03-23-06,8:27am
Iraq three years later: A glance back -- from the 19th century until today
Despite the current bloodshed, mayhem, corruption and fear engulfing post-Saddam Iraq, the country, fragmented though it is, still possesses much potential. Iraq is home to a well-educated population of 26 million resilient people. With over 70 percent of this population living and working in cities, Iraq boasts a literate and highly-skilled work force that can gear up -- provided that the rule of law is re-established -- to meet the challenges of complex bureaucratic settings, fair governance, and an integrated modern economy based not only on oil production, but also agriculture and high-tech industries. Although Iraq’s literacy rate, formerly one of the highest in the Arab Middle East, has declined in recent years, it still exceeds the literacy rates of most surrounding countries, and is on a par with that of Portugal in Western Europe, according to a 2002 UNDP report.
Before 1991, Iraq had a substantial middle class characterized by a sophisticated urban and secular culture, distinctive musical styles and a rich body of innovative contemporary poetry and art. In the wake of significant damage from successive wars and the cumulative devastating impact of the UN-imposed sanctions regime, much of Iraq’s infrastructure requires extensive and costly repairs and upgrades.
Even more so, Iraqis themselves are in need of social and psychological healing and regeneration. This is a sociopolitical and interpersonal process requiring considerable time and patience, two things that the Bush administration did not grant Iraqis because of US domestic politics and the need to justify an arrogant foreign policy based on pre-emptive war and neo-imperial attitudes. Democracy, a putative goal of the 2003 US/UK invasion, is always an 'inside job': it cannot be imposed or forced from above -- especially not militarily.
Iraqis, cowed and silenced by a quarter century of Saddam Hussein's tyrannical rule, had high expectations for their country’s infrastructural and social rehabilitation three years ago. The slow rate of such rehabilitiation, given the spectacularly incompetent and clueless US-installed “Transitional Coalition Authority' as well as the current daily murderous violence, has eroded Iraqis' hopes, collective identity and national dignity. As a result, the country’s social cohesion and political stabilization are increasingly under question. Indeed, many observors claim that a long and bloody civil war has already begun.
Clearly, the US and the UK have failed miserably in their crusade to force change (needed though it was) on the Iraqi people. Hence, it will be no surprise if the US begins to extract itself from the profound mess it has made in Iraq just in time for the 2008 US presidential elections. But whether Republicans or Democrats control Congress and the White House three years from now, the spectre of Iraq will haunt much of America's domestic and foreign policies for the next decade. The Iraqi and American people, rather than their leaderships, will pay the greatest price for Iraq's current suffering.
Dangerous Assumptions
Iraq’s oft-noted ethno-religious diversity (the population is approximately 60 percent Shi`a Arabs, 20 percent Sunni Kurds, 20 percent Sunni Arab, and also includes small but influential communities of Turkmen and Assyrian Christians, as well as a very small minority of Jews), has never led to civil war or attempts at partition. Pre-war fears that the destabilization of the Ba’ath regime could spark massive population displacements and bloodletting similar to the events of March-May 1991 have not been borne out –- though they may yet -- since it is not simply the existence of ethnic and religious diversity that gives rise to violent conflict, but rather, the means through which historically distinct communities are treated by administrative power centers.
The manner in which individuals’ and groups’ legal rights and access to resources are constructed, how groups are related to larger political and economic structures, and whether modes of incorporation into administrative systems are collaborative and mutually beneficial, or exploitative and asymmetrical, is what engenders conflicts, not 'essential' cultural traits, religious extremism, or genetic predispositions to conflict. The failure to acknowledge and grasp such social and political dynamics is the most tragic legacy that the international community has bequeathed to the Iraqi people three years after the invasion of Iraq. This poisonous legacy will not, however, remain confined to Iraq, or even to the Middle East, in the coming years.
By any standards of logic, accountabilty or decency, the key architects of this war and its toxic repercussions (particularly the use of torture and the erosion of the Geneva Conventions), should have been fired at least two years ago. The fact that US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is still in his office at the Pentagon, arrogantly dismissive of criticism and unconditionally supported by President Bush and Vice President Cheney, speaks volumes about the callous short-sightedness of US foreign policy and military objectives in the Middle East. It is also a dangerous sign of official blindness to reality, given that many high ranking, seasoned US military officals expressed deep reservations about the invastion. They were pointedly ignored or belittled by neo-conservatives entranced by dreams of over-riding US force and influence.
The sociopolitical and economic background of Iraq’s creation
Iraq, a young state with an ancient heritage, is endowed with tremendous resources: considerable proven oil reserves as well as arable lands watered by the Tigris and Euphrates river systems. The combination of these assets, unique in the Arab Middle East, should ideally enable Iraqis to meet their own needs while offering much to the region and the rest of the world.
The territory of central and southern Iraq is the site of ancient Mesopotamia, one of the key sites of the agricultural revolution that dramatically transformed human sociopolitical organization and economic processes many millennia ago. Iraqis are justly proud of their unique heritage as the 'cradle of civilization,' and have drawn considerable artistic and literary inspiration from a rich history shaped by numerous ancient urban civilizations.
Not only were some of the world’s first cities and city-states established here several millennia ago, but cities also figured prominently in the birth of modern Iraq. The state was formed by conjoining three Ottoman provinces, administered from the cities of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul respectively, during the British colonial period (1918-1932) following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. To a great extent, Iraq’s modern history is a tale of these three cities, as well as the Shi`ite holy cities of Najaf, Karbala, and Samarra, and the predominantly Turkmen and Kurdish oil-rich city of Kirkuk in the north.
Administratively, the Ottoman Empire was a system in which patrilineal kinship systems and tribal organizations, religious identity, localized ties, and occupational distinctions, more so than conceptions of citizenship and an over-riding national identity, provided the modes of organization and frames of meaning underlying sociopolitical structures. Cities were the primary administrative and economic units of the Ottoman Empire. Urban-rural ties organized people’s social universes and structured institutions of resource allocation, political competition, dispute resolution, revenue collection, and economic integration.
Key conflicts during the Ottoman era usually arose not between cities, but rather, between cities and their surrounding rural communities and nomadic or semi-nomadic tribal federations. Until the mid-19th century, most tribal federations had never been formally integrated into the administrative structures of the Ottoman state, but rather, were connected to it through constantly shifting informal patron-client ties.
The weakening of cities usually implied the strengthening of tribal federations, which had dominated the history of this “frontier” region between the Ottoman and the Persian (non-Arab) Safavid Empires from the 15th to the 18th centuries. Conversely, whenever cities became stronger as centers of administrative control and political authority, the influence of tribal federations diminished. Social and political conditions were never static or fixed, as the great Muslim thinker Ibn Khaldoun observed several centuries ago.
As sites of economic and administrative centralization for the rural and tribal communities inhabiting ecologically diverse regions, the cities of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul exhibited distinctly different socioeconomic and ethnic profiles by the close of the Ottoman period in 1918. A quick overview of each city demonstrates this:
Baghdad:
1920 population: 200,000
Economic Bases: Administration, courts, military, universities, central markets and trade, transportation, and artisanal production of goods.
Socio-political Structure: Sunni Georgian (Mamluk) and Arab military elite dominated a population of Shi`a, Jews, and Christians.
Basra:
1920 population: 50,000
Economic Bases: A port city on the Shatt al-Arab, with trading activities oriented towards Indian markets; date and rice cultivation.
Social and Political Structure: A Sunni and Shi`a Arab landowning elite dominated a population of Shi`a, Jews, and some Indians.
Mosul:
1920 population: 70,000
Economic Bases: Markets and overland trade oriented toward Syria and Istanbul; cotton production, grain export, crafts, and agricultural production.
Social and Political Structure: A Sunni Arab and Turkmen military and landowning elite dominated a population of Sunni Arabs and Kurds, and Assyrian Christians.
(Source: Hanna Batatu. 1979. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. (Princeton: Princeton University Press).
Though all three cities were linked by river systems and trade networks that connected this region to China and India in the east and Europe and Istanbul in the west, each city used different currency, weights and measures until the late 19th century.
Contemporary Iraq is profoundly plural in its languages, religions, ethnic groups, cuisines, rituals, and ideological orientations because for centuries it was a region of multiple and autonomous power centers and distinct economic activities, the relative fortunes and interrelations of which fluctuated constantly in relation to administrative initiatives and political events in Istanbul and beyond.
Although Iraq did not emerge as a modern, independent nation state until 1932, the institutional frameworks of a future state structure were put in place in the latter half of the 19th century through the Ottoman Empire's Tanzimat legal reforms. Ottoman reformers, keen to introduce the kinds of administrative structures thought to account for Western Europe’s political and economic successes, buttressed Baghdad as an administrative center in a bid to bring Shi`i, Sunni, and Kurdish tribal groups and agricultural communities beyond the cities under Istanbul’s decisive control.
The key means of accomplishing these reforms centered on land ownership mechanisms, which were to prove revolutionary for the region’s future political and economic profile. The Ottoman Land Reform Law of 1858 aimed to secure and clarify land tenure systems. It reaffirmed state ownership of land, and granted deeds of usufruct in the name of individuals in possession of productive tracts of land. The aim of this reform was to encourage settled and productive agriculture and investments, and thus to produce revenues and economic intgegration, as well as to assert stronger political control from the center to the peripheries of the Ottoman Empire.
Land reforms led, in effect, to an institution similar to private property, which transformed tribal social structures into landed feudal structures. Tribal shaikhs (leaders) quickly became wealthy landlords, while their followers became tenant farmers. The prohibition on collective rights to land resulted in a profoundly hierarchical and asymmetrical social structure that gave rise to a new elite class of wealthy land owners as well as a new -- and much larger -- class of impoverished farming families.
Traditional moral values affirming rights and obligations rooted in a rural and/or pastoral nomadic lifestyle, which had encouraged solidarity, egalitarianism, honor, mutual assistance and dignity, began to break down as tribal groups became agriculturally based and integrated into a regional and international capitalist order. Though the previous social and political system had its share of problems, the new order sharpened inequalities and encouraged grievances.
Reversing the integrative measures initiated by the 19th century Ottoman reformers, British colonial administrators reinvigorated tribal identity categories and reinstated privileges for tribal leaders, who had now become a wealthy agricultural, rather than semi-nomadic, propertied elite. Shaikhly landowners accumulated ever more land, money and power in the 1920s and 1930s, and also became parliamentarians, ministers, and absentee landlords. Most attained clear legal title to their vast landholdings after the establishment of the state in 1932, thus formalizing and entrenching existing class disparities.
Tenant farmers, however, sank further into poverty and received low wages as well as inadequate services and infrastructure in the rural hinterlands of Iraq’s southern and northern governorates. Furthermore, over-exploitation of water in the vicinities of Kut and Baghdad dried up regions further downstream, and left some agricultural areas useless for future production. Soil salination became a serious and long-lasting problem in the south of the country. Thus, tribesmen-turned-peasants fed the massive waves of migration from rural areas to Baghdad, Basra, Mosul and Kirkuk that began in the late 1920s and accelerated over the next three decades.
Urban population growth in Iraq’s three main cities, 1935-1977:
Year Baghdad | Basra | Mosul
1935: 350,000 | 60,000 | 100,000
1957: 793,183 | 164,905 | 178,222
1977: 2,600,000 | 550,000 | 450,000
(Source: Batatu, 1979, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq.) continues... (Part 1 of 2 parts)
