I loved this quote from Dreaming of Democracy, by George Packer:
In Arabic, ”Iraq” means ”well-rooted country,” which suggests the kind of promotional thinking that makes urban planners christen a concrete housing project ”Metropolitan Gardens.”
Packer also gives a concise history of modern Iraq:
The country was assembled at Versailles after World War I out of three former Ottoman provinces and handed over by the League of Nations in 1920 to be a British mandate, breaking the promise of postwar independence that T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, had made to Britain’s Arab allies. But the British found this unruly concoction of peoples more trouble to govern than it was worth, even with Lawrence’s friend King Faisal I on the throne, and in 1932 Iraq became an independent constitutional monarchy, though the imperial power didn’t leave without securing favorable oil concessions. Within four years Iraq gave the Arab world its first modern coup. After that, the violence never really stopped, with coups, ethnic pogroms and massacres among political parties. (The Arab Baath movement emerged in World War II as a pro-Nazi group.) But the most turbulent decade followed the overthrow of the constitutional monarchy in 1958. One military regime was toppled by the next. In 1968 the Arab Baath Socialist Party finally consolidated power, destroying its opponents among the Communists and the other Arab nationalists. Saddam, the head of internal security, quickly acquired de facto power but assumed the presidency only in 1979 amid a bloody purge. Chaos gave way to dictatorship, two ruinous foreign wars and the Kurdish genocide.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that the Arab Baath movement emerged in World War II as a pro-Nazi group, but didn’t anyone explain to them what the Nazis thought of their race? (I often wonder the same thing about the Japanese.)