6,000 years of war: A brief history

The ruins of the city of Hatra

In December of 2003, I visited one of the ancient killing grounds of the Cradle of Civilization because there was a war going on there, or rather, there were two wars going on – our war on Iraq and Assad’s war on Aleppo and the rest of Northern Syria. There were several dozen other wars going on around the world, if we’re going to be honest.  If you’re bored and you want something to do, just turn the channel or pick up a paper or check out Twitter, and you’ll find a war going on somewhere.  The amazing part is that this has been true since the first so-called civilized human being walked across the sands of the so-called Cradle of Civilization.

I was embedded with the Bastogne Bulldogs, the 1^st Brigade of the 101^st Airborne Division at Q-West, an Iraqi air force airfield outside of Al Qayyarah, a town of about 15,000 souls sitting on top of a field holding an estimated 800 million barrels of oil along the Tigris River south of Mosul. There was so much oil under Al Qayyarah, it came bubbling out of the ground in the middle of an oil refinery there, so you had to walk along carefully laid out wooden walkways in order not to get stuck in the bubbling oil all around you.  That’s how much oil there was.  It was alongside the roads and it was bubbling up along the Tigris River, and it bubbled out of the ground and formed lakes of oil in the middle of wheat fields out to the west all the way to the Syrian border. 

We were told that the Al Qayyarah oil field and all those lakes of bubbling oil had nothing to do with the fact that the United States of America had sent 140,000 or so heavily armed soldiers there, having “conquered” Iraq some eight months previously.  No sir, as we shall see, our military forces were there to find those WMD’s and to save the Iraqis from Saddam…or something or another, anyway.  It wasn’t clear then what the United States Army was doing there, and it’s even less clear now. 

But one chilly morning as the run rose over the sands of Nineveh Province, the Brigade commander sent a Specialist 4^th Class to my bunk with the news that we would be flying into Al Qayyarah for a big meeting of all the Sheikhs in the region.  The commander of the 101^st Airborne Division, (then) Major General David Petraeus, already somewhat famous by that time and soon to become even more famous, followed by his crash-and-burn over an affair with his biographer (of course) would be chairing the meeting.  So, we piled into a pair of Blackhawk helicopters and flew over to Al Qayyarah and landed in a field near the town hall and joined a large roomful of Sheikhs in various tribal attire. 

Up on a low dais, Petraeus took his place at a table alongside several Iraqi men in suits, along with a guy who translated Petraeus’ remarks to the gathered Sheikhs.  The place was packed, standing room only, but a young Iraqi guy made room for me to join him on a bench at the very back of the room.  He was grinning ear to ear, and I had no idea why.  Nothing funny seemed to be going on.  The room, in fact, fairly crackled with tension.  Sheikh after Sheikh rose to his feet and yelled at the men on the dais, including Petraeus, something to which I had to assume the General was unaccustomed.

It had been advertised as a meeting where the region’s leaders could air their concerns.  Petraeus had flown down to Al Qayyarah from his headquarters in a Saddam summer palace up in East Mosul as part of a listening tour around the region occupied by his airborne infantry division -- an area stretching from just north of Tikrit in the south all the way up to the Turkish border in the north, from the Syrian border in the west, to a line between Erbil and Kirkuk in Kurdistan to the east.  In other words, Petraeus and his soldiers occupied a landmass about the size of Connecticut, which was by any sane military measure absolutely ridiculous if not outright insane.  New York City has a police force of about 34,000 to take care of 304 square miles.  The area that the 30,000 troops in the 101^st policed was more than 5,500 square miles.

Well, Petraeus had come up with an answer to controlling that much real estate that had more or less worked for the past six months – making up for what he lacked in soldiers by liberally spreading money around, most of which had been glommed up when his troops had blown away Saddam’s sons Uday and Qusay and seized millions in cash from their house in Mosul. 

But now the money had dried up and the Sheikhs were restless.  Some Iraqi guy with a big mustache wearing a suit was trying his best to calm them, but the Sheikhs kept jumping up and yelling at the guys on the dais and at each other.  The young Iraqi I was sitting next to kept cracking up, and I asked him what he was laughing at.  “These fucking guys, they are all from different tribes and they all hate each other, but they hate the guys up there on the stage even more!” he exclaimed, pointing to Petraeus and the officials at the table. 

I kept asking him questions, so he started translating for me and telling me which Sheikh led which tribe, which tribes hated which other tribes, the few tribes that were allies, which Sheikhs had been colonels and generals in Saddam’s army, who had been in the now-outlawed Baath party and who hadn’t.  My new friend was giving me a short course in local politics Iraqi-style.  It was bewildering, and this was just the Al Qayyarah region, a tiny slice of greater Iraq.  The funniest part of the whole thing to him was that the guys on the dais with Petraeus, all of whom had been elected to a regional council some months previously, had been prominent in the outlawed Baath party, and Petraeus didn’t know it. 

“Baath party guys weren’t eligible to be on the regional council,” he told me.  “They were banned from politics!  But look up there!  They were Baath party leaders!  The whole place is full of Baath party guys!”

One of the older Sheikhs, a man with a long gray beard, stood up and suddenly the rest of them fell silent.  “This guy is a big leader,” the young Iraqi whispered.  “And boy is he pissed.”  The old Sheikh didn’t yell, but you could hear the anger in his words.  My friend translated:  The Americans had screwed everything up.  They banned the Baath party.  They disbanded the Iraqi military and fired all its officers.  There was no one in Mosul to run any of the departments in Nineveh Province because all the bureaucrats had been in the Baath party.  No one working in the department of power could run the electrical system because the professionals were gone.  There was no one competent to run the water system.  There was no one in charge of sanitation.  The police had all been in the Baath party, so they were fired, and now a bunch of idiots were walking around in police uniforms doing nothing and taking bribes.  Traffic was crazy.  Crime was everywhere.  The courts were broken because the judges and prosecutors had been in the Baath party, and they were gone.  Everything had fallen apart.

There were murmurs of assent as he made each of his points.  “You know what he’s saying?” asked my new friend.  “He is saying, what is wrong with you Americans?  You came in here and you beat us and now look what you’re doing!  When you are conquerors, you are supposed to co-opt the power structure, not disband it!  He is asking, what is wrong with you?  Don’t you know what to do when you win?  Are you crazy!”

The answer then was yes, and looking back from the perspective of today, 12 years after the end of American’s war in Iraq, it’s hell yes.  We did something very, very crazy when we invaded Iraq.  And then we did something even crazier when we didn’t have a clue what to do once we owned the place. 

The reason the Iraqi Sheikhs couldn’t understand what we had done to their country was because they were inheritors of a long, long history of being conquered and collaborating with the winners until they could drive them out.   This had to be the first time that their ancient history had not repeated itself, the first time the conquerors, instead of acting like any sane conqueror was supposed to – kicking ass and taking names and ruling the roost and ordering people to do stuff and getting things done – were instead spazzing around and making things up on the fly.

Even the stuff they were making up didn’t make sense, and the old Sheikh was exactly right.  The Americans were fucking crazy.  Petraeus was standing up there representing a country that had not only lost its way, but lost its mind, and from the looks of him, his mind was going, too.  He was not a big guy.  He had a slight frame, and even his custom made BDU’s looked a little big on him, and his head seemed to be sinking down a little further into his collar with each verbal blow. 

You could see on his face that he couldn’t wait for January, only a month away, when orders would arrive to pick up the whole 101^st Airborne Division and get the hell out of Nineveh Province and go home.  Which is exactly what he and the 101^st did.  They took all their Humvees and howitzers and M-240 and .50 caliber machine guns and Blackhawks and Apache gunships and loaded them up and went back to Fort Campbell, Kentucky where they could drive down the road a few miles and find not an oil field but a Burger King where they could order a Whopper or they could hie themselves over to the O-Club and slap back a double shot of Jack or they could stop off at the local Clarksville Gentleman’s Club and ogle a few pairs of inflatable boobs.

Yessir, Kentucky was heaven on earth, and fuck all those Sheikhs back there in Al Qayyarah in their weird head wraps and shower clogs yelling and complaining and shit.  They were out of there.

Wouldn’t it have been useful to know who those Sheikhs were back in Al Qayyarah?  Wouldn’t it have made sense to have some idea who the hell we were dealing with over there?  What made them tick?  Why did they do stuff like chop enemy heads off and gas their own people?  What do you think?  Are you ready for a little down and dirty history of the region where, even now, even as I write this, even as you read it, we’ve still got an unknown number of American soldiers over there in Iraq? 

First, however, we’re going to travel back to that day in December of 2003 when I visited the big meeting between Petraeus and the Sheikhs in Al Qayyarah, because that wasn’t all we did that day. 

After the big meeting with the Sheiks, we loaded into the Blackhawks and flew out to Hatra, in the desert about 30 miles west of Al Qayyarah. The ruins at Hatra are famous as the site of the archaeological dig shown in the first few moments of that classic horror movie, The Exorcist.  Remember?  They’re digging around in these stone ruins and somebody comes up with a little amulet depicting the devil himself, a rendering of the Numero Uno Evil One which becomes important later in the movie.

Anyway, Hatra was really cool.  An ancient city that was probably built sometime in the 2^nd or 3^rd century BC, it was surrounded by a wall about a mile in diameter and once had temples and holy buildings supported by some 160 columns.  The Great Temple of Hatra had walls nearly 100 feet high.  When night fell, one of the ruined temple walls was used as a gigantic stone screen on which soldiers from the 101^st Public Affairs Office projected a slide show telling the story of the division’s six month stay in Nineveh Province.  To say it was a bizarre scene is to do the word “bizarre” an incalculable injustice.  Images of tanks and Humvees and soldiers handing candy bars to Iraqi children and helicopters landing in huge clouds of dust, playing to some kind of musical soundtrack…I mean, all of this shone on a gigantic stone wall with about a hundred Iraqis standing around watching.

And moving through all of them, General Petraeus with a coterie of aides and a translator, shaking hands and greeting Sheikhs and assuring everyone that all they had to do was be patient because the month before, in November, the Congress of the United States had passed an enormous Supplemental Appropriations bill of $70 billion for the Iraq War and only one month hence, in January, the money would begin to flow into Northern Iraq and All Would Be Well.

Before the sun went down, I set up my camera on a little tripod and climbed up on the wall around Hatra and took a picture of all that ancientness – columns and stone walls and stone steps leading down through narrow tunnels to hidden vaults.  It all seemed so old that nothing could be more ancient, more historic, more beginning-of-it-all than Hatra.

How incredibly wrong I was:  it had all begun about 4,000 years before Hatra, 300 miles south in Lower Mesopotamia in the Uruk IV period, which no doubt refers to the truly ancient city of Ur, way back at the time the first known historical writings were scratched in sandstone in pictographs.  It would be another thousand years before the words and deeds of dynastic kings would be recorded in an actual early language on Cuneiform tablets, but even back then, even in the land of Ur, they were drawing pictures of wars on the wall, because that’s pretty much what they did.  They went to war.  And then they either won or they got beaten, and if they got beaten, they went to war again. 

Sometime in the 3^rd millennium, about 500 miles north and west of Ur around the city now known as Idlib but which was then known as Ebla, a long war was fought with Mari.  Now listen up.  There was Sargon of Akkad and some grandson of his called Naram-Sin, and they pounded Ebla over and over again in the 23^rd Century BC until they could make Ebla a part of Mesopotamia under the Akkadian Empire.

And man, they were off and running.  One century after another, one ruler after another, one war after another.  By 2000 BC, some guys called the Hurrians moved into the northeast part of Syria, which was then known as Amurru.  The town of Mari – remember Mari?  Conquered by Ebla? – made a comeback until it was conquered by a ruler known as Hammurabi of Babylon.  Then along came Yamhad – now known as the destroyed city of Aleppo – which controlled northern Syria around the 19^th and 18^th centuries BC, when eastern Syria was ruled by Shamshi-Adad I, king of the Old Assyrian Empire, which was then taken over by the Babylonian Empire.  

Are you following me?  Yamhad was famous for having even more slaves than Babylon and those dudes in Yamhad ruled the roost up in Syria until it was conquered, along with Ebla, by the Hittites around 1600 BC. Poor Idlib and Aleppo couldn’t catch a break even back then.  

So here we are, we’re not even close to A fucking D, and we’re already waist deep in blood and kings and wars and destroyed cities and conquered peoples.  Up comes the Assyrian Empire, and it’s a battleground for the Mitannis, the Egyptians, something called the Middle Assyrians and up comes Babylonia again!  Around 900 BC, a guy named Adad-nirari II – they’re all guys, in case you hadn’t noticed -- takes Assyria and spreads into Anatolia, the Levant, Ancient Iran and back down to good old Babylonia. 

He’s followed by some butcher called Ashurnasirpal II in the mid 800’s BC, who pushes even further south into Mesopotamia and gets himself into Asia Minor until Shalmaneser III comes along a couple of decades later and unsatisfied with how much land that lazy King Ashurnasirpal II had conquered, cranks up his armies and marches right into Israel, Damascus, Canaan, and all the way back to the foothills of the Caucasus. 

And then along comes a real mother-whomper, Adad-nirari III, son of Queen Semiramis, and this guy starts slaughtering Phoenicians, Philistines, Neo-Hittites, Persians, Israelites, Medes and Manneans.  And he was just getting started.  He goes back down to Babylon and beats the shit out of them, and he basically enslaves all of eastern Mesopotamia.  Then around 700 BC, the Egyptians and a whole bunch of local kings get together and decide to teach the Assyrians a lesson.  So, King Lule and King Hezekiah and King Sidka and the king of Ekron team up with the Egyptians, and they take on this new Assyrian King Sennacherib, who had relocated to Nineveh (Mosul).  That pisses off Sennacherib, who slashes his way through the lot of them and keeps on going for Jerusalem, taking out 46 towns and villages along the way.  Then he turns east and takes out poor Babylon again.  All this murderous rampaging and raping and killing took about 39 years. Then a couple of Babylonian guys took it back until King Sennacherib got pissed enough to go after Babylon yet again, this time diverting the canals around the city and flooding Babylon, turning it into a swamp.

You with me?  No?  Well, the people we’ve been talking about all this time are the murdering, thieving, slave driving monsters who ran Syria before Assad was even a quark in some future molecule.  Within a few centuries of the birth of Christ, the ancestors of today’s Syrians had conquered and basically enslaved 28 nation-states and occupied all of what is now Egypt, Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, Palestine, Syria, Kuwait, Jordan, Bahrain, Cyprus, and large parts of Iran, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Turkey, Armenia, Libya, Azerbaijan and Georgia. 

They still had to face Alexander the Great and the Romans and then the Byzantines and then came the Arameans and the Jews and the Christians and then the invasion of Duma by Muhammad and then came the Arabs followed by the Crusades and occupation by Germans, French, Italian occupiers, and then some Turco-Mongol dude called Timur-Lenk took over and then came the Ottoman Empire and a period of comparative peace until the Ottomans made the fatal mistake of taking the side of the Germans in World War I, and after the war, a couple of the winners, England and France, in the persons of Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot secretly agreed to divvy up the Ottoman Empire and drew the infamous Picot-Sykes line creating the modern Middle East as we know it, including, of course, the descendants of the murdering, thieving, enslaving monsters we’ve been talking about in what now became known as modern Syria.

So my pals the Sheikhs over in Al Qayyarah and Hatra and the ancestors of all of the various tribes and religious factions and ethnic minorities and majorities in northern Iraq and all over Syria, the Sunnis and the Shiites and the Kurds and the Yazidi and the Turkmen and the Persians of Iran and the Turks of Turkey have been at each other’s throats for 6,000 years, and we’re going to waltz in with a couple hundred thousand troops and we expect these people to pay attention to us?

I keep thinking of Petraeus up there on that little dais in Al Qayyarah looking all confused as those Sheikhs yelled at him.  When we got out of there and he was heading over to his Blackhawk that already had its rotors turning, he was looking positively giddy at the thought of getting the hell out of there.  I kept thinking, who the fuck do we think we’re fooling?  We sent a few hundred thousand troops over there in rotating shifts of one-year deployments and then we shipped them right back home, and we did it over and over, and what did we have to show for it?  Mosul is in ruins, Allepo and Idlib are a maze of heartbreak and rubble.  Their ancestors have been slaughtering each other and various invading armies using everything from rocks to sticks to knives to swords to spears to bows and arrows to muskets to AK-47’s to RPG’s to mortars to Russian made jet fighters and high explosive and gas bombs, and they’ve been doing it pretty much around the clock for almost 6,000 years.  Do you want to know what they haven’t been doing?  They haven’t been campaigning for votes and running political ads, and they haven’t been voting, and they haven’t been doing shit like going on MSNBC and CNN and Fox and talking big about who really won the last election and who’s going to win this one. 

What they were doing was fighting for was their lives and hoping to survive, and as usual – it just happened again in Ukraine -- some asshole ruler from across a desert or over a mountain range attacks their land and starts killing them by the thousands without stop. 

We’re supposed to impress the world that we’re the bulwark of liberty with our zillion dollar economy and Hollywood movies and SUV’s and Morning Joe and Tucker Carlson and our almighty democracy that we can’t even manage to run without lunatic rulers and political riots and killings of our own.  

God help us, through 6,000 years of wars, none of us has been truly civilized.