Iraq will continue to be a major issue and involvement for the United States into the foreseeable future says William R. Polk, former member of the State Department's Policy Planning Council and professor of Middle Eastern history at the University of Chicago. Iraq sits on the world's largest supply of oil, and with the world's energy requirements continuously rising, Iraq will play an ongoing role in the global economy and the political environment throughout the Gulf region and the Middle East.

Polk's concise, authoritative overview of Iraq's history shows how the pattern of outside intervention was established first by the Ottoman Turks and the Persian Safavids and later by England, Russia, and Germany. After World War I came British rule, followed by a brief and uneasy period of independence that sparked Iraqi nationalism, leading Saddam Husain to power with American military and financial aid and covert CIA involvement. The Iraq-Iran War and the invasion of Kuwait was followed by the Gulf War, the sanctions period, and the Bush administration's decision to invade. Finally, there is the American occupation and the challenges, opportunities, and options that Iraqis and Americans face now and in the future.

Ancestors of inhabitants of today's Iraq began to emerge from the long shadows of prehistory about twelve thousand years ago. We cannot see them clearly, but we have some notion of how they lived. Gathered in groups of fifty or so people, they ranged along the slopes of the mountains that divide modern Iraq and Syria from Turkey. They did not live in permanent villages but sheltered under lean-tos that were covered with the skins of animals. The men hunted wild animals while the women gathered wild grasses from which they extracted the seed and pounded them into digestible bits.

Using crude sickles, faced with flint chips, they scoured the valleys to collect every edible thing, and, driven by hunger, they ate everything they found. Where archaeologists and paleobotanists have made studies of their campsites, they have found more than a hundred different kinds of seed. Animals and seed were usually plentiful, but each day brought risk. Their besetting fear must have been famine. Although on average their lives were reasonably easy, they lived literally hand to mouth, so a chance break in the weather might send the wild animals on which they depended out of reach or cause wild grasses to wither.

As they hunted or gleaned one area bare, whole clans would pick up their few possessions and move to a new location. Often they left caches of seed behind in clay-lined baskets or pits to which they planned to return. It is astonishing, in these circumstances, that they left a rich legacy: they became our first farmers.

No one knows exactly how they began this revolutionary new venture, but the agricultural revolution was probably partly accidental. From time to time, someone, perhaps a child, spilled a basket or dropped a handful of seed. Probably also, at least some of the caches of seed they left in storage pits or clay-lined baskets got rained on. Much, of course, would have just rotted. But, over the long years, some would spout into what modern gardeners call "volunteers." Watching this, the tribesmen—and particularly the women -- would naturally find it convenient that the volunteers were in or around their camps and waterholes where they were easy to collect.

At various times when and where rainfall was abundant in the hills along the northern reaches of what is now Iraq, some people began to winnow out seeds or sprouts. From the results, we know that what had probably been an accident certainly became a purposeful move. With pointed sticks like the ones they used to dig up tubers (and the men used to spear wild goats), they poked holes in the soft mud beside a waterhole or on the bank of a stream and dropped in a few grains. Probably the seed often failed to come up, but some did. The lucky or those who did it right were more apt to survive periodic famines than their more backward neighbors. Fear of starvation was a great teacher. Paleobotanists believe that within a few generations these adventurous —and hungry—tribal peoples achieved the first feats of domestication. So evident were the advantages of these experiments that the example spread widely from encampment to encampment. Sometime around 6000 b.c., "farming" began.

During these years also, the once-bountiful wild game had become harder to find and kill. Some of the little groups scattered along foothills and in the valleys of the Zagros -- the area that because of its relatively bountiful rainfall has become known as the Fertile Crescent -- had already begun a process that has been termed "management." Much as Laplanders today work with still-wild reindeer, they followed and partly managed herds of goats.