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15/06/2015 - Does Iraq exist?
The question asked today leaves us perplexed. He also puzzled observers at the end of the British protectorate, when the fragile independent monarchy did not seem able to give institutional continuity to a complex country, zip of demarcation between areas of strong contrast.
Bearing between Arabs and Persians, seam between Sunnis and Shiites, South frontier of the Kurdish people and the most populous Arab nation to look out over the Persian Gulf, 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 hostile to the God of Israel and known for its dissolute life. So dissolute that in ancient Italian Baghdad was translated Baldacca, from which whore.
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.
Because of Isis, Ninive, 500 km north of Baghdad, has returned to the news, more than we believe in our lives.
The Assyrian capital was the intended destination of God for the prophet Jonah, but he rebelled, pointed to the West and embarked in Jaffa (the Israeli city of grapefruit). God got furious and set off a storm, subsided only when the sailors threw him into the sea. Jonah was thus swallowed by a large fish to be then forgiven by God and returned. From this biblical event two facts were born:
- 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 sufficient to recognize a land beyond the Arab rhetoric of the last thousand years. When Saddam Hussein in the 1991 started to launch Scud on Israel it was not inspired by Arab or Islamic leaders, so much so that his impromptu appeal to the holy war was taken to ransom by the imams of half the world. He thought back to Nebuchadnezzar, the Babylonian king who conquered Jerusalem and destroyed the 1500 Temple years before the arrival of the Arabs. It is no coincidence that a motorized division of the Iraqi Republican Guard took the name of the ancient sovereign.
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 Parthians; it became crucial in the 20th century to prevent Kurdistan from existing and to the Southern Shiites to join too great a Iran.
The dismemberment de facto The Iraqi state unit following the two Gulf Wars scrambled the cards to make less of the internal and external benefits that had forged their development. The same dissolution of the party Baath, unlike the CIA since Soviet aid in the 70 years, an own goal has been revealed. Although at the price of blood and rights, for decades he had held together the networks of a complex country, not too distant from clanistic and tribal logic.
In this respect, the similarities with the Ba'athist Syria of the Assad dynasty is all too evident.
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A weak Baghdad is useless. Not even to Israel. This is the great damage that today the West must take note of. With this logic ISIS 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.
Giampiero Venturi
(photo: US DoD / Euronews)