Thank you very much for your wonderful article, but if you overlay ancient societies with a very recent artificial state - this is what you get, no "ifs", no "buts".
A nation is like a family, you cannot just group random people, insist they adopt a common flag & anthem - and then expect them to behave like a nation. That is the problem with a lot of the "nations" that were created post WW2 (after the fall of European empires).
Iraq's fundamental problem is this; it is not a nation. Saddam could have held it together by extreme violence (or another dictator could), but absent that, there was never going to be a basis for nationhood. Shias were smarting under decades of oppression by Sunnis and Sunnis weren't going to take lightly to their diminished status. Kurds had a long-term project - and it wasn't Iraq, it was an independent Kurdish state.
This kind of ethno-sectarianism isn't limited to the Middle-east - it is one of Africa's primary problems - a consequence of poorly thought out "states". You'll see how Boko Haram (and other Sahelian terror groups) bring out the same ethno-sectarian tensions you noticed in Iraq to the open - keep tuned.
Let me add that the great advantage the Far East had over Africa and the Middle East is this - colonial borders coincided more or less with ancient/related societies - there was a historical continuum, not a "disjunction" - not the kind of "cut and join" states one sees in the Middle East/Africa - for example; the Vietnamese had a strong identity, the French didn't create a "Vietnamese identity".
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