Iraq

IRAQ

Major country of the Middle East.

Iraq, with its current political boundaries, is a new country. It is a product of the twentieth century, formed in the aftermath of World War I. The term Iraq was adopted by the government in 1921. Historians disagree about the origin of the word. The most common interpretation is that it is derived from al-Raq al-Arabi, a term used in the Middle Ages to designate the southern delta region of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers from the al-Raq al-Ajami, the Persian Mountains. Before Iraq was established as a state, the Europeans referred to the area as Mesopotamia, a name that was given to the area by the
ancient Greeks which means the land between two rivers. It corresponds roughly to the Ottomans' provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul.

Geography and Population

Iraq covers about 169,000 square miles and is surrounded by six countries—Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, and Syria. It is essentially a landlocked country. The country's access to the high seas is through two major ports, Umm Qasr on the Persian Gulf and Basra, which is located at the Shatt al-Arab, the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers. Geographically, the country is divided into four areas: the Syrian Desert in the west and southwest; the river valleys of the central and southeast areas, which contain the most fertile agricultural soil; the upland between the Upper Tigris and Euphrates Rivers; and the mountains of the north and northeast. The climate is subtropical, with long dry summers and a wide difference in temperatures between summer and winter. Rain falls mostly between the months of October and April, but not heavily.

Iraq's population of about 24 million is a mixture of ethnic and religious communities. About 95 percent is Muslim, of which 60 percent are Shiʿite. Four percent are Christians of various denominations. There are a few other small religious communities of Yazidis, Sabeans, and Jews. About 80 percent of the population is Arab. They live in an area that stretches from Basra to Mosul including the western part of the country. The Kurds represent 18 percent of the population, and they live mainly in the mountains of the northern and eastern areas of the country. The majority of the Kurds are Sunni; a small minority are Kurdish Shiʿa called Fiyliaya. The Kurds of Iraq speak two different dialects of the Kurdish language—Sorani and Karmanji. Other small ethnic communities include the Turkomen, Assyrians, Yazidis, and Armenians. Arabic is the official language of Iraq; Kurdish is used in the Kurdish area in addition to Arabic.

Baghdad, the capital of Iraq, is the largest city in the country, with a population of five million. Basra, the second largest city, has a population of more than a million and half, and is the gateway to the Persian Gulf. Mosul, in the north, is the third largest city, and has a population of more than a million. Kirkuk City, also in the north, has more than half a million people. It is situated among major oil reserves. In addition to these cities, Iraq is the site of several Shiʿite holy cities, including alNajaf, where Imam Ali is buried, and Karbala, where Imam Husayn is buried. Both cities are located on the Euphrates River southwest of Baghdad.

Oil was discovered in large quantities in 1927 near Kirkuk City. The Iraqi Petroleum Company (IPC), a consortium of the British Petroleum Company, Shell, Mobil, Standard Oil of New Jersey (Exxon), and the French Petroleum Company, was formed to manage oil production. IPC and its subsidiaries obtained concessions from the Iraqi government and had total control over oil production. The concessions covered practically the entire land area of Iraq, and they lasted for many decades. For all intents and purposes, Iraq played no role in oil development from the time it was first discovered until the 1950s. Oil production was very limited before 1950, but it began to rise in the 1950s when the Iraqi government slowly but steadily gained control over it. The production increased significantly after Iraq nationalized its oil industry in 1972. Oil production reached its peak in 1979, reaching 3.5 million barrels a day, twice the amount produced in 1971, a year before the nationalization. Since then, the production has decreased as a result of the Iran-Iraq War (1980–1988), the Gulf Crisis and War of 1991, and the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces in March 2003. Iraq has a proven oil reserve of more than 112 billion barrels, second only to the reserve in Saudi Arabia. Since the 1950s, oil has been the mainstay of the Iraqi economy and the major source of funds for social and economic development.

Pre-Twentieth-Century History

Although Iraq is a new country, it has an extraordinarily rich and complex history. Historians and
archaeologists consider Iraq to be the cradle of civilization. It is associated with many ancient civilizations such as the Sumerians, the Akkadians, the Babylonians, the Chaldeans, and the Assyrians. It is the land of the biblical Garden of Eden and of the Hanging Garden of Babylon, the site of the first farming settlements and urban settlements and of the invention of writing and the wheel, and the home of Hammurabi (1800–1760 b.c.e.), the great lawgiver (author of the Code of Hammurabi).

In 637 c.e. Islam poured into Iraq. In 750 c .e. the Abbasids triumphed and the center of the Islamic empire shifted from Damascus to Iraq. In 762 c.e. the second caliph Abu Jaʿfar al-Mansur (754–775 c.e.) founded the new city of Baghdad as the
new capital of the empire. During the reign of Harun al-Rashid (786–810 c.e.) and his son Maʾmun (813–833 c. e.), the Abbasid Empire reached its peak in material splendor and intellectual advances. Baghdad enjoyed grand glory and prosperity as the center of Islamic culture. The city became an international trade center for textiles, leather, paper, and other goods from areas ranging from the Baltic to China. Baghdad also became a magnet for scientific and intellectual achievements. The famous Bayt alHikma Academy was established in 830 c.e. by the great patron of scholarship, Caliph al-Maʾmun. The academy included several schools, astrological observatories, libraries, and facilities for the translation of scientific and philosophical works from Greek, Aramaic, and Persian into Arabic.

The empire began to disintegrate gradually, and in 1256 Baghdad and the Abbasid caliphs were destroyed by the Mongols. The Ottoman sultan, Süleiman the Magnificent, incorporated Iraq into his empire in 1534. Thereafter, except for a period of Persian control in the seventeenth century, Iraq remained under Ottoman rule until the Ottoman Empire came to an end at the end of World War I.

Administratively, during the Ottoman rule, Iraq was divided into three provinces: Mosul, where most of the Kurds lived; Baghdad; and Basra, where most of the Arabs lived. During that period, Iraq was totally neglected and the economy was in a state of dis-array and confusion. In the second half of the nineteenth century a few Turkish governors, such as the reform-minded Midhat Paşa, introduced a few modern improvements such as the establishment of modern secular schools, reorganization of the army, creation of codes of criminal and commercial law, improvement of provincial administration, and a new system of transportation.

The British occupied Iraq during World War I. After the war, the Treaty of Sèvres placed Iraq under a British mandate. In 1921 the British established a constitutional monarchy headed by Faisal I ibn Hussein, a member of the Hashimite House (House of Hashim) of Arabia and one of the leaders of the anti-Turk Arab Revolt of 1916.

Early Nationhood

On 13 October 1932 Iraq became independent and joined the League of Nations. Between 1932 and 1941 Iraq's political situation was unstable, marked by tribal and ethnic revolts, military coups, and countercoups. In 1941 a nationalistic government assumed power, angering the British and prompting them to reoccupy Iraq and to install a pro-British government.

Between 1941 and 1958 Iraq was basically ruled by two British-oriented rulers: Nuri al-Saʿid, who assumed the office of prime minister several times; and Abd al-Ilah, the regent. From 1932 to 1958, Britain exercised significant influence over the ruling elite. During this time, modern secular education was expanded and became accessible to the general public in a limited way. Economic development was slow but gained some steam in the early 1950s when oil revenue increased. Political life was
marred by corruption and manipulation of the election process and domination by a few personalities.

After World War II, Iraq, like many other developing nations, experienced a rise in anti-imperial sentiment that demanded the reduction of British domination and the introduction of social and economic reform. These trends culminated in the nationalistic military coup of 14 July 1958. The coup was executed by the Free Officers, led by General Abd al-Karim al-Qasim, who stayed in power until February 1963. During the coup the king, the regent, and Nuri al-Saʿid were killed. This coup brought significant changes in Iraq's domestic and foreign policies. The Hashimite monarchy was replaced with a republican regime, and Iraq withdrew from the Baghdad Pact and began a foreign policy of nonalliance. The new regime initiated land reform and expanded education on all levels. It also challenged the existing profit-sharing arrangement with oil companies, and in December 1961 it enacted Public Law No. 80, which resulted in the expropriation of 99.5 percent of the IPC group's concession area that was not in production. This was also a period of political turmoil: There was an attempted coup in Mosul in 1959 and an attempted assassination of Qasim, and the Kurds launched armed rebellion against the government.

The Rise of Saddam Hussein

In February 1963 the Baʿth Party, along with nationalistic officers, seized power in a bloody coup. Nine months later, the Baʿth Party was kicked out of power by a coup led by Abd al-Salam Arif, one of the original Free Officers of the 1958 coup. On 17 July 1968 the Baʿth Party came back to power through a bloodless coup. This marked the ascendance to power of Saddam Hussein, which lasted until the U.S. invasion of Iraq in March 2003. From 1968 to 2003 Hussein dominated the political scene, even when he was vice president from 1968 to 1979. He was the undisputed leader, ruling Iraq with an "iron fist" and discouraging opposition through elimination, imprisonment, and the use of multiple security forces. For all practical purposes, all political activities outside of the Baʿth Party were outlawed.

In the 1970s Iraq nationalized its oil industry. As the price of crude oil went up, the government invested a lot of money in improving the infrastructure of the country, its education system, and social services. The Kurdish revolt reached its peak in the mid-1970s due to the support it had received from Iran, Israel, and the United States. These countries viewed Iraq as a threat. During this period, Iraq advocated Arab nationalism, adopted anti-imperialism policies, and allied itself more with Soviet Union. Also, Iraq adopted a policy against the so-called reactionary regimes of the Gulf who were allies of the United States. Therefore, Iran, Israel, and the United States were interested in destabilizing the regime through the Kurdish revolt.The attempt to quell the Kurdish rebellion in the north was unsuccessful, and in 1975 Saddam signed a treaty with the shah of Iran in which Iraq agreed to share the Shatt al-Arab with Iran in return for the ending of Iran's support of the Kurds. Within a few weeks of concluding the agreement, the Kurdish revolt was quashed, and for more than a decade, the Kurdish region was relatively quiet.

On 16 July 1979 Saddam formally assumed the presidency of Iraq. He began his presidency by eliminating a number of high-ranking members of the Baʿth Party, accusing them of plotting against him. Soon his relationship with Iran began to deteriorate in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution (1979). A border skirmish between the two countries was used by Saddam to justify the invasion of Iran on 22 September 1980. Saddam erred in his assumption that the war was going to be quick; it lasted for eight years. Iraq was left with hundreds of thousands dead and wounded and a seriously damaged economy. Iranian bombardments of oil facilities in Iraq's south significantly impaired the oil industry, which was the mainstay of the Iraqi economy. The government shifted spending from projects of modern development to spending on the military to meet the requirements of the war. The Kurds resumed their revolt against the Iraqi government with the support of the Iranian government. By the time the Iran-Iraq War ended in July 1988, Iraq was $80 billion in debt to several countries, including Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, France, the Soviet Union, and Japan.

Between 1988 and 1990, Saddam's government struggled to put the country back in order. After the war, Saddam turned against the Kurds. His forces savaged their villages for siding with Iran during the war, forcing many of the Kurds to leave the mountains for detention centers in other parts of the country. The drop in oil prices on the international front led to serious tensions between Iraq and Kuwait. Saddam accused both Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates of conducting an economic war against Iraq by intentionally flooding the oil market by exceeding their export quotas within the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). According to Saddam, the high output of these two countries kept prices low, leading to a big reduction in Iraqi oil revenue that was sorely needed to rebuild the country.

The Kuwaiti government stubbornly refused to yield, and the U.S. ambassador to Iraq gave mixed messages—on the one hand declaring that any dispute between Arab countries was not a U.S. matter, and on the other joining Britain in encouraging Kuwait not to accommodate Iraq. Saddam's invasion of Kuwait on 2 August 1990 ultimately led to the first Gulf War, which was executed by the United States and its coalition on 17 January 1991. The war's code name was Operation Desert Storm, and it lasted for forty-three days. The United States and its allies flew more than 110,000 sorties that dropped a total of 99,000 to 140,000 tons of explosives on Iraqi targets—the firepower equivalent of five to seven of the nuclear bombs that were dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima during World War II. The war destroyed the infrastructure of Iraq, knocking out electricity grids, roads, bridges, communication systems, sewage and water purification systems, factories, and telephone systems. A United Nations (UN) report written shortly after the war stated that the destruction caused by the war returned Iraq to a preindustrial state.

In the aftermath, both the Kurdish ethnic community in the north and the Shiʿite Muslim community in the south revolted against Saddam's regime. The Kurds hoped to establish an independent state in the north, and the Shiʿa hoped to topple Saddam's regime and replace it with a more sympathetic government. Despite Saddam's recent defeat in the war, he was able to muster enough power to crush both rebellions. He dealt with the rebels harshly, killing thousands of people and wounding many more. Hundreds of thousands of Kurds fled Iraq to the neighboring countries of Turkey and Iran. This massive flight prompted the United States, along with Britain and France, to impose a no-fly zone for Iraqi aircraft in the north. Also, the United States, Britain, and France established a Kurdish Autonomous Zone in Iraq, which Iraqi forces were not allowed to enter, and where Kurds ruled themselves. This new arrangement allowed hundreds of thousand of refugees to return to their homes and villages. The Kurdish zone, for all practical purposes, was independent. It had its own currency, taxes, and educational system. In this area, Kurdish was the primary language and Arabic was waning as the official language.

On 6 August 1990, four days after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 661, imposing on Iraq the most repressive sanctions and embargo in the history of the organization. When the Gulf War ended, the United Nations Security Council passed several new resolutions concerning Iraq. Resolution 687, passed on 3 April 1991, continued the sanctions and the embargo on Iraq until it dismantled its weapons program, including all long- and medium-range missiles, and all chemical, biological, and nuclear facilities. The dismantling was to have been implemented by the Vienna-based International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which had been inspecting Iraq for any possible military use of its nuclear facilities since the 1970s, and the newly established UN Special Commission (UNSCOM) under the chairmanship of Rolf Ekeus, a Swedish diplomat. Resolution 713 established a permanent UN monitoring system for all missile test sites and nuclear installations in the Iraq. Resolution 986, passed in 1992, allowed Iraq to sell $1.6 billion worth of oil every six months, subject to renewal, for the purchase of food and medicine. About one third of the money raised through the sale of oil was designated for war reparations for Kuwait and payments to the UN for its operations in Iraq. Iraq agreed in principle to the first two resolutions, but it rejected the third one on the grounds that it did not allow Iraq to control the funds realized from the sale. But by 1996 the life of the Iraqi people was approaching destitution, and the government was forced to accept the terms of Resolution 986. In 1998 the sale limit was raised to $5.52 billion worth of oil every six months, and in 1999 to $8.3 billion.

Iraq was not happy with UNSCOM's intrusive inspections, and there were confrontations between Iraqis and the inspection teams. The United States, the driving force behind the inspections, used these confrontations as grounds for bombing Iraq in 1993, 1996, and 1998. The last bombardment, codenamed Operation Desert Fox, lasted for four days. Before it began, Richard Butler, the second head of UNSCOM, withdrew the inspections teams without the authorization of the UN Security Council. The bombardment put the future of UNSCOM in doubt, and the inspectors did not return until 2002, and then under a different name. By the time of the 1998 confrontation, the UN had destroyed more than 95 percent of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction (Iraq claimed that it had destroyed the last 5 percent, but could not account for it). There were two reasons for the difficulties that the inspection teams faced: Iraq's concern that the inspection teams violated its sovereignty, and the U.S. govern-ment's misuse of some members of the inspection teams as spies.

The sanctions and the embargo begun in 1990 had a dreadful impact on Iraqi society. They hit the sanitation and health-care systems hard, and also led to the breakdown of the electric system, which contributed to chronic problems with sewage and water treatment. The sanctions also contributed to inadequate diets, resulting in malnutrition and a proliferation of diseases, which led to a high mortality rate among children. Furthermore, the sanctions led to many social ills such as homelessness of children, increased crime rates, high divorce rates, a drop in the marriage rate, and the virtual destruction of the educational system. Thousands of schools were left in a state of disrepair. The sanctions weakened the oil industry, the mainstay of the Iraqi economy, because of a lack of spare parts and a lack of investment to update oil facilities. The sanctions lasted for almost thirteen years and contributed to the deaths of more than one million people, many of them children, women, and elderly people. Two UN chief relief coordinators—Denis Halliday in 1998 and Han von Sponeck in 2000—resigned their posts in protest of the continuation of the sanctions.

The terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on 11 September 2001 marked a turning point in U.S. policy toward Iraq. The foreign policy of the Republican administration of George W. Bush was controlled by neoconservatives who advocated a regime change in Iraq. Some of the planners of the new policy were behind the passage of the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998, in which the Congress allocated $100 million to help Iraqi opposition groups in their quest to remove Saddam from power. After 11 September, the neoconservatives pushed for the removal of Saddam by military means. The UN adopted Resolution 1441, which demanded that Iraq allow the weapons inspections teams to return. There were two teams—one from the International Atomic Energy Agency, headed by Muhammad El-Baradei from Egypt, and another from the United Nations Monitoring, Verification, and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC), headed by Hans Blix from Sweden. The new resolution gave the inspectors more freedom to operate and conduct their activities inside Iraq, and it imposed more restrictions on Saddam's regime than previous resolutions had. Iraq agreed to the resolution and emphatically denied having any weapons of mass destruction, stating that it had destroyed all of them. However, the Iraqi government could not give a full accounting of the missing items. Both heads of the inspection teams asked for more time to finish their job.

The United States and Britain refused to wait for UN consensus on the issue. The United States government continued to claim that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and that he was a threat to U.S. and world security, and on 17 March 2003 the United States, along with Britain, initiated a military invasion against Iraq, defying world opinion. On 9 April 2003 Baghdad fell, and the occupation of Iraq began. The claims that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, including biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons, turned out to be questionable. In May, under pressure from the United States, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 1483, which legalized the result of the invasion (though most UN member nations had considered it to be illegal). On 16 October 2003 the UN adopted Resolution 1511, again under U.S. pressure, which authorized a multinational force under U.S. leadership to replace and reduce the burden on the U.S. occupying forces.

see also arab revolt (1916); arif, abd alsalam; baghdad; baghdad pact (1955); basra; baʿth, al-; faisal i ibn hussein; gulf war (1991); hashimite house (house of hashim); hussein, saddam; iranian revolution (1979); iran–iraq war (1980–1988); iraq petroleum company (ipc); karbala; kirkuk; kurdish autonomous zone; kurdish revolts; kurds; midhat paŞa; mosul; najaf, al-; sÈvres, treaty of (1920); shatt al-arab; tigris and euphrates rivers; united nations special commission (unscom); war in iraq (2003).

Bibliography

Graham-Brown, Sarah. Sanctioning Saddam: The Politics of Intervention in Iraq. London: I. B. Tauris, 1999.

Mackey, Sandra. The Reckoning: Iraq and the Legacy of Saddam Hussein. New York: W. W. Norton, 2002.

Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

ayad al-qazzaz