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US repeating Britain's 1920 mistakes in Iraq |
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by William Choong
(No verified email address) |
16 Apr 2004
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'What happened in Iraq in 1920 so closely resembles the events now that only a historical ignoramus can be surprised' |
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April 17, 2004
A HEAVILY armed military force from a Western country takes down a Middle Eastern regime which threatens Western interests in the region. A widespread revolt breaks out. This forces the invader to hand back power to elements of the former regime.
Iraq? Obviously. But in describing the latest case of insurrection in the country, one could just as well be talking about Britain's Iraqi experience in the 1920s.
'What happened in Iraq in 1920 so closely resembles the events now that only a historical ignoramus can be surprised,' writes Mr Niall Ferguson, the author of Empire: The Rise And Demise Of The British World Order And The Lessons For Global Power. The parallels are chilling.
During World War I, between 1914 and 1918, Britain overthrew an authoritarian regime in Baghdad. It then installed a political order that was respectful of British interests in the Persian Gulf. In 1920, a widespread revolt ensued, comprising the country's three main ethic groups - Shi'ites, Sunni and even the Kurds. It led to thousands of British casualties. By August that year, the desperate British commander even appealed to London for poison-gas shells - an option that Winston Churchill, then a secretary of state in the War Office, had also called for.
In the following years, Britain ceded control of the country to elites from the former regime - made up mostly of Sunnis and politicians not representative of the population. This scenario led to the emergence of Saddam Hussein, a Sunni, in the 1970s. There is no reason - as yet - to believe that Washington's experience in Iraq could see the United States venturing down the British road.
The latest insurgency led by radical Shi'ite cleric Moqtada Al-Sadr is estimated to command support from less than a tenth of Iraq's 25 million people. But the intensification of the current insurrection suggests that the US is slowly being pushed the way of Britain in the 1920s.
'A light military force whose occupation of Iraq was becoming unpopular allowed armed groups to fight with great effectiveness,' said Iraq expert Toby Dodge of Britain's Warwick University. 'That caused Britain to leave before completing the job of state-building. It looks like this might happen to the US as well,' he told The Straits Times.
If the US does leave before it builds a broad-based government, the Iraq of today could indeed go the way of the Iraq of the 1920s. Ironically, the unpopular 25-member Iraqi Governing Council - whose members are considered by many Iraqis to be US puppets - looks very much like Britain's unrepresentative regime of the 1920s.
'The British were forced to give up on building a solid state with popular support. They gave power to a clique of politicians who were totally unrepresentative of the population,' said Dr Dodge. 'This is what the Americans are doing today.'
To be fair, Washington has agreed to United Nations' recommendations that the council be scrapped in place of a more broad-based interim government before power is returned to Iraqis on June 30. But with the rise of the insurgency and an American public that is cooling towards Iraq, a British-style disengagement is possible.
Writing three months before the US invasion of Iraq in March last year, British historian Charles Tripp warned of such an outcome.
A US disengagement would 'certainly cause despair among those Iraqis who have seen the US as their main hope of radical political change,' he wrote. 'But for the US, as for the British 80 years ago, the lower risk, the lesser cost and the short-term advantages may outweigh the possible future benefits of fundamental social transformation in Iraq.' |
See also:
http://straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,246208,00.html
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Re: US repeating Britain's 1920 mistakes in Iraq |
by Ed
frozenthought (nospam) hotmail.com (unverified) |
Current rating: 0
18 Apr 2004
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'Lawrence of Arabia' Redux
Published: April 18, 2004
S the Iraq war enters its second year, it has already barreled through at least four movie plots. What began as a "High Noon" showdown with Saddam Hussein soon gave way to George W. Bush's "Top Gun" victory jig. Next was the unexpected synergy with "The Fog of War," Errol Morris's Oscar-winning documentary underlining how the Johnson administration's manipulation of the Gulf of Tonkin incident was the ur-text for the current administration's hyping of Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. And then Fallujah: "Black Hawk Down."
If the news from the war were better, there might be an audience now for Disney's new version of "The Alamo," with which Michael Eisner had once hoped to "capture the post-Sept. 11 surge in patriotism." But its opening weekend may have drawn fewer moviegoers in total than there were Jews at "The Passion of the Christ." Triumphalism is out. If we are to believe most commentators, the next title on our wartime bill will instead be "Apocalypse Now" (if we stay and sink into the quagmire) or "Three Kings" (if we cut and run). Though perhaps not quite yet. The most apt movie for this moment just may be David Lean's "Lawrence of Arabia." Richard Holbrooke, the Clinton ambassador to the United Nations whose foreign service career began in Vietnam, said to me last week, "That's the image everyone I've talked to who saw the movie has in his head right now."
What Mr. Holbrooke is referring to is the story's mordant conclusion. The Arab revolt against the Ottoman empire, abetted by the heroic British liaison officer T. E. Lawrence and guerrilla tactics, has succeeded. The shotgun mandating of the modern state of Iraq, by the League of Nations in 1920, is just a few years away. But as the local leaders gather in an Arab council, a tentative exercise in self-government, there is nothing but squabbling, even as power outages and public-health outrages roil the populace. "I didn't come here to watch a tribal bloodbath," says Peter O'Toole, as Lawrence, earlier in the movie when first encountering the internecine warfare of the Arab leaders he admired. But the bloodbath continued — and now that we've ended Saddam's savage grip on Iraq, it has predictably picked up where it left off. Only Americans have usurped the British as the primary targets in the crossfire of an undying civil war.
It was last weekend, after I watched "Lawrence" again for the first time in years, that L. Paul Bremer was asked by Tim Russert to whom we would turn over the keys in Iraq on June 30, and gave his now immortal answer: "Well, that's a good question." We don't have a clue, and in part that's because we have no memory.
As the historian Niall Ferguson points out in his new book, "Colossus: The Price of America's Empire," President Bush's promise to Iraqis of "a peaceful and representative government" in place of Saddam's brutal regime was an uncanny, if unconscious, replay of what the British commander who occupied Baghdad in 1917 told the people of what was then still Mesopotamia. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," Gen. F. S. Maude said back then, expressing the desire that his forces would help the populace build their own governmental institutions.
Iraq did not, however, give birth to an indigenous form of self-government. The country was run instead by a Bremer-like civil commissioner, Sir Arnold Wilson, for three often violent years. He and his deputy, Mr. Ferguson writes, "drew up a scheme for a unitary Iraqi state with almost no local consultation, simply ignoring those who advised against yoking together Assyria and Babylonia, Sunni and Shia." Eventually a British-style constitutional monarchy was installed, leading to decades of tumult and coups. By the time the revolution of 1958 overthrew the monarchy, the Baath party and Saddam were lurking in the wings.
To revisit "Lawrence" and the history it dramatizes in embryo is to feel not only déjà vu but also a roaring anger at the American arrogance and ignorance that has led to the current nightmare. Condoleezza Rice's use of the word "historical" to describe the Aug. 6, 2001, presidential briefing on Osama bin Laden was not the only tipoff to her limited understanding of history. In the opening filibuster of her testimony, she invoked the Lusitania, Hitler's rise and Pearl Harbor as analogues of 9/11 — an asymmetrical comparison that blurs the distinctions between nations' acts of war and the stateless conspiracies of modern terrorists. Apparently the administration's understanding of British colonial history in the Middle East is no sharper. Though it might have been impossible to prevent the 9/11 attacks, it would have been possible to avoid what's happening in Iraq now had anyone heeded the past. However much the current crisis may be a function of a military bungle like Donald Rumsfeld's inadequate deployment of troops or the diplomatic failure to attract a proper coalition, it is above all else the product of cultural hubris. |
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