<![CDATA[MARCUS E. SMITH

<![CDATA[MARCUS E. SMITH - Blog]]>Sat, 05 Apr 2025 09:34:48 -0700Weebly<![CDATA[The Greatest Casualty in the U.S.-Iran Confrontation might be Iraqi Democracy]]>Thu, 09 Jan 2020 02:07:43 GMThttps://www.marcusesmith.net/blog/the-greatest-casualty-in-the-us-iran-confrontation-might-be-iraqi-democracyAfter the U.S. strike killing Iranian general Qasim Suleimani in Iraq, U.S. critics warned that the president’s lack of strategy may escalate to outright war with Iran. After Iran’s clearly muted retaliatory strike last night and President Trump’s address this morning it seems that the escalation many commentators feared will be avoided. Assuming that is the case, many Americans’ attention will turn back to other matters and any future mention of these events will focus on the tragedies that almost ensued.

Before we all breathe our sigh of relief, however, at avoiding another war, I would like to point out the implications of the strike for Iraqis who have, in one form or another, been living in the conditions of war since 2003. For Iraqi society, it seems the damage may already have been done.

Two months ago, I wrote a blogpost explaining the significance of popular demonstrations which had been going on in many Iraqi cities since October 1, 2019. In it, I stressed the significance of the multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian participation of Iraqis who together called for broad sweeping reforms ending the sectarian-based political system. The cry of these protestors was “Nahnu Nureed Watana!” It literally means “we want our country!” This was a confrontation, not between Sunni and Shia Iraqis, but between a system of corrupt political elites and the majority of Iraqi citizens, who demanded better.

The success of these demonstrators in continuing their street demonstrations and maintaining a united front in doing so were Iraqis’ greatest hopes for achieving truly democratic government in decades!

The reforms demanded by the demonstrators were broad sweeping and would, no doubt, have proved difficult to achieve, as it would have required many entrenched politicians to give up their positions. Most analysts, myself included, pinned any chances of success on the ability of the Iraqi demonstrators to keep the demonstrations united along a non-sectarian front. Conversely, the best hope of the Iraqi political elite was to divide Iraqis again by forcing sectarian conflict. Chief among those who hoped to divide Iraqis was Iran, whose proxies in Iraq had thus far failed to turn Shia and Sunni Iraqis against each other (Iran and its proxy forces in Iraq are Shia). In fact, on November 4, Iraqi protesters attacked the Iranian embassy in protest of Iranian influence in Iraq, demonstrating the widespread rejection, among Iraqis, of Iran’s overbearing influence in Iraqi politics. These were not Sunnis attacking the embassy because Iran is Shia, they were Sunni and Shia Iraqis alike demonstrating their rejection of foreign influence. The cries of the protesters remained resilient… “we want our country!”

Only after the irresponsible decision to kill Qasim Suleimani on Iraqi soil were the voices of Iraqi citizens drowned out by the sounds of Iran-controlled militias chanting “death to America” from inside the charred walls of the U.S. embassy.

Qasim Suleimani was everything that the supporters of the recent U.S. strike say he was. Indeed, he had the blood of Americans and others on his hands. Whether killing Suleimani prevented an imminent attack, as the U.S. administration claims, is yet to be determined. What is clear is that the Iraqi people’s best shot at a real democratic system was just taken away from them. The united front of demonstrators and their demands for reform now risk being overshadowed by tensions between Iran, the U.S., and the Iraqi government, who has demanded a full American withdrawal. As a result, they may not be able to maintain the pressure needed to force real reform in their political system. The world may have one less murderer after the killing of Suleimani, but the U.S. strike also helped ensure the continuation of Iran’s influence in Iraq, to the detriment of U.S. interests and, more importantly, the well-being of forty million Iraqi citizens.

]]><![CDATA[Reflections on the Demonstrations in Iraq]]>Sat, 09 Nov 2019 21:55:49 GMThttps://www.marcusesmith.net/blog/reflections-on-the-demonstrations-in-iraq

Image credit: https://mosul-eye.org/

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, Sunni and Shia alike, have been taking to the streets in cities across Iraq to protest their country’s failed political system and its rampant corruption. Although the demonstrations in Iraq have been going on for weeks, they are finally getting some coverage in western media. The issues at stake in these protests and the government’s responses to them are complex and there is a lot to say, but for this post I will focus on one aspect of these protests that I think is important for Americans to understand: sectarianism or, more accurately, the lack of it.

So, why is Iraq’s government so corrupt?

The short answer: a political system set up by the U.S. based on faulty premises fosters both corruption and sectarianism.

The current political system in Iraq is 16 years old and was originally set up under the direction of the U.S. after the 2003 invasion. Prevailing wisdom among American policy makers in Iraq considered the greatest challenge to achieving democracy in Iraq to be accommodating deeply entrenched sectarianism between Sunni and Shia Muslims (and Iraq’s ethnic Kurds). To solve this perceived challenge, U.S. envoy Paul Bremer oversaw the creation of a parliamentary democracy structured to divide power between Shia, Sunni, and other religious groups as well as the Kurdish ethnic minority. As a result, since 2003, the Iraqi political system has structured Iraqi citizens’ political participation through parties corresponding to ethnic or sectarian identities, thus politicizing sectarian identity and leading to rampant political corruption.

How does the sectarian political system lead to corruption?

First, access to government employment (usually the best jobs available) is guaranteed by pledging allegiance to one of the political parties promoting sectarian politics. That means that politicians control hiring policies and can give out much needed jobs as rewards for personal allegiance or crooked deals.

Second, because political parties earn control of government ministries and their corresponding resources by mobilizing voters along ethno-sectarian lines, the parties that secure control of government ministries then exploit the resources of the ministry in their efforts to dominate the political field. As a result, necessities like water and electrical service are apportioned by corrupt government ministers to mobilize support for their party, resulting in unreliable services for everyone.

The result is a tightly closed system of well-connected political and commercial elites who benefit politically and economically while most Iraqis lack basic services or access to meaningful employment. Imagine having a medical degree and being unemployed because you lack the political connections, all while Iraq suffers from an understaffed health-care system. You can’t pay your bills or take care of your aging parents well despite your highly lucrative skills and when election time rolls around the polls offer no prospects for anything different. Instead, you can’t even renew your state I.D. without spending a day traveling from office to office bribing officials. This is just one example of the ways that widespread corruption affects Iraqis every day.

So, what are Iraqis doing about it?

In recent years, Iraqi youth have begun regular demonstrations calling for an end to corruption. In recent weeks, they have been specifically demanding an end to the system of apportioning parliamentary and ministerial seats along sectarian lines. Several days ago, demonstrators in Karbala even attacked the Iranian Consulate there to protest Iranian influence in Iraq’s politics. The symbolic power of this is difficult to overstate. Iran, a Shia “Islamic Republic” that has meddled heavily in Iraqi politics since the 2003 invasion has done so largely claiming to intervein on behalf of Iraq’s Shia population, yet last week Sunnis and Shia protestors together attacked a potent symbol of Iranian influence in Iraq.
This is an important turning point. Sunni and Shia together are demanding an end to the political system that treats them not as Iraqis, but as Sunni or Shia.

This patriotic mass movement is not, however, an unprecedented development in Iraqi history. Since Iraq’s founding in 1920, some of its political parties have been sectarian based but its most prominent ones were not. In my time researching Iraqi history I have become quite used to hearing the refrain among Iraqis over forty that they grew up in Iraq not knowing who was Sunni and who was Shia. Those of us who followed the news coming out of Iraq since the 2003 invasion recall the sectarian violence of the Iraqi Civil War in 2006-2007 and the so-called Islamic State’s Caliphate in 2014-2017, but these extreme and tragic outbursts of sectarian violence sprung from the mistrust engendered by the sudden political and security vacuum in 2003 and the success of international terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda and ISIS in stoking sectarian violence in Iraq. They are not representative of what Sunnis and Shias do when ‘left to their own devices.’ More than that, not all attempts by outside actors to use sectarianism to divide Iraqis has succeeded. In 1980, when Iraq went to war against Iran, Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini called on Iraq’s Shia to rise up against Saddam Hussein. Instead, Shia enlisted to fight for their country in a brutal eight-year war. Iraqi patriotism in Iraq proved stronger than Khomeini’s calls for sectarian solidarity.

In other words, this recent show of patriotic civic action by Iraqi youth demanding an end to sectarian politics is not an anomaly. Instead, the severity of sectarian strife in the last sixteen years is an anomaly caused by specific historical events. It is normal for Iraqis to identify strongly as Iraqis even as they argue and debate about what Iraq’s politics, society, and culture should be like. In other words, civil disagreement. You know… Democracy.

The capacity of Iraqis to demand democratic change and oppose sectarianism is greater than we often give them credit for. Instead of thinking, as U.S. policymakers did in 2003, that an outsider must concoct some creative way of making democracy work in Iraq, perhaps we should be thinking what part the outside world will have to play in supporting democratic change initiated from within.

The challenge is not figuring out how to get Sunnis and Shias to work together. They already are.

It is not figuring out how to get Sunnis and Shias to understand what democracy is and work for it. They do and they are.

The challenge is to translate the desire of Iraqis for fair democratic representation and an end to corruption into a reality when the current politically corrupt system is so entrenched.

How that will be achieved is not clear. Government responses to the demonstrations have resulted in hundreds of deaths in the last few weeks, which have only fueled further unrest by protesters who are rejecting government reform proposals as insufficient. The current political elite in Iraq have too much invested in the status quo to alter it significantly.
What is clear is that this is not a case of external powers needing to invent a solution to solve problems intrinsic to Iraqi society and culture. Outside attempts to address political challenges in Iraq have often harmed more than helped. The solutions, perhaps yet undetermined, will come from within Iraqi society itself. Outside powers will have a role to play, as no nation’s politics happen in a vacuum, but the role of powerful nations like the U.S. will only be helpful when our policies are informed by accurate notions of the realities at work in Iraq.

]]><![CDATA[Finding Jewish Baghdad in Montreal]]>Sat, 19 Aug 2017 00:29:31 GMThttps://www.marcusesmith.net/blog/finding-jewish-baghdad-in-montreal

This weekend I had the privilege of attending a high school reunion like no other. A synagogue in Montreal, Quebec hosted roughly two hundred Iraqi Jews from around the world.

Montreal
LA
New York
London
Israel

While they traveled from many parts of the world they all came of age in the same place.

Baghdad.

Didn’t know there was a Jewish community in Iraq? They also go by the name Babylonian Jews because they date their origins to the exile of the ancient Israelites from Jerusalem two and a half millennia ago.

In the twentieth century, Baghdad was home to 130,000 Jews. They comprised a third of the city’s population and constituted the most affluent and integrated Jewish community of any Arab country. In fact, Jews were so central to its economy and culture that even Muslim businesses closed every Saturday for Shabbat. By the 1950s and 60s, when most of these alumni attended school together, the situation was far different. Most of the community left between 1950 and 1951 following a rise in state and popular persecution that came in the wake of Israel’s independence. Around the same time a new school opened its doors in Baghdad.

The Frank Iny School.

Named after its benefactor, the school had been one of many Jewish schools in the city but when it moved to a newly completed facility in the old Baghdad neighborhood of Alwiyah in 1951 it then served as the sole Jewish high school and, thus, a focal point of the now small Jewish community in Baghdad.

Weddings
Bar-mitzvahs
Graduations
The school acted like a magnet, drawing its students and their families closer inward, strengthening the bonds of the community.

Meanwhile, the persecution that precipitated the mass migration abated significantly and the remaining Jewish community carried on working, going to school, and raising their families. Like other Iraqis in Baghdad, they swam in the cool waters of the Tigris and slept away the hot summer nights on their terrace rooftops. They tuned in to radio Baghdad as revolution brought an end to the monarchy in 1958. Regimes came and went in the decade or so following the revolution but daily life continued largely undisturbed for the residents of the Iraqi capital, including the Jews.

At the Frank Iny School the students tackled the most rigorous curriculum in the country, studying their subjects in English and French as well as their native Arabic. The program was so renowned for its quality education that a number of prominent Muslim families sent their children there. Jewish families, wary of what the future held for them in Iraq, sought education for their youth that would provide opportunities abroad, yet they continued to enjoy their lives in Iraq.

Attending the cinema with friends.
Weekend trips to the countryside.
Long evenings at the Jewish country club or at a local café playing games and socializing.
On weekdays many went to work alongside Muslim and Christian business partners and clientele.
Some Jews called this period in the 1950s and early 60s a “return to normalcy.”
Others “a golden age.”
Whatever they call it, they all agree that 1967 was a turning point.

Many Iraqis continued to conflate all Jews with the Zionist project in Israel, which Iraqis considered an affront to Arab independence. When Israel dealt a crushing blow to its Arab adversaries in the Six Day War of 1967, many Iraqis including some in the government once again turned on their Jewish neighbors.

Accused of espionage, their phone lines were cut.
Assets were frozen.
Travel restricted.
Arbitrary searches, surveillance, and arrests ensued.
Relationships with Muslim acquaintances were tested as associations with Jews could invite trouble.

The Ba’th Party coup a year later brought an escalation of this crisis as the new government played up the false claims that Jews were engaging in espionage for Israel. It fabricated evidence of an elaborate spy ring and brought several Jews up on charges in a widely publicized show trial. Nine Jews and three others were convicted and executed, their bodies displayed in public squares in Baghdad and Basra where thousands gathered to celebrate what the state touted as a victory against Zionism and Imperialism.

These were the events that precipitated the flight of Iraq’s remaining Jews from the country.

Some of them have truly harrowing stories of imprisonment, torture, and terror. These are survivors. Each one of them can name classmates that did not survive those perilous days in Iraq. For many of them the deceased include siblings or parents, and while they are remembered at the synagogue tonight, the terrors they faced are not the subject of discussion.

This is a celebration.

As the foyer of the synagogue fills I watch the faces—delayed reactions of friends slowly recognizing each other after an absence of more than forty years. The crowd grows and excited voices combine to create a roar of enthusiastic conversation. Countless discussions of who was in which class with whom. Who is related to whom. Who is present and who is not.

Embraces.
Kisses.
Laughter.
Friends cling to each other’s elbows as they talk, as if to prevent them from escaping for another decades-long absence.

The doors to the hall are opened and as some remain lost in conversations in the foyer, oblivious to the activities around them. Others filter in arm-in-arm with old classmates they’ve found and claim tables as they begin swapping stories of adolescent exploits and classroom antics from a half-century ago. I hear one teasing another about how he used to cheat off of a classmate’s work until a teacher caught him in the act and shamed him in front of the class. The memories are so fresh for them that the intervening decades seem to collapse as they are transported to the Baghdad of their childhood. Or, perhaps, Baghdad circa 1965 has suddenly materialized in Montreal, Quebec.

Conversations continue. English mingles with Judeo-Arabic, sustaining a hum of energy throughout the hall as a number of them take to the dance floor, dancing the twist with impressive dexterity as if the age has vanished from their bodies. When they begin to form groups and pose together for class pictures I am overcome by the sense that I am witnessing a historic event.

In the days surrounding the reunion I have the privilege of joining many of these Iraqi Jews for breakfast at the hotel or dinner in old Montreal. I even get to interview a few of them. Despite their positivity, the sense of loss is palpable. Though they express thanks to God that they escaped “that hell,” as one refers to it, their sense of dislocation and loss lingers just below the surface. Their lost homeland is a source of both nostalgia and grief. For some, there is resentment that history has largely forgotten them. Apart from myself and a few others (Henry Green of the Sephardi Voices Project, which documents the stories of Jews from Arab countries, is one such person), few from outside of their community are aware of their history in the region, of their loss, or of the incredible assemblies like this one that bring the members of this lost community together.

Of course, the older generation of Iraqis still living in Baghdad have first hand memory of the city’s Jewish community but for many years they found the youth of Iraq to be an unreceptive audience to their recollections. Perhaps the idea of an indigenous Jewish population in Iraq was hard to fathom. More likely the fact of their displacement is an uncomfortable reality. Either way this seems to be changing recently. Many Iraqis old and young have begun taking to social media in recent years to remember the days of Jewish Baghdad, telling and hearing personal anecdotes about lost Jewish friends. One young man in Baghdad commented on a video I posted to Facebook during the reunion. “Sending all love to them. Can’t wait to meet up with Iraqi Jews in person. Hug them as much as you can from me!” For Iraqis like him, the stories of Iraq’s Jews are a reminder that Iraq was once home to a diverse kaleidoscope of ethnic and religious communities. Perhaps remembering this past helps twenty-first century Iraqis to imagine a future where such coexistence could be possible again?

When I finished my tour in Baghdad with the Army in 2005 I was woefully unaware of any of this rich history, but I felt as though I was taking a piece of that city with me, knowing I would never be the same. It was this combined sense of ignorance and of being touched by my experience there that led me to study the region’s history. Before I had even left Baghdad, I already sensed a strong desire not only to learn, however, but to return—to interact with the people in a way I hadn’t been able to as a soldier.

I never imagined it would happen like this.

I may have yet to step my feet on the streets of Baghdad again, but I’ve now entered into a piece of Baghdad’s history that even those living in the city today can’t experience—the community of Iraqi Jews whose history speaks to the country’s cosmopolitan past.

]]><![CDATA[An Introduction]]>Wed, 05 Oct 2016 16:05:08 GMThttps://www.marcusesmith.net/blog/an-introduction

Why are you interested in the Jews of Iraq?

(I get asked this a lot when I meet Iraqi Jews I hope to interview)

It has been a strange path that led me here. Born and raised in northern Ohio I never expected to travel outside the country, much less specialize in another part of the world. To be honest, I wasn't much of an academic growing up either... so finishing a PhD and becoming a college professor (as I hope to do) is likely the last thing anyone would have guessed for me. All that changed when my National Guard unit was deployed to Iraq in 2005, where we spent a year in Baghdad searching the highways around the city for roadside bombs. There is a lot I can say about that experience, but I'll stick to how that led me to where I am now.

The most frustrating thing about my year in Iraq was my inability to interact with the people of Baghdad. Our convoy missions made it impractical and the language barrier didn't help. Everyday I observed the people of that ravaged city attempting to carry on with their lives while my comrades and I rolled through their neighborhoods in armored vehicles. I hadn't the first understanding of why I was there or why the country was in such a messy situation. Over the year I spent there I accumulated more questions and fewer answers, so imagine my frustration when, upon arriving home, friends looked to me to help them understand what the Iraq war was about.

The Middle East continues to generate questions for puzzled Americans who have little recourse to worthwhile sources to gain any sort of understanding of the reasons for the regions conflicts, much less the beautiful cultures and histories of the modern Middle East that lay beyond the headlines of the latest bombing.

I am drawn to the history of Jews in Iraq because it is a history largely unknown to Americans and it is indicative of both a defining characteristic of the Middle East--diverse ethnic and religious communities with a long history of coexistence--and the current crises facing the region that are bringing so many of these communities to an end (today there are a mere four Jews living in Baghdad, where Jews constituted a third of the population as recently as 1950).

In future entries, I will use this blog as a platform for sharing insights that I've gained through my studies and research as a specialist in the modern Middle East. Whiles the articles I publish in academic journals will be written for a scholarly audience and have a very formal tone, These blog entries will be my opportunity to write more informally about topics related to my areas of specialty (Middle East, Jewish, and Muslim American histories) and about my current research projects, travels, and community involvement. My hope is that readers may gain some insights to help them better understand some of the important and often puzzling issues facing our world today.

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