Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History, of Outside Rule from Genghis Khan to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation by William R. Polk

From the Publisher

Iraq will continue to be a major issue and involvement for the United States into the foreseeable future says William R. Polk, former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Council and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago. Iraq sits on the world's largest supply of oil, and with the world's energy requirements continuously rising, Iraq will play an ongoing role in the global economy and the political environment throughout the Gulf region and the Middle East.

Polk's concise, authoritative overview of Iraq's history shows how the pattern of outside intervention was established first by the Ottoman Turks and the Persian Safavids and later by England, Russia, and Germany. After World War I came British rule, followed by a brief and uneasy period of independence that sparked Iraqi nationalism, leading Saddam Husain to power with American military and financial aid and covert CIA involvement. The Iraq-Iran War and the invasion of Kuwait was followed by the Gulf War, the sanctions period, and the Bush administration's decision to invade. Finally, there is the American occupation and the challenges, opportunities, and options that Iraqis and Americans face now and in the future.

Foreign Affairs

Unlike many single-state histories that take the reader from the dawn of history to modern times in a scant page or so, Understanding Iraq begins with two substantial chapters entitled "Ancient Iraq" and "Islamic Iraq." They set the stage for the treatment of Iraq from the time it got its modern name. A chapter entitled "British Iraq" (covering 1917 to 1958) is followed by "Revolutionary Iraq" (1958 to 1991) and then "American Iraq" (1991 to the present). These diverse adjectives bespeak a country that has long been dominated by outsiders or homegrown strongmen, and Polk's history depicts as much. Britain burst into Iraq but failed to put together an effective state. A nominally sovereign ruling elite during the years of the Iraqi monarchy accomplished little. Then, after 1958, came sundry revolutionary leaders from Abdul Karim Kassem to the long, brutal tenure of Saddam Hussein. Now Iraq faces up to yet another outside invader. Polk's final chapter is entitled — what else? — "Whose Iraq?" There are no heroes here, only a sober and informed account of Iraq's history, culminating in a compelling critique of the U.S. intervention there.

Kirkus Reviews

A supremely helpful companion to, and gloss on, the news from Iraq-news that, to all appearances, we'll be reading for years to come. Former State Department advisor Polk (History/Univ. of Chicago; Polk's Folly: An American Family History, 2000), who has lived in Iraq (and speaks fluent Arabic), provides a swiftly moving overview of Iraqi history from the dawn of Sumerian civilization to the present turmoil. He's concerned with finding continuities over long periods of time, noting, for instance, that southern Iraq has enjoyed "a tradition of revolt against government and landlords" dating back at least 12 centuries, while the powerful capital and its dynasts have always lorded it over the countryside. One thing is certain, he says: "Over its long history, the one group that has seldom 'owned Iraq' was its people." That is in part because Iraq has throughout that long history been ruled by outsiders, whether Persians or Mongols or Ottomans-or, more recently, Britain and the United States, both of which, by Polk's account, have made a terrible hash of things, and both of which have given the average Iraqi much reason to believe "in what might be called the James Bond school of politics," whereby shadowy agencies and governments are really in charge of things, presumably because Iraq has so much oil. Saddam Hussein knew how to exploit that sentiment, and so, Polk avers, do the insurgents who are making life so difficult for the American occupiers today. Polk adds that Iraq has another long tradition, a system of neighborhood self-government that tends to mistrust larger authority. The British dismantled the system in the 1930s, not trusting the decentralization of power, whereas under BaathParty rule the local councils were co-opted. The Americans have done no better than either, Polk argues: "They focused on the rulers and neglected the people." Learned, constantly engaging and full of pointed lessons for those wondering why the war has not ended, peace has not come, and no one in Iraq save Halliburton seems liberated.

Product Details

• Table of Contents
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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One

Ancient Iraq

Ancestors of inhabitants of today's Iraq began to emerge from the long shadows of prehistory about twelve thousand years ago. We cannot see them clearly, but we have some notion of how they lived. Gathered in groups of fifty or so people, they ranged along the slopes of the mountains that divide modern Iraq and Syria from Turkey. They did not live in permanent villages but sheltered under lean-tos that were covered with the skins of animals. The men hunted wild animals while the women gathered wild grasses from which they extracted the seed and pounded them into digestible bits.

Using crude sickles, faced with flint chips, they scoured the valleys to collect every edible thing, and, driven by hunger, they ate everything they found. Where archaeologists and paleobotanists have made studies of their campsites, they have found more than a hundred different kinds of seed. Animals and seed were usually plentiful, but each day brought risk. Their besetting fear must have been famine. Although on average their lives were reasonably easy, they lived literally hand to mouth, so a chance break in the weather might send the wild animals on which they depended out of reach or cause wild grasses to wither.

As they hunted or gleaned one area bare, whole clans would pick up their few possessions and move to a new location. Often they left caches of seed behind in clay-lined baskets or pits to which they planned to return. It is astonishing, in these circumstances, that they left a rich legacy: they became our first farmers.

No one knows exactly how they began this revolutionary new venture, but the agricultural revolution was probably partly accidental. From time to time, someone, perhaps a child, spilled a basket or dropped a handful of seed. Probably also, at least some of the caches of seed they left in storage pits or clay-lined baskets got rained on. Much, of course, would have just rotted. But, over the long years, some would spout into what modern gardeners call "volunteers." Watching this, the tribesmen—and particularly the women -- would naturally find it convenient that the volunteers were in or around their camps and waterholes where they were easy to collect.

At various times when and where rainfall was abundant in the hills along the northern reaches of what is now Iraq, some people began to winnow out seeds or sprouts. From the results, we know that what had probably been an accident certainly became a purposeful move. With pointed sticks like the ones they used to dig up tubers (and the men used to spear wild goats), they poked holes in the soft mud beside a waterhole or on the bank of a stream and dropped in a few grains. Probably the seed often failed to come up, but some did. The lucky or those who did it right were more apt to survive periodic famines than their more backward neighbors. Fear of starvation was a great teacher. Paleobotanists believe that within a few generations these adventurous —and hungry—tribal peoples achieved the first feats of domestication. So evident were the advantages of these experiments that the example spread widely from encampment to encampment. Sometime around 6000 b.c., "farming" began.

During these years also, the once-bountiful wild game had become harder to find and kill. Some of the little groups scattered along foothills and in the valleys of the Zagros -- the area that because of its relatively bountiful rainfall has become known as the Fertile Crescent -- had already begun a process that has been termed "management." Much as Laplanders today work with still-wild reindeer, they followed and partly managed herds of goats. Although goats are today reviled as destructive animals spreading ruin in fragile ecosystems, they offered great advantage to these early farmers. From accumulations of bones in their campsites, we know that goat meat was a big part of their diet. They killed enormous numbers, but some of the hunters must have figured out that killing more than they could eat just produced rotting carcasses that attracted dangerous carnivores. Since there was no advantage in killing all the animals, there might be a way to postpone the deaths of at least some of them. Keeping them was relatively easy since goats are extremely adaptable and thrive and breed with little forage. They were a major contribution to survival of those tribesmen who took the trouble, since in addition to meat, goats produce milk, which tribesmen began to drink; fiber for clothing; tallow for light and medicine; bone for tools; sinew for bindings; and dung for fuel.

Herding and then domestication of animals immediately created two new conditions that were of great and lasting influence. For the first time, little settlements had reasonably secure sources of a balanced diet. Fewer people died of hunger, and more lived longer. As populations increased, the initial trends were reinforced. Planting crops made staying put both possible and necessary, but managing or herding animals required some degree of movement. So divisions of labor, which had long been practiced, became more sharply defined. While the women, the elderly, and the very young remained fixed in the village, young men went out, sometimes for weeks or months at a time, to hunt or herd animals. This pattern was so stamped by generation after generation of daily experience that, until just a few years ago, it was the common way of life throughout the villages of Iraq.

Then, sometime about 6000 b.c., the mountains, foothills, and plains of Iraq became hotter and drier. Upland areas that had given rise to farming could no longer sustain the increasingly dense concentrations of people. To survive, many migrated to places where there was more water. Animals probably showed them the way in their yearly trek from the highlands in the summer down into the plains in winter. Following them, the hunters probably had already established temporary camps along the great rivers.