Editor's Note: Tom Fowdy is a British political and international relations analyst and a graduate of Durham and Oxford universities. He writes on topics pertaining to China, the DPRK, Britain, and the United States. The article reflects the author's opinion and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Over the past few days, severe protests have swept Baghdad, Iraq, with demonstrations being waged against political corruption, unemployment and inadequate social services.

As of October 4, over 65 lives have been lost in the event with police weaponizing live fire on activists, with thousands more injured. The events mark yet another crisis in the Middle Eastern country, which has been repeatedly rocked by cycles of catastrophic instability, conflict and severe turmoil over a near 40-year period.

In the midst of this all, how are to understand Iraq? Why is it this way? This is a country that is known almost exclusively out of infamy amongst Western audiences. Its image is soaked in the legacy of Saddam Hussein, war, insurgency, terrorism and ISIL.

It has become a microcosm and finely weaved conceptualization of everything the Middle East is imaged to be, yet these cliché images offer us neither answers nor solutions to this country's tragic history.

The reality is this: the ever ill-fated political life of Iraq is the product of a never ending series of Western meddling in the Middle East on a timespan dating back to 100 years ago.

From creating the state itself out of artificial boundaries and lumping diametrically opposed groups into a nation they did not ask for, to setting the stage for conflict and later engaging it directly, at every angle of history, Western powers have articulated an inherently unstable and dysfunctional country, of which authorities are incapable of governing in such conditions.

What we know to be "Iraq" entered the world not as an organic nation state, but a legacy of imperialism. At the end of World War I, following the demise of the Ottoman Empire, the British and the French (then the world powers of the time) collaborated together to divide the Turkish-held Arab territories into new spheres of influence, aiming to divide the region and create client regimes subservient to their interests.

In doing so, they initiated the 1917 "Sykes-Pikot" agreement, which divided the territory up into a series of states with artificially imposed boundaries drawn on a map, ignorant of the sectarian and ethnic divisions within them.

The end output of this project was to create a series of inherently unstable regimes which lacked political legitimacy, Iraq being one of them wherein Shi'ia arabs, Sunni arabs and Kurds were lumped together without any consultation.

The inevitable tensions of an artificial multi-ethno religious state accumulated in the rule of brutal Ba'athi Arab nationalism under Saddam Hussein, who sought to unify the political divisions in his country with an appeal to conflict.

Saddam would first invade Iran in 1980, setting off the deadly Iran-Iraq war. Then in 1990, he would invade the oil rich monarchy of Kuwait of which the British had separated from its territory as a protectorate, provoking a Western intervention in the form of the Gulf War.

From this point, Iraq was subject to a total economic embargo which decimated its standard of living, setting the stage for its current economic well-being. Then, following the epoch of the "war on terror"– the United States and United Kingdom invaded the country outright in 2003, toppling Saddam under the false mantra of "weapons of mass destruction."

However, ignorant of the country's ethno-religious fractures, the newly designated Western style democracy to run the country would not be capable of managing tensions.

This, combined with the country's impoverished conditions and the ideological upheaval of war, led to the radicalization of Sunnis under first Al-Qaeda, then secondly ISIL, which sought to wage war against the Shi'ia majority and occupy swaths of the country.

Although ISIL has since been defeated, all is not well in Iraq. The country's political structure remains inadequate, chaotic and incompetent. Despite being an oil rich country, Iraq's economic development has been depleted through decades of unending conflict and extreme instability which has made progress impossible. Few people would be tempted to invest in such circumstances.

Thus it was only inevitable that with a largely young, increasingly deprived population, that all of these fault lines would spill over into yet more destruction and chaos within the country.

Thus as a whole, it is important to understand that Iraq, as how we know and conceive it to be, is the epitome of what has been a century long, failed experiment within the Middle East conceived on the dream of building a Western friendly client state within the oil rich region.

For the people of this country themselves, this has come at the cost of millions of lives. The country is locked in a never ending sporadic cycle of violence, chaos, conflict and upheaval, and it does not appear to be coming to an end anytime soon.

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