The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 79 The Past as Prologue Understanding Iraq William R. Polk, HarperCollins Publishers, 2005, $22.95, hardcover, 221 pages. R EVIEWED BY R OBERT V. K EELEY Anyone dealing with the Iraq quagmire, or who truly wishes to understand this horrendous adven- ture, should make the time to read this new book, which fully lives up to its pithy title. I have not seen a better book on the subject. It provides a strong antidote to the profound and pervasive ignorance about Iraq that prevailed in Washington as we were led into this war. The author could hardly be more expert. William R. Polk has been studying, teaching, writing about and following Iraq since he first went there as a graduate student in 1947. During the Kennedy administration he was the Middle East specialist on the State Department’s Policy Planning Coun- cil. A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, he taught Middle East politics and history and Arabic language (which he speaks) and literature at Harvard and at the University of Chicago during a long academic career, and has published many books in his field. He was even in Iraq short- ly before we launched our invasion in 2003. In five succinct chapters he covers the history of Mesopotamia in ancient times, under Islamic rule (before and as part of the Ottoman Empire), British Iraq, revolutionary Iraq (devot- ing particular attention to the Saddam Hussein regime), and “American Iraq” (1990 to the present). The most inter- esting chapter for me was about the British experience, which offers so many parallels with our own. Among other missteps, the British tried to establish security on the cheap by hiring local militias, in their case made up of minority ethnic Assyrian Christians. Polk takes us through the history of our own involvement with Iraq: the “Baghdad Pact” (aka CENTO), a Dulles creation to counter Soviet influence in the region; the short- lived Hashemite “Arab Union” with Jordan to counter Nasser’s “United Arab Republic” and Arab nationalism in general; and our assistance to Saddam Hussein during the mutually destructive war with Iran, to counter what we saw as dangerous Islamic extremism. People in the Middle East have longer memories than we do. They do not forget the heritage of Western colonialism and imperialism. Consider the U.K.’s “Iraq Petroleum Com- pany,” designed to exploit the world’s largest supply of oil in a single territo- ry. Iraq’s share of the oil revenues was $40 million in 1952. In 1972 the Iraqi government (instigated by Saddam Hussein) nationalized the IPC, with dramatic results. By the following year, Iraq’s oil revenues were $1 bil- lion. They reached $8 billion two years later. And by 1980 they were $26 billion. This mountain of cash permitted a vast program of development and modernization, unprecedented in the Middle East, that in a very few years transformed Iraq into the most advanced state in the Arab world — a Saddam legacy that no one now cares to remember. Iraq was briefly, in some limited ways, an exemplar for the region, until a combination of fear and hubris drove Saddam way off- course, into a useless war that caused immense damage to both Iraq and Iran, and in turn to the entire neigh- borhood — and, regrettably, eventu- ally to the United States as well. Polk’s final chapter is a cogent, informed and understandably pes- simistic critique of our current perfor- mance in Iraq. His policy prescrip- tion for the future, briefly stated, is that since democracy cannot be imposed by military means, we should get out sooner rather than later. I believe he would add that we should also at least learn from our mistakes, B OOKS Polk’s book provides a strong antidote to the profound and pervasive ignorance about Iraq that pre- vailed in Washington as we were led into this war. w