THE crisis in Iraq has roots which go far back in history – to colonial times when the French and British divided up the Ottoman empire into arbitrary segments and called them countries. A process which took hundreds of years in Western Europe – when the breakdown of the Roman Empire created states based on the ethnicity of the tribal populations there, was accelerated into a matter of months by the Europeans. They failed to see that the religious composition of the total population would have such a tremendous impact on the political and social dynamics of the countries which they had arbitrarily created by drawing lines on pieces of paper.
When extremists from the Islamic State (IS) took over the Iraqi city of Mosul and hurtled south towards Baghdad in June, the Kurds in the north were happy. They had no love for IS, a group which grew out of al-Qaeda in Iraq, later re-emerged in Syria and now operates in both countries. Indeed IS is sufficiently vile and disobedient, not to mention power hungry, that not even al-Qaeda likes it any more. But the Kurds saw its success as a deserved kick in the teeth for Nuri al-Maliki, the Shia prime minister. And if the fight with IS broke Iraq into sectarian pieces, semi-autonomous Kurdistan would achieve long-dreamed-of independence.
The sentiment disappeared in August when, facing resistance in the South, IS attacked the Kurds with sophisticated American weaponry taken from the Iraqi armed forces. Meanwhile, the plight of the Yazidis prompted President Obama to launch a limited offensive to prevent genocide. But although US officials talk of IS as a broad threat to Iraqi and regional stability, as well as a cauldron of extremism that threatens to send hundreds of foreign passport holders back to their home countries trained to kill, America is not as yet embarked on a campaign to extirpate it. Mr Obama has repeatedly argued that IS has been strengthened by the Iraqi government’s mistakes, specifically its marginalisation of Arab Sunnis, who make up about a quarter of Iraq’s 33m population. If IS is to be turned back, Iraqi politics must turn around, too. Indeed, they must turn around first.
The historically dominant but minority Sunnis have never acknowledged their reduced status or indeed their numerical inferiority since Saddam Hussein’s fall. They let resistance to America’s intrusion morph into a brutal, religiously bigoted movement. They turned their noses up at Iraq’s new democracy and squabbled endlessly, failing to unite behind credible leaders, so encouraging the now Shia-dominated establishment in Baghdad to rule over them with bribes, threats and thuggery.
Iraq’s Shias, for their part, have largely flocked behind rabble-rousing, unscrupulous politicians. Those men, including the prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, during his eight years in office, have done very little to build sound or just institutions. Instead they have played political games, packing offices with cronies and siphoning cash from the oil geysers that Iraq sits on top of. This system of spoils has signally failed to lessen the misery of most Iraqis.
Mr Maliki, prime minister since 2006, ruling Iraq under the name of democracy initiated by the USA. He acted as US puppet and failed to unite the people.
We do not say dictatorship in Iraq was good. But America destroyed dictatorship saying democracy will be established in Iraq. Now it is America’s responsibility to prove its intentions were genuine by helping Iraq to make democracy work.
