The Gaul of Iraq

As all schoolboys know from Julius Caesar’s Commentaries, “Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres,” all Gaul (today’s France) is divided into three parts.

What those three parts were no longer matters very much. But it does matter that Iraq also is divided into three parts — Sunnis, Shi’ites and Kurds. It is a country based on a fiction, as are many post-colonial countries like Nigeria. Iraq will not survive as a united country, no matter how much the U.S. or the United Nations try to endow it with territorial legitimacy.

“Iraq,” the country’s official name, comes from the Arabic word araqa meaning “deep-rooted.” Etymologically, “Iraq” came from the Sumerian region of Uruk (Warka) dating to about 3,400 BCE. The biblical name was “Erech” (Genesis 10:10).

The official boundaries of Iraq were the product of a sketch on tracing paper in 1918 by Gertrude Bell, at that time a minor British diplomat. With T.E. Lawrence, she set up a king of the new “nation” of Iraq, another example of the absent-mindedness which characterized British empire-building.(See Janet Wallach, “The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell.”)

Iraq emerged from the union of three Ottoman provinces: Mosul in the north, Baghdad in the middle, and Basra in the south. Mosul’s political ties were with Syria and Turkey, and its history was bound up with that of the Kurds as well.

Baghdad, and the adjacent Shi’ite shrines of Najaf and Karbala and Basra, also heavily Shi’ite, could well gravitate toward Iran.

Judging from past history, this unnatural union may not hold together long. There were three Kurdish uprisings in the north between 1922 and 1932 and a rebellion in the south between 1935 and 1936. Between 1921 and 1958, more than 50 Iraqi governments came into power, often on the wings of military coups and “strongman” dictators like Saddam Hussein, in the later decades of the 20 century.

The asset Iraq lacks today is what its next-door neighbor, Turkey, enjoyed after the crushing defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I: an intelligent but secular-minded leader, Kemal Ataturk. And the contrast between the two adjacent countries is startling in its implications.

Unlike Iraq, Turkey had never been a European dependency. In 1923, Kemal became Turkey’s first president and ruled from 1923 until his death in 1938. During the years of his rule, this ex-Army officer undertook a campaign of Westernization that primarily meant forcing organized religion and traditional Islamic values to submit to civil authority.

Ataturk abolished both the sultanate and the caliphate, advanced education (especially in the sciences), gave women the vote, outlawed wearing the red fez as a symbol of outmoded Ottoman ways, abolished the Arabic alphabet and introduced the Latin alphabet, insisting the transition be effected within six months, required Turks to take surnames, hence Kemal adopted the surname “Ataturk,” and overhauled the bureaucratic and economic spheres of Turkish activity.

The position of Sheikh ul-Islam (the highest-ranking religious official in the Ottoman Empire) was abolished, religious schools were closed, and the administration of all vakifs (religious and charitable endowments) was given over to the prime minister.

Islamic law courts were shut down. A civil code of law, based on Swiss civil law, was put in place to supersede Islamic law in personal matters. Finally, a constitutional amendment dropped Islam as the state religion. ( I found a good deal of this information in “The Encyclopedia of World History” and in the writings of Professor Dankwart Rustow.)

The onerous task for the new Iraqi government is to see if it can do the impossible: keep the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shi’ites in southern Iraq within the country’s presently recognized boundaries. This task is achievable only so long as the coalition military forces, primarily those of the U.S., remain on station. The day these forces leave — bye-bye, Iraq.

Arnold Beichman, a Hoover Institution research fellow, is a columnist for The Washington Times.