Heirs of Sargon.

• Author: Kaplan, Robert D.
• Position: Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation - Book review

Adeed Dawisha, Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 408 pp., $29.95.

Iraq has never been left alone. The late British travel writer and Arabist Freya Stark writes: "While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man." (1) For Mesopotamia cut across one of history's bloodiest migration routes. It was the subject of foreign invasions and the by-product of ethnic conflicts.

Whether Iraq is being attacked from the Syrian Desert in the west or the plateau of Elam in Iran to the east, this is a country constant victim to occupation. From as early as the third millennium BC, the ancient peoples of the Near East fought over control of Mesopotamia. From the Persian kings Darius and Xerxes who ruled Babylon, to the Mongol hordes that later swept down to overrun the land, to the long-running Ottoman rule that ended with the First World War, Iraq's is a tragic history.

Increasing the bloodshed, Mesopotamia has rarely been a demographically cohesive country. The Tigris and Euphrates that run through Iraq have long constituted a frontier zone where various groups, often the residue of these foreign invasions, clashed and overlapped. As the French orientalist Georges Roux painstakingly documents in Ancient Iraq (1964), since antiquity, north, south and center have always been in pitched battle. Rulers of the first citystates, the southern Sumerians fought the central-Mesopotamian Akkadians. They both fought the north-inhabiting Assyrians. The Assyrians, in turn, fought the Babylonians. And this was to say nothing of the many pockets of Persians who lived amid the native Mesopotamians, forming another source of strife. Not since its earliest existence has Iraq been free of violence. And it has always taken totalitarian rule to control the people.

For though totalitarianism may be a product of the twentieth century, megalomania and its attendant personality cult first broke ground in the mud swamps of Mesopotamia. Only the most suffocating of tyrannies could stave off the utter disintegration to which this frontier region was and remains prone. As Adeed Dawisha notes in Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation, "The fragility of the social order was structural to the land of Mesopotamia...." And this fragile order, which pitted group against group in a densely populated river valley with no protective boundaries, led ultimately and seemingly inexorably to a twentieth-century tyranny straight out of antiquity: a tyranny which, the moment it was toppled, led to several years of bloodcurdling anarchy with atrocities that had an ancient aura. That is why, with Saddam Hussein, one came face-to-face with the living past. Here is the late-seventh-century-BC Assyrian ruler Sennacherib describing his deeds against Babylon: "I devastated, I destroyed, by fire I overthrew." (2) Here is Saddam in 1990, prior to the first Gulf War: "I will consume half of Israel by fire ... the earth will burn beneath [the Americans'] feet ... no military leader can become master of the world unless he controls Babylon."

And controlling Babylon is no easy task. Through the Ottoman occupation to the twenty-first century, Iraq remained a vague geographical expression--a loose assemblage of tribes, sects and ethnicities--much more than a clearly defined state. When the British tried to "sculpt" a polity between the Tigris and Euphrates after the fall of the Ottoman...