To: MrLucky who wrote (47249 ) 5/26/2004 10:51:12 PM From: Dayuhan Respond to This all comes back to a point that some of us beat our heads against a wall trying to make, back in the silly days when people were comparing Iraq to Germany and Japan. Iraq is a country, but in many ways it is not a nation. What we now call Iraq was cobbled together by the Ottomans as a buffer against the Persians, which is why the Sunnis were always kept in control. The British found it convenient to sustain that artificial nationhood. The Iraqis had the chance to begin defining themselves as a nation during the brief period of the republic, but that government was so thoroughly paralyzed by the competing interest groups inside it that it could do nothing at all, and it was quickly replaced by a dictatorship.
