Iraq

Iraq was founded in the 1920 by the invention of the colonial hubris of Britain and France at the end of the First World War. For the last three decades it has been the centre of media attention—almost always for the wrong reasons. Ruled at first by King Feisal, a coup by the Baath Party turned the country into a republic in 1958, a de factor military dictatorship. Since 1979, it has been ruled, with brutality, by Saddam Hussein. Against the odds, however, held the disparate and conflicting Sunni, Shi'ite', and Kurdish communities together until it was wrecked by American and British forces—on the false pretence that Saddam harboured WMD (weapons of mass destruction)—in the 2003 'Gulf War'. Civil wars now threaten to tear the nation further apart and the future of the nation is hardly promising.

☰ Open Map

What is now Iraq was, until the end of WWI, part of the Ottoman Empire. Britain had already had an active interest in the region before WWI, since it was crucial to the security of its empire in the east, and esp. India. That interest became more urgent with the discovery of oil in Iran at the beginning of the 20th Cent and the continuing growth of the motor industry. The thought that what would become Iraq would also be oil rich was tantalizing. When Britain and France became the Ottoman's enemies during WWI, they worked on a secret pact on how the carve out the region between them after their victory (the same pact that gave rise to the treaty that would make Palestine a homeland for the Jews, i.e., modern Israel). To make this a reality, the British scholar and spy T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) was tasked with getting the Hashemite Arabs on their side to fight against the Ottoman with the promise of independence and power after victory was won. Meanwhile, British forces (mainly Indian troops) invaded eastern Mesopotamia and managed to capture territories as far north as Baghdad. The war was won, and Britain and France began to curve out the Middle East as they had hoped to do. (Notice that the boundaries of most of the Middle Eastern countries are straight lines; they were quite literally drawn with pen and ruler. The tragedy created by these lines was that those responsible for drawing them up were absolutely clueless𔃀or they just didn't care—about the vastly different ethnic and religious sentiments of the people actually living in those territories.) Out of this modern entities like Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Iraq (together with Armenia and Turkey) were born. The Hashemite prince Emir Faisal, who did do the fighting, made himself he king of Syria. The French, however, felt that he had intruded into their sphere of influence and kicked him out, forcing the British then to make him king of Iraq instead. He was officially installed 23 August 1921 as king of Iraq.

Faisal's Hashemite monarchy—protected by the RAF and, therefore, never as independent as it wished, and with a land blessed with hardly any other natural resources except oil, its future was always subject to external wimps and interests—was an extremely unstable experience, witnessing 58 changes of government in its 37 years history. With a heterogeneous population of fiercely opposing Kurds, Sunnis, Shi'ites, and Turkomans, it limped from the rule of one strongman to another until Abdul Karim Qasim exterminated the monarchy in butchery and bloodbath in 1958. Qasim, however, was a secularist living amidst a fervently religious majority, who survived for a decade until Saddam Hussein gained control in 1979, after executing one-third of his Revolution Command Council. Making effective use of a small but loyal personality cult, Saddam created a "republic of fear," and taking authoritarianism to heights that verged on being evil.

At first embraced and encouraged by the US (which was then engaged in a cold war with the USSR) and the other Sunni Arab neighbours bordered by the threat of disruption to the movement of their oil through the Persian Gulf by Iran, this megalomaniac initiated a long and wasteful war with Iran from 1980-88. At the end of the war, Saddam had expected the other Arab states to be grateful and write off the loans they had made him for the prosecution of the war. When they refused, he (apparently with affirmation of US friendship) invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1990. It sparked outrage everywhere, and set in motion the beginning of his downfall. The affirmed friendship of the US turned within weeks into dust (friendship no longer deemed so needed as European communism was collapsing everywhere) when the UN Security Council invoked economic sanctions on Iraq and George H. W. Bush (Sr.), led an international coalition against him. Operation Desert Storm began on 15 Jan 1991. When the operation end a month and two weeks later, Iraq's infrastructure were in ruins. Bush then made a fateful decision, with terrible consequences: instead of removing Saddam Bush left him in power in Iraq still.

Then came 9-11 gave the neo-conservative war-hawks in George Bush's administration the excuse for making Saddam a target for action. He was accused of partnering the al-Qaeda in its terrorism. On evidence that were clearly manufactured by the US and British administrations, he was accused of refusing to give up the WMD (weapons of mass destruction) he was supposed to be manufacturing. Naively believing that they would be welcomed in Iraq with open arms, Bush Jr and Blair invaded Iraq in March 2003 in "shock and awe." The war was over quickly; Saddam was captured in December, and hanged in 2006. But the invasion forces—so patently illegal—were not welcomed and their attempt to put in place a government friendly under Paul Bremer was short-sighted and incompetent. Iraq quickly descended into civil wars as the different sectarian groups—the majorty Shi'ites who had been oppressed by the Sunni minority (of which Saddam was a member) took the opportunity to right past wrongs, and the Kurds to push for more independence. The al-Qaeda, who were never active in Iraq until then, turned up with their guns and rockets, and soon morphed into the ISIS (Islamic Nation, and soon carried the violence into Syria as well). Deaths piled up and misery spawned like poppies on killing fields. And there is still no let-up. As of Jan 2020, all evidence indicate that Iraq will, more than ever before, come under the influence of Iran. How things will resolve themselves is anyone's guess.

On a point of more specifically Christian interest is the tragedy that one of oldest surviving Christian communities in Iraq, the Chaldeans, descendants from the earliest Christians in the country, is now in danger of being wiped out. Historian William Dalrymple notes the irony of how two supposedly devout Christians, George Bush and Tony Blair, "led to the destruction of Christianity in one of its ancient heartlands—something Arab, Mongol and Ottoman conquests all failed to pull off" (The Guardian, 12 Nov 2010).

The horrendous tragedy that Iraq has become also raises serious questions that we Christians must address with open hearts. One of the most important must surely be whether we, esp. evangelical Christians, who had chauvinistically and openly given our support to Bush and Blair to go to war, esp. when it was already clear that the evidence for guilt were manufactured, had not failed in our prophetic responsibility of calling our leaders to account? And should we now not repent and, (perhaps) just as openly, admit our failure and to ask the Iraqi people for forgiveness for the suffering the war we supported has caused them and for the hope and prospects it had robbed them? As Christians we cannot go on living as if nothing had happened. We were in on the act. Even more specifically we should also ask if George Bush and Tony Blair (both confessing Christians) should not now publicly apologise and to ask forgiveness from the tens of thousands of Iraqis whose lives have been destroyed and whose loved ones had died in the thousands as a result of their—from hindsight, especially—reckless and faithless (i.e., they lied to do what they did) decisions. These are not easy questions to ask but, as Christians, they are needful to ask.

NB: Iraq is properly pronounced 'ee-raq' and not 'ai-raq' as Americans like to do. The name derives from eragh, a Persian word meaning the "lowlands," referring to the flood-plains and marshes of the Mesopotamia.