The Making of Modern Iraq
I have just finished Margaret Macmillan's Paris 1919, a fascinating account of the Paris peace process that followed World War I, culminating in the Treaty of Versailles and the founding of League of Nations. The Allied negotiators found themselves taking on the herculean task of trying to "fix the world", resolving the boundaries of all those nations that were drawn into the conflict. The decisions that they made have shaped much of the world today, and contingently contributed to many of its recent global conflicts: from the four Balkan wars of the 90s, to the civil war in Lebanon and the ongoing Palestinian conflict. Most pertinently, the peace process had the dubious distinction of drawing the borders of modern Iraq (at time, the British protectorate of Mesopotamia). Macmillan ominously described this decision:
In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs make one country.
With this as the basis for constructing a nation, it hardly bodes well for the future of a new "independent" Iraq.