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: