"The Coming Normalcy?
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Whatever else the American occupation of Iraq may be, it serves as a laboratory for ideas about how to wring stability out of chaos—the great foreign-policy challenge of the twenty-first century
by Robert D. Kaplan
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T he Iraqi city of Mosul is an age-old caravan crossroads whose history defies the concept of the twentieth- century nation-statethe kind of nation-state the U.S. military occupation of Iraq is trying to hold together (if not create), and to keep from imploding into full- scale civil war.
Historic trade routes have linked Mosul to cities in Syria, Turkey, and Iran, bringing cultural as well as commercial exchanges. The Arabic language in Mosul bears Kurdish and Syriac influences. There is a large community of Chaldaeans—descendants of Christians who were converted (eons ago) from Nestorianism to Catholicism. For a long time, this city was a seat of Catholic missionary activity. Seljuk Turks held Mosul in the Middle Ages and Ottomans held it in the modern era, with a Persian occupation in between. Mosul's degenerating old quarter, with its beetling Ottoman walls and elegantly stuccoed twelfth-century Seljuk minaret, is testimony to this cosmopolitan lineage."
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