This is a good read on some Iraq history>
REWIND TO BRITAIN'S OCCUPATION.
Iraq has been through much of this before.
By Hugh Dellios is Tribune's foreign editor and a former Middle East correspondent
April 8, 2007
The two old books stood out on the shelf at the Mutanabi Street book market in Baghdad -- not for their titles or contents, but for the obvious love and care they received from their previous owner.
Their hard, red covers were delicately wrapped in see-through plastic. Though they were 70 years old when I came across them in 2001, they still had maps neatly folded inside the back cover. The former owner's name, J.A. Bagdadlian, was proudly stamped in blue on the title pages.
Last month, after a suicide bomber blew up the famous market and killed more than 30 Iraqis, I took the books down from my shelf and read them again, this time more closely. What I found was a striking reminder of why it is so important to learn from history.
The two volumes were a detailed, firsthand account of Britain's insurgency-marred occupation of Iraq after World War I. They were written by Sir Arnold Wilson, a military officer who was Britain's acting civil commissioner in the newly created nation after the postwar crumbling of the Ottoman Empire.
In his time, Wilson was the equivalent of Paul Bremer, the American diplomat who headed Iraq's Coalition Provisional Authority after the 2003 invasion. And in language hauntingly similar to the way the Bush administration has portrayed the current conflict, Wilson wrote of the "liberty, justice and prosperity" that the British promised the Iraqis, the bloody revolt that soon broke out, and the constant conflict among Sunnis, Shiites and others.
Helping Iraqis?
"I said in Baghdad in 1920 that I believe that we, and we alone, had it in our power to enable the peoples of the Middle East to attain a civic and cultural unity more beneficial and greater than any reached by the Great Empires of their romantic past," Wilson wrote.
"Since then successive British Governments have by treaty and otherwise voluntarily abandoned the means and destroyed the administrative machinery by which they might have helped the people of Iraq to accomplish such things, yet have done little to assist the various races which constitute the population of Iraq to live in harmony with their neighbors, much less to 'stand alone in the strenuous conditions of the modern world.' The future is thus uncertain, even dark."
Wilson wasn't the most influential British official trying to pacify Iraq at the time. He was in favor of direct British rule, but his vision lost out to the rival ideas of T.E. "Lawrence of Arabia" Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, Wilson's deputy and a famous chronicler of the Middle East. Those two successfully lobbied for installing a British-backed Arab ruler.
Wilson's views and actions at times bordered on the contradictory and repugnant: The colonel later represented the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. and then became a member of the British Parliament, where he was accused of sympathizing with Hitler. Later, he joined the British air force as a gunner and died when his plane was shot down by the Germans in World War II.
Yet Wilson's recollections illustrate with startling clarity how much of the current conflict Iraq has been through before.
Local rule dismissed
"It was beyond consideration, in A.T. Wilson's view, and Gertrude's as well, to turn over control of the country to the local population," historian Janet Wallach wrote in a 1999 biography of Bell. "To give them total power would have been like handing over the reins to a riderless horse."
"The Sunni nationalists wanted an Arab kingdom; the Shiites wanted an Islamic state; the Kurds in the north sought an independent Kurdish entity; the business community that has prospered under the [Ottoman] Sultan wanted a return to the Turks."
Britain was granted a mandate to rule Iraq in 1920 by the newly formed League of Nations. It was the product of secret negotiations in which the British and French conspired to divvy up the Middle East after they defeated the Ottomans, who had aligned with the Germans.
But the region's various peoples had never considered themselves a nation. Britain drew the borders, sided with secular Sunnis and hastily installed a king, Faisal I, who had never been to Iraq. The monarchy ended in turmoil. Faisal's grandson, Faisal II, was overthrown in 1958 in a military coup that ultimately led to the barbarian dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
Back in mid-1920, the months-old Iraq was already in open revolt against the British, stirred by old tribal and religious hatreds and new aspirations to Arab independence. Shiite holy leaders called for jihad from Karbala and Najaf. Local sheiks were threatened with death for cooperating with the occupiers.
The place names are familiar: An ambush at Diwaniyah. The railway line cut at Baqouba. A series of outbreaks between Fallujah and Hit.
Relying on a surge
Wilson, complaining of a lack of forces, put stock in a surge of reinforcements.
"If [British political officers] could hold on, and maintain the facade of civil administration in their respective districts, while the army dealt with the areas in open revolt, there was every reason to believe that we could prevent a general [uprising] until the arrival of reinforcements now on their way from India," Wilson recalled.
"The tribes have been led to believe that it is a holy war. ... The demands of the rebel leaders so far as formulated are the complete expulsion of the British from Mesopotamia and an 'Islamic kingdom,'
" he wrote.
By the end of the year, the British had succeeded in tamping down the insurrection. But not without a high cost: 2,000 British casualties, including 450 dead. An estimated 10,000 Arabs were killed.
Wilson, attributing the revolt to "anarchy plus fanaticism" rather than nationalism, was merciless in his response. One historian says he reacted to a killing of six British soldiers by "machine-gunning" the area and destroying parts of villages.
Back in London, Parliament had begun complaining about the effort's cost, and newspaper editorials were demanding to know how long the conflict would grind on.
"How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?" asked the Times of London in a passage cited by historian David Fromkin.
In his two-volume account, titled "Loyalties: Mesopotamia 1914-1917" and "Mesopotamia: 1917-1920, A Clash of Loyalties," Wilson deals with a range of problems borne of World War I and still tearing at the Middle East today.
Yet, in an irony apparent only through the lens of the last 77 years, Wilson also found reason for optimism. The recent discovery of oil in the Mideast, he wrote, had given the region's leaders a reason to unify, maintain order and prevent any disturbances "which might ham
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Hugh Dellios is the Tribune's foreign editor and a former Middle East correspondent.
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