The Triangle

Issue date: 2/9/07 Section: Ed-Op

The story of our catastrophe in Iraq is the story of a three-legged stool. It was built by the British, who fashioned Iraq by cobbling together disparate elements of the old Ottoman Empire after World War I. The British, taking their usual cue from the old Roman adage "divide and conquer," pitted three groups against one another: Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. Shiites and Sunnis had long lived side by side in Turkish Mesopotamia. The Ottomans, Sunni themselves, had given the minority Sunnis of the region political control of the Shiites as a means of containing Shiite Persia (present-day Iran), its great historic rival. This policy had worked for four hundred years, and the British saw no reason to change it. The Kurds, who had been promised an independent state of their own at Versailles, were forcibly incorporated into Iraq, not as a makeweight to the contending elements of the Arab population, but as a deliberately destabilizing factor. Thus was the three-legged stool of modern Iraq created. The fourth leg, of course, was to be supplied by the British themselves, not through direct rule, but by an imported monarchy that, in the nature of the case, would be both wholly reliant on the British and brutally repressive of the population it governed.

This formula worked as designed. Strongmen ruled on behalf of the monarchy, and they simply stepped forward on their own when the monarchy collapsed in 1958. By that time, the United States had replaced Britain as Iraq's imperial overlord. It kept the same system going, grooming potential replacements for the tyrant of the moment and helping to install whichever candidate had the right stones when the hour of succession came.

In this fashion, Saddam Hussein came to power. He proved the reliable client and the ruthlessly efficient dictator the United States had trained him to be, and, at bloody cost, contained expansionist Iran with an eight-year war in the 1980s. When Kurdish rebels attempted to take advantage of the war to loosen Iraq's grip in the north, he suppressed them with exemplary brutality, while the United States not only turned a blind eye, but supplied him with the chemicals he used to gas Kurdish civilians.

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