Why did every Iraqi regime fail to understand its country's geopolitics?

The British inheritance: a state without a geopolitical identity

When the British drew the borders of modern Iraq in 1920, they were not building a state; they were securing their interests. The border line that joined Kurdish Mosul, the Sunni center, and the Shia south was not built according to the logic of internal cohesion, but according to the logic of colonial control over oil and trade routes. The Hashemite Kingdom established thereafter was born already carrying a structural contradiction: a state with artificial borders governing a people that had not chosen to be a single state in this form.

This inheritance was never addressed. Every system that came after inherited the problem but not the intellectual tools necessary to address it. Instead of asking: How do we turn this diversity into a geopolitical advantage? -- every system was occupied with the easier and more dangerous question: How do we suppress this diversity to ensure survival?

The monarchy: the first missed opportunity

The Iraqi Kingdom between 1921 and 1958 lived under its full Western orientation. This was not genuine self-governance; it was management by proxy in the service of British, then American, interests. The Baghdad Pact of 1955 was the apex of this orientation: full alignment with the Western camp in the Cold War, without granting Iraq any margin of maneuver, and without taking into account that Iraq sits at the heart of a region in which multiple competing dynamics play out, dynamics that cannot be managed by full alignment with a single party.

Iraq's geographic position calls for a policy of balance, not a policy of alignment. The British understood this for themselves on many occasions, but they never taught it to the Iraqi ruler they created.

The republics: ideology instead of strategy

After the coup of 1958, Iraq entered a tunnel of republican regimes each more ideological than its predecessor. Arab nationalists, Baathists, and competing officer factions -- all governed by doctrine, not by a map. Pan-Arab nationalist ideology made the question of Arab unity a priority at the expense of building the Iraqi state itself. Instead of asking: What does this land and this position require in terms of realistic policy? -- leaders were asking: How do we achieve the unity of the great Arab nation?

Every system that governed Iraq carried in its pocket a project larger than Iraq -- the Arab nation, Islam, the Revolution -- and each time, Iraq paid the price of a dream bearing no direct relation to its geography.

Saddam: tactical brilliance and strategic absence

Saddam Hussein represents the most compelling case study in Iraqi geopolitical failure. He was a brilliant tactician who understood how to use fear, money, and personal relationships to consolidate power. But he was a geopolitically failed strategist in a way that was almost astonishing.

The war with Iran 1980: an attack on a larger and strategically deeper state, based on the false assumption that the revolutionary Iranian regime would collapse quickly. It did not. Eight years of war exhausted Iraq and burdened it with debts. The invasion of Kuwait 1990: another grave geopolitical error. Declaring hostility to the Gulf powers and the West simultaneously, without any realistic reading of the balance of forces. The price was a devastating blockade and then a second war that brought down the entire regime.

In all these decisions, the fundamental geopolitical question was absent: What do your neighbors want, and what will make them let you build your state in peace? And what do you truly want from your geographic position?

Post-2003: complete strategic vacuum

The system that came after the American invasion brought no alternative geopolitical thought. It brought lists of historical grievances and sectarian and ethnic agendas reflecting the visions of parties that had governed for decades from exile. Sectarian power-sharing as a system of governance is fundamentally a complete denial of the concept of a state with a unifying strategic interest. When ministries and institutions and wealth are divided on sectarian and ethnic grounds, every group becomes occupied with protecting its share rather than building a national vision.

More dangerous still, this system made every external power -- Iran, America, Turkey, Saudi Arabia -- a natural partner to some internal faction, which means that Iraqi geopolitics came to be managed from outside through internal proxies. This is the precise opposite of mature geopolitics.

Analytical conclusion

The failure of Iraqi regimes to understand their country's geopolitics was not an accidental occurrence; it was the inevitable result of the accumulation of three factors: first, a state born with a manufactured identity and no self-defined strategic purpose; second, systems that governed by ideologies transcending the state or by narrow interests that denied the state; third, a complete absence of independent strategic-thinking institutions capable of offering a long-range vision. The result: a country with the geography of empires, managed with the mentality of the tribe.