Would Iraqi Sunnis and Shiites and Kurds therefore be better off living in separate states? This proposal is advanced in The Future of Iraq, by the British writers Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield. Where Dodge's book is a work of scholarship, The Future of Iraq is an undisguised work of advocacy. We have seen a number of such books since the buildup to war--notably The New Iraq by Joseph Braude, an Iraqi-American business consultant who was arrested on his way back from Baghdad with stolen artifacts from the Iraqi National Museum--and we can expect more to come. Not that all these books concur with one another. Just as officials of the British Empire clashed over how to rule Iraq, so do American policy-makers today.

Anderson and Stansfield's narrative of modern Iraqi history casts a glance at the descent of the country after independence in 1932 into military dictatorships that alternated with reactionary civilian governments in the service of the large landlords. Anderson and Stansfield shortchange the brief rule of Brig. Abdel Karim Qassim, who came to power in the 1958 coup that overthrew the monarchy, painting him as a do-nothing leader. In fact, Qassim finally enacted land reform and protected workers' rights, becoming enormously popular and launching an epochal change in Iraq's social structure. They do get right the rapid rise of the Communist Party in the 1950s and early '60s (though they underestimate its numbers) and the challenge it posed to Qassim, who responded by letting party members into his Cabinet.

Unfortunately, Anderson and Stansfield are so focused on internal Iraqi politics that they ignore the evidence, reported over a decade ago by Adel Darwish and Gregory Alexander in their 1991 book, Unholy Babylon, that Washington was extremely alarmed by Qassim and the Communists, and therefore wooed the Baath Party as an alternative. When the Baath briefly came to power in 1963, the CIA passed to Saddam Hussein, probably an agency asset, a list of hundreds of Iraqi Communists, whom the new regime liquidated. The Baath was in the wilderness when the coup collapsed, but came back to stay in 1968. Again, Darwish and Alexander report assertions of US backing for the 1968 coup, confirmed to me by other journalists who have talked to retired CIA and State Department officials. This Great Power context for Iraqi events of the 1960s is not discussed in The Future of Iraq, although Anderson and Stansfield do present a workmanlike survey of Baath rule from 1968: the familiar story of oil wealth, industrialization and rising prosperity in the 1970s, followed by more than two decades of serial disaster under Saddam Hussein's presidency.

Throughout, they emphasize ethnic tensions rather than social cleavages, such as class conflict or divisions between the city and countryside. This emphasis serves their dubious argument that Iraq would be better off if it were partitioned, a plan that at the least ignores the way the country's various ethnic and religious groups are intermixed and intermarried. While ethnicity is certainly a burning issue in contemporary Iraq, its importance has been artificially inflated by Baath policies. When the largely Sunni Arab civilian wing of the party came to power in 1968, it distributed the petroleum wealth and other perquisites to Sunni members of the ruling elite, especially those from Saddam's home base in Tikrit. Shiites filled lower-level posts in the south, but Sunnis dominated the top posts and funneled resources to a Sunni Arab sect-class of rentiers.

Shut out of the circle of patronage, non-Sunni Iraqis had to find bases on which to mobilize. They could not form secular parties that might try to appeal across ethnic cleavages on economic issues. The regime's relentless surveillance forced them to turn inward, to family, clan and the mosque. As a result, Shiite movements were able to organize clandestinely in ghettos and among settled tribes in the late Saddam period to make preparations for an Islamic state. Likewise, the longstanding yearning of many Kurds for more autonomy from Baghdad was intensified by the Baath regime's horrifying poison gas attacks in reprisal for the Kurds' support of Iran in the Iran-Iraq War (1980-88). The Kurdish movement for autonomy was reinforced by the no-fly zone established to protect them from Saddam after his troops defeated the 1991 revolt, which the Americans encouraged and shortly afterward abandoned, leaving thousands of rebels to be slaughtered by Saddam's troops.

With regard to the Iraqi Kurds, Anderson and Stansfield regrettably fall into the trap of primordialist thinking. That is, they assume that ethnicity (and its political saliency) is a given, rather than something actively fashioned by society. There is, of course, no denying that the Kurds have suffered grievously; they have as much right to imagine themselves into a nation as anyone else. But they did not start out as a nation, just as no one else did. The major dialects of Kurdish (an Indo-European language) are not mutually comprehensible. Many Iraqi Kurds are bilingual in Arabic, and many live in mixed provinces and intermarry with other Iraqis. If Iraq remains a multiethnic state, it would hardly be alone in the world--or even in the region (think of Iran, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Pakistan and Algeria, among others). Of course, some of those who favor breaking up Iraq into its constituent "ethnic" components also favor an ethnically pure Israel, cleansed of Palestinians.

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