Partitions V — Iraq

Nobody asked but …

I imagine that there have been many conjunctions and disjunctions of territories in the swirling sandstorms of the deserts and the mingling illusions of the imperialist minds.  Mesopotamia is criss-crossed with these fictions.

After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the usual suspects from among the European imperialists redrew the lines.  This was coincident, in the broader scheme, with the discovery of oil and the horseless carriage — a perfect storm of colonialism.

What could they have been thinking, Sunni, Shi’ite, and Kurd, jammed together under one sock puppet?  What could go wrong?

I shuddered when one of the ideas advanced was to partition Iraq into Kurdistan, Sunnistan, and Shi’astan.  That would have been just more of the endless dance.

My dad spent some years in Saudi Arabia.  He would just shake his head at the latest news.  A millennium of history was being oversimplified yet again.

— Kilgore Forelle

Save as PDFPrint

Written by