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Between Tradition and Transition: State Building, Society and Security in the Old and New Iraq

After the traumatic aftermath of the war to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime in 2003, Iraq is now entering a key phase of its rebuilding process. While the insurgent campaign in the country continues, the general tone of reportage and discussion on the many reconstruction challenges faced remains relentlessly pessimistic. Indeed, the general tenor of analysis on the broader historical and political context of the current situation emphasises Iraq’s violent past as almost in itself a determinant of the country’s inevitable tendency to descend into anarchy, civil conflict and even fragmentation. Quite apart from the destructive attacks on the US-led coalition forces and embryonic Iraqi military and police, the deliberate bombings of Shia civilians by Sunni terrorists are grimly calculated to provoke ethnic strife and fulfil many sombre predictions of an atavistic bloodbath in the making. Given this scenario, it is no surprise that the Washington administration in particular is talking up the moderately encouraging outcome of the January 2005 elections that saw a turnout of nearly 60 percent and unmistakeable signs of an embryonic polity emerging from the political, economic and social wreckage of the Ba’thist era. A sample of the already considerable literature relating to the 2003 war and its aftermath invokes both the historical background behind the fragility of the current state-building project in Iraq, and the continuing regional repercussions of the demise of Saddam Hussein’s regime. Iraq’s traumatic history can be interpreted as either preordained by inherent contradictions exacerbated by the evolution from Ottoman district to British mandate to independent state, or instead a case of a viable polity hijacked by a ruthless and tyrannical regime. This explanatory tension between ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ forms the basis of debate on the origins and nature of the government of Saddam, and now that the ‘Hitler of the Middle East’ has been removed from the forefront of attention, the emphasis has been switched to the perceived imbalances in the historic Iraqi system and the ways in which these helped to distort the country’s political culture and civil society. Toby Dodge’s analysis of the British role in the formation of Iraq between 1914 and 1932 has been heavily promoted by Hurst Publishers as essential background reading on the 2003 war and the insurgency that followed it. As well as an interesting case study of colonial nation building in itself, Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 41, No. 3, 445 – 452, May 2005