Not surprisingly, the origins of the Iran–Iraq War lie deep in the past. In fact, until the early twentieth century, when the British stitched together disparate provinces of the Ottoman Empire that they had acquired in the political fallout from that empire’s collapse, there was no such political entity as Iraq. Yet, the territory from which modern Iraq emerged has been at the center of world events since the dawn of history. Along with Egypt and China, the Mesopotamian Valley gave birth to the earliest of human civilizations. Beginning in the third millennium bc, small Semitic tribes combined with the Akkadians and Sumerians to build a prosperous city-state culture around Ur and Babylon. Theirs were societies born in the harsh conditions of subsistence agriculture, which forced them to constantly balance their actions in a world caught between disaster and opulence.

Change in Mesopotamia was often swift and violent. The life-giving rivers represented a capricious resource, often failing to flood or flooding too much. This gave rise to a particular fatalism – so-called Babylonian “pessimism” – within a culture where nothing was sure and the future was of little comfort. Nature was not the only source of gloom. During the centuries, Hittites, Assyrians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Parthians, Byzantines, Arabs, Mongols, Ottomans, Britons, and Americans have all invaded, devastated, and then, in a fashion, ruled, but never fully subdued Mesopotamia.