Nemir Kirdar was brought up in Iraq and comes from a family that served in the Ottoman Parliament before the First World War. He fled Iraq in 1958 when the Hashemite Royal Family, which had held the Iraqi throne from 1921, was overthrown on the first of a series of military coups that eventually brought Saddam Hussein to power. Kirdar was a childhood friend of the last King, Faisal II, murdered in the coup.
Kirdar presents a very favourable view of pre-1958 Iraq. He stresses the heavy investment in education and in physical infrastructure. He claims that the Kingdom of Iraq was successfully integrating the different ethnic and religious groups in a single Iraqi nation, and blames Saddam for starting a process of disintegration by offering privileged autonomy to the Kurds, a policy he subsequently brutally reversed. He also says that the Ottoman rulers and the British showed bias in favour of the Sunnis.
He criticises Saddam for building an overlarge bureaucracy, leading a position in 1991 that 40% of the populace were dependent on the state for their income.
He condemns the United States' approach management of Iraq after its successful invasion in 2002. He says the laying off of all Baath Party members from their government jobs, and the dissolution of the Iraqi army, led to the insurgency and civil war which peaked in 2006. The 2005 electoral system, which offered voters choices among national lists of candidates rather than representatives of local constituencies, aggravated the sectarianization of Iraqi politics.
He also talks of the corruption under the American occupation, and of the "massive ongoing theft of U.S. and Iraqi funds", over which he claims there was virtually no U.S. Congressional oversight.
He now worries that Iraq will not remain a single country. The Kurdish regional government has its own armed forces and banned the flying of the Iraqi flag in its territory in 2006. Disputes remain unsolved about ownership of oil and gas and the status of Kirkuk.
His prescriptions for the future of Iraq suffer from the fact that he has spent most of his life outside the country – running a very successful company which channeled Gulf oil money into investments in Western countries. He lists the many leaders and experts he has spoken to, but none of those are currently living in Iraq either.
Most of his prescriptions are fairly standard, a strong central Government, separation of powers, a fair tax system, and a new petroleum law. He makes a very convincing case for the revival of Iraqi agriculture, pointing out that the country in which agriculture was first invented was able to export food before 1958, but now cannot feed itself. But some of his suggestions seem fanciful and extravagant, like building a new national capital to replace Baghdad.
This book argues for a single, non sectarian, Iraqi state. To those coping with the daily realities of Iraq today, this may seem quite unrealistic. But it should not be forgotten that there is such a thing as Iraqi patriotism. It was shown during the Iran/Iraq war and, most recently, in the support the current Iraqi Prime Minister is getting for his determination that the Iraqi army replace the Americans as completely and as quickly as possible.
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