It’s the stuff of spy novels. Two men, gathered in secrecy in the midst of seemingly unending war, huddled over a map. In the center of this map, drawn in chinagraph pencil, is a straight line, which audaciously slashes the north half of the region from the south.
As GlobalPost co-founder Charles Sennott explains, this is the story of how the country we now know as Iraq came to be: the product of secretive, backroom wheeling and dealing between colonial powers Britain and France as the First World War raged around them. Today, a full century after that war’s end, the consequences of that line have emerged once again in the latest eruption of violence in Iraq.
The glaring problem with the border the war left behind, Sennott says -- besides, of course, the secrecy, the unfulfilled promises, and the dubious authority Britain and France had to be carving the land up in the first place -- is that it cut indiscriminately across an extremely diverse region without any regard for existing religious, cultural, or tribal boundaries.
“It was this colonial arrogance,” Sennott explains. “The truth is: we’ve been paying for that as Westerners. And particularly, the people who live here -- the people of the Middle East -- have been paying for that arrogance for one hundred years.”
Today, the people of Iraq are paying for those colonial sins in the form of the nation’s swift and dramatic unraveling. As ISIS advances in its stunningly ruthless march toward Baghdad, the world is waiting to see if embattled Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, in concert with the international community, will be able to put out the fire in time to keep his country intact. The consequences of failure include not only the disintegration of Iraq as we know it, but the explosion of violence into a regional war between Sunni and Shia with the potential to engulf and destabilize the entire Middle East.
A situation of this complexity necessitates delicate and skilled diplomacy. Yet, so far, that does not seem to be the strategy of Nouri al-Maliki, who has largely ignored calls from international leaders to compromise with warring factions within his country, relying instead primarily on force. Such a purely military solution either from Maliki or other nations like the United States, Sennott says, may be destined for failure.
“ISIS is definitely a nail, and it needs a hammer,” Sennott says. “But the difference is: it’s a bent, rusted nail. And you need to pull it out, not brutally bang it back in.”
Hear more from Sennott on World War I’s enduring legacy in the Middle East and his thoughts on a diplomatic way forward below.
