If you read a history of Iraq in an encyclopedia, you'll learn a lot about border disputes and military coups. But you won't find much that explains why Iraq is the way it is.

What follow are three principles to help you organize your thinking about Iraq. I'm certainly not claiming that this is the only way to look at the country's history. Rather, it's just one framework for understanding the present conflict -- one that's informed by my research and by the opinions of experts, and one that I hope you find useful.


I. Iraq is an artificial state held together by a political culture of force.

Iraq was assembled out of three provinces of the defeated Ottoman Empire following World War I. At that time, the entire Persian Gulf region was intentionally cut into small -- and often nonsensical -- pieces. The pieces were designed to meet the colonial powers' administrative needs, not the contours of geography or ethnicity.

In 1921, the British, charged with designing Iraq's new government, installed Faisal, a cosmopolitan Saudi prince, as monarch. The foreign regime was unpopular from the beginning, and it set a precedent for unrepresentative government in Iraq. By 1958, Faisal's heirs were dead, murdered and replaced by a group of military officers. They wouldn't last long.

Iraq has never had a government that reflected the interests of all three national constituencies -- the Kurds, the Shia, and the Sunnis. Any ruler who has remained in power for long has done so not by consensus but by oppression. Because Iraq's political and economic systems are winner-take-all -- with the ruler controlling the massive flow of oil wealth -- that oppression has been all too feasible for a succession of Iraqi strongmen.

More reading:
• History of Iraq (AP)
• Book Review: "A History of Iraq" (Institute of Historical Research)
• Who Are the Kurds? (Washington Post)
• Tumultuous Rule of Saddam (Washington Times)
• Iraq, a country study (Library of Congress)
• The Lesson of Iraq (The Atlantic Monthly, 1958)


II. The roots of the current conflict predate the first Persian Gulf War.

In 1979, Iran's secular government was overthrown by Islamic revolutionaries. Saddam Hussein, who had just come into power in Iraq, was nervous that Iran's new Shia rulers might inspire Iraq's own majority Shia population to rise up against him. His neighbors in the Persian Gulf -- Kuwait and Saudi Arabia -- shared his concern.

So Saddam invaded Iran, using Saudi and Kuwaiti loans to pay for the war. The U.S. and the Soviet Union also gave money to Iraq.

Eight years later, in 1988, Iran and Iraq agreed to a cease-fire. Iran hadn't borrowed any money, and was able to begin reconstruction and development immediately. Iraq, on the other hand, was left with a dangerous combination: a huge military -- financed by foreign nations -- and a huge debt, owed primarily to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait.

It was this deep debt that led Saddam Hussein into Kuwait. His nominal justification was a dispute over oil rights; however, it was Iraq's dire economic situation that made him risk the invasion and, eventually, war with a U.S.-led coalition.

Iraq's history since the first Gulf War has been the story of Saddam Hussein clinging desperately to power as his regime has grown more impoverished, more oppressive, and more isolated. But all of that -- and what's happening today -- is historical fallout from the Iran-Iraq conflict.

More reading:
• Timeline: Saddam's Iraq (BBC)
• The Unfinished War (CNN)


III. The Persian Gulf is a lever that controls the U.S. economy.

But probably not how you think. Most oil used in the United States -- 75 percent -- comes from other sources, such as Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States itself. That makes the link between the politics of the Persian Gulf and prices in the U.S. less obvious -- but no less important.

First, understand that the Persian Gulf produces around 30 percent of the world's crude oil supply. That's a lot -- but a lot also comes from Russia, the North Sea, South America, and West Africa. New oil-producing regions, such as the Caspian Sea, are being developed.

So it's not as if gas stations will dry up if the Persian Gulf goes off-line. Most of the oil you use probably comes from elsewhere.

Here's the key: Regardless of source and destination, crude oil is traded on a global market. If the Persian Gulf's oil supply were cut off, the countries that are most dependent on it -- Japan, for instance, which gets 75 percent of its oil from the Gulf -- would shift their demand to other sources, such as... well... Mexico, Venezuela, and the United States itself.

Ideally, these sources would increase their own supply to compensate. The problem is that they can't. More than 90 percent of the world's excess capacity -- that is, the oil that's immediately available to expand the global supply -- is in the Persian Gulf.

That's the key to the Gulf's pivotal power: Yes, it's a major oil-producing region; but it also the most flexible and expandable oil-producing region by far.

So while the Persian Gulf can pick up the slack for other oil-producing countries when they falter, the reverse is not true. If supply shrinks because there's trouble in the Gulf, it will take a long time for other suppliers to develop new capacity; in the meantime, crude oil prices will rise all over the world, making everything from gasoline to air travel to garbage bags more expensive.

More reading:
• Persian Gulf Oil and Gas Exports Fact Sheet (U.S. Energy Information Agency)
• A Primer on Gasoline Prices (U.S. EIA)


When you think of Iraq in the context of post-World War I colonialism, internecine conflict with Iran, and the global economy for oil, the current conflict can begin to seem painfully predictable -- even inevitable.

But that may be going too far. Some elements of history, Iraqi and otherwise, are capricious and unpredictable -- the choices of a single person, the events of a single day. To correctly identify those elements, both now and in the days to come, you'll need an understanding of the larger forces that have been driving events in Iraq since at least the beginning of the last century.