History of Politics in Iraq and Iran

narrative of Politics in Iraq and IranIran Iraq Comparative Political Essay young History of IraqThe state of matter of Iraq, offici exclusivelyy named the Republic of Iraq, is a country in Western Asia spanning most of the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range, the eastern fragmentise of the Syrian Desert and the northern part of the Arabian Desert. Iraq sh bes b localizes with Saudi Arabia and capital of Kuwait to the south, Jordan to the west, Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, and Iran to the east. With a 35-mile coastline on the Persian disjuncture and two study rivers -the Tigris and the Euphrates- Iraq contains agriculturally proficient place down. Iraqs history is long and rich, dating back to ancient Mesopotamia, place by some historians as the cradle of civilization and the birthplace of writing. passim its long history, Iraq has served as the capital of the Babylonian empire, and as a body politic of the Mongol, Ottoman empires and, in conclusi on, the British empire which effectively birthed the modern Republic of Iraq.The British ar largely credited with the creation of the modern state of Iraq, and had a vested interest in the region as soon as oil was discoered there. Indeed, as the British Petroleum Company (PLC) began production on the Persian side of the gulf, the British became encouraged by indications that oil was alike nearby in what was soon to be Iraq. The British, whose semi semipolitical and economic interests in the Persian Gulf and the Tigris-Euphrates region had progressively grown since the late eighteenth century, ultimately brought an end to the Ottoman presence in Iraq following the agreement of Lausanne in 1923. The treaty, which followed the British armys march on Baghdad, light-emitting diode to the replacement of the Ottoman provincial regimen in occupied Iraq by the British. As a result, Turkey, the successor to the Ottoman Empire, effectively gave up all claims to its former Arab provinc es including Iraq. Subsequently, Great Britain succeeded in merging the three provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Al-Barah into wholeness political entity, forging a new nation out of the heterogeneous ghostly and social entities there.However, anti-imperialist sentiment and Iraqi nationalism grew over the next decade, which, conjugated with British frustrations at home, ca habituated Iraq to finally emerge as an independent political entity in 1932. On October 3, 1932, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as an independent state. (Metz, 1998) Decades subsequent in 1976, as ibn Talal ibn Talal Hussein Hussein was officially handed power later on forcing al-Bakr to step down, he became eager to take advantage of Irans weakened array and what he saw as revolutionary chaos across the border. Specifically, ibn Talal Husseins goal was to occupy Irans adjacent oil-rich province of Khuzestan while belowmining Iranian Muslim revolutionary attempts to incite the Shia majority of h is country. (Algar, 2008) This led to the beginning of ibn Talal Husseins tyrannical rule. Shortly after his Baathist power grab, ibn Talal Hussein exe newspaper clippinged several top members of his party under claims of espionage in what would be a foreshadowing of his dominant, Machiavellian personal rule of Iraq for decades to come.Regime variation in IraqEver since seizing power in 1979, Saddam Hussein presented himself as a secular modernizer, a social revolutionary who slackly followed the Egyptian model of Gamal Nasser, the second president of Egypt. To the alarm of Islamic fundamentalists (especially his Iranian counterparts) Husseins government conferred women with open freedoms, offering females high-level government and industry jobs. Saddam also created a Western-style legal system, making Iraq the just country in the Persian Gulf region that was not rule according to Sharia right, even going as far as abolishing the Sharia courts in spite of appearance Iraq. His secularism, masked by a nominal inscription to Sunni Islam, allowed him to operate in bellicosity to wards his Muslim neighbors without the encumbrance of ghostly commitment. This lack of sacred loyalty was displayed in the summer of 1990, when Saddam led Iraqs forces into the Muslim nation of Kuwait, a nation whose population itself is 70% Sunni (CIA, 2008).In stately 1990, Iraq seized Kuwait but was soon expelled by US-led, UN alliance forces during the Gulf war of January-February 1991. Following Kuwaits liberation, the UN Security Council (UNSC) required Iraq to destroy all weapons of mass last (WMD) and long-range missiles while allowing open-ended UN verification inspections. Over the next 12 years after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Saddam Hussein continually restrain the inspection process of the UN and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). numerous on both sides of the partisan divide in the US took his obfuscation to be a clear sign of guilt, believing th at Saddam had rebuilt, regaind and go on Iraqs WMD arsenal over the decade since the first Gulf War. Hence, following the attacks of 9/11, which conferred the Bush Administration with the political ammunition to engage its centre Eastern enemies, (Benedetto, 2001) the get together States led a divided coalition into Iraq in March of 2003 against the wishes of the UN. The creation now knows that the intelligence which sent the join States to war with the sovereign nation of Iraq was in the words of the official presidential Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction bushed(p) wrong.(CNN, 2006) In one report, the intelligence warning read, Intelligence indicates that the Iraqi troops are able to deploy chemical or biological weapons within forty-five minutes of an order to do so. (The Independent, 2003) It is now cognize that this and early(a) like intelligence was politicized and augmented, serving as the means to fulfill a seemingly necessary political end.9 The end, in the case of Iraq, was a full-scale US invasion in March of 2003 that led to the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and was followed by mass chaos, forcefulness and predation throughout the country. The use of force can be legal under international law if it is authorized by the United Nations Security Council (UNSC). Article 39 of the United Nations charter confirms that hard power may be used when the UNSC determines the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or function of aggression.However, Security Council Resolution 1441, passed in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, held that disarming of Iraq should be done only through multilateral, international twinge via the race of United Nations inspectors, not by military force (Hartung Donnelley, 2003). Russian overseas Minister Igor Ivanov echoed the feelings of the United Nations when he insisted, Iraq does not need democracy brought on the wings of Tomaha wks cruise missiles. (Weir, 2003) President Putin himself predicted that the U.S.-led war in Iraq threatened to destabilize the holy Middle East and spill into the territory of the former Soviet Union, asserting, The war against Iraq is fraught with unpredictable consequences, including increased Muslim extremism. (IBID.)Unfortunately but undeniably, the prognostications of the Russian leaders turned out to be true, as the aftermath of the US invasion has appeared more(prenominal) Hobbesian than democratic. However, there have been politically salubrious (albeit evanescent) events in Iraqs regime variety away from personal, authoritarian rule towards democracy. On January 30th, 2005 an estimated eight million people voted in elections for a Transitional study Assembly where the Shia United Iraqi Alliance won a majority of assembly seats with the Kurdish parties coming in second. The transition to a stable democracy did not immediately follow the historical elections however, as 114 people were killed by a massive car fail in southern Baghdad less(prenominal) than a month later (the worst single incident since the US-led invasion.) as well as numerous other suicide bombings (AP, 2008). Later that year, voters approved a new com pose which aimed to create an Islamic federal democracy while also balloting for the first full-term government and parliament since the US-led invasion. After years of violence and misery by the Iraqi government to secure political, social or ethnic stability, the Parliament passed legislation allowing former officials from SaddamAfter years of violence and failure by the Iraqi government to secure political, social or ethnic stability, the Parliament passed legislation allowing former officials from SaddamIranKnown as Persia until 1935, Iran (meaning the land of the Aryans) is a relatively large country enjoying a strategic position in the Persian Gulf. It is larger than Alaska and slightly smaller in size of it than France, Germany, Spain, and the United Kingdom combined. Most of the terrain is a plateau consisting of mountains and desert, with a Continental climate marked by scarce precipitation and extreme temperature differences in the midst of summer and winter. These factors have made much of the country inhospitable to floriculture and have resulted in a preferably skewed demographic distribution. As in much of Asia, the maintenance and control of irrigation infrastructure have been politically important throughout the countrys history. The most important resources are petroleum, natural gas, and mineral deposits. Iran is the second largest oil exporter within OPEC and the fourth largest oil producer in the world. Its proven oil reserves (estimated to be over 94 billion barrels, or 10 pct of the world total) are concentrated along the southern coast (Persian Gulf) and in the Caspian Sea in the north, both of which are areas of geopolitical rivalry and instability. Iran also possesses 15 percen t of the worlds proven natural gas reserves, which places it second in the world after Russia. Bordering eight different countries from Central Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, and the Caucasus, it has ongoing territorial disputes with Iraq, the United Arab Emirates, and neighbors in the Caspian basin. In 2003, Iran ranked 19 (out of 231 countries) in terms of its gross domestic product.Iran is a lower-middle-income country that has the worlds seventeenth largest population (over 67 million people). Close to 70 percent of the countrys population live in less than 30 percent of the land, concentrated in the north and northwest of the country and such major cities as Tehran, Mashhad, Isfahan, Tabriz, Shiraz, Karaj, Ahvaz, and Qom. Much of the country is rural and historically had an important nomadic pastoral component that came under state pressure to take up settled agriculture in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The population is 89 percent Shiite M uslim, another 10 percent are Sunni Muslims, and the remainder (1 percent) are Christians, Bahais, Jews, and Zoroastrians. Persian (or Farsi, as the Iranians affect to it) is the official and predominant language. There are more than a 12 different ethnic minorities in Iran, including Turkic-speaking Azeris in the north, Gilaki and Mazandaranis in the north, Kurds in the northwest (part of a transnational Kurdish zone that cuts across Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria and sustains an license movement that all these states have tried to suppress), Balochis in the southeast, and Arabs along the south-west coast. In this patchwork of identities, it is important to note that the cleavages of ethnicity, language, and religion often cut across one another rather than overlap.Brief Political HistoryIran, a country with a history spanning over three millennia, has one of the richest artistic, literary, and scholarly lineages of the Middle East. This tradition is due to the accumulated contr ibutions of Persias expert craftsman, gnostic and hedonist poets, and learned men of philosophy, science, and religion. The countrys rather complex political culture and sense of self-identity is heavily influenced by (a) a pre-Islamic notion of Iranian identity centered on nationalism, (b) intellectual loans acquired in the course of encounter with Western modernity, and (c) attachment to the minority branch of Islam known as Shiism. Each of these currents has served as a breeding ground for the composition of different types of political sentiments ranging from anti-Arab Iranian nationalism to secular humanism and finally radical Shiism.The Shiite/Sunni split occurred soon after the advent of Islam, over the head word of who was eligible to succeed Prophet Muhammad (d. 632) as the new caliph (loosely similar to the Catholic papacy). Shiites (now some 15 percent of Muslims worldwide) believe that legitimate rulership of the finished Islamic community could descend only through the heirs of the Prophet Muhammad. They think other early leaders, whom Sunnis revere, as usurpers. A resistance centered on the legitimate line of imams lasted for several generations, until the last imam mysteriously disappeared in the year 874. Since then, Shiites have held on to a messianic belief that the secluded imam will return at the end of time and restore a just order. Shiite political thinkers historically have held, based on these doctrines, that in the interim all secular authority is ultimately illegitimate.Compared to Sunni Islam, Shiism has thereof remained more critical of monarchs and less fully reconciled with political order for its own sake. At best, the Shiite clergy extended a provisional legitimacy to rulers who let Islamic institutions flourish unmolested. The clergy itself came to stand in collectively for the hidden imam, in his absence. Over the centuries, they functioned as the conscience of the Shiite community and thus occupied a role similar to t hat of the Christian priesthood in premodern Europe, or the Confucian mandarins in premodern China. Certain distinct features of church-state relations bear noting, however. Compared to the Confucian mandarins, the Shiite clerics were far more hostile to power holders and enjoyed more independence. Their religious functions were separate from the state and usually unaffected by it. They also enjoyed a strong institutional base. They were self-organized, in informal hierarchies that rested only on the esteem in which religious scholars held one another. They also had a secure income from the voluntary religious taxes paying(a) by the believers as well as mosques and charitable endowments that were inviolable under Islamic law. Compared to the Christian priests, Shiite clerics often refused to make peace with secular political science based on a dividing line between church and state. Islamic doctrine has held that religion and politics flow into one another, as aspects of a compreh ensive Islamic society. Rulership by monarchs other than the hidden imam was endlessly viewed, therefore, as an unnatural conditioneven if inevitable for the time being. The Shiite clergys withdrawal from political life before modern times reflected a desire to be untainted by the prevailing injustice, not a sense that some spheres of life lay outside the scope of religion. Hence, the church-state family relationship has always been problematic.References(2015). Retrieved 3 may 2015, from(2015). Retrieved 3 May 2015, from http//cis.uchicago.edu/sites/cis.uchicago.edu/files/resources/CIS-081206-iraqiran_SimilaritiesandDifferencesIraqIranAnswerKey.pdf(2015). Retrieved 3 May 2015, from http//apcentral.collegeboard.com/apc/public/repository/ap05_comp_govpol_iran_42251.pdfIndexmundi.com,. (2015). Iran vs. Iraq Country Comparison. Retrieved 3 May 2015, from http//www.indexmundi.com/factbook/ canvas/iran.iraq