Curse of the Militias

IRAQ is teetering on the brink of civil war, or so the watching world believes and bemoans. Just one more major atrocity, and it’ll be worse than Lebanon in the 1980s, the fragile regime will collapse and the country will break apart, the Turks and the Iranians will move in, and here comes another war in the Middle East.

It’s instructive to compare and contrast Lebanon and Iraq. Civil war has always been latent in both countries, exploding regularly into bloodshed—and for very clear reasons. Molded out of outlying provinces of the Ottoman Empire, neither Lebanon nor Iraq has ever had a national identity, or anything that might pass for it. Both were agglomerations of peoples with separate ethnic, communal, and religious identities, altogether a joy to students of ethnography and theology: Maronites and Druze and Arabs in Lebanon, Kurds and Chaldeans and Turkmen and Arabs in Iraq, to name but some. In these Middle East versions of the Balkans, territory and boundaries are flexible concepts, and citizenship nonexistent. The human and social cement for one and all lies in the family, the tribe, the sect, or religious confession, not in statehood or nationhood. Allegiance to those of one’s own kind is what counts.

About the Author

David Pryce-Jones

David Pryce-Jones (1936–2025) was a British author and commentator and served as a senior editor of National Review.

Featured Tags

IRAQ is teetering on the brink of civil war, or so the watching world believes and bemoans. Just one more major atrocity, and it’ll be worse than Lebanon in the 1980s, the fragile regime will collapse and the country will break apart, the Turks and the Iranians will move in, and here comes another war in the Middle East.

It’s instructive to compare and contrast Lebanon and Iraq. Civil war has always been latent in both countries, exploding regularly into bloodshed—and for very clear reasons. Molded out of outlying provinces of the Ottoman Empire, neither Lebanon nor Iraq has ever had a national identity, or anything that might pass for it. Both were agglomerations of peoples with separate ethnic, communal, and religious identities, altogether a joy to students of ethnography and theology: Maronites and Druze and Arabs in Lebanon, Kurds and Chaldeans and Turkmen and Arabs in Iraq, to name but some. In these Middle East versions of the Balkans, territory and boundaries are flexible concepts, and citizenship nonexistent. The human and social cement for one and all lies in the family, the tribe, the sect, or religious confession, not in statehood or nationhood. Allegiance to those of one’s own kind is what counts.