How the catastrophe happened

Ali A. Allawi has spent much of his life in exile from his native Iraq. Born into a family that had served the royal family that came to grief in 1958, he spent his childhood at schools in England and his career abroad as an academic, engineer and banker. Active among the émigré anti-Baathists in the 1990s, he returned in September 2003 to find his unfortunate country disintegrating into civil war with Britain and America and a troupe of home-grown adventurers and crooks hurrying it on.

After brief and frustrating stints as Trade and Defence Ministers in 2003 and 2004, Allawi was elected to the Transitional National Assembly for the main Shia list, the United Iraqi Alliance, in January 2005 and served as Finance Minister without compromising his reputation for financial probity.

Allawi refused to live in the fortified Green Zone and his ministerial convoy was twice attacked. He left politics with a whole skin last May. He has written a clear, unpartisan and literate account of the catastrophe brought on by the Anglo-American invasion and one that is strikingly calm and dispassionate. Every- body is to blame in Allawi’s account, including himself.

For Allawi, the invasion smashed Iraq as comprehensively as the Mongol armies of Hulagu in 1258. Baathist Iraq, with its terrorised bureaucracy, technical esprit de corps and barbaric cruelty, disintegrated and Iraqis were thrown back on their aboriginal loyalties to tribe, region and sect. Allawi finds premonitions in the Iraqi historian Ali al-Wardi (1913-95) (and through him ibn Khaldun) of the brittle fragility of civilised values in Iraq and the savagery of the Sunni insurgency.

He shows that during the 1990s, concealed by the death agonies of the Baath, there were sinister changes at the root of Iraqi society: the demoralisation of the professional middle class, the spread of Wahhabism and other xenophobic creeds among the Sunni and the rise of the Sadrists among the Shia.