The Making of the Modern Iraq
Study Grant Proposal: Summer 2006
Wendy Gunderson, Professor of HistoryThe past few years I have had more and more students asking about why the United States is involved in the Middle East, and why we started our involvement there. Most tend to think this is a relatively new development partly because it is not somethingthat is well covered in the general U.S. history textbooks, and many do not understand the background of US involvement in the Middle East. In the last ten years, I find myself wanting to know more about the region as well, especially as it has become a larger part of the foreign policy of the United States, and due to its effect on the rest of the world.
Middle Eastern history was not an area that was readily available as a region to study and research at most universities when I was in college, and at the time, having very little knowledge of the Middle East, I had no inclination to know more. Being older and hopefully wiser, my interest in the region has changed due to the circumstances of today, and my need to further explain it to my students (and not rely on the simplistic comments by some of our politicians that “those in the Middle East are envious of our freedoms” as the think that will explain everything). The Middle East has been a part of European and US history since at least the First World War, although relatively few people in the United States, my students included, realize this. Although I have become more knowledgeable about some areas in the Middle East, particularly in regard to the creation of Israel, my knowledge of other regions of the Middle East, especially Iraq, is limited. I feel that is detrimental to explaining the complexity of the situation to my students, and in my own understanding of the region and its history, which is why I am seeking a study grant to help rectify the situation and allow me to expand on my study in a more specific manner.
Another reason for my interest in the region is that from my previous readings regarding the Middle East, I see a parallel with the study of Native American History (one of my primary fields) in the Americas. Both areas (Middle Eastern and Native American) of history are at times very ethnocentric in the portrayal of those peoples native to the region. Both groups were dominated by other peoples, (mainly those of European background) and both attempted to keep their culture vibrant while surviving the domination, although the Middle Eastern peoples so far have been more successful in that area than Native Americans, partly due to the inhospitable region (as seen by other cultures) they inhabit. If it were not for the raw materials found in the Middle East, primarily oil, the region may still be obscure to parts of the world.
I do strongly believe that the people of today need a better understanding of the Middle East and the United States’ relationship to that region. In order to do that, one must have a grasp of the history of the nations and peoples of the Middle East. Once I begin this plan of study on Iraq this summer of 2006, I hope to continue it to other areas of the Middle East, as my schedule permits.
I plan to begin my work with a general study of the Middle East, looking at the area prior to World War I, followed with the aftermath of the war, including the partitioning of the area into the Mandates. From that point I plan to concentrate fully on Iraq and its experiences up through the twentieth century. Some historians have seen a similarity between the British mandate system and how it led to a de-stabilization of the region and the involvement of the United States and the resulting instability today. I wish to study the arguments on this matter, along with the cultural studies of ethnocentrism in the imperialistic processes used in the region by various groups.
The study of this region will allow me to better understand the influences upon the region of Iraq, and its importance in US foreign policy in the twentieth and twenty- first centuries. I think that a discussion with the college community would be in order to present my findings to the interested parties at the college, while the information learned will enhance my teaching of US foreign policy and bring a greater dimension to my classes on the importance of the Middle East in world and U.S. matters. It will also become an area to use as a comparison with Native American studies in the development of the histories of both regions.
AAlthough the study grant would be for the Summer II session, I plan to begin some reading in Summer I, therefore I have it scheduled over the 8 weeks rather than 5
Reading Schedule:
Weeks 1-2 In the first weeks of the study grant I plan to immerse myself in the general readings on the Middle East with chapters taken from general text by William Ochsenwald & Sydney Nettleton Fisher’s The Middle East: A History. I will continue to consult this text as needed for general concepts of the Middle East. I will also address the enthnocentrism and cultural relativism of the region through Edward Said’s classic work Orientalism and Bernard Lewis’ Multiple Identities of the Middle East. After that is accomplished, I plan to look at the involvement of the British in the area involvement in Iraq with David Fromkin’s, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, which looks at the peace treaties ending World War I and the creation of the mandate system in the Middle East.
Weeks 3-4 During the next two weeks of the study grant I will continue to look at the influences on Iraq with Christopher Catherwood’s Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq, which gives credit to Churchill for the creation of the modern nation and Samari Haj’s The Making of Iraq 1900-1963: Capital, Power, and Ideology, showing other influences on the founding of the modern era of Iraq. To get another perspective on the time frame before World War II, I will study Reeva Simon’s Iraq Between Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny. (originally titled in the first edition Iraq Between Two World Wars: The Creation and Implementation of a Nationalist Ideology)
Weeks 5-6 Douglas Little’s American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, will help to explain the US policy in Iraq since World War II. The work, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship by Farouk-Sluglett & Sluglett will give me a different perspective of much of the same time frame as Little’s work. Geoff Simons’ Iraq, From Sumer to Saddam and Charles Tripp’s A History of Iraq, although covering the same general time frames, they purport different interpretations of the history of the nation of Iraq.
Weeks 7-8 This week will update the history from the 1980s through to today with Dilip Hiro’s work on The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict of the 1980s, and Toby Dodge’s work Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied, and Kanan Makiya’s Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, which addresses the dominance of Saddam’s political party in the 1990s. I will wrap the study up with William Polk’s work on Understanding Iraq which brings the era up through the American Occupation.
Reading List for the Study Grant
Catherwood, Christopher, Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq, New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2004.
Dodge, Toby, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied, New York: Columbia University Press, 2005.
Farouk-Sluglett, Marion & Peter Sluglett, Iraq Since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, London: IB Tarius & Company, 2001.
Fromkin, David, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East, New York: Avon, 1989.
Haj, Samira, The Making of Iraq 1900-1963: Capital, Power, and Ideology, New York: State University of New York Press, 1997.
Hiro, Dilip, The Longest War: The Iran-Iraq Military Conflict, New York: Taylor & Francis, Inc, 1991.
Lewis, Bernard, Multiple Identities of the Middle East, New York: Schocken Books, Inc., 2001.
Little, Douglas, American Orientalism: The United States and the Middle East Since 1945, University of North Carolina Press, 2004.
Makiya, Kanan, Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998.
Ochsenwald, William & Sydney Nettleton Fisher, The Middle East: A History, New York: McGraw Hill, 2003. (use some chapters for reference)
Polk, William, Understanding Iraq: The Whole Sweep of Iraqi History, of Outside Rule from Genghis Khan to the Ottoman Turks to the British Mandate to the American Occupation, New York: HarperCollins, 2005.
Said, Edward W., Orientalism, New York: Knopf Publishing Group, 1979.
Simon, Reeva Spector, Iraq Between Two World Wars: The Militarist Origins of Tyranny, 2nd edition, London: Kegan Paul, International, 2004.
Simons, Geoff, Iraq, From Sumer to Saddam, 2nd edition, New York: Palgrave MacMillian Publishers, 1996.
Tripp, Charles, A History of Iraq, 2nd edition, New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.