For centuries, we've been 'liberating' the Middle East. Why do we never learn?
By Robert Fisk
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
façade [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 £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."
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