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JSOU Report 16-1
By 2001, the Iraqi regime was increasingly isolated within its own borders.
Its military was a shadow of what it had been a decade before and the
infrastructure was crumbling, yet Saddam Hussein clung to power. The
regime had taken on a much more religious tint. The flag had been changed—
inscribed with Allah al-Akbar. In the increasingly tribal and almost exclusively
Sunni ruling group, Islamic references to jihad and other forms of
resistance became more prominent. In effect, Saddam comingled pan-Arabist,
and pan-Islam became the new ‘survival’ political discourse. 154 What
the world called Iraq had returned to its fractured roots and the pretense of
a nation-state forgotten in the struggle of its ruling Sunni leaders to survive.
The events of 11 September 2001 brought matters to a head. From the
beginning, the Bush administration internally made it clear that one of the
post-9/11 goals would be the destruction of Saddamist Iraq. When the argument
that he was aligned with Osama bin Laden failed to carry sufficient
weight, then the argument that he was manufacturing WMD was raised.
After the invasion when the WMD did not materialize, then the campaign
to rid Iraq of a dictator and establish a functioning democracy was substituted.
After capturing Baghdad in 2003, the United States would learn—
like the Ottomans, the British, the Hashemites, and the various republican
governments before them—the three former Ottoman provinces of Mesopotamia—Basra,
Baghdad, and Mosul—did not constitute a nation-state
and that any effective centralized control rested on coercion and top-down
imposed stability.
Summary
Between 1970 and 2003, Syria and Iraq followed a remarkably similar trajectory.
The dictatorships utilized the captive Ba’th Party structure as a tool to
exercise control over a socially, ethnically, and religiously fractured state.
During this period, Iran and Syria were no more nation-states than they had
been under the Ottomans, the mandates, or the previous republican governments.
They were an amalgam of competing and conflicting interests and
groups. The groups themselves were splintered from within and it was only
autocratic control at the top that maintained order and stability. Saddam
Hussein and Hafiz al-Assad attempted to use the Ba’th party, albeit firmly
under their control, as a rallying point around which to build a secular,
inclusive, and yet controlled society.
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