https://x.com/hussain91679430/status/2090808821534871836?s=46
Iqbal Latif
A long post went around this week in Arabic, twenty five thousand views by the time it reached me, laying out what it called Kissinger's reading of Iraq in World Order.
It has chapters. Chapter One, Iraq, a Westphalian State Without a Westphalian Society. Chapter Two, 2003, the moment the world order committed suicide in Baghdad. Chapter Three, four world systems clashing in one street. It has a first law and a prophecy and a closing aphorism that has already been screenshotted a thousand times: if you want to know whether the global system still exists, do not look at Washington or Moscow or Beijing, look at Baghdad.
I went to the book.
World Order has nine chapters. None of them is about Iraq. There is no chapter one on Westphalian states without Westphalian societies, no first law, no four systems in one street. Iraq appears in two places, scattered through chapter three on Islamism and the Middle East as a world in disorder, and in the subsection of chapter eight, the chapter on the United States as an ambivalent superpower, that deals with the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, where it is handled as an episode in the history of American foreign policy and not as a case study in the fate of the state. The Baghdad aphorism is not in the book, not in his essays, not in any quotation database in English or in Arabic. It does not exist.
And the forgery does something worse than invent. It reverses him. In World Order itself Kissinger records that he supported the decision to undertake regime change in Iraq. He argued for the war in the Washington Post in the months before it began. He put in print in August 2005 that victory over the insurgency was the only meaningful exit strategy, and he confirmed as late as 2008 that he had supported the invasion, faulting the Bush administration only for having rested too much of its case on weapons of mass destruction. The man the post has calling 2003 an act of moral and strategic suicide is the man who argued for it and who defended the decision eleven years later in the very book he is being quoted from. What he did recant, and recanted plainly, was the nation building that followed.
The honest part of this story is that the Arabic readers under the post caught it before anyone else. One of them wrote that he could find no reliable source for the Baghdad line. Another asked Grok which chapter it was in and was told the symbolism does not exist in the book. A third said the decent thing would have been to credit the man who actually wrote the text. The crowd was more rigorous than the post. That happens more often than the people who write posts would like to admit.
So why did it travel. Because it is downstream of things Kissinger did write, and because those things are true enough to carry a forgery on their back. He did write that Sykes Picot and Sèvres produced borders that for the most part had no historical roots. He did write that Syria and Iraq may lose the capacity to reconstitute themselves as unified Westphalian states. Somebody took two real sentences, built three chapters and a prophecy around them, and put the most famous name in twentieth century diplomacy on the title page. It is a good enough forgery that I want to argue with it rather than merely correct it, because the argument underneath it is the one a great many people in the region actually believe, and it is wrong at the foundation.
Start with the sequence, because everything else in that post rests on it. The claim is that in Europe the people unified first and then demanded borders, whereas in Iraq the borders came first and the people were asked to unify inside them. That is presented as the European norm. It is the European exception.
France in 1870 was not yet French. When Abbé Grégoire reported to the Convention in June 1794 on the necessity of destroying the patois, he counted a population of some twenty five to twenty eight million in which about three million spoke French properly and about six million were wholly ignorant of the national language, with something like thirty patois in daily use. As late as 1871 only about a quarter of the population spoke French as a mother tongue. Eugen Weber called his book Peasants into Frenchmen and the title is the argument: the schools, the conscript army, the roads, the railways and the market turned a collection of Bretons, Gascons, Basques, Catalans, Flemings, Alsatians and Corsicans into a nation, and the state did it from above, after the borders were fixed. The nation did not demand the state. The state manufactured the nation.
Germany is worse for the thesis, not better. The unification of 1871 deliberately excluded millions of German speakers by leaving Austria outside, and it just as deliberately included Poles, Danes and Alsatians who had not asked to be included, and then set about Germanising them by law, by school and by language policy. In the province of Posen the German speaking share of the population fell across the following decades in spite of everything the state did. The border came first and the nation was built behind it, and in places it refused to be built. Italy did the same thing and left behind the slogan everyone quotes at dinner: we have made Italy, now we must make Italians.
That is the European record. The border first, the nation afterwards, by administration and coercion, over decades, with failures. Which means the charge against Iraq, that it put the container before the contents, is not a charge at all. It is a description of how almost every state in Europe was made.
Now take away the foundation itself.
The Westphalian system is not what it is said to be, and the demolition is not mine. Andreas Osiander published it in International Organization in 2001 and it has stood since. The treaties signed at Münster and Osnabrück in October 1648 are silent on sovereignty. They contain no principle of non intervention. They do not settle the emperor's prerogatives and they do not mention the Pope. Most of the text of both instruments concerns the internal constitutional affairs of the Holy Roman Empire, which did not dissolve in 1648 and went on functioning, with its Reichstag sitting permanently from 1663 and its imperial courts still hearing cases brought by subjects against their own rulers by the thousand a century later. That is not exclusive internal jurisdiction. It is the opposite of it. Derek Croxton adds the detail that makes the whole thing faintly comic: the drafters had no settled Latin term for sovereignty to put in the text, and the right of alliance that every textbook cites as proof of princely sovereignty was a right the princes already had, qualified in the treaties themselves by the condition that it must not be exercised to the detriment of the emperor or the empire.
And then the fact that finishes it. The settlement supposed to have founded the principle of non intervention made France and Sweden guarantors of that settlement, which gave two foreign powers a written right to intervene in the affairs of Central Europe. They used it for a century and a half.
Where does the story we all repeat come from. Osiander traces it to a single article by Leo Gross, written for the tercentenary in 1948, in which Westphalia became a majestic portal leading from the old world into the new. Gross went to the treaties to find support for the claim, found little that was serviceable, and published the claim anyway. The Westphalian system as we invoke it is seventy eight years old. It is not three hundred and seventy eight. We have been measuring the Middle East against a yardstick that was manufactured in New York after the Second World War and then backdated.
So the post measures Iraq against an invented standard, using an invented sequence, over the signature of a man who wrote neither. Set all of that aside and the interesting country is still there. It is simply not the country the post describes.
Iraq is not a small place and it is not a poor one. Its population was counted properly in November 2024 for the first time in thirty seven years, and the detailed result announced in February 2025 gave 46.1 million, which makes it larger than Saudi Arabia, larger than Syria, four times Jordan, and second among Arab states only to Egypt. It was producing about 4.4 million barrels a day before this year's war, second in OPEC, on reserves of 145 billion barrels, and since the Emirates announced their departure from OPEC in April, effective the first of May, it is a larger share of what remains. Anyone who tells you Iraq does not matter in oil has not looked at a production table.
What Iraq has is enormous mass and almost no agency. It is a country things are done to. In the last six months its territory has been struck by four separate air forces, American, Israeli, Saudi and Kuwaiti. By the seventh of April the Iraqi government itself reported one hundred and thirty eight American strikes on its soil, which had killed seventy three members of the Popular Mobilisation Forces, ten soldiers of the Iraqi army, three federal police officers and six civilians. Washington then shaped the choice of prime minister from outside, threatening to cut off support and suspending cooperation and funding for Iraqi security agencies until the Coordination Framework withdrew the candidate it wanted, and it worked, and the man who emerged in May was a businessman of around forty with no political experience in elected office or government administration and nine ministries still unfilled, defence and interior among them. Its own showcase, the Arab League summit it hosted in Baghdad in May 2025, was boycotted by every Gulf head of state. It convened the Saudi Iranian talks and China closed them in Beijing and took the credit. It flares enough gas to generate more electricity than it produces and imports power anyway.
And then the number that settles the question of agency. More than ninety four percent of Iraq's exports leave through a strait it does not control, and roughly ninety percent of the federal budget comes from those exports. When Hormuz closed at the end of February, southern production fell by about eighty percent in March, from around 4.3 million barrels a day to eight hundred thousand. Across the whole of May and June the country exported 32.1 million barrels and earned 2.34 billion dollars, which is a little over half a million barrels a day for a state that had been shipping 3.4 million. Set Riyadh beside that. The Petroline ran at its full seven million barrels a day to Yanbu on the Red Sea, with about five million loading there, keeping roughly sixty percent of pre war Saudi exports moving. Saudi Arabia had built an exit. Iraq has a plan for one, approved in 2024, still unbuilt. The Fund now expects the Iraqi economy to contract by nearly seven percent this year. That is not an inconsequential country. That is a heavyweight that cannot convert.
Its history is told in myths too, and one of them is worth killing on the way past. The Mongols in 1258 did not end the intellectual life of the Islamic world, and the Tigris did not run black with ink. Michal Biran classifies that image as a literary trope built to magnify Mongol barbarity, and her evidence is not rhetorical: teaching resumed in Baghdad within a very few years of the siege, and Nasir al Din al Tusi, who was travelling with the Mongols, is credited with salvaging manuscripts before and around the conquest, although the figure of four hundred thousand volumes usually quoted in this connection properly belongs to the library at Alamut two years earlier and should not be transferred to Baghdad. Dimitri Gutas goes further and questions whether the House of Wisdom was ever an institution at all rather than a book depository, noting that not one of the great translators of the movement, Hunayn ibn Ishaq included, ever mentions it. The fall of Baghdad ended five centuries of Abbasid caliphate, which is a real rupture. It did not end a civilisation. Timur in 1393 and 1401 and the Ottoman conquest of 1534 did far more to marginalise the city, and nobody writes threads about them.
Now the part of Iraq that actually deserves the attention the post wasted, and it is the opposite of what the post claims.
The most consequential thing about Iraq since 2003 is that its Shia majority did not take the Iranian model, and the reason is a seminary.
Ruhollah Khomeini lived in Najaf from October 1965 to October 1978. Between the twenty first of January and the eighth of February 1970, in a mosque in that city, he delivered the lectures that were published as Islamic Government and became the founding text of clerical rule. He composed the doctrinal charter of the Iranian revolution inside the Najaf hawza, and the Najaf hawza did not adopt it. Thirteen years of proximity produced no conversion. His audience was Iranian students. The Iraqi seminary listened and went back to work. Then Abu al Qasim al Khoei held Najaf neutral through eight years of war between Iran and Iraq, which is the moment the old alliance between the two cities ended, and it ended on the Iraqi side.
The doctrine underneath the refusal is precise and it is not timidity. Ali al Sistani's recorded position is that if we have only these narrations to go on, the guardianship of the jurist cannot be established. Where he does allow a jurist executive competence, he makes it conditional on that jurist being accepted by the general body of believers. Khomeini derived the ruler's authority from deputyship of the Hidden Imam, which is to say from God, downward. Sistani makes any political competence conditional on the consent of the governed, which is to say upward. That single clause is why everything Sistani has done since 2003 has been about ballot boxes.
And he proved it at the one moment when nobody could have stopped him. In 2003 the state had collapsed, a foreign army was in the country, the majority was Shia for the first time in the history of modern Iraq, and he was the most trusted man in it. He could have had anything. He asked for elections. He ruled that a constitution written by men appointed by an occupier had no legitimacy, that the drafters must be elected and the text put to referendum. Bremer tried an appointed council and then a caucus scheme and Sistani broke both of them without leaving his house, and Iraq voted on the thirtieth of January 2005. A behavioural refutation of a doctrine is worth more than a written one, and that is what that was.
Then look at who these men are, because this is the part almost nobody notices and it is the heart of the thing.
For most of the last generation the supreme religious authority of Iraq's Shia has rested with four grand ayatollahs. Ali al Sistani was born in Mashhad, in Iran. Muhammad Ishaq al Fayyad was an Afghan from Jaghori in Ghazni province, and he died on the fourth of June this year at ninety six, with three days of national mourning declared in Iraq. Bashir Hussain al Najafi was born in Jalandhar in 1942, moved with his family to the Lahore area after Partition, studied there, went to Najaf in 1965 and never came back, and he is a Pakistani. Muhammad Said al Hakim, who died in 2021, was the only Arab Iraqi among them.
The highest religious authority in the country was held for a generation by three foreign born scholars and one Iraqi, and nobody in Najaf found that strange, because it is not a national office and was never meant to be one. Standing in that system is earned by scholarship and conferred by the emulators who choose to follow you, and it is financed by their khums, paid directly, hand to hand, through agents, with no state anywhere in the transaction. Four men, independent of each other, independent of Baghdad, independent of Tehran, holding an authority that no government issued and no government can withdraw.
And what they refused is the whole argument. They refused to be the deputy of God on earth in the political sense. Not because they are quiet men, and not because they lack views. Sistani ended a prime minister's career with one sentence in a Friday sermon in November 2019 and Adel Abdul Mahdi resigned that same day. Sistani raised an army in a single day in June 2014 when ISIS was on the road to Baghdad, and he did it in language addressed to all Iraqi citizens whatever their sect or ethnicity, and he told them to volunteer for the army and the federal police rather than form militias of their own. These are not passive men. They are men who intervene and then decline the office. They keep the moral authority and hand the political process back to the politicians, and they do it again and again, and that refusal, repeated for twenty years, is the single largest source of whatever stability Iraq has.
Qom made the opposite choice and we can all see the results. Ali Khamenei was killed on the twenty eighth of February this year in an American and Israeli strike on Tehran, confirmed by Iranian state media on the first of March, and within days the Assembly of Experts installed his son. A doctrine that claims divine deputyship for a living man produced a dynastic succession by airstrike. Najaf's model has no supreme leader, no vice regency, no divine mandate for a living man, and no state. That is why Iran could not capture it, and it is also why Baghdad cannot capture it. It is the only genuinely transnational institution in this entire argument, and it cuts against Iranian sovereignty rather than for it.
Two things must be said against my own case here, or someone else will say them for me.
The first is that Najaf is not anti Iranian and I will not pretend otherwise. When the United States killed Qassem Soleimani and Abu Mahdi al Muhandis on Iraqi soil in January 2020, Sistani called the dead heroes of the fight against Daesh and condemned Washington's breach of Iraqi sovereignty, even as he told the militias to show self restraint. When the American and Israeli campaign against Iran began this year, he condemned it as a dangerous precedent, called on the international community to stop it, and expressed solidarity with the Iranian people. He received Hassan Rouhani in March 2019, although he used the meeting to demand that weapons be kept in the hands of the state. He declined Ahmadinejad and he declined Pezeshkian, and he received the Pope in his rented house in a Najaf alley in March 2021. The divergence is institutional and not personal. Najaf does not dislike Iran. It refuses Iranian religious sovereignty. Keep that distinction and the argument is unbreakable. Blur it and it collapses.
The second concession is harder. This year Iraq was used. From the end of February, factions on Iraqi soil fired missiles and drones at American facilities in Baghdad and across the Kurdistan region, struck American diplomatic premises, and drew retaliation onto Iraqi territory from four air forces. Iraq's declared neutrality did not hold, and the International Crisis Group's verdict in April was the correct one, that Baghdad had been unable to keep the country out of the fray. Militias based in Iraq extended their attacks to Gulf energy targets and Gulf air forces struck back inside Iraq. And in the parliament elected in November 2025, blocs attached to armed factions hold dozens of seats.
My answer is the distinction between a province and a contested state. The Iraqi state refused. The seminary issued no call to arms. In 2014, with the country about to fall, the marjaiyya raised an army in a day. In 2026, with Iran under bombardment and its supreme leader killed, it issued condemnation and asked for restraint and did not mobilise a single man. That is the dog that did not bark, and it is the loudest fact of the year. Iraq was used despite its institutions and not through them, which is precisely what a province is not.
And the direction of travel is with me, not against me. Muqtada al Sadr has moved to dissolve his own formation and hand it to the state. The government has set a deadline for disarmament this autumn. Asaib Ahl al Haq, which not long ago said there was no place in its doctrine for handing over weapons, now claims compliance, and conditions the handover on the vision of the religious authority. Even the militias have to launder their position through Najaf. Kataib Hezbollah and Nujaba refuse, Badr threatens, and most people expect symbolic handovers rather than real ones. But the shape is clear. Iran's ideological claim in Iraq is spent. Only the coercive one is left. A movement that once offered a theory of government now offers protection money, and that is a demotion, whatever it looks like from the outside.
Which brings me to the substitution, and I want to be careful about how I make it, because the careless version of this argument has an ugly history.
If what you actually want to test is whether sovereignty, borders and loyalty can be made to coincide, Iraq is not the hardest case available. Iraq tests whether a border can generate a nation. Pakistan tests something rarer and much more demanding: whether an idea about peoplehood that existed before any line was drawn can hold a territory whose every land frontier is disputed and whose largest ethnic groups have kin on the other side of each of them.
It has been running that experiment for seventy nine years, at five and a half times the population, with nuclear weapons. And it has already failed once. In 1971 the wing that held the majority of the country's people seceded, and religion did not hold it, and language and ethnicity did the holding instead. Iraq has lost control of territory more than once and has never partitioned. Pakistan is the one of the two that has actually broken.
There is a way of measuring this that is not mine either. Alesina, Easterly and Matuszeski built the standard quantitative treatment of border artificiality in economics, and their two criteria are the share of a population belonging to ethnic groups split across a border and the straightness of the border itself. Apply those two criteria honestly and Pakistan scores badly on both, with Pashtuns, Baloch, Punjabis and Kashmiris divided by every line it holds, and with the Durand Line among the most consciously drawn frontiers in Asia. Iraq does not score as badly, which is the opposite of what the viral post assumes. And the genuinely interesting thing is that the more artificially bounded of the two is the one that stayed in one piece while holding a frontier that no neighbour has ever recognised.
That frontier is the ground I know. No Afghan government of any description, monarchy, republic, communist, mujahideen or Taliban, has ever accepted the Durand Line. Afghanistan cast the only vote against Pakistan's admission to the United Nations in 1947. The fence is almost complete and sections of it keep coming down. And in February of this year it stopped being a border dispute at all. On the twenty seventh of February Pakistani aircraft struck Kabul, Kandahar and Paktia after Afghan forces attacked Pakistani border posts, and the defence minister Khawaja Asif announced that the cup of patience had overflowed and that it was now open war between the two countries. Regional foreign ministers offered to mediate. Add the Line of Control, which is a ceasefire line and not a border and remains the most dangerous few hundred kilometres between two nuclear powers on earth. Add Sir Creek, sixty miles of tidal estuary, six rounds of talks since 1989 and no settlement, and an Indian defence minister warning in October 2025 that a build up there would change both history and geography. Add the Indus Waters Treaty, held in abeyance since April 2025, which puts the water itself into the dispute.
Then add the loyalties that do not stop at the line. Iran raised a brigade of Pakistani citizens, the Zainebiyoun, for a war in Syria, and Pakistan proscribed it in 2024, and some of its members have been charged with killings inside Pakistan. That is a foreign state recruiting an army from another state's population for a third country's war, and there is nothing in Iraq that is cleaner as a demonstration that citizenship and loyalty are not the same thing. The Tehreek e Taliban leadership sits across the Durand Line under the protection of a movement that shares its school of jurisprudence. And the tribal system is still there underneath all of it. Eight years after the twenty fifth amendment folded the tribal areas into Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the verdict written from inside Pakistan this July was that a merger which exists in the constitution but not in the courthouse, the police station or the land records is not integration, it is citizenship on paper.
And then the last piece, which completes the picture and which I would rather not write. The frame is held by the army. In November 2025 the twenty seventh amendment wrote that into the constitution, creating a chief of defence forces holding command of the strategic organisation, granting lifetime immunity to five star officers and to the president, and making the office harder to remove than a prime minister. Two judges of the Supreme Court resigned over it.
So there it is. A state whose founding idea preceded its map, whose map no neighbour accepts, whose largest minorities have kin and armed movements across every frontier, whose tribal law still outruns its courts in the districts that matter, which fought an air war with one neighbour in May 2025 and declared open war on another in February, which has spent this year acting as the channel between Washington and Tehran and hosting the foreign ministers of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Turkey to do it, which signed the Mecca Joint Defence Agreement on the seventh of August under which an attack on any one of the three signatories is an attack on all, and which holds the whole arrangement together with an army that has now written its primacy into the founding document. Every element the viral post claimed to want, running at scale, in a nuclear state. Nobody writes threads about it, because Baghdad is more romantic than Bannu.
One warning, and I put it against myself deliberately. Sara Pursley wrote the best demolition of the legend that Iraq is uniquely artificial, and her sentence is that Iraq's borders were formed in much the same way that the borders of nation states everywhere have been formed, with a great deal of work and a great deal of violence. She also warns that the artificial state narrative carries inside it a logic of ethnic tidying up, and that this logic has been picked up and used by people who tidy with knives. That warning applies to my version too. So the disciplined claim is not that Pakistan is more artificial than Iraq. Artificiality is a word that does damage. The claim is that Pakistan is the more demanding test of whether sovereignty, borders and loyalty can be made to coincide, and that it has been passing that test, imperfectly and expensively, in full view, for seventy nine years.
I will end where the post began. Somebody wanted to say something true about Iraq and could not get anyone to listen without a famous signature on it, so he borrowed one. That tells you what the argument was worth on its own. If a case needs a forged Kissinger to travel, the case was not there. And the case that was actually available, that four foreign born and Iraqi scholars in a seminary in Najaf declined to be the deputy of God on earth and handed politics back to the politicians, and that this refusal has done more for the stability of Iraq than any constitution written for it, is a better story than the one that was invented, and it has the additional merit of being true.