Imperialism in Iraq and Iran

Iran and Iraq

Analysis of the Impact of Imperialism on Iran and Iraq

The modern nation of Iraq was formed in 1932 when the Kingdom of Iraq gained independence from the United Kingdom. It had been placed under the authority of Great Britain as the British Mandate of Mesopotamia by the League of Nations in 1920. Prior to that, it was part of the Ottoman Empire. This delineates the history of imperialism in Iraq as beginning with the arrival of the Ottomans the 15th century, through independence from the Great Britain. These two stage of imperial rule had several different impacts on modern-day Iraq.

The first is the borders of the current state of Iraq were the direct result of British rule. The Ottomans had administered Iraq differently, with three main provinces. Under Ottoman rule, Baghdad, Mosul and Basra were all provinces within the Ottoman Empire. Iraq was not Iraq in the sense of a modern nation-state, but governed territories that were delineated largely along ethnic lines. In Basra, the population consists of Shia Arabs. In Baghdad, the population was more mixed, predominantly Sunni, but with one-quarter Jewish population and a sizeable Shia presence as well. In Mosul, the population has long been predominantly Sunni. All are Arabs across the country. The Ottomans recognized and respected the demographic split more, knowing that Shia holy sites, and therefore Shia population, are concentrated in the south of the country. There was no attempt made by the Ottomans to tie the different regions of modern Iraq together in any way -- they were simply Ottoman provinces, and not related to each other.

The British redrew the internal boundaries of the region. The Sykes-Picot Agreement between England and France was the first attempt at creating such boundaries. The San Remo Agreement redrew the boundaries of the modern nations of Iraq and Syria (Stansfield, 2014). This resulted in the creation of what would become the modern state of Iraq. The country ended up with a Shia majority, a large Sunni minority, a Kurdish region, and in the post-colonial years the entire country bled minorities, especially the Jewish and Christian communities, to the point where modern Iraq is 99% Muslim of some denomination (Stansfield, 2014).

The governance structure of Iraq, as the Kingdom of Iraq, was put into place by the British during their mandate. Stansfield (2014) argues that the British had greater trust in Sunni Arabs than they had in Shia Arabs at this time, and that is why they elected to put the Sunni in charge of the new country, even though they were in the minority. He also argued that the state of Iraq today would not exist without the British. They created the idea of it, and the Sunni who were put into power built up the national story along their own vision. But a unified Iraq only came about because the British invented it.

Governance in Iraq

The first question is why the British set up the new government in Iraq as a monarchy. The British enjoyed a more democratic form of government, but the Arab countries in the mandate inherited a series of monarchies, some of which still exist today. One theory is that the Hashemite family, to whom power over Iraq (among others) was awarded had assisted by way of the Arab Revolt the conditions under which the British were able to take the areas from the Ottomans in the first place. The family was well-respected among Sunnis, tracing from the Prophet (pbuh) and having been governors of Mecca for centuries (Dawson, 2014)..

The creation of the state of Iraq, comprising a mix of Sunni and Shia, and then conferring power to a Sunni family when that denomination was in the minority has had longlasting effects on Iraq. Through a succession of leadership, Iraq came to be ruled by the Baath Party, but was always under Sunni control. Privileges were often conveyed to Sunnis over Shiites, though this was less pronounced under Saddam Hussein's rule. The Sunni rulers built a narrative about the nation-state of Iraq in order to solidify their hold on the territory, which otherwise might have been prone to sectarian fracture (Stansfield, 2014). This narrative focused on the Sunni. However, this narrative created some alienation among the Shia, who under the Ottomans were not subjected to Sunni rule, at least not in the south around Basra, where they had local governors and rarely would have encountered an Ottoman Turk (Stansfield, 2014).

The poor governance in Iraq would eventually abut the United States and its economic imperialism, specifically relating to the country's oil wealth. Saddam Hussein projected as a leader with strong support, but that support was relatively thin, and mainly held by his own Baathist followers. Other ethnic groups, who had cowed out of fear of Hussein, left his the first chance they had. The rule that the Sunni had cultivated over decades since independence wilted very quickly, as other groups in Iraq never had particularly strong support for Sunni leadership, especially given the circumstances under which Sunni rule came to exist in the country -- a legacy of the British.

The arrival of the Americans in the 2000s is an example of new imperialism. In this case, oil was the primary driver for the invasion. The United States may have been content to operate with economic imperialism, but had been shut out of the market in favor of European companies. Hussein was known to use oil -- the main economic driver of Iraq -- as a political tool for years. The 2000s were no exception. The rich oil reserves of the country provided Iraq with the power to avert economic imperialism. Hussein, in the days before the U.S. invasion, reached out to European oil companies like TotalFinaElf and Repsol in order to sign extraction deals, as a means of maintaining the country's control over the critical resource, its internal finances, and the ability of the United States to influence Iraq's economic health (The Economist, 2002).

The moves did not work in the face of U.S. military invasion. The subsequent occupation of the country by American forces ushered in a new era of imperialism. If oil wealth and a strong military had allowed Sunni to rule Iraq since independence, that era was over and a new era of imperialism had begun. The new era was characterized by the United States government implementing its own leaders in the country, and then seeking to control the transition of Iraq to a more democratic state.

This fractured state, and fractured governance, is another new era in Iraq's history with imperialism. The U.S. decision to invade was based on an imperialistic agenda, as much was transparent from the outset. But it was this current imperialistic invasion that broke up the strong governance of the country that had been built by the Baathists. Once, again Iraq fell apart, and largely on sectarian lines. Nordland and Al-Salhy (2014) note that sectarian violence came in waves in post-invasion Iraq. The old hostilities that existed between Sunni and Shia in this artificially-created country were renewed in the absence of a strongman leader to enforce discipline.

The Kurdish Quasi-Independence

The area where the Kurds had lived under Ottoman rule was generally a singular area. At the end of the Ottoman Empire, the British, French and Turkish powers decided to split the Kurdish Territory. The Treaty of Sevres in 1920 was never ratified, but it contained the blueprint for the partition of Kurdish territory, ostensibly to weaken the Kurds politically. This treaty proposed the creation of Iraq, Syria and Saudi Arabia as kingdoms, as well as autonomous states for the Armenians and the Kurds. The final treaty on the region, the Treaty of Lausanne, left out the latter two states. The reason for the change has been attributed to the oil interests of the British and the French. The British were intent on controlling the major oil-producing areas. Knowing that they were going to control Iraq at that point, the British sought to extend Iraqi territory into Kurdistan. The result of this is that Kurdistan would be split between Iraq, Syria and Turkey (Malanczuk, 1991).

The Kurdistan issue remains unresolved to this day, and therefore continues to have resonance in the context of modern Iraq. The Kurds have been able to maintain their own political and cultural identity over the this period, for example winning some measure of autonomy within the Iraqi state in 1970. This autonomy continued when the Americans invaded Iraq, with the Kurds taking the side of the coalition against Saddam Hussein. While political issues kept the issue of an independent Kurdistan off the table after the conflict, Kurdish Iraq became a de facto independent nation anyway. Kurdistan became the only secure part of the Iraqi state, with its own governance, and its own territorial integrity. Observers are skeptical that Kurdistan will ever be allowed to achieve full de jure independence, but the region still enjoys de facto independence from the rest of Iraq, even if the questions about regaining territorial sovereignty over Kurdish areas of Turkey and Syria remain muddied (The Economist, 2015). The unresolved Kurdish issue is another example of the legacy of imperialist ambitions and colonial rule, nearly 100 years later.

The Kurds remain a strong force combating the Islamic State as well. While the U.S.-backed government in Baghdad has been ineffective at combatting the rise of IS, the Kurds have been able to hold on to their critical territories for the most part, and have been able to expand southward towards Kirkuk when the Iraqi army fled the area under IS pressure. This has in turn created an opportunity for the Kurds to sell oil via pipelines that run through Turkey (The Economist, 2015).

ISIS

The rise of ISIS is typically attributed to the destabilization brought about by the U.S. invasion, an imperialist act, but it also has roots in older imperialism. Where the Ottomans had divided the different areas of modern-day Iraq into three provinces that reflected three unique demographics, the modern state of Iraq has always faced an uneasy ethnic mix. That the minority Sunni were put in charge of the country only exacerbated these challenges. ISIS are nominally a Sunni group, following Wahhabism. They were able to rise in the security vacuum created by the Syrian Civil War, but moved into northern Iraq thereafter. The group's territory has waxed and waned since it entered Iraq but it remains a force in the area today.

IS has its own imperialist ambitions, though perhaps not so closely related to capitalism. They still, however, need money to fight their war, and that money comes from oil, same it is does for all other actors in the region. To that end, IS has sought to capture oil-rich territories and to otherwise expand its influence over these areas. Their behavior might differ in some ways from that of Western imperialists, but they are nonetheless outsiders seeking to exploit Iraq's resources for their own gain, and have little to genuinely offer the people of Iraq. Their moral authority is no greater or worse than Western nations that show up with guns, set up camp and take over key resources.

The modern Iraqi political landscape, with a de facto Kurdish state, IS, and a weak Iraqi central government in Baghdad, are all vestiges not only of the U.S. invasion but also of the ancient rivalries that have bubbled up after Saddam Hussein was toppled (Stansfield, 2014). None of these groups had to live with each other under the Ottomans. They would have had little contact with one another outside of some light trade in those days. Today, however, as part of one country and with a powerful resources (oil) at stake, things are different. Not only are these groups in contact, and thus conflict with each other more frequently, but there are substantial economic stakes as well, to say nothing of the religious ones. The crisis that Iraq faces today may seem to have been precipitated by the U.S. invasion and subsequent imperial conquest, but these conflicts have their roots in the ancient rivalries of the people living in this region. Were it not for the creation of a singular Iraqi state by the British, and the subsequent destabilization of that state by the Americans, doubtless some of this conflict would not exist, but there would still be the underpinnings of conflict in the region and some of the rivalries would have become heated, eventually, at some point in time because of their inherent intractability.

Iran

Unlike Iraq, Iran was never subject to imperial power. It was, in fact, an imperial power in its own right at times during its history. Of course, Iran's apex was probably under Zoroastrian Achaemenid Empire. In the modern age, Persia was a rival to the Ottomans, with Kurdistan in fact as a buffer between the two. Iran exercised imperial ambitions in a hundred-year occupation of Kurdistan, for example, bookended by Ottoman rule. The Persian Empire abutted not only the Ottomans but the Russians. While it engaged in conflict with the Russians, and suffered territorial losses as a result, the main heart of Persia was never subject to imperial conquest. Sort of.

In 1951, Mohammed Mosaddegh rose to power and nationalized the country's oil industry. In 1953, a combined U.S.-British effort overthrew him in response to their loss of Iranian oil interests. This overthrow was officially revealed in declassified documents in 2013 as an official act of U.S. foreign policy. The British Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (BP) was the primary company that was nationalized by Mosaddagh, and British response was to defend its economic interests in the region. The only way it felt it could do that was to overthrown Mosaddagh and install a leader in the country that was friendlier to British and American interests (Dehghan & Taylor, 2013).

The U.S. and UK effectively created the monarchy of the Shah by eliminating the democratically-elected leader of the country. This would have lasting repercussions in the country. First, those two nations were major economic beneficiaries of the arrangement. While they never officially took charge of Iran for themselves the way the U.S. would eventually do in Iraq, the Shah owed them a great debt for his power and support, and was rather amenable to their needs. This sort of de facto economic imperialism worked just fine for the U.S. and Britain in Iran for a few decades. They had no need to take on the political risk of colonizing Iran; the country was an example of a post-colonial imperialist state, controlled by nations via proxy rather than via direct rule.

The religious sector was perhaps the first to reject this imperialism, in part because it clashed with their Islamic worldview but also in part because it reduced their political power, as Iran was essentially run as a secular state under the Shah. The underlying principle that modernity is associated with progress was not challenged by many, but it was within strict Islamist circles in Iran (Rouleau, 1980). The Iranian Revolution was therefore a rejection of both imperialism and modernity. The Shah was too much like an imperialist ruler, the mullahs argued, and he was taking Iran in a social direction that ran counter to their religious worldview (Rouleau, 1980).

Iran-Iraq War

Shortly after the Islamic Revolution, Iran entered into a prolonged war with Iraq in the 1980s. A key underpinning of this war was the Revolution's rejection of Western values, essentially a rejection of pro-Western ruling elites. Such elites, common throughout the Arab world, were beholden to Western interests because a) they were put in place by the British, b) they depended on Western purchases of their oil for their wealth and for their internal power, or c) both. Many in the Arab world saw the Iranian Revolution as a cultural touchstone, and an opportunity for Arabs to likewise rid themselves of the imperialist powers who were thought to run their countries.

The imperialists had no love for the side they were supporting, but saw that the conflict between Iraq and Iran was multifaceted, and they wanted to control the outcome. It was a conflict between secular values and religious ones, but also a conflict over control of a massive portion of the world's oil supply, so an economic conflict. As such, the U.S.S.R. and Western powers sided with Iraq in the conflict, both having reason to fear the religious power of Iran as a potential model for the Arab nations. China, a rival of the U.S.S.R. predominantly, sided with Iran. The Gulf States, fearful of what Iranian victory would mean for their own imperialist-supported grips on power, chose to side with Iraq. The conflict would ultimately end in a stalemate, but would have further repercussions. Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991 as a means of extending Saddam Hussein's own imperialist ambitions that went nowhere during the war, only to be rebuffed by the United States, thus ending U.S. support of Saddam Hussein's regime.

Oil

The main cause for imperialism in the region has always been oil. The Ottoman Empire fell during the First World War, at a time when it had become apparent that the way forward technologically for the world was going to be with internal combustion engines. Cars were becoming more common in wealthy countries. Airplanes and tanks and ships were all critical to the war effort. It was evident at that point that oil was one of the most important resources in the world, or would be going forward. The British, who were the world's leading imperialist power at that point in the time, seized the opportunity to capture the oil-rich areas of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk was more focused on the creation of his Turkish Republic, and had little bargaining power besides, and the result of this was the various British mandates in the region. This was the most salient dawn of imperialism in the Middle East, and set up the rest of the conflicts in the region for the next 100 years.

Oil has not waned as a resource, and Western powers have never felt motivated to relinquish their economic imperialist ambitions over the region. The British installed rulers favorable to trade with Western companies, and when the Americans ascended to be the world's dominant power they followed suit. The interests of Western nations in both Iraq and Iran has always been focused on oil. They took an interest in the area when they realized its strategic importance as an oil resource, and have maintained their interest ever since for the same reason. Without oil, neither of these countries would spend much time on the radar of the world's major powers.