Does Iraq exist? The question posed today is perplexing. It also left observers perplexed at the end of the British protectorate, when the fragile independent monarchy did not seem able to give institutional continuity to a complex country, a demarcation zip between conflicting areas. A buffer between Arabs and Persians, a seam between Sunnis and Shiites, a border between Kurds and the most numerous Arabs in the Persian Gulf ... it has always been dynamite ready to jump.
But the essence of Iraqi unity has always been functional, if only for a comparison with Western societies.
Let's think about history. Near Baghdad is Babylon, a biblical city enemy of the God of Israel known for its dissolute life. So dissolute that in ancient Italian Baghdad was translated Baldacca or baldracca if you prefer ...
The Hanging Gardens, the Sumerians, the Assyrians ... since childhood we eat bread and Mesopotamia, the land between Tigris and Euphrates which more or less corresponds to today's Iraq.
Due to ISIS, Nineveh also returned to the news, 500 km north of Baghdad, present in our lives more than we believe.
The Assyrian capital was God's intended destination for the prophet Jonah who instead headed west and embarked at Jaffa (mother of all grapefruits). The storm unleashed by the enraged God only subsided when the sailors threw it overboard. Jonah was thus swallowed by a fish to be then forgiven by God and spat back. Two facts arose from this biblical event:
- Collodi invented Pinocchio's whale;
- Being a Jonah, according to the naval tradition, means to bring a defiance.
Pinocchio and whales aside, this reference to ancient books might be enough to identify a land beyond the Arab rhetoric of the last thousand years. When Saddam Hussein in 1991 launched the Scuds on Israel he was not inspired by Arab or Islamic leaders, so much so that his impromptu call to holy war was reaped by imams from all over the world. Conversely, he thought of Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who conquered Jerusalem and destroyed its temple 1500 years before the arrival of the Arabs. It is no coincidence that a motorized division of the Iraqi Republican Guard was named after the ancient ruler.
That Nebuchadnezzar had also inspired Giuseppe Verdi for Nabucco, leaves the time he finds. We are interested in pointing out that Iraq as a united country, albeit with a thousand frictions and contradictions, is ideally and potentially always existed.
It was limes at the time of the Romans, worried by the knights Parti; it has become fundamental in the 20th century to prevent Kurdistan from existing and the Shiites of the South from joining too large an Iran.
The de facto dismemberment of the Iraqi state unit that followed the two Gulf Wars has reshuffled the cards, eliminating the internal and external benefits that had fueled its development. The dissolution of the Baath party, which has been against the CIA since the time of the Soviet aid in the 70 years, turned out to be an own goal. Although at the price of blood and rights, for decades it had kept together the networks of a country that was too complex.
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Now that the Iraqi national fabric is in tatters, worn down by rivers of death and new hatred spread from north to south, the heralded reconquest of Ramadi, Tikrit or who knows what other Iraqi city seems like a joke. A real nothing from a military point of view and even less from a political point of view. Comparable only to the choice of a facade leader or to phantom parliamentary elections, useful only to clear the conscience of those who have failed in Iraq.
A weak Baghdad is of no use to anyone. Not even to Israel. This is the great damage that the West must take note of today. With this logic, the so-called Islamic State ends up being an even incidental problem.
In common sense manuals it is clear that imported constitutional forms often serve little. At international level, the voice of a recognizable regime is always better and the unpredictable voice of a lost nation and prey to chaos.
Read also: Farewell to Mesopotamia: the end of Iraq as a unitary state
(photo: US DoD / Euronews)
