A Requiem for Iraq and Syria

 

This week Antonio Guterres, the outgoing head of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees, said that ongoing domestic conflict threatens the viability of the Iraqi and Syrian states. “If the conflict does not end quickly, this might be the end of Syria as we know it – and the same is true for Iraq," he warned.

If one were to rely on Max Weber’s definition of a state – “a human community that successfully claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory” – then Syria and Iraq stopped existing some time ago. If we would like to focus a bit more on the issue of “legitimate use of physical force,” then these states never existed in the first place. Both colonial creations, Iraq and Syria might have eventually emerged from such illegitimate origins if successive governments had treated their populations better over the years. Instead, a sorry litany of authoritarian regimes in Damascus and Baghdad terrorized large segments of their own populations. If humans invented states as a vehicle to protect themselves and pursue their dreams secure from the predations of others, nothing of the sort happened for most Iraqis and Syrians. No one knows this better than the Kurds in both countries, of course, who were forbidden the simple right to live in their own language and culture.

In Iraq, abuses against the Kurds went on for decades, culminating in the anfal campaigns of 1987-88 (which involved systematic government programs to massacre up to 180,000 Kurdish civilians) and the chemical weapons attacks on Halabja and other Kurdish towns (which saw Iraqi jets drop mustard and sarin-laden bombs on Iraqi Kurdish civilian centers). Under successive Sunni Arab governments that ruled the country since Iraq’s founding (Sunni Arabs only make up some 20% of Iraq’s population), Shiite “Iraqi” Arabs fared little better than Kurds. The (Shiite) Iraqi academic Kanan Makiya thus entitled his well-known book on modern Iraq “Republic of Fear.”

In Syria the Kurds never even revolted like their brethren in Iraq, yet they fared little better. Some 100,000 Kurds had their citizenship summarily revoked in 1963, denying them the right to marry, study, work, own a house or receive health care (their descendants now number more than 300,000). Arabization policies in Syria’s northeast saw thousands of Kurds’ lose their land to government confiscations and Arab settlers. A police state run from Damascus, with much in common with the similar Ba’athist regime in Saddam’s Iraq, arrested, tortured and disappeared any who dissented with the government. Since the 1960s, an Alawite regime kept the rest of the country under its thumb, although Alawis make up only some 10% of Syria’s population (numerically comparable to the Kurds in Syria).

The American-led international community’s solution for such failed states seems to center on trying again. In Iraq the effort to try again began with the 2003 overthrow of Saddam, accompanied by assiduous American efforts to preserve Iraq’s territorial integrity. Although the Iraqis drafted a good constitution in 2005, by 2010 the Nuri al-Maliki government in Baghdad increasingly came to look like its authoritarian predecessors (with a Shiite flavor this time, however). Maliki’s sidelining and repression of Arab Sunnis is what largely paved the way for the Islamic State’s takeover of their parts of the country. At the same time, Maliki’s increasingly praetorian Iraqi army appeared poised to enter into active hostilities against the Kurdish Peshmerga over territories disputed between Baghdad and autonomous Kurdistan. Kurdistan’s disputes with Baghdad over other issues, such as powers over oil, caused paralysis in Baghdad’s parliament. Maliki’s replacement by fellow Dawaa Party Shiite leader Haidar al-Abadi in August 2014 seems unlikely to really change this dynamic, given that little has changed even with the Islamic State putting everyone’s feet to the fire since June 2014.

In Syria, the world is supposed to believe that the warring parties – myriad rebel groups, the Assad regime, various pro-Assad militas, and the shadow of over a dozen agenda-laden foreign states – can arrive at a peace agreement and transition into a democratic government after six months. This would have to happen only after Assad steps down, according to some, and after the likes of the Islamic State and Jabhat al Nusra are eliminated (never mind that the Islamic State alone controls more territory than Assad at the moment).

Under such circumstance, where none of the significant sectarian communities or “Iraqi” and “Syrian” political elites seems good at sharing power, perhaps the time has come to stop kicking these sick horses. Hopefully the outgoing UNHCR High Commissioner is right, and this is “the end of Syria and Iraq as we know them.” Although change carries its own risks and difficulties, the Iraq and Syria that the world knew are nothing to mourn should they pass away now. The focus should have long ago shifted to creating something new rather than replaying these brutal authoritarian systems.

David Romano has been a Rudaw columnist since 2010. He is the Thomas G. Strong Professor of Middle East Politics at Missouri State University and author of The Kurdish Nationalist Movement (2006, Cambridge University Press) and co-editor (with Mehmet Gurses) of Conflict, Democratization and the Kurds in the Middle East (2014, Palgrave Macmillan).

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of Rudaw.