www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian/issues03/may03/iraq.html
Iraqs Unruly Century Ever since Britain carved the nation out of the Ottoman Empire after World War I, the land long known as Mesopotamia has been wracked by instability In 1921, Great Britain, with the approval of the League of Nations, installed the first king of the newly created nation of Iraq. Since then Iraqs political history has been marked by nationalist fervor, ethnic uprisings, tribal conflicts, palace treacheries, warfare and deadly oppression. Scholars have offered a catalog of reasons why antiquitys cradle of civilization has been so unstable. Some blame geography, pointing out that Iraq, which covers some 168,000 square miles, has a mere 12 miles of shoreline, on the Persian Gulf, making it the most landlockedand culturally isolatednation in the Middle East. Others tie Iraqs bloody history, as many have described it, to the preponderance of groups vying for power. Britains experiment in nation-building failed partly because it did not unify the disparate factions, says Charles Tripp, a British citizen and author of the 2000 book, A History of Iraq . But Adeed Dawisha, an Iraq-born historian and author of Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century , suggests that Britain failed mainly because it granted Iraq too little autonomy. From the establishment of the constitutional monarchy in 1921 all the way to its fall in 1958, Dawisha says, it was very clear that none of the Iraqi governments could carry out any policy against British opposition. Author Jonathan Kandell, a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times , reports on the instability of Iraq from the onset of British rule to the rise of Saddam Hussein, the dictator whose pursuit of weapons of mass destruction would put him on a collision course with the United States.
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