Shifting Sands

by Raja Shehadeh

  I remember in the immediate run-up to the Iraq War of 2003 the Guardian published a survey of views on the impending conflict from leading historians on both sides of the Atlantic. Though the verdicts were varied, the weight of opinion, as you would expect from the Guardian, was anti-war. Most disputed the historical analogies made by both the pro-war (this was Munich 1938) and the anti-war (no, it was Suez 1956) camps. The Bush and Blair governments portrayed anti-war opinion as the appeasement of a dangerous dictator who threatened world peace. A number of their opponents predicted the looming conflict would be another Suez, an imperial fiasco revisited.

  ‘History never repeats itself, ever. That’s its murderous charm,’ Simon Schama argued. ‘The poet Joseph Brodsky, in his great essay “A Profile of Clio”, wrote that when history comes, it always takes you by surprise, and that’s what I believe, too.’ Having said that, Schama then went on to predict that Western-led war in Iraq would bring a chaotic and broken state, ‘a teddy bears’ picnic for terrorism’.1 It is difficult, looking back from the vantage point of 2015, to argue with that. In fact, it was a remarkably prescient forecast from a man who believed history was a series of surprises.

  Before discussing the turmoil raging across Iraq and Syria, let’s go back to the eighth century for a dose of historical enlightenment. The year was 775 and the founder of Baghdad, the Abbasid caliph Abu Jaafar al Mansur, ‘The Victorious’, had just died. He had left strict instructions to his son and heir, Mahdi, and his daughter-in-law, Rita, together with a key to a door that must not be opened until his death was confirmed. Off trooped Mahdi and his wife, expecting to find an underground storeroom full of treasures: gold, precious stones and so on. The wealth of the world had been piling up in Baghdad during the past decade, since the city’s foundation in 762, and already it was becoming the cultural, commercial and political capital of the planet.

  But instead, when Mahdi and Rita opened the door, they found an entire storeroom full of dead bodies. Men, women and children of all ages, and every single one of them had a little leather tag in their ear detailing the name, the tribe and the exact genealogy of the victim. The one thing that they had in common was that every single one of them was an Alid, a supporter of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-inlaw. In a word, a Shia.

  The reason why I tell that story is not to cast a little note of cheer into the prevailing Middle Eastern gloom, as much as we all need it, but to make the point that the sectarian tensions that bedevil the region today have existed in Iraq since Baghdad was founded in the late eighth century. These sectarian tensions, in other words, are not a creation of the Americans or the British, much as they may have exacerbated them. That is the first thing, I would argue, that we should bear in mind when we discuss Iraq in the twenty-first century. And the second is that for almost its entire history – with only a brief hiccup in the tenth and eleventh centuries under the Shia Buyid dynasty and a fleeting glimpse of Safavid rule in the seventeenth – Iraq has always been ruled by a Sunni minority. That was the ancient structure of power the US and the UK overturned in 2003, with consequences that we still live with – and Iraqis die from in their droves today.

  I must stress that this is not the same thing as saying Iraq is a country where Sunni and Shia cannot and do not live quite happily together. The vast majority of Iraqis, for a large portion of their history, have done precisely that, whether in the glorious times of the Abbasid caliphate or during the era of nationalism, pan-Arabism and Baathism a thousand years later. Peaceful coexistence tends not to make headlines in the same way that explosive violence does. What has changed during the past decade from 2003 is the sharp polarisation between the communities and the redrawing of the sectarian map of Baghdad, which has been transformed from a mixed city to a largely Shia city with Sunni enclaves.

  It is a fact that Shia rule in Iraq remains unacceptable today to many Sunnis – and vice versa. There is no shortage of Sunni aristocrats, including highly educated friends of mine who helped me when I was researching my history of Baghdad, who flatly deny that the Shia are a majority in Iraq. Some Sunnis I have spoken to see the Shia as peasants, barbarians, uneducated, illiterate, unfit to be the natural rulers of Iraq. They describe them in terms better excluded from these pages. It is an extreme view, certainly, but it is surprisingly widely held. It is also, perhaps, typical of an urban–rural divide which characterises much of the region, indeed much of the world.

  If that sets the scene in terms of a brief demographic portrait of Iraq, we should also take note of how the territory was administered in the days before it became a modern nation-state, headed by a new Hashemite monarch, King Faisal I, in 1921. When Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent arrived before the city walls and took Baghdad in 1534, he ushered in a lengthy era of Ottoman control that lasted until the British arrived in 1917. (Unlike many other conquerors, including his Ottoman predecessor, aptly named Salim the Grim, he offered respect to both Sunni and Shia subjects, making pilgrimages to important Shia shrines.) One could argue that the Turks, co-religionists of the Iraqi people, understood the place rather better than the British in the twentieth century and the Americans in the twenty-first. For one thing the Ottomans ran what later became Iraq as three vilayets, or provinces. To generalise about these three regions, Mosul in the north was largely but not exclusively Kurdish, Baghdad in the centre was largely but not exclusively Sunni, and Basra in the south was predominantly Shia with exceptions. The Ottomans, in other words, chose to administer this territory as three related but separate provinces. The British, in their wisdom, decided to throw them all together and create the new state of Iraq.

  Being British in design, the new state naturally had to have a king. When assessing how successful was the monarchy, we can begin with a reflection on its relatively brief duration. Created with high hopes in 1921, it ended in a hail of bullets in Baghdad in 1958. Though some Iraqis look back to this as a halcyon period of Iraq’s history and a rare time of stability, it should be noted that within fifteen years of King Faisal’s coronation Baghdad earned the dubious distinction of hosting the first coup within the modern Middle East when General Bakr Sidki replaced the civilian government with a military regime in 1936. If we are looking for constancy under the British Mandate and in pre-revolutionary Iraq, the dominant figure of his time was unquestionably Nuri Pasha, who generally occupied the positions of foreign minister or defence minister when he was not serving one of eight terms as prime minister. First appointed premier in 1930, he survived as a minister until 1958, when he too came to a bloody end. He, like so many of his governments, was viewed by many Iraqis as a British stooge. In the era of Nasser, it was hardly surprising that nationalism and pan-Arabism found fertile soil in Iraq from the 1950s. To summarise the period from the creation of Iraq to the rise of the Baathists, we could do worse than recall the forgivably jaundiced words of King Faisal shortly before his death in 1933: ‘In Iraq, there is still – and I say this with a heart full of sorrow – no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.’2

  On the one hand, then, you have Iraq or Mesopotamia as home to the world’s oldest civilisation, with successive empires flourishing in the fertile Land Between the Rivers from Sumerian times in the sixth millennium BC through the Babylonian, Assyrian, Achaemenid, Seleucid, Parthian, Roman and Sassanid periods. On the other, you have Iraq as a modern nation-state with limited history – less than a century old and with serious questions now being asked about its very future as a nation-state. I have had numerous conversations with Iraqis discussing the possibilities of an Iraqi break-up, including its fracturing into three parts along ethnic and sectarian lines: a ‘Sunnistan’ in central Iraq, with a Kurdistan to the north and a ‘Shiastan’ to the south. For more encouraging signs that Iraq may weather its latest storm and rema
in a sovereign state, a recent survey found that although 81 per cent of Sunnis and just 34 per cent of Shia favoured a separation of religion and politics, ‘both Sunni and Shia tended to identify themselves as Iraqis rather than as Muslims or Arabs’.3 Whatever their positions, few take the survival of Iraq with its present borders for granted.

  So much for that brief survey of Iraq’s demographics and earlier methods of administration. If we are to understand the ongoing crisis in Iraq – not to mention that in Syria, Egypt, Yemen and Libya – it is essential to give some thought to the quality of government and governance. I would argue that in recent years Iraq has suffered terribly from a devastating lack of good governance. Iraqis of a certain age – sophisticated urban Sunnis especially – go misty-eyed when discussing the 1950s, which they see as the last of the halcyon days in the country. It was a time of peace, rising prosperity, a vibrant cultural life, architectural innovation and growing regional influence. Tragically, it proved all too short-lived. With the revolution of 1958, the British-supported monarchy met its bloody end and Iraq became a republic. Instead of leading to greater freedoms and a more inclusive politics, however, the 1960s deteriorated quickly from hope to despair – and violence between Communists, Baathists and pan-Arabists. General Abd al Karim Kassem, leader of the revolution and champion of the Iraqi masses, was himself executed in 1963 by his former comrade in arms Colonel Abdusalam Aref. Power was not to be shared. It was to be won – and preserved at all costs – by force.

  Recent decades have certainly contributed to the crisis that we see now in Iraq. A certain form of political stability, one could argue, arrived with Saddam Hussein seizing complete power in 1979 – having ruthlessly taken charge of the various intelligence and security agencies during the previous decade (as did, more recently, the former prime minister Nouri al-Maliki during his eight years as premier). But at what a cost! Very shortly after taking power, Saddam launched a war against Iran. That lasted a decade, and the casualty count was between 1 million and 1.5 million on both sides. Complete ruin and apocalypse for both countries.

  Within two years of that war ending, Saddam precipitated the first Gulf War in 1990, when, in American Secretary of State James Baker’s words, issued as a pre-war threat, Iraq was bombed ‘back into the Stone Age’.4 Iraqis haven’t really known peace and its dividends since that time. The 1990s were an appalling decade, when Iraqis bled under UN Security Council sanctions while Saddam and his entourage got richer. Infant malnutrition became endemic in a country that should have been prospering from oil revenues. UNICEF estimated around 500,000 children under five died unnecessarily as a result of the embargo.5 Visiting Baghdad in the 1990s, the Canadian writer Paul Roberts aptly described what had been happening to Iraq during the past twenty years as ‘a psychological holocaust’.6 Bear in mind what has happened to Iraq since the 1990s.

  Sanctions only ended in 2003 with the US-led invasion, which quickly triggered an al-Qaeda-led insurgency of unfathomable violence, drawing in disgruntled Baathists and a shifting mix of tribal militias. Living in Baghdad at that time, I was sometimes shaken out of bed by yet another car bomb blowing innocent Iraqis to smithereens. It always used to amaze me – and still does – that the flow of young men prepared to kill themselves in a jihad which took almost exclusively Muslim blood was apparently so endless.

  From al-Qaeda it was only a short, bloody step – via the deeply corrupt, incompetent and sectarian premiership of Nouri al-Maliki – to ISIL (Daesh in Arabic) today. And now we find ourselves in yet another bloody Iraqi crisis. For the first time in 2,000 years the ancient city of Mosul has no Christians. Yazidis have been butchered. Iraqi Jews have already been hounded into extinction, suffering the same fate as their co-religionists across so much of the Middle East. It is one of many tragedies that corruption in the Iraqi army is so bad that vast swathes of the country have fallen to the jihadists as army units, neglected by their commanding officers, starved of proper supplies of food, water and equipment, have simply melted away.

  The point of that summary of Iraq’s recent history is to emphasise the calamitous lack of good governance that has bedevilled the country in recent decades and which continues to do so. Good governance in Iraq – and across much of the Middle East – is an oxymoron. This is not simply the view of another critical Westerner. Go back to the UNDP’s Arab Human Development Report of 2002, compiled by a team of Arab scholars, and review some of its key findings. That inaugural report highlighted what it called three major deficits at the heart of the Arab world’s predicament – in freedom, knowledge and women’s empowerment. ‘The transfer of power through the ballot box is not a common phenomenon in the Arab world,’ the report noted in a triumph of understatement. As for the quality of education on offer, as Imam Ali bin Abi Taleb wrote in the seventh century, ‘If God were to humiliate a human being, He would deny him knowledge.’ On the question of women’s position in Arab societies, where the report was more hopeful, the rise of Daesh in Syria and Iraq, and the growing conservatism of a number of countries, does not augur well. As Iraqis know only too well, you cannot enjoy peaceful development, basic public services, human rights, a functioning economy and an inclusive political environment if your leaders are unwilling or unable to share political power equitably on the one hand and guarantee security on the other.

  When you look at the Arab Spring, in Iraq it seems to me it never really happened. It is surely one of the greatest tragedies for the Arab world that the hope unleashed by popular movements across the region, from Tunisia, Egypt and Libya to Syria and Bahrain, has been so comprehensively snuffed out – with the single exception of Tunisia. In Egypt vested interests in the army hit the default button, protecting their economic interests, imprisoning opponents and dealing a near death blow to democratic forces. In Libya, militias have refused to disarm, tribal and regional differences have been allowed to intensify and foreign powers have boosted Islamist extremists in the east of the country, making peace and stability a more distant prospect than ever. You now have two premiers and two ‘governments’ in two cities. It wasn’t meant to be like this. Looking at Syria in early 2015, it is difficult to see that vicious conflict ending any time soon. Summarising things crudely, you have a cruel dictator versus vicious Islamists, with the moderate opposition squeezed into virtual irrelevance for the time being. The cynical words of Henry Kissinger, when describing the Iraq–Iran War, spring to mind: ‘A pity they both can’t lose.’ But, as is always the case in war, it is the ordinary people who are losing everything.

  The only consolation I can take from this desperately bleak picture in Iraq and across the region – once more with a historian’s hat on – is that it takes time to recover from devastating dictatorships and prolonged conflict. Gaddafi ruled – and eviscerated – Libya for forty-three years. As I write, it has been less than four years since his removal. It may take a generation to recover, and of course there is no guarantee of a happy ending. I always felt, having worked in Libya since the 1980s, that if Libya couldn’t make a decent fist of the Arab Spring, no country could. Rich in energy resources, with a small and moderate population and no sectarian divide, Libya is favourably blessed. Yet the turmoil there continues.

  As a natural optimist I’ve found the events of the past few years, especially in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya, profoundly disheartening. One thing I’ve learned from studying thirteen centuries of Iraqi history is that turbulence and conflict are almost the norm. Stability tends to be elusive. Of course Sunni and Shia can live together very happily, and they generally do, together with Jews and Christians, but all too often there are these extraordinarily violent flashpoints, frequently exacerbated by foreign invasions, a recurrent curse in the history of the Middle East. I remember years ago one of my Middle East history professors likened the Western powers to quarrelling dinosaurs. As they fought in Europe, their long tails would sweep across the Middle East, destroying countries, remaking borders and creating new facts on the ground that the loc
al population then had to live with. Has anything changed, I wonder, as we contemplate more Western intervention in Iraq and Syria?

  There is an ongoing debate about whether the West should intervene militarily in Iraq and Syria. In a 2014 piece in the Spectator advocating robust military intervention, I was fascinated – OK, horrified – to read that one of the reasons given by the writer was that the new Iraqi prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, speaks fluent English and has a DPhil from the University of Manchester. The message was clear. He’s one of us, so it’ll all be all right. Then came the argument that the American failure was not to have spent too long in Iraq but to have left too early – after eight years. To me that argument is complete fantasy, as good an example as any of the lack of understanding of Middle Eastern history, politics and culture. I would suggest that we in the West should be much more humble and realistic about what we can achieve in the Middle East and acknowledge what general publics in both the West and Middle East know only too well, especially after the case studies of Iraq and Afghanistan: we’re not very good at interventions.

  Looking ahead, I think that in fifteen years Iraq will be a violent, difficult place. Some Iraqis say its best hope may well be under someone who is able to create security, and in recent years that has tended to mean a strongman or dictator. Against that dispiriting view, one should also note that a recent survey found that 88 per cent of Iraqis considered democracy the best form of governance for Iraq – in which case politicians and the population will need to learn and put into practice some of its basic principles, from transparent government and the protection of minorities to honest elections and the peaceful transfer of power.7 Iraq should be one of the most prosperous countries in the world, but it’s not. It’s sitting on a lake of oil, but can barely get the oil out of the ground. Iraqis have seen so much warfare, but it’s proving incredibly difficult for them to return to anything approaching a peaceful situation. Politicians urgently need to provide responsible, non-sectarian leadership and functioning public services.