Good article by Robert Fisk. The REAL WAR likely to begin AFTER US defeats Saddam. Anybody remember the 240 marines killed in a 1983 suicide bombing in Beirut. I expect we will see many such incidents if US tries to occupy Iraq.
FOR CENTURIES, WE'VE BEEN 'LIBERATING' THE MIDDLE EAST
Why do we never learn?
By Robert Fisk*
[The Independent - 6 March 2003]:
ON 8 MARCH 1917, Lieutenant- general Stanley Maude issued a
"Proclamation to the People of the Wilayat of Baghdad". Maude's
Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigres had just invaded and occupied Iraq -
after storming up the country from Basra - to "free" its people from
their dictators. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands
as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," the British announced.
"People of Baghdad, remember for 26 generations you have suffered
under strange tyrants who have ever endeavoured to set one Arab
house against another in order that they might profit by your
dissensions. This policy is abhorrent to Great Britain and her
Allies for there can be neither peace nor prosperity where there is
enmity or misgovernment."
General Maude, of course, was the General Tommy Franks of his day,
and his proclamation - so rich in irony now that President George
Bush is uttering equally mendacious sentiments - was intended to
persuade Iraqis that they should accept foreign occupation while
Britain secured the country's oil. General Maude's chief political
officer, Sir Percy Cox, called on Iraq's Arab leaders, who were not
identified, to participate in the government in collaboration with
the British authorities and spoke of liberation, freedom, past
glories, future greatness and - here the ironies come in spades - it
expressed the hope that the people of Iraq would find unity.
The British commander cabled to London that "local conditions do not
permit of employing in responsible positions any but British
officers competent... to deal with people of the country. Before any
truly Arab facade sic can be applied to edifice, it seems essential
that foundation of law and order should be well and truly laid."
As David Fromkin noted in his magisterial A Peace to End all Peace -
essential reading for America's future army of occupation - the
antipathy of the Sunni minority and the Shia majority of Iraq, the
rivalries of tribes and clans "made it difficult to achieve a single
unified government that was at the same time representative,
effective and widely supported". Whitehall failed, as Fromkin
caustically notes, "to think through in practical detail how to
fulfil the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local
inhabitants". There was even a problem with the Kurds, since the
British could not make up their mind as to whether they should be
absorbed into the new state of Iraq or allowed to form an
independent Kurdistan. The French were originally to have been
awarded Mosul in northern Iraq but gave up their claim in return for
- again, wait for the ironies - a major share in the new Turkish
Petroleum Company, newly confiscated by the British and recreated as
the Iraq Petroleum Company.
How many times has the West marched into the Middle East in so
brazen a fashion? General Sir Edward Allenby "liberated" Palestine
only a few months after General Maude "liberated" Iraq. The French
turned up to "liberate" Lebanon and Syria a couple of years later,
slaughtering the Syrian forces loyal to King Feisel who dared to
suggest that French occupation was not the kind of future they
wanted.
What is it, I sometimes wonder, about our constant failure to learn
the lessons of history, to repeat - almost word for word in the case
of General Maude's proclamation - the same gratuitous promises and
lies? A copy of General Maude's original proclamation goes under the
hammer at a British auction at Swindon this week but I'll wager more
than the pounds 100 it is expected to make that America's
forthcoming proclamation to the "liberated" people of Iraq reads
almost exactly the same.
Take a look at Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations -
on which Mr Bush claims to be such an expert - that allowed the
British and French to divide those territories they had just
"liberated" from Ottoman dictators. "To those colonies and
territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be
under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them,
and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by
themselves... there should be applied the principle that the
well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of
civilisation... the best method is that the tutelage of such peoples
should be entrusted to advanced nations who, by reason of their
resources, their experience or their geographical position, can best
undertake this responsibility..."
What is it about "liberation" in the Middle East? What is this
sacred trust - a ghost of the same "trusteeship" the US Secretary of
State, Colin Powell, now promotes for Iraq's oil - that the West
constantly wishes to visit upon the Middle East? Why do we so
frequently want to govern these peoples, these "tribes with flags"
as Sir Steven Runciman, that great historian of the 11th- and
12th-century Crusades, once called them? Indeed, Pope Urban's call
for the first Crusade in 1095, reported at the time by at least
three chroniclers, would find a resonance even among the Christian
fundamentalists who, along with Israel's supporters, are now so keen
for the United States to invade Iraq.
Urban told his listeners the Turks were maltreating the inhabitants
of Christian lands - an echo here of the human rights abuses which
supposedly upset Mr Bush - and described the suffering of pilgrims,
urging the Christian West's formerly fratricidal antagonists to
fight a "righteous" war. His conflict, of course, was intended to
"liberate" Christians rather than Muslims who, along with the Jews,
the Crusaders contentedly slaughtered as soon as they arrived in the
Middle East.
This notion of "liberation" in the Middle East has almost always
been accompanied by another theme: the necessity of overthrowing
tyrants.
The Crusaders were as meticulous about their Middle East invasions
as the US Central Command at Tampa, Florida, is today. Marino
Sanudo, born in Venice around 1260, describes how the Western armies
chose to put their forces ashore in Egypt with a first
disembarkation of 15,000 infantrymen along with 300 cavalry (the
latter being the Crusader version of an armoured unit). In Beirut, I
even have copies of the West's 13th-century invasion maps. Napoleon
produced a few of his own in 1798 when he invaded Egypt after 20
years of allegedly irresponsible and tyrannical rule by Murad Bey
and Ibrahim Bey. Claude Etienne Savary, the French equivalent of all
those Washington pundits who groan today over the suffering of the
Iraqi people under President Saddam, - wrote in 1775 that in Cairo
under Murad Bey "death may prove the consequence of the slightest
indiscretion". Under the Beys, the city "groans under their yoke".
Which is pretty much how we now picture Baghdad and Basra under
President Saddam.
In fact, President Saddam's promises to destroy America's invasion
force have a remarkable echo in the exclamation of one of the
18th-century Mameluke princes in Egypt, who, told of an eminent
French invasion, responded with eerily familiar words: "Let the
Franks come. We shall crush them beneath our horses' hooves."
Napoleon, of course, did all the crushing, and his first
proclamation (he, too, was coming to "liberate" the people of Egypt
from their oppressors) included an appeal to Egyptian notables to
help him run the government. "O shayks, 'qadis', imams, and officers
of the town, tell your nation that the French are friends of true
Muslims... Blessed are those Egyptians who agree with us." Napoleon
went on to set up an "administrative council" in Egypt, very like
the one which the Bush Administration says it intends to operate
under US occupation. And in due course the "shayks" and "qadis" and
imams rose up against French occupation in Cairo in 1798.
If Napoleon entered upon his rule in Egypt as a French
revolutionary, General Allenby, when he entered Jerusalem in
December, 1917, had provided David Lloyd George with the city he
wanted as a Christmas present. Its liberation, the British Prime
Minister later noted with almost Crusader zeal, meant that
Christendom had been able "to regain possession of its sacred
shrines". He talked about "the calling of the Turkish bluff" as "the
beginning of the crack-up of that military impostorship which the
incompetence of our war direction had permitted to intimidate us for
years", shades, here, of the American regret that it never took the
1991 Gulf War to Baghdad; Lloyd George was "finishing the job" of
overcoming Ottoman power just as George Bush Junior now intends to
"finish the job" started by his father in 1991.
And always, without exception, there were those tyrants and
dictators to overthrow in the Middle East. In the Second World War,
we "liberated" Iraq a second time from its pro-Nazi administration.
The British "liberated" Lebanon from Vichy rule with a promise of
independence from France, a promise which Charles de Gaulle tried to
renege on until the British almost went to war with the Free French
in Syria.
Lebanon has suffered an awful lot of "liberations". The Israelis -
for Arabs, an American, "Western" implantation in the Middle East -
claimed twice to be anxious to "liberate" Lebanon from PLO
"terrorism" by invading in 1978 and 1982, and leaving in humiliation
only two years ago. America's own military intervention in Beirut in
1982 was blown apart by a truck- bomb at the US Marine headquarters
the following year. And what did President Ronald Reagan tell the
world? "Lebanon is central to our credibility on a global scale. We
cannot pick and choose where we will support freedom... If Lebanon
ends up under the tyranny of forces hostile to the West, not only
will our strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean be
threatened, but also the stability of the entire Middle East,
including the vast resources of the Arabian peninsula."
Once more, we, the West, were going to protect the Middle East from
tyranny. Anthony Eden took the same view of Egypt, anxious to topple
the "dictator" Gamal Abdul Nasser, just as Napoleon had been
desperate to rescue the Egyptians from the tyranny of the Beys, just
as General Maude wanted to rescue Iraq from the tyranny of the
Turks, just as George Bush Junior now wants to rescue the Iraqis
from the tyranny of President Saddam.
And always, these Western invasions were accompanied by declarations
that the Americans or the French or just the West in general had
nothing against the Arabs, only against the beast-figure who was
chosen as the target of our military action. "Our quarrel is not
with Egypt, still less with the Arab world," Anthony Eden announced
in August of 1956. "It is with Colonel Nasser."
So what happened to all these fine words? The Crusades were a
catastrophe in the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Napoleon
left Egypt in humiliation. Britain dropped gas on the recalcitrant
Kurds of Iraq before discovering that Iraq was ungovernable. Arabs,
then Jews drove the British army from Palestine and Lloyd George's
beloved Jerusalem. The French fought years of insurrection in Syria.
In Lebanon, the Americans scuttled away in humiliation in 1984,
along with the French.
And in Iraq in the coming months? What will be the price of our
folly this time, of our failure to learn the lessons of history?
Only after the United States has completed its occupation we shall
find out. It is when the Iraqis demand an end to that occupation,
when popular resistance to the American presence by the Shias and
the Kurds and even the Sunnis begins to destroy the military
"success" which President Bush will no doubt proclaim when the first
US troops enter Baghdad. It is then our real "story" as journalists
will begin.
It is then that all the empty words of colonial history, the need to
topple tyrants and dictators, to assuage the suffering of the people
of the Middle East, to claim that we and we only are the best
friends of the Arabs, that we and we only must help them, will
unravel.
Here I will make a guess: that in the months and years that follow
America's invasion of Iraq, the United States, in its arrogant
assumption that it can create "democracy" in the ashes of a Middle
East dictatorship as well as take its oil, will suffer the same as
the British in Palestine. Of this tragedy, Winston Churchill wrote,
and his words are likely to apply to the US in Iraq: "At first, the
steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end
the very stones crumbled under their feet."
* Robert Fisk has been reporting from and about the
Middle East for the past quarter century. An exclusive
multi-part MER interview with Fisk is available in the
MER Video section. |
