It may surprise most Americans, but the “forever wars” haven’t ended quite yet. Rather, the final US-led mission in Iraq — Task Force Inherent Resolve, a 25-nation coalition set up in 2014 to counter the Islamic State — isn’t set to disband until sometime in our new year. Although a small group of US counterterrorist forces may remain in the region, 2025’s pullout can be viewed as a symbolic end to America’s ill-fated attempt to create a stable and free Iraq that, in President George W. Bush’s words, would “be a watershed event in the global democratic revolution.”
This withdrawal will probably have none of the bloody chaos of the Joseph Biden administration’s botched exit from Afghanistan in 2021. That said, few people are optimistic about the future of Iraq’s 46 million people. For 20 years, parliaments have come and gone; twice, the nation has suffered more than nine months without a sitting government. Acrimony and distrust between Shiites, who form a majority, and Sunni Muslims remain strong. The ethnic Kurdish regions in the north are largely autonomous. Above all, there is the Iran problem: Tehran exerts tremendous political pressure on its fellow Shiites in Iraq, and the strongest militias are Iranian proxies.
Looking ahead, is there hope that anything good can come from the toppling of Saddam Hussein — which occurred before about half of today’s Iraqis were even born? Can sectarian strife give way to a functioning polity? Will Iraq’s government establish real sovereignty, or is it doomed to puppethood under Iranian domination? Looming above it all is a 100-year-old question: Is Iraq even a “real” place?
Across the political spectrum, foreign policy mandarins give little reason for hope. They may be prescient — I hardly consider myself a mandarin — but if one takes the long view about the future of nations as I do, a more encouraging picture emerges. And by long, I mean really long: Let’s look at Iraq not through the lens of the last two decades, but that of the last five millennia.
I’m going to get a little help here from two longtime acquaintances. One is Bartle Bull, an explorer of distant lands, Iraq war correspondent and author of the mammoth new book Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000-Year History of Iraq. The other is Robert D. Kaplan, one of the most prolific and insightful writers on the Middle East and beyond, whose newest book is Waste Land: A World in Permanent Crisis. While their erudite works pass any history test, both men started their careers as travel writers — or perhaps more accurately, writer-travelers — which so often proves a valuable background. (They will be appearing together to discuss US foreign policy at the University of Albany on Feb. 5.)
Bull’s book is great fun, all door-stopping 546 pages of it. When you think about it, 100 pages per millennium doesn’t seem so excessive. Ranging from the voyages of two epic adventurers, the mythical Gilgamesh (who inhabits “the shadow lands at the very edge of history itself”) and the Bible’s Abraham, to the nonexistent WMDs of Saddam Hussein, it makes a lengthy and convincing case that Iraq has always been “real.”
“The last word on the question of whether Iraq really is a distinct place, historically, can be given to the following fact,” he writes. “If one divides the five thousand years of human civilization into ten periods of five centuries each, during the first nine of these the world’s leading city was in one of the three regions of current-day Iraq.”
This historical reality runs counter to the conventional wisdom that Iraq and its neighbors are artificial constructs: the result of misguided colonialism, particularly the “lines in the sand” of the Sykes-Picot agreement cooked up in secret between France and the UK in 1916 (which Bull says was never meant to be anything more than “a putative sketch of the future” and T.E. Lawrence, aka “Lawrence of Arabia,” called “a fraud”). Bear in mind that not all imperialism was Western: Under Ottoman rule, Mesopotamia was divided into three provinces — Mosul, Baghdad and Basra — that more or less comprised the Iraq of today.
The question is whether geography is still destiny. “That floodplain of the Tigris and Euphrates that led to these cities has created a very long time ago something that still exists today, which is a distinct geographical place and the kind of cultural and civilizational and political history flow from that,” Bull told me.
True, the region was often under the yoke of foreign powers, yet Mesopotamian culture still reshaped that of its conquerors: For example, the Abbasid Empire that ruled the area from the 8th to the 13th centuries even moved its capital from Syria to the new city of Baghdad. It quickly became the wellspring of one of the greatest cultural and intellectual flowerings in human history, powered not just by Arab society, Bull notes, but Sufi mysticism, Persian Zoroastrianism, and Western humanism, among others. (Alexander the Great planned to shift his capital from Macedonia to Iraq before his death at Babylon in 323 BC.) “It was an extraordinarily fruitful cross-pollination of cultures in the region, without which our existence today would be incalculably poorer,” writes Bull.
But throughout the millennia, there was one constant source of tension: Iran (or by its former name, Elam), “was fundamentally — again and again, on and on, for almost three thousand years — the mortal rival of the leading Iraq-based states of the day.” It’s an ancient animosity that actually bodes well for Iraqi autonomy today.
“Iraqis don’t look over the border and want to be part of this failed communist hellhole,” Bull told me. “Yes, Iran’s going to have undue influence if we just give up and don’t counter them, of course. But Iraqis have spoken again and again, voted with their feet, so to speak.” As the Iranian-American scholar Karim Sadjadpour likes to say, “Iran has a government that aspires to be like North Korea and a society that aspires to be like South Korea.”
Bull dismisses the idea that, absent a strongman, chaos is Iraq’s natural state. “To say that is to ignore the historical facts of Iraq,” he told me. “Iraqis think of the years immediately after the US-led invasion. If Iraq was ever not supposed to exist and was going to split up, it would’ve happened then. How many countless Iraqis stood up inside their own country and made sure that that never happened.”
Robert Kaplan, for his part, uses recent history to rebut the argument that the Iraqis aren’t capable of liberal self-rule. “It’s not true that Iraq has not governed itself. They did during the whole interwar period into 1958” — when a brutal military coup toppled the postwar constitutional monarchy, eventually leading to Saddam Hussein’s taking power in the 1970s.
“I think the real culprit since the US invasion has been Iran,” adds Kaplan, echoing Bull. “It has been the sort of unofficial imperial overseer of Iraq and has tried to keep the state as weak as possible.”
But some smart people have been cynical about the Iraqis’ ability to manage their own affairs. Kaplan reminded me of the great Iraqi historian Elie Kedourie, a fervent critic of Britain’s early 20th-century efforts to spur Arab nationalism and self-rule, which he felt turned the Middle East into a “wilderness of tigers.” Kedourie, Kaplan told me, “would have none of this stuff, as he would’ve put it, that the Arabs can succeed at stable, moderate self-governance. And they always needed a tough ruler. That made him a lot of enemies. But it’s very relevant to the future of Iraq.”
Yet Kaplan doesn’t think Iraq is fated to become an Iranian puppet. “Arab Shiites of Iraq have always felt distinct from Iran. Shiism has not bridged the gap,” he told me. “In the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, Arab Shiites on the Iraqi side fought just as hard as Iraqi Sunnis against Iran.”
Why did nationalism trump religion? “The holy sites of the Shiite religion are in Najaf and Karbala in Iraq,” Kaplan notes. “And Iraqis have always taken pride that the real heartbeat of Shiism is in their country, not Iran.”
“I don’t believe Iraq is doomed at all,” he concludes. “The Iraqi regime is very weak, but the Iranian regime is weaker now than it’s been in decades,” he told me. “I think the next big change in the Middle East will be either a regime change or a kind of regime metamorphosis in Iran.”
I’ve long been skeptical of claims that Iran is on the brink of regime change. Yet now it seems plausible: Israel’s devastation of Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza, followed by the collapse of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in Syria, may be the first real catalysts. Iran’s mullahs have been power players across the region through their proxies; when those proxies begin to disappear, that’s a big blow to your government’s legitimacy. The Iranian people haven’t been happy about the economy for decades, and the sparse turnout in last year’s presidential election showed vast discontent with the political system. When your people rally around wars, and you start losing those wars badly, that’s a big problem.
But it’s a problem for the Iranian people to tackle, and Iraq’s future is now in the hands of the Iraqis. As Kaplan puts it: “Just as the US could not reinvent Iraq following its removal of Saddam, it cannot midwife a more secure and institutionally sturdy Iraqi state now. Only the Iraqis themselves can do that. What will help enormously is regime change in next-door Iran. That will change the Middle East, probably for the better. And that, too, ultimately, can only be accomplished by the Iranians themselves.”
So let’s hope the withdrawal of Inherent Resolve marks not just the end of the Forever Wars, but also the beginning of a more coherent Western strategy to aid Iraq without meddling in its affairs. Thankfully, everyone seems to have abandoned crackpot schemes like “Finlandizing” the country, using a “containment policy” to counter terrorists, or dividing Iraq into three separate nations along the old Ottoman lines — looking at you, Joe Biden.
Over the last decade, the US has given about $3.6 billion in humanitarian and developmental aid, which may seem a lot until you consider that total US defense spending over that period exceeded $8 trillion. The first Donald Trump administration didn’t help: Aid cuts forced the US Agency for International Development to fire 80% of its non-Iraqi staff in Iraq, hampering its “ability to effectively oversee its high-priority, high-risk portfolio,” according to a federal watchdog report. The incompetence has been bipartisan: Last April, the Biden administration’s scattershot aid approach featured 32 separate efforts on everything from promoting microbusinesses to digitizing historic documents — hardly a recipe for coherence.
Meanwhile, Iran isn’t the only foreign threat to American interests in Iraq. Last spring, Chinese firms won five massive contracts for hydrocarbon exploration, even though Iraqi officials met with American business leaders to gin up US interest. Beijing is buying about a third of the nation’s oil production, building thousands of schools and millions of houses around the country, and investing in refineries, petrochemical complexes and desalination plants. (Fortunately, Beijing’s biggest play for influence — a $10 billion oil-for-infrastructure deal — looks to have stalled.)
So what can the US and its allies do?
Here is a very non-comprehensive set of ideas. First, despite the uncertain situation in Syria, the Pentagon must keep a small deployment of special forces on the ground to counter ISIS. (This month’s deadly attack in New Orleans showed that even in its much-degraded state, the terrorist group can still inspire followers.) USAID needs a bigger budget and staff around the globe — not likely under Trump, perhaps — but Iraq should be a priority. Bull urges Washington to do more to “crack down on Iraqi assistance to Iran’s sanctions-busting trade,” but also has smaller suggestions: re-opening the US consulate in Basra, and getting more Iraqi students into American universities.
US businesses, our strongest form of soft power, must stop yielding the field to Chinese investors; incentives from the US International Development Finance Corporation and Export-Import Bank might spur greater interest. One sector that badly needs real attention and investment: drought relief and water infrastructure. Ironically, the two rivers that gave Mesopotamia its name, the Tigris and Euphrates, are shrinking so quickly that the World Resources Institute warns that by 2040, Iraq faces “complete drought” and a “toxic environment.”
I’ll end with Gertrude Bell — the British diplomat, archeologist, mountaineer and foremost architect of present-day Iraq’s borders — even if she is largely disparaged today as an “orientalist” (Edward Said’s academic euphemism for “racist imperialist”). Originally a skeptic of Arab self-rule, she became its foremost advocate after World War I (so long as the self-rulers were pro-British, anyway). “Oh, if we can pull this thing off; rope together the young hotheads and the Shiah obscurantists,” she wrote. “If we can make them work together and find their own salvation for themselves, what a fine thing it would be.” As the 2003 invasion showed, “we” cannot make the Iraqis do anything. But if they can salvage their democracy, it would indeed be a fine thing.
Source » bloomberg