Iraq's History of Social Conflict Term Paper

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Sumer and Akkad were the two city-states that produced the most sophisticated armies of the Bronze Age (Gabriel & Metz, 1991). The Greeks called the area Mesopotamia, meaning "the land between the two rivers," a reference to the Tigris and Euphrates basin; however, in the Bible, the region is referred to as "Shumer," the original Sumerian word for the southern part of Iraq, the site of Sumer with its capital at the city of Ur (Gabriel & Metz, 1991).

Modern social organization and therefore social conflict therefore find their collective historic basis in Iraq. According to Roux (1993), people first manifested the high degree of cooperative human effort necessary to make urban life possible in the early Sumerian cities of Eridu and Urak. Likewise, Gabriel and Metz report that these two cities "reflected the evidence of this cooperation in the dikes, walls, irrigation canals, and temples, especially the giant ziggurates, which date from the fourth millennium" (p. 4). Likewise, an efficient agricultural system made it possible to free large numbers of people from the land, and the cities of ancient Sumer produced social structures comprised largely of freemen who met in concert to govern themselves. Early Sumerian cities were characterized by a high degree of social and economic diversity, which gave rise to artisans, merchants, priests, bureaucrats, road and temple architects, and professional soldiers (Gabriel & Metz, 1991).

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Much like the increasingly multicultural society in the United States today, ancient Sumerian civilization was also comprised of a polyglot of ethnic people; however, all fourteen of the major city-states of the region shared essentially the same culture: "For the most part all Sumerian states had the same political institutions, economic practices, religious beliefs and practices, gods, legends, administrative language, and general way of life. Not surprisingly, they also developed the same military forms" (Gabriel & Metz, 1991, p. 5). The 1,200 years following the Arab conquest of the country have been marked by a steady stream of invasions, wars, incursions and revolts. In this regard, it would seem that in spite of - or perhaps because of - Iraq's abundant natural oil reserves, modern Iraq's history has been influenced more by foreign powers than the Iraqi people themselves.

In what has been termed a "resource curse" by Auty (1993), who reports, "a growing body of evidence suggests that a favorable natural resource endowment may be less beneficial to countries at low- and mid-income levels of development than the conventional wisdom might suppose. Two important pieces of this evidence are the developing countries' postwar industrialization efforts and the performance of the mineral-rich.....

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