Recent setbacks suffered by Iraqi forces in the country’s contested Sunni areas have led senior Pentagon officials to question their courage. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter said the Iraqis “showed no will to fight” when ISIS moved to seize the Anbar provincial capital of Ramadi despite greatly outnumbering their enemy, and Joint Chiefs Chairman Martin Dempsey observed that Iraq’s military wasn’t driven out of the city, “they drove out.” The reality, though, is that Iraqi forces had been fighting for over a year in Anbar with little support from Baghdad. So Marina Ottaway of the Wilson Center got it right when she told the Associated Press that the defeat at Ramadi was not a failure of courage, but a failure of politics.
Unfortunately, that assessment could be accurately applied to Iraq’s entire modern history, which began a century ago when European powers invented the nation without any real understanding of the region. That flawed beginning nearly guaranteed that Iraq would one day become a failed state, just like Lebanon, Libya, Syria and other Arab countries that the Europeans played a role in creating. The discovery of vast quantities of oil in Iraq may have delayed its dissolution by giving the central government the resources needed to impose order, but in the end Iraq will cease to exist. So a U.S. strategy focused on stabilizing the country is unrealistic. Here are five basic reasons why Iraq can’t be fixed.
Nonsensical Borders. The borders of Iraq were drawn hastily during World War One by Britain and France as part of an agreement to demarcate where their respective spheres of influence would be in the Middle East if the Ottoman Empire and its Central Power allies were defeated. France got the Levant and Britain got Mesopotamia, which became Iraq by kluging together three former Ottoman provinces centered on Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. That’s the reason why the borders consist largely of straight lines and sharp angles: the Europeans drew them with little regard to who lived where. So Iraq ended up with the makings of three nations within its arbitrary boundaries: Arab Shia in the south, Arab Sunnis in the northwest, and non-Arab Kurds in the northeast. British leaders realized the new state would probably be incapable of self-government, so they planned to run the place until an indigenous ruling class could be installed.
No National Identity. From the start the Brits favored relying on Sunni Arabs to carry out local administration, because they had come to comprise much of the Ottoman military’s officer corps in the area during four centuries of Ottoman rule. However, Shiite Arabs did not want to be ruled by Sunni Arabs — who they greatly outnumbered within the new state — and Kurds did not want to be ruled by Arabs. The Kurds rebelled against Baghdad’s authority continuously throughout the 20th Century, and once-submissive Shia became politicized after the Iranian revolution installed a radical Shiite theocracy in Teheran in 1979. So Iraq had no organic national identity at its inception, and the repressive steps Sunni autocrats took over the years to enforce their authority left the country ripe for dissolution when America invaded in 2003. The U.S. found itself defending a state for which the vast majority of citizens felt no real sense of loyalty.
Autocratic Tradition. Mesopotamia — the “land between the rivers” in Greek – has been home to numerous civilizations during its 8,000-year history, but it has never given rise to anything resembling a democracy. It is riven with ethnic, religious and tribal divisions that would defy management by even the most enlightened leaders, and there have been precious few of those. Simply keeping the Sunni tribes of the north and west in line has been a challenge for Baghdad’s rulers, and that has usually been achieved by giving them a disproportionate share of the spoils from autocratic rule, while the other 80% of the population was neglected or coerced. The current Shiite-dominated government has turned the tables on tradition by treating Sunnis the same way Shia once were, which explains why defenders of Anbar have gotten scant support from Baghdad. But there is nothing in Iraqi tradition indicating democracy is feasible, or even favored.
Systemic Brutality. Authoritarian rule has been the norm for most of human history, but that has not always meant the kind of state-sponsored brutality common in modern Iraq. Faced with a rebellion during the Iran-Iraq war, Saddam Hussein destroyed 2,000 Kurdish villages, killing up to 200,000 civilians; his predecessors had used mass deportations in an attempt to pacify Kurdish areas. Similar brutality was applied to Shiites in the south when they rose against Baghdad in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. So the widespread sectarian violence during the American occupation may have been new in form, but it was far from unprecedented in Iraqi history. When ruling classes repeatedly resort to mass brutality in enforcing order, they traumatize oppressed populations for generations, making it all but impossible for later rulers to bridge the communal divide in fashioning a unified state.
Pervasive Corruption. Iraq’s political culture is one of the most corrupt in the world. Transparency International, the global coalition against corruption, ranks Iraq 170th out of 175 countries in terms of the rapacity of its leaders and the extent of official corruption. Virtually every transaction of the government from construction contracts to military commissions to prisoner releases is tainted by corruption. A commission to investigate the extent of wrongdoing has calculated that up to $330 billion in public funds is missing as a result of malfeasance by officials. This continues a long tradition in which political leaders disbursed funds to strengthen ties with families, tribes and religious communities at the expense of the larger good. And as Patrick Cockburn observed in the British newspaper The Independent, “The system cannot be reformed by the government because it would be striking at the very mechanism by which it rules.”
Given these fundamental flaws, the real question isn’t whether Iraq has a future. Over the long run it is sure to disappear, at least in the sense that its borders will change. The real question is what will follow, and there the dangers are considerable. Anbar might become part of a jihadist caliphate. The Shias of the south might federate with overwhelmingly Shiite Iran to form a new disruptive force in the region. Kurdistan could become a radical state fomenting insurgency among Kurds in neighboring countries. Washington supports the current Iraqi state more because it fears what might follow than because it likes what it sees.
But a breakup need not lead to even worse conditions. Freed from the neglect of Shiite-run Baghdad, the tribes of Anbar might take ownership of the fight against ISIS. Shiite Iraq would possess the resources to sustain nationhood on its own, and thus might elect not to make common cause with the Persian government of Iran. And the Kurds of Turkey and Syria might view an independent Kurdistan as a homeland worth emigrating to, rather than a source of support for insurgency. Obviously, the key word in each of these scenarios is “might.”
The one thing that should be clear to everybody is that the ethnic and sectarian cauldron that Iraq has become today does not have a future. Making its preservation the centerpiece of American policy in the region is a prescription for defeat.
Syria is also disintegrating into Sunni, Alawite and possibly Druze cantons. That’s the future of the post-Sykes-Picot Middle East.