ELIMINATE IRAQ

Not the country. Not the people who live in the country. Eliminate the country’s name.

“Iraq” is a plain Arabic noun – al-iraq – meaning “the shore and grazing area of a river.” Inspiring, isn’t it?

Prior to 1921, there had never been a country called “Iraq” – never in history. “Iraq” was an invention of the British after World War I, who along with the French were carving up pieces of the defeated Ottoman Turkish Empire into colonies called League of Nations Mandates.

Stitched together from three distinct Ottoman vilayets or provinces – Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Arab Baghdad, and Shiite Arab Basra (but excluding the pre-existing British colony of Kuwait, run by the al-Sabah family) – the area had the name “Iraq” foisted upon it by the Brits, who installed their puppet Faisal Hashem as king after the Saudis kicked him and his family out of Arabia. Thus was born the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq.

Invented in 1921, the Iraqi Kingdom lasted 37 years. In 1958, the “royal” family was slaughtered, and a KGB-sponsored military dictatorship established which Saddam Hussein took over in 1979 — yet the name Iraq remained (officially Al-Jumhurriya al-Iraqiya, the Republic of the River Shore).

Yet there already was a name for the region encompassed by the three Ottoman provinces, a name from the mists of time. For thousands of years before it was eliminated from history by reasons known only to the unfathomable British colonial mind, it was called Mesopotamia.

This week, on June 28, 2004, Iraq achieved sovereignty. The Coalition Provisional Authority dissolved, Jerry Bremer got on a plane back to Washington, and Prime Minister Iyad Allawi declared his new government’s primary goal was eliminating terrorism and bringing security to his country.

Such a goal is indeed of primary importance, but there is another of equal import: keeping Iraq in one piece, securing its continued existence as an intact nation-state.

Bear in mind that up until 1921, the land within Iraq’s borders enjoyed only one brief period of sovereignty, lasting less than one century over the last twenty-five.

The Persian Emperor Cyrus the Great conquered the region in 538 BC. After the Persians, it was subsequently ruled by Alexander’s Greeks, the Romans, and the Byzantines. In 747 AD, the Abbasid family (descendants of Mohammed’s uncle Abbas) rebelled against the Umayyad family which had formed the first Islamic dynasty. The Abbasids moved the Caliphate from Damascus to their capital of Baghdad.

The most famous of the Baghdad Caliphs was Haroun Al-Rashid (764-809), the king to whom Sheherezade spun her stories of a Thousand and One Nights, and under whom Islamic Mesopotamia reached its apogee. It’s been downhill ever since. By 836 Samarra replaced Baghdad as the Abbasid capital, with Islamic Mesopotamia spliting up into warring kingdoms. In 1238, the Mongols under Genghiz’s grandsom Helagu sacked Baghdad and left it a pile of rubble. The Mamelukes of Egypt took over, then the region was absorbed into the Ottoman Empire in 1517.

When the Brits created the Hashemite Kingdom of the River Shore out of Ottoman pieces in 1921, it was an artificial construct of ethno-religious antagonisms: The non-Arab Kurds of Mosul, the Sunnis of Baghdad, the Shiites of Basra – and so it remains to this day.

Iraq desperately needs a national glue to hold it together, to overcome its enormous centrifugal forces. A critically necessary ingredient in that glue will be renaming the country, to reach back and recapture the extraordinary history and achievements of its predecessor with the ancient name of Mesopotamia.

In one stroke, the country of Mesopotamia – The Land Between Two Rivers, as the Greeks called it – would erase the horrible legacy of the last 83 years as Iraq, remind the world that it is the original Cradle of Civilization where history’s first city-states were born six thousand years ago, unite all its peoples – Kurds, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Turcomen, Sunnis and Shiites – under its ancient historical legacy, and announce to the world that Civilization’s Cradle is ready and eager to participate in the civilization of the 21st century.

It would also enable Iraqis – or rather, Mesopotamians – to understand that their country has 3,700 years of history before Islam.

Names have power. There is a magical resonance to Mesopotamia. Such a name, coupled with a stable government providing public safety and a rule of law, would result in a flood of tourists excited to explore 5,000 years of history, to visit the sites of Sumer, Babylon, Nineveh, Abraham’s Ur, scores of other biblical locations, and fabled Baghdad.

If there is any place on earth that needs a fresh start, it’s Iraq. The best way would be to shuck the disgraced name itself and begin anew with the original, the magic name of Mesopotamia.