Katherine Harvey's "A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy"

Katherine Harvey is an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University. She is also on the Board of Advisors at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies from King's College London. Previously, she served as an intelligence officer in the US Navy, with tours in the Middle East, in Europe and at sea.

Harvey applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq, and reported the following:

A Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: The Saudi Struggle for Iraq explores the Saudi leadership’s response to the political ascendance of the Iraqi Shi’a following the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Page 99 of the book looks at Arab reactions to the results of Iraq’s first free elections in January 2005. In the 20th century, a narrative had become predominant among Sunni Arabs – both inside and outside Iraq – that Iraqi Sunnis constituted a majority of the Iraqi people. Thus, when Iraqi Shi’a took a majority of parliamentary seats in the January 2005 elections, many Sunnis (including, for instance, elites in Saudi Arabia and Jordan) claimed that the elections had been fraudulent – they refused to believe that the Shi’a constituted Iraq’s true majority. From there, page 99 concludes by highlighting the stark change that occurred in Iraq’s political order at this time. From 2005 on, the Iraqi Shi’a consolidated a position of power in the new Iraq. But “[f]or many Arabs, both inside and outside the country, this new Iraq appeared alien, and despite the fact that the Iraqi Shi’a are mostly Arab, it seemed less Arab – even anti-Arab.”

Page 99 gives readers a pretty good idea of what the book is about. The 2005 elections constituted a huge shock to many Sunnis in the Arab world. Sunnis had been in charge of Iraq throughout the 20th century, and many were astonished when the Shi’a “won” the January 2005 elections. Many could only explain the election result by claiming fraud had taken place. (The Iraqi Shi’a constitute roughly 60 percent of the Iraqi population.) It seems that the Saudi leadership, adhering to a view that Sunnis should be in power in the Arab world, believed the fraud narrative. The book as a whole is about how the Saudi leadership, and the late King Abdullah in particular, struggled to come to terms with the new Shi’a-led Iraq that emerged after the invasion, and this page provides a window onto their confusion in the aftermath of Iraq’s first free elections.

Page 99 actually contains one of my favorite paragraphs of the book! It’s hard to overstate the momentousness of the shift Iraq experienced with the rise of the Iraqi Shi’a from 2003 on, and the second paragraph on this page captures that huge shift, as well as the bewilderment of many Sunni Arabs witnessing and experiencing it. For many Arabs, including Saudi leaders, the new Iraq really did seem “alien.” The Saudis, for their part, chose to isolate the new Iraq as a result, but in doing so I argue that they paradoxically pushed Iraq into the arms of their regional rival, Iran. That is the self-fulfilling prophecy alluded to in the title!

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--Marshal Zeringue