A Brief Audio History of Iraq

Despite being 4 years into the Iraq war, most Americans still couldn’t tell you very much about the
historical background of the country in which we’ve invested so much. Iraq will be with us for a good long time, so it wouldn’t hurt to spend 30 minutes getting familiar with the broad brush strokes history of the fractured nation, especially since the past holds clues as to why this campaign never went as smoothly as some first anticipated.

In this audio segment from The Leonard Lopate Show (iTunes – Feed – Web Site), Barry Lando, a former investigative reporter for 60 Minutes and the author of a new book on Iraq, gives a half-hour overview of Iraq’s history — of how the British fashioned an independent nation in 1932 out of the fragments of the Ottoman Empire, and how, from there, the destiny of this artificial melding of three ethnic groups has been constantly intertwined with the foreign policy ambitions of England, Russia, and eventually the United States, which, of course, leads us to today.

P.S. You may want to check out Lando’s blog, and, on the lighter side, and especially if you’re bummed by the whole Iraq affair, you may want to take a look at Lando’s recent appearance on The Colbert Report: