What Year Is This?

Iraq is a microcosm in the Middle East.  There is not a single ethnic, sectarian, religious, political or economic group in the Middle East that is not represented in Iraq.  This had been a typical example of the Middle East until modern times. That is to say, cities built by the Islamic civilization, particularly during the Ottoman era, have always been diverse in terms of religion, sect and ethnicity. The crisis began when the West carried its formula of the nation state, which had been the West’s own solution to its disasters after the First World War. In other words, with the Sykes-Picot order, millennium old sociological and political structures were destroyed by legal means.

Over the years, those who had been given power in various pieces of the Sykes-Picot order built surreal structures. Although some of these actors were able to gain traction through Arab nationalism and Ba’thism, in many ways the Sykes-Picot order remained trapped in 1918. The situation involving Iraq and Syria, today, is not all that different from what it was in 1918. We are still at the same point from where the Ottoman’s left off. Despite the fact almost a century has passed since the four century long Ottoman governance collapsed, neither the Middle East and North Africa, nor the Balkans have found peace and stability. The solution is clearly not another Ottoman rule. However, it is equally clear that there is a lot to be learned from the Ottoman era. The nation state, heir apparent to the Ottoman, lived through its own shares of disasters, just as tragic as those experienced by the artificial elements of Sykes-Picot. The century long effort to govern with Kemalism finally dwindled down at the turn of the millennium. Since then, in other words, since the...