad. Advancing northward, the British took Mosul in early November 1918. As a result of the victory at Mosul, British authority was extended to all thee Iraqi provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul.

At the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, under Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant, Iraq was formally made a Class-A mandate entrusted to Britain. This award was completed on April 25, 1920, at the San Remo Conference in Italy.

The British were confronted with Iraq's age-old problems, compounded by some new ones. Villagers demanded that the tribes be restrained, and tribes demanded that their titles to tribal territories be extended and confirmed. Merchants demanded more effective legal procedures, courts, and laws to protect their activities and interests.

The most striking problem facing the British was the growing anger of the nationalists, who felt betrayed at being accorded mandate status. The nationalists soon came to view the mandate as a flimsy disguise for colonialism. The exclusion of Iraqis from administrative posts added humiliation to Iraqi discontent. Ethnic groups such as the Kurds and the Assyrians, also hoped for their own autonomous states.

When the news of the mandate reached Iraq in late May 1920, the Shiite leader Imam Shirazi issued a fatwa (a religious decree), and called for a jihad against the British. The country was in a state of anarchy for three months. The British restored order only with great difficulty and with the assistance of Royal Air Force bombers. For the first time, Sunnis and Shiites, tribes and cities, were brought together in a common effort. This constituted an important first step in the long process of forging a nation-state out of Iraq's conflict-ridden social structure.

The revolt convinced the British administration not to deal directly with the cultivators and to support the tribal houses because many of the larger tribes refused to participate in the revolt. From 1920 on, the British colonial office took systematic measures to legitimate the power of the shakily class and its claim to the land. The sheikhs were awarded seats in the first parliament of 1924, cementing their alliance with the mandate state while not hesitating from using force to bring the cultivating class to submission.

The British occupation of the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and their subsequent consolidation into the new state of Iraq under a League of Nations Mandate radically changed the political worlds of the inhabitants of these territories. The history of the new Iraqi state began as such, not simply as the history of the state’s formal institutions, but as the histories of all those who found themselves drawn into the new regime of power.

The impact of such penetration on the indigenous social and demographic structure was tremendous. Western influence first took the initial form of transportation and trading links and the switch from tribal-based subsistence agriculture to cash crop production, mostly dates, for export. As this process accelerated, the nomadic population decreased both relatively and in absolute numbers and the rural sedentary population increased substantially, particularly in the southern region.

The history of the state, therefore, is in part a history of the strategies of cooperation, subversion and resistance adopted by various Iraqis trying to come to terms with the force the state represented. It            has also been a history of the ways the state transformed those who tried to use it. These different forms of engagement over the years shaped the politics of Iraq and contributed to the composite narrative of Iraq’s modern history.”

Narratives that had made sense of people’s lives in one setting were being overtaken by changed circumstances as the emerging state became the vehicle for distinctive ideas and forms of order, prefigured by, but not necessarily identical to those of the late Ottoman state. The Iraqi state became a new center of gravity, setting up or reinforcing the structures that shaped a distinctively Iraqi politics. 

One feature of the new state that was apparent was the absence of any Shiite appointees to senior administrative positions. The old Sunni-dominated order of Ottoman times was re-established and the Shiites had largely been excluded from the administrative levels.

Administratively, the new state began to take shape. But the issue of its constitutional form was not resolved. This led to the convening of the Cairo Conference in March 1921 by Winston Churchill, the newly appointed colonial secretary entrusted with Iraq’s affairs. A large delegation from Baghdad attended the conference and the decision was taken to establish a kingdom of Iraq.

At the Cairo Conference of 1921, the British set the parameters for Iraqi political life. They chose Prince Faisal of Hijaz as Iraq's first King. The British also established an indigenous Iraqi army. To confirm Faisal as Iraq's first monarch, a one-question referendum was carefully arranged that had a return of 96 percent in his favor.

As a counterforce to the nationalistic inclinations of the monarchy and as a means of insuring the king's dependence, the British cultivated the tribal sheikhs. While the new king sought to create a national consciousness, to strengthen the institutions of the emerging state, and especially to create a national military, the tribal sheikhs supported a fragmented community and sought to weaken the coercive power of the state. A major goal of the British policy was to keep the monarchy stronger than any one tribe but weaker than a coalition of tribes so that British power would ultimately be decisive in arbitrating disputes between the two.

In doing so, the British-created a monarchy that suffered from a chronic legitimacy crisis. To begin with, the concept of a monarchy was alien to Iraq. Second, despite his Islamic and pan-Arab credentials, Faisal was not an Iraqi, and, no matter how effectively he ruled. Iraqis saw the monarchy as a British creation. The continuing inability of the government to gain the confidence of the people fueled political instability well into the coming decades.

Because Iraq's newly established political institutions were the creation of a foreign power, and because the concept of democratic government had no precedent in Iraqi history, the politicians in Baghdad lacked legitimacy and never developed deeply rooted constituencies. Thus, despite a constitution and an elected assembly, Iraqi politics were more a shifting alliance of personalities and cliques than a democracy in the Western sense.

Once the monarchic oligarchy was established and social groups sympathetic to the British were firmly in power, British mandate rule over Iraq was no longer necessary. In 1932, British rule was officially terminated. And, under the Iraq-British Treaty, Iraq was internationally recognized as sovereign. However, the British continued to exert power through the monarchic oligarchy.

The declaration of statehood and the imposition of fixed boundaries triggered an intense competition for power in the new entity. Sunnis and Shiites, cities and tribes, sheikhs and tribesmen, Assyrians and Kurds, pan-Arabists and Iraqi nationalists, all fought vigorously for places in the emerging state structure. Ultimately, lacking legitimacy and unable to establish deep roots, the British-imposed political system was overwhelmed by these conflicting demands.

The monarchy's ability to deal with tribal unrest suffered a major setback in September 1933, when King Faisal died while undergoing medical treatment in Switzerland. Faisal’s reign, which lasted twelve years, was marked by his attempt to give some strength to an office characterized by its weakness. He was sovereign of a state that was itself not sovereign.

Faisal was succeeded by his twenty-one-year-old son, Ghazi, an ardent but inexperienced Arab nationalist. Unlike his father, Ghazi was a product of Western education and had little experience with the complexities of Iraqi tribal life. Increasingly, the nationalist movement saw the monarchy as a British puppet. Iraqi politics during Ghazi's reign degenerated into a meaningless competition among narrowly based tribal sheikhs and urban notables that further eroded the legitimacy of the state and its constitutional structures.

During the 1930s and 1940s, Iraq earned the dubious distinction of being the first Arab country to experience a military coup. Between 1936 and 1941, Iraqi Army officers, aided by civilian politicians, launched seven military coups, not against the king, but against one another and against the civilian population.

In April 1939, Ghazi was killed in an automobile accident and was succeeded by his infant son, Faisal II. Ghazi's first cousin, Abdul Ilah, was made regent.

Accumulated grievances against the monarchy climaxed in the 1948 uprising. The uprising was a protest against the Portsmouth Treaty of January 1948 between Iraq and Britain and its provision that a board of Iraqis and British be established to decide on defense matters of mutual interest. The uprising also was fueled by widespread popular discontent over rising prices, by an acute bread shortage, and by the regime's failure to liberalize the political system.

In 1952 the depressed economic situation, which had been exacerbated by a bad harvest and by the government's refusal to hold direct elections, triggered large-scale anti-regime protests. The protests turned especially violent in Baghdad. In response, the government declared martial law, banned all political parties, suspended a number of newspapers, and imposed a curfew.

In 1958 King Hussein of Jordan and Iraq’s Regent Abdul Ilah proposed a union of the Hashimite monarchies of Jordan and Iraq in order to counter the recently formed Egyptian- Syrian union. At this point, the Iraqi monarchy found itself completely isolated. The government was able to contain the rising discontent only by resorting to even greater oppression and to tighter control over the political process. The combination of all these factors enabled the Free Officers Organization in the Iraqi military to ride the public sentiments against the monarchy, lead a coup on July 14, 1958, topple the monarchy and established the Republic of Iraq.

The seizure of power was possibly quicker than any of the Free Officers had anticipated. By the same token, they found themselves in command of the massive financial and administrative resources of the state. The ease of the transfer of power encouraged different thoughts among the Free Officers who soon discovered the immense powers of patronage conferred upon them.

The 1958 coup radically altered Iraq’s social structure, destroying the power of the landed sheikhs and the absentee landlords while enhancing the position of the urban workers, the peasants, and the middle class. In altering the old power structure, however, the coup revived long-suppressed sectarian, tribal, and ethnic conflicts. The strongest of these conflicts were those between Kurds and Arabs and between Sunnis and Shiites.

The coup and the coming to power of Qasim also altered Iraq’s military orientation. Disagreement with the British and with the Western world’s stance on Iraqi nationalism issues, and growing pan-Arab sentiment led Qasim to abrogate a pact that was formed between the former monarchic regime and pro-Western governments in the region, and to turn Iraq to the Soviet Union for arms.

Since majority of Iraqis between 1918 and 1958 were divorced from the political process, and the process itself failed to develop procedures for resolving internal conflicts other than rule by decree and the frequent use of repressive measures, the formative experiences of Iraq’s post-1958 political leadership centered on government activity that have been veiled in secrecy. Furthermore, because the country lacked deeply rooted national political institutions, political power was also monopolized by a small elite, the members of which were often bounded by close family or tribal ties.

In March 1959, a group of disgruntled Free Officers, who came from conservative, well known, Arab Sunni families and who opposed Qasim's increasing links with the communists, attempted a coup. The ill-planned coup attempt never really materialized and, in its aftermath, the communists’ massacred some Iraq-Arab nationalists and some well-to-do Mosul families, leaving deep scars that proved to be very slow to heal.

With communist fortunes riding high, another large-scale show of force was planned in Kirkuk, where a significant number of Kurds (many of them either members of, or sympathetic to, the ICP) lived in neighborhoods contiguous to a Turkoman upper class. There, the communists’ rallies got out of hand, a bloody battle ensued, and the Kurds looted and killed many Turkomans. The violence led Qasim to crack down on the communists by arresting some of the more unruly rank-and-file members of the ICP and by temporarily suspending the People's Resistance Force.

Following the events at Mosul and at Kirkuk, the Baath Party decided that the only way to dislodge the Qasim regime would be to kill Qasim. Saddam Hussein, a junior Baath Party member, carried out the attempted assassination along with other Baathists, which injured Qasim but failed to kill him. Qasim reacted by softening his stance on the communists and by suppressing the activities of the Baath and other nationalist parties. Saddam's handlers were an Iraqi dentist working for CIA and the assistant military attaché at the Egyptian Embassy, who was also an Egyptian intelligence officer.

After the failed assassination attempt on Qasim, Saddam left Tikreet and crossed the Iraqi borders into Syria, where Egyptian intelligence agents transferred him to Beirut. While in Beirut, the CIA paid for Saddam's apartment and put him through a brief training course. The agency then helped him get to Cairo where he was installed in an apartment in the upper class neighborhood of Dukki and spent his time playing dominos in the Indiana Café, guarded by CIA and Egyptian intelligence operatives.

While in Cairo, Saddam was making frequent visits to the American Embassy where CIA specialist Miles Copeland and CIA station chief Jim Eichelberger were in residence. The embassy then pushed the Egyptians to raise Saddam’s monthly allowance, a gesture not appreciated by Egyptian officials since they knew of Saddam's CIA connection.

Seeking new Soviet arms, threatening Western oil interests in Iraq, resuming old quarrel with Kuwait, talking openly of challenging the dominance of America in the Middle East all had Washington to regard Qasim as a dangerous leader who must be removed.

Encouraged by the CIA, a full-scale fighting broke out between Kurdish guerrillas and the Iraqi army in September 1961. The army did not fare well against the seasoned Kurdish guerrillas, many of whom had deserted from the army. By the spring of 1962, Qasim's inability to contain the Kurdish insurrection had further eroded his base of power. The growing opposition was now in a position to plot his overthrow.

Britain and Egypt backed the American intervention for a coup against Qasim, while other United States allies, chiefly France and Germany resisted. In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshaled opponents of the Iraqi regime. Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States also armed the Kurdish insurgents in their fight against the government.

As its instrument, the CIA chose the authoritarian Baath Party to lead the coup. During the 1960s, the Baath still was a relatively small political faction and had little influence in the Iraqi Army. Nevertheless, the party was able to align itself with other anti-Qasim forces that had some influence within the army, making itself a viable vehicle to carry on the coup. On February 8, 1963, Qasim was eventually overthrown. Qasim himself and his lieutenant were killed in a summary execution, along with thousands of Iraqi communists. Robert Komer, a National Security Council aide, wrote to President Kennedy the day of the takeover and stated that the coup was “a gain for our side."

Upon assuming power, the Baath established the National Council of Revolutionary Command as the highest policy- making body and appointed al-Bakr as prime minister and Arif as president.

The Baath, however, was having difficulty in holding on to power. Nevertheless, the United States continued supporting the new Baath regime in exchange for information on Soviet military tank T-54 and Soviet fighter jet MiG-21. The US also sent arms to the new regime that it used against the Kurdish insurgents that the United States had backed against Qasim and later abandoned. Western corporations like Mobil, Bechtel and British Petroleum started to do business with Baghdad for American firms, their first major involvement in Iraq.

By supporting the 1963 coup, the CIA fatally weakened the prospects for Iraqi democracy. As a reward for America’s support, the 1963 coup leaders declared that the rights of the American oil companies in Iraq would be respected and that they would be permitted to continue their operations.

Because of its lack of unity, President Arif was able to outmaneuver the Baath and expel it from government in November 1963. It was not until 1968 that the Baath reclaimed political power through another military coup. This time, the Baath institutionalized its rule by formally issuing a Provisional Constitution in July 1970.

From the outset, the Baath Party prepared itself for the task of containing and defeating any attempts at popular revolt and true democratic changes. Most notable in this regard was the emergence of the Tikreeties, Sunni Arabs from the northwest town of Tikreet. The Baath was reorganized under the direction of Bakr as president with Saddam as his deputy. Although Bakr was the older, by 1969 Saddam clearly had become the moving force behind the party.

Under the Baath regime, Iraq's society was undergoing profound and rapid social change that had a definite urban focus. As the country witnessed a growing involvement with the world market and particularly the commercial and administrative sectors, the growth of a few urban centers, notably Baghdad and Basra, became astounding.

In order to finance its economic and social programs, the Baath nationalized Iraq’s oil in 1972. This maneuver alarmed the United States as it watched Iraqi oil once again becoming a destabilizing force in the region. With the United States and the West increasingly becoming dependent on foreign oil, the subject of leaving such vital commodity to the whims of the Baathists was too risky. The Arab oil embargo of 1973 also helped in shifting the United States policy in the Middle East toward direct involvement through the use of US military force if needed.

The United States once again began to support the local Kurds (through Iran) in order to exert pressure on the Baath government in Iraq. The aim was not to topple the Baath regime but to change its orientation toward the West and ensure US vital interests in Iraqi oil.

In March 1974 the Baath implemented the Kurdish autonomy law. Protesting against the exclusion of the oil-rich areas of Kirkuk, Sinjar, and Khanaquine from the Kurdish region and encouraged by the CIA and the Shah of Iran, the Kurds led an insurgency in northern Iraq against the Baath regime.

The regime responded with the use of force and fighting resumed in northern Iraq between the Kurdish militia and the Iraqi Army. Then on March 6, 1975, Saddam signed an agreement with the Shah, promising to resolve Iraq’s borders problems with Iran in exchange for both countries to end all infiltration of a subversive nature. Almost immediately, Iraqi forces went on the offensive and defeated the Kurdish militia, which was unable to hold out without Iranian support. Under an amnesty plan, about 70 percent of the militia surrendered to the Iraqis. Some remained in the hills of Kurdistan to continue fighting, and about 30,000 crossed the border to Iran to join the civilian refugees, estimated between 100,000 and 200,000.

After the collapse of the Kurdish uprising in 1975, the Baath ended its tactical alliance with the ICP. With the Kurds and Communist out of political picture, the Baath ended all forms of political participatory and manipulated power absolutely, sustaining it with terror and force. In this endeavor, it was helped by the enormous rise in oil revenues. A substantial proportion of these revenues went to strengthen the state machinery, especially the organs of repression, intelligence and propaganda.

In February 1979, the Shah was overthrown by an Islamic revolution led by Khomeini. The rise of an Islamic republic in the Shiite-majority Iran under Khomeini provoked militancy among Iraqi Shiites, to the extent that Saddam acted severely against them, much to the unease of the older President Bakr. The differences between Bakr and Saddam on how to tackle the Shiites problem became problematic.

On June 10, 1979 Saddam submitted a list of Shiite activists to be executed to President Bakr for his signature. Besides the leaders of the Shiite activists, the list included a number of senior military officers. When Bakr objected to the inclusion of officers, he found himself under house arrest. Some weeks later he resigned on “health grounds.” On July 16, 1979, Saddam became president of Iraq.

Saddam’s rise to power, and ultimately to the presidency was due to both calculated efforts on his part and the role of luck of being at the right time in the right place. Once Saddam overthrew Bakr and took full control of Iraq, his all-encompassing influence over the Baath Party and Iraq became cemented as of day one. A personality cult of awesome proportions was created around him, portraying him as the representative of all the people of Iraq, both in their particular identities as members of different communities, and their common condition as subjects of the Iraqi government. National institutions were created to sustain the national myths.

But behind the picture of stability, the dictatorship was isolated from the people under its rule. Its growing resort to mass executions, arrests and torture, murder of political opponents both in Iraq and abroad, exposed its lack of confidence in its ability to stay in power without terrorist methods.

Saddam spent enormous amount of Iraq’s oil wealth on importing the latest technology of coercion and in building a highly sophisticated surveillance system. This system consisted of massive armed forces, a private militia, and a secrete police service, to bolster and maintain his leadership.

With this system of coercion and in the absence of participatory politics, force became the convenient method of solving conflicts, both on local and international levels. On the domestic scene, coercion ranging from forced migration, mass deportation, and execution to imprisonment and torture was commonly used against organized resistance groups and ordinary people. On the international level, force also was used as the solution to conflict.

The society of Iraq’s Saddam, unlike that of other Third World countries, evolved by compromising people in the violence of the Baath, by sucking them into the agencies of the secrete police, army, and militia. The role of fear in Iraq can only be understood from this standpoint.

Once masses of people actively engaged themselves to absorb into their individual and collective view of the world not only a set of empty abstractions about what caused what but also a caricature-like “appearance” of those abstractions in the form of demons onto which they clutched, all ingrained distinctions between truth or falsity of what they experienced and felt began to break down. The result was a very vulnerable populace, unable to “think” or accumulate experience in dealing with itself, and consequently more prey than ever to believing the most fantastic lies.

In early 1980, Iran actively began to promote its revolutionary vision for Iraq. Once Saddam secured Saudi and Kuwaiti financial support, he ordered the Iraqi troops to invade Iran on September 23, 1980. His action started an eight-years long war with Iran, during which massive military and financial aid was poured into Iraq both from the oil-rich Arab states as well as the West and the United States. The aim was to use Iraq as a tool in order to curtail the Iranian revolution and prevent its spread to the oil-rich Arab states.   

Iran responded by massive human wave attacks on Iraq that threatened the overthrow of the Baath regime. This led Saddam to develop his WMD program in order to offset Iran’s manpower. Saddam’s WMD programs were aided and made possible by the West and the United States. Saddam’s use of these weapons against Iranian targets as well as Kurdish insurgency inside Iraq began as of 1982 and intensified gradually. The West and the United States chose to turn a blind eye to these practices. In 1989, Iran realized that it was no longer fighting Iraq only but a network on Western interests, and because of that it had no realistic chances to win, thereby accepting a cease-fire.

The war crippled Iraq’s economy. To ease his financial burden, Saddam turned to Kuwait as a cash caw. When Kuwait refused to aid Saddam once the Iranian threat was neutralized, Saddam ordered his army to invade Kuwait on August 2, 1990. He was encouraged to do by assurances from April Glaspie, then US Ambassador to Baghdad, that the United States would not interfere in the conflict.

In order to shrink Saddam’s military capacity to pre-Iran/Iraq war in 1980, the US led a coalition of 29 other countries in order to resize Iraq’s military capacity and restore Kuwait to the Sabah family in the process. As such, the Gulf war took place in 1991. The main objective of the war, however, was not to remove Saddam from power, but to resize his military capacity. To assure the regime’s survival, the Republican Guards were allowed to leave the Kuwaiti theatre intact in order to crush the populous uprisings that took place in southern and northern Iraq.

From 1991 until 2003, Iraq was placed under economic sanctions by the United Nations, aimed at forcing Saddam to comply with the Gulf War’s seize-fire resolutions, chiefly among them the destruction of Iraq’s WMD programs. As a result of these sanctions, average Iraqis were suffering harsh living conditions and nearly three million Iraqi children died due to malnutrition and disease.

During 12 years of sanctions, only three groups managed to escape the harshness of the sanctions and their impact. One of these groups was Saddam and his inner circle that continued to live in lavishing palaces. The other group was the Kurdish parties, who enriched their bank accounts by taxing their populous, smuggling oil to Turkey, and receiving aid from the United States. The third group was the Shiites clergies in Najaf, headed by Ayatollah al-Sistani, who continued to receive handsome salaries from the Ministry of Antiquity in Baghdad as well as donations by Iraqi Shiites. The remaining Iraqis were experiencing deteriorating economic conditions.

The suffering of the Iraqi people was causing a worldwide reaction against the sanctions and their chief enforcer, the United States. For many members of the UN Security Council, lifting up the sanctions on Iraq became a matter of when, rather than how. But, lifting up the sanctions also would have revived Saddam’s regime. To the United States, this former stooge was no longer to be trusted and such had to go.

In 2003 and despite worldwide opposition, the United States invaded Iraq under the pretext of ridding the imminent threat of Saddam’s WMD. The invasion ousted Saddam and his Baath regime from power, but it failed to find any WMD. The US then declared itself as an occupying power of Iraq, supported by the United Nations, the very world body that opposed the invasion of Iraq and declared the US-led war as illegal.

Post-Saddam Iraq

 On May 6, 2003 President Bush issued a classified National Security Directive creating the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in Iraq and appointed Ambassador L. Paul Bremer III as head of the CPA, reporting directly to the President through the Secretary of Defense.  On June 28, 2004, the CPA dissolved itself and Bremer left Iraq in haste, allowing for a non-elected interim Iraqi government to take hold while protected and guided by the U.S. military forces in Iraq.

On May 16, 2003 the CPA issued its first regulation in Iraq, in which it spelled out its authority in no uncertain terms.  Section 1 of that regulation stated: "The CPA is vested with all executive, legislative, and judicial authority necessary to achieve its objectives, to be exercised under relevant U.N. Security Council resolutions, including resolution 1483, and the laws and usages of war.  This authority shall be exercised by the CPA Administrator."  

This was a powerful statement, especially for an agency that was never authorized by Congress and not confirmed by the Senate. The CPA was also not accountable to Congress for much of spending of Iraqi oil revenue, and it made very little effort to keep Congress and the public informed about the its reconstruction plans. Under Paul Bremer, the CPA had the power to run the Iraqi government ministries, to appoint Iraqi officials and award lucrative private contracts for reconstruction. It also oversaw local police and set public curfews in Baghdad.

Bremer inhabited Saddam’s Republican palace, an immense complex stretching for several kilometers along the banks of the Tigris, in the center of Baghdad. His offices were situated in the heart of the "green zone." Everywhere else was the "red zone," and was to be avoided.

It was the isolation and centralization of power inside the Green Zone that made America seem an occupying rather than a liberating power.

The CPA will be known for its failures than its accomplishments. This is due to the volume of its negative results and their magnitude. Examples of the CPA’s negative practices and results in Iraq are its policy of DeBaathification, its mishandling of Iraqi oil revenue, its creation of a puppet government and discredited Iraqi Governing Council, its illegal act of privatizing Iraqi economy, its responsibility for the killings of thousands of Iraqi civilians, and its dictations to engineer the political structure in Iraq for years to come.   

DeBaathification From the beginning of Bremer's arrival in Iraq, the CPA consistently misplayed the issue of Iraq's former ruling Sunni group, most of whom were members of the Baath, but who were also the most able and knowledgeable administrators in the country. In addition, many able government employees joined the Baath Party not out of any special political sympathies, but simply to attain or retain their jobs.

The Sunnis were better educated, more experienced and more unified than the Shiite majority. Since a U.S. victory eroded their position of dominance, they were very receptive to the argument that the U.S. government needed to utilize their expertise in order to ensure a smooth political transition.  Instead, under orders from Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, Bremer tried to get rid of former Baathists in the Iraqi government by removing the top layers of bureaucracy. This blunder was also caused by the CPA’s blind support and backing of Chalabi and the INC.

On May 23, 2003, the CPA dissolved the 400,000 Iraqi Army. This decree produced a battle-ready cadre of former officers and enlisted men that resented the US occupation, and left a major security vacuum inside the country. It was one of the CPA’s biggest mistakes.

The Iraqi army was a highly respected institution in Iraq, which Saddam Hussein did not trust and used other organizations like the Republican Guard to spy on. But it was disbanded in an effort to sweep aside any viable internal leadership and to install "democrats" from Chalabi's Iraqi Governing Council. The Pentagon thought the United States would arrive to find a mostly moderate citizenry aching for democracy. What it got was a violent, lawless, rivalrous society coursing with Islamic extremism. The CPA’s decision also not to pay the thousands of unemployed soldiers turned out to be dangerous and was changed fairly soon after the large demonstrations they organized on the streets of the big cities.

In November 2003, Bremer fired 28,000 Iraqi teachers as political punishment for their former membership in the Baath Party, fueling anti-U.S. resistance on the ground. The CPA attributed the firings to "tough, new anti-Baath Party measures" lead by Ahmed Chalabi, a favorite of administration hawks in the White House and Pentagon.

Bremer's DeBaathification policy was questionable from the start and echoed by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi hinting that de-Baathification in Iraq was a policy too stridently enforced by US civilian command.

The Creation of the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) The CPA’s second mistake was the creation of the IGC, a puppet advisory body made up primarily of Iraqi exiles who were agents of the CIA or the Pentagon, such as Ahmad Chalabi and Iyad Allawi. The IGC was something of a curious interim creation. It was not an elected government. Bremer and the CPA hammered the Council together after consultations between factions that supported the war, and created a body that emphasized Iraq’s ethic divisions instead of its unity. The IGC handled the staffing of several ministries and, as a result, cronyism and corruption was rife, with Chalabi putting incompetent, greedy relatives in charge of at least two ministries.

There was a natural suspicion among many Iraqis of the Council’s makeup. Although it represented the major groups, and gave the Shiites a slight majority, some of the Shiites had few roots in the community. The exclusion of the Sadr Movement, for example, proved to be problematic.

Mishandling Iraqi Oil Revenue The third mistake committed by the CPA was its mishandling of Iraqi oil revenue. In May 2003, the United Nations Security Council passed resolution 1483, which gave control of Iraq’s oil revenues and other Iraqi funds to the CPA on condition that they were spent in the interests of the Iraqi people and that they were independently monitored.

U.N. Resolution 1483 of May 2003 says that Iraq's oil revenues should be paid into the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI), that the money be spent in the interests of the Iraqi people, and that it be independently audited. Resolution 1483, which created the Development Fund for Iraq in May 2003, stipulated that the money in the DFI be “used in a transparent manner to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people” and called for it to be audited by independent public accountants approved by the International Advisory and Monitoring Board. The UN, however, clearly lacks any real enforcement power. Therefore, the alleged “flagrant breach” and missing billions notwithstanding, it is unlikely that anyone will ever be charged for robbing Iraq of billions of dollars.

By December 2003, more than six months after the resolution, this board had still not met, amid allegations that the CPA was stalling. Then it took until April 2004 to appoint an auditor, leaving only a matter of weeks to go through the books before the CPA dissolved itself in June 2004.

Watch dog agencies, such as Christian Aid, believes that this failure put the CPA in flagrant breach of the UN resolution. Moreover, in the run-up to the handover, billions dollars were hastily allocated to projects that did not appear to have been properly planned and that $20 billion of Iraq’s oil revenues and other funds were unaccounted for.

Other watchdog groups complained about the opaque nature of the CPA's handling of Iraqi money and the lack of transparency by U.S. and Iraqi officials. This money may never be tracked down, especially when the CPA is not around now to be held accountable. Groups critical of the lack of transparency in the CPA's spending were particularly angry that the CPA was using Iraqi money to pay for questionable contracts some awarded without a public tendering process with U.S. companies.

Assessing Iraq’s oil revenues is made extremely difficult because its oil production is not being metered. The facilities for doing so fell into disuse during the sanctions period. Oil metering is essential to ensure accountability over oil revenues. Yet at the end of April 2004, nearly a year after the CPA started pumping Iraq’s oil, a CPA meeting acknowledged that metering was nonexistent.

It is impossible to tell with any accuracy what the CPA did with $20 billion of Iraq’s own money. This also means that the CPA disappeared without ever having been held accountable for the money. The UN still do not know exactly how Iraq’s money was earned, on what contracts it was spent, or whether this spending was in the interests of the Iraqi people, as required by resolution 1483.

Bremer told the UN that Iraq’s oil money was used to pay for the wheat purchase program, the currency exchange program, the electricity and oil infrastructure programs, equipment for Iraqi security forces, and for Iraqi civil service salaries and ministry budget operations. But the UN does not know which companies have been paid for which jobs. It only knows the total amounts and movements in and out of the Development Fund for Iraq (DFI).

Not only the CPA failed to show exactly how it is spent Iraq’s oil money, but it also failed to be transparent about how it was earning it. A bald figure, updated every few days, was given for Iraq’s cumulative oil earnings since the CPA has been running Iraq.

The CPA then nominated KPMG Audit & Risk Advisory Services to audit the CPA use of the DFI money. The auditor, KPMG, sharply criticized the CPA for the way it spent more than $11 billion in oil revenues and charged that the DFI's administration made it "open to fraudulent acts." 

The CPA’s own inspector general also found that Bremer's agency "failed to exercise adequate control over $9 billion in international aid." For example, the CPA "failed to rein in the cost of housing government employees at a hotel in Kuwait under a contract with Halliburton." According to the inspector general's report, Halliburton booked rooms for CPA officials in the five-star beachfront Hilton in Kuwait at a cost of $2.8 million.

Despite promises by the CPA to rebuild and expand Iraq's infrastructure, the country is still not producing as much electricity or as much oil on a sustained basis as it was just before the war. This is due to a combination of sabotage by unexpectedly strong insurgency, a lack of adequate planning and incompetence by the Pentagon and the CPA, and profiteering by big U.S. companies like Halliburton that captured virtually all of the reconstruction contracts despite the much greater experience of Iraqi firms.

For example, Iraqi construction companies charge only about a tenth of what their U.S. counterparts due and Iraqi security guards get less than one percent of their foreign counterparts for the same work. The average Iraqi is paid $100 a month while truck drivers from the U.S. are paid $8,000 a month by Halliburton for work with similar skills.

Privatization The fourth mistake committed by the CPA was the privatization of Iraqi economy outside international trade agreements and without the consent of the Iraqi people and their representatives. The "Privatization Act" was passed in August 2003 and was intended to help foreign companies pillage Iraq's vital interests and resources. Little to no details have become public. The most important conferences related to Iraq's reconstruction contracts were held abroad to keep the Iraqi media away.

The CPA unveiled in late August 2003 its latest gambit to revive Iraq's economy by opening the country to outside investment. There was concern that traditional industries, rendered relatively inefficient by 23 years of war, sanctions, and under-investment, would quickly be swamped by new factories, throwing more people out of work in a country where unemployment hovers near 60%.

The market economy was more a political issue than a purely economic one. The concern was that the privatization plan for the oil industry would transfer this national asset to foreign hands, and especially to American hands. Many Iraqis cautioned against the colonization of the oil fields, the sale of Iraqi assets to Americans and the plundering of Iraqi wealth by occupiers and again portray oil as the real pretext for war.

On September 19, 2003 Bremer enacted the now infamous Order 39. It announced that 200 Iraqi state companies would be privatized; decreed that foreign firms can retain 100% ownership of Iraqi banks, mines and factories; and allowed these firms to move 100% of their profits out of Iraq. Order 39 violated the Hague regulations in other ways as well. The regulations state that occupying powers "shall be regarded only as administrator of public buildings, real estate, forests and agricultural estates belonging to the hostile state, and situated in the occupied country. It must safeguard the capital of these properties.”

Killing Civilians The fifth mistake that was made by the CPA in Iraq was its responsibility for the killings of thousands of Iraqi civilians. The CPA justified these killings as a response to escalating insurgency. However, more innocent civilians were killed by US occupying forces, including women and children, than members of the Iraqi resistance movement.

It was US occupation that caused the insurgency to emerge. Fallujah residents told reporters that the Americans themselves triggered the birth of the resistance only two weeks after the fall of Baghdad, when their troops entrenched in a Fallujah school opened indiscriminate fire against an angry crowd, killing at least 17 people, including women and children. Bremer then declared war on local populations, causing thousands civilian victims in Iraq.