Iraq: A Political History from Independence to Occupation
In the spring of 2003, at the onset of the invasion of Iraq, Dawisha (Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, 2003) coauthored an article in Foreign Affairs in which he suggested, with cautious optimism, that building democracy in his native country might not be as difficult as some critics of the war were then warning. Six years later, his concern is not whether Iraq will bloom as a democracy but whether Iraq as a unified national entity and sovereign member of the international community will even continue to exist. The challenge, he argues, is and has always been “ethnosectarianism,” a product of Iraq’s geographically and demographically diverse population. From King Faysal in the 1920s through the rule of Saddam Hussein, powerful central government, nationalist ideology, and brute force more or less successfully contained Iraq’s internal centrifugal forces. Such diversity could be fertile ground for democracy, but since 2003, the flames of sectarian conflict have been fanned by the state’s inability to effectively neutralize threats to its power, and by a political system that cultivated, rather than managed, sectarian strife. More scholarly in tone than most recent works asking what went wrong in Iraq, Dawisha’s historical perspective also sets his account apart. --Brendan Driscoll