DISHARMONY IN IRAQ: THE HISTORY OF THE STRUGGLE GOES BACK TO OIL

As we contemplate the possible implosion of Iraq, we might recollect the genesis of its creation: oil.

David Yergin puts it this way in his recent book The Prize: "World War I had made it abundantly clear that petroleum had become an essential element in the strategy of nations; and the politicians and bureaucrats, though they had hardly been absent before, would now rush headlong into the center of the struggle, drawn into the competition by a common perception that the post-war world would require ever greater quantities of oil for economic prosperity and national power. The struggle would focus on one particular region Mesopotamia (Iraq)."

As administered by the Ottoman Turks, Mesopotamia the northeastern side of the Arab-speaking world was a loose amalgam of diverse groups and tribes possessing only one thing in common: suspicion and hatred of each other. There were Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs. The former were much more numerous; the latter more proficient at grabbing political power. There were Kurds and Yazidis. Jews, at the end of World War I, were the largest single group in the city of Baghdad. There were other cities like Basra and Mosul, each unrelated to the other. The region was so splintered as to defy any notion of being a coherent entity.

At the close of World War I, the British named a Captain of the Indian Army, Arnold Wilson, to be the Mesopotamia civil commissioner. They didn't have anyone of rank to spare. By 1920, Wilson was to describe the scene in Iraq as one of "anarchy plus fanaticism."

One of Wilson's advisors warned him about the impracticality of uniting the various elements and forces in Iraq. "You are flying in the face of four millennia of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unit. They have no conception of nationhood yet."

It was the British zeal for empire and oil that brought into existence an artificially created, thoroughly divided Iraq. So as to sanctify disunion, the Brits installed their out-of-work King of the road Feisal, recently deposed in Syria and propped him up as front-man ruler of a nation with a new name, but with no sense of nationhood.

In more recent times, Iraq has been held together by a political cult and by terror. Oil has been the glue of this discordant mosaic along with a touch of execution, murder and butchery. The butcher is on the wane. In his place can there be harmony when the ageless history of Iraq is one of disharmony? Today, just as in the time of Captain Wilson, Iraq is "anarchy plus fanaticism." There is no hope for democracy. The splintering of Iraq into a Lebanon-style frenzy is a distinct possibility. Lurking in the background is the specter of Khomeniesque, Teheran-spired fundamentalism, the nightmare example of neighboring Iran.

Can it be that our best hope is for some of Saddam's own cronies to be the reformers of a new and enlightened Iraq? If we can clean up Assad in Syria and the Emir in Kuwait to serve as founding fathers in "the new world order," I guess we can tolerate Saddam's heirs as repentant liberators. Ugh!