A few days ago, Asharq Al-Awsat published a dispatch from Baghdad titled National Day Stirs Debate Over Independence in Iraq.
"The independence debate" seems, at first glance, a strange phrase. The norm, especially in our societies, is for independence and its anniversary to be collective occasions for celebration and for proclaiming agreement and harmony. The celebratory excess that prevails here may well be a way to paper over the frailty of any real consensus around the event, with "brotherhood" inflated to keep the actual quarrel among the "brothers" out of view, or to convince ourselves that the supposed brotherhood is stronger than that quarrel.
But "the independence debate" (and its revival time and again) tells us that this inclination is no longer needed in Iraq- that is, the urge to air disagreement has become far stronger than the tradition of disguising it and working around it.
And when that open disagreement extends to the moment of political birth, independence itself, everything that rises out of this birth will be a subject of disagreement and contention.
The accepted view is that Iraq became independent on October 3, 1932, making it the first Arab country to gain independence and join the League of Nations. By doing so, it won international recognition of "the completion of the components of the modern Iraqi state: an independent government, fixed borders, financial resources, an independent judiciary, and international commitment," as the Iraqi legal expert Ali al-Tamimi puts it.
Nonetheless, going back to the dispatch of our colleague Hamza Mustafa, three major claims contest this dating of independence. The Baath Party (which ruled the country from 1968 to 2003) holds to the day it seized power, July 17, 1968, as the true independence day.
The same holds for leftist currents that tie independence exclusively to July 14, 1958, when a military coup led by Abd al-Karim Qasim and Abd al-Salam Arif overthrew the monarchy and established the republic.
And some of Saddam Hussein's opponents, who came to power after his overthrow, had proposed that the day his regime fell, April 9, 2003, be made independence day.
The difference between the 1932 option and the others has three aspects.
The first has to do with modesty. Those associated with achieving the original independence did not claim to have created Iraq from scratch, or that Iraq's political existence was conditional on their own. The proponents of the other options, and those who adopt their narratives- ideologues of one kind or another- see in their own group's victory the day the country passed from nothingness into becoming, from political nonexistence to political birth.
The second concerns the incompleteness of the 1932 independence, given its link to the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty signed two years earlier. Here, two approaches part ways. One is open to the principle of gradualism, in keeping with the mandate system, which was supposed to prepare the peoples placed under it to govern themselves in the future. This language seems paternalistic and distasteful today, but the modern history of Iraq and a few other countries shows that experience defied the arguments of those who rejected gradualism and called for full and immediate independence.
The third concerns how much weight is given to the world as indispensable to achieving and consolidating independence. Those behind the 1932 independence knew that the world's recognition is what gives a nascent state its legal existence before the international community. But they also understood that this recognition allows it to sign treaties and agreements of every kind, join international organizations, and exchange diplomatic representation (with the embassies and consulates that come with it). It also improves a new state's chances of withstanding invasion and annexation, and strengthens its position for joining the global financial system and securing loans and investment. Indeed, membership in international institutions enables national forces to push for the move from incomplete to full independence.
The proponents of the other options care little for this factor. On the contrary, they often stress their outright opposition to it, substituting for it ties to one or two ideologically kindred states.
Modern Iraq, like most of our countries, came into being amid internal fragmentation and divergent views of the world. In Iraq specifically, the "1920 Revolution" expressed that disparity and divergence- and without overcoming them, independence of whatever kind is of no use. The project embodied in the 1932 independence was preoccupied with this task, after that "revolution" had cast one part of the people as the party that appropriated it and another as the beneficiary of its defeat. The proponents of the other options, for their part, only deepened the disparity and divergence within a people that is supposed to be one. Anyone who digs a little into concepts that appear neutral toward sects and communities, or above them, will readily discover that, in their Iraqi laboratory, they carry other meanings. And all this before even mentioning the qualitative contribution that Iran's 1979 revolution and its regime volunteered to dismantling the Iraqi people and blurring their independence.
