The Great War for Civilisation

by Robert Fisk

  The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by The Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab River and the Turkish-held town of Qurnah, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by “local [Arab] notables” that “we should be received in Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition.” But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at The Independent, Patrick Cockburn, found “tombstones . . . still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed . . . a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.” In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.

  Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets

  gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed . . . In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves . . . There was no longer any life in the town . . .

  The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a “new” Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America’s own pipedreams of 2003. “There is no doubt,” The Sphere told its readers in 1915, “that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia . . . and under British rule everything may be hoped.”

  The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army, but who “always entertained friendly ideas towards the English,” found that in prison in India they were “insulted and humiliated in every way.” These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand over Iraq to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz—to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of “independence” for the Arab world if it fought alongside the Allies against the Turks—on the grounds that “some of the Holy Moslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia.”

  British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia—the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that—and that “clearly it is our right and duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end”—which was not how General Maude expressed Britain’s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917. Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that “taking Mesopotamia . . . means spending millions in irrigation and development . . .” Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governed and reconstructed by a “Council,” formed partly of British advisers “and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants.” Later, they thought they would like “a cabinet half of natives and half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives.”

  The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became “oriental secretary” to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion. “. . . The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased . . . they can’t conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it.” Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude’s proclamation eleven months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told—which, of course, they were not— that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name and which was in fact written by Sir Mark Sykes, the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with François Georges Picot for French and British control over much of the postwar Middle East.

  By September of 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain’s plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. “I imagine,” the Times correspondent wrote on 23 September, “that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination . . . from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.”

  Within six months, Britain was fighting an insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. “Is it not for the benefit of the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?” Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to “anarchy and confusion.” By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on “local political agitation, originated outside Iraq,” suggesting that Syria might be involved. For Syria 1920, read America’s claim that Syria was supporting the insurrection in 2004. Arnold Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq, took a predictable line. “We cannot maintain our position . . . by a policy of conciliation of extremists,” he wrote. “Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money . . . We must be prepared . . . to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions.”

  There was fighting in the Shiite town of Kufa and a British siege of Najaf after a British official was murdered. The authorities demanded “the unconditional surrender of the murderers and others concerned in the plot” and the leading Shiite divine, Sayed Khadum Yazdi, abstained from supporting the rebellion and shut himself up in his house. Eleven of the insurgents were executed. A local sheikh, Badr al-Rumaydh, became a British target. “Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out,” a political officer wrote. The British now realised that they had made one major political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq: the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. Wilson put it all down not to nationalism but “anarchy plus fanaticism.” All the precedents were there. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi in 1920, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in 2004. For Badr in 1920, read Muqtada al-Sadr in 2004. For “anarchy and fanaticism” in 1920, read “Saddam remnants” and al-Qaeda in 2004.

  Another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed an officer, Colonel Gerald Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted “heavy punishment” on the tribe. The location of this battle
is today known as Khan Dhari; in 2003 it would be the scene of the first killing of an American occupation soldier by a roadside bomb. In desperation, the British needed “to complete the façade of the Arab government.” And so, with Churchill’s enthusiastic support, the British were to give the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Feisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, a consolation prize for the man whom the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. “How much longer,” The Times asked on 7 August 1920, “are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?”

  The British suffered 450 dead in the Iraqi insurgency and more than 1,500 wounded. In that same summer of 1920, T. E. Lawrence—Lawrence of Arabia— estimated that the British had killed “about ten thousand Arabs in this rising. We cannot hope to maintain such an average . . .”37 Henceforth, the British government—deprived of reconstruction funds by an international recession and confronted by an increasingly unwilling soldiery, which had fought during the 1914–18 war and was waiting for demobilisation—would rely on air power to impose its wishes.

  The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill’s support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen. So urgent was the government’s need for modern bombers in the Middle East that, rather than freighting aircraft to the region by sea, it set up a ramshackle and highly dangerous transit system in which RAF crews flew their often un-airworthy bombers from Europe; at least eight pilots lost their lives in crashes and 30 per cent of the bombers were lost en route. In Iraq, Churchill urged the use of mustard gas, which had already been employed against Shia rebels in 1920. He wrote to Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff, that “you should certainly proceed with the experimental work on gas bombs, especially mustard gas, which would inflict punishment upon recalcitrant natives without inflicting grave injury upon them.”

  Squadron Leader Arthur Harris, later Marshal of the Royal Air Force and the man who perfected the firestorm destruction of Hamburg, Dresden and other great German cities in the Second World War, was employed to refine the bombing of Iraqi insurgents. The RAF found, he wrote much later, “that by burning down their reed-hutted villages, after we’d warned them to get out, we put them to the maximum amount of inconvenience, without physical hurt, and they soon stopped their raiding and looting . . .” This was what, in its emasculation of the English language, the Pentagon would now call “war lite.” But the bombing was not as surgical as Harris’s official biographer would suggest. In 1924, he had admitted that “they [the Arabs and Kurds] now know what real bombing means, in casualties and damage; they know that within forty-five minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”

  Lawrence remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that “these risings take a regular course. There is a preliminary Arab success, then British reinforcements go out as a punitive force. They fight their way (our losses are slight, the Arab losses heavy) to their objective, which is meanwhile bombarded by artillery, aeroplanes, or gunboats.” This same description entirely fits American military operations in Iraq in 2004, once the occupying powers and their puppet government lost control of most of Iraq. But Lawrence had, as a prominent member of the T. E. Lawrence Society put it, a maddening habit of being sardonic or even humorous about serious matters which was one of his less attractive traits. “It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions,” he wrote in the same letter. “Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children, and our infantry always incur losses in shooting down the Arab men. By gas attacks the whole population of offending districts could be wiped out neatly . . .”

  In a less unpleasant mood, however, Lawrence spoke with remarkable common sense about the Iraqi occupation. “The Arabs rebelled against the Turks during the war not because the Turk Government was notably bad,” he wrote in a letter to The Times the same year, “but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects . . . but to win a show of their own. Whether they are fit for independence or not remains to be tried. Merit is no qualification for freedom.”

  Far more prescient was an article Lawrence published in the Sunday Times in August 1920 in words that might have been directed to British prime minister Tony Blair eighty-four years later:

  The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . . We are today not far from a disaster.

  Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers in Iraq that he resigned his post as Senior Air Staff Officer Iraq because he could no longer “maintain the policy of intimidation by bomb.” He had visited an Iraqi hospital to find it full of wounded tribesmen, and after the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Suleimaniya, Charlton “knew the crowded life of these settlements and pictured with horror the arrival of a bomb, without warning, in the midst of a market gathering or in the bazaar quarter. Men, women and children would suffer equally.” It was to be a policy followed with enthusiasm by the United States generations later.

  The same false promises of a welcoming populace were made to the British and Americans, the same grand rhetoric about a new and democratic Iraq, the same explosive rebellion among Iraqis—in the very same towns and cities—the identical “Council of Ministers” and the very same collapse of the occupation power, all followed historical precedent. Unable to crush the insurgency, the Americans turned to the use of promiscuous air assault, just as the British did before them: the destruction of homes in “dissident” villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons were allegedly concealed, the slaughter by air strike of “terrorists” near the Syrian border—who turned out to be members of a wedding party. Much the same policy of air bombing was adopted in the already abandoned democracy of post-2001 Afghanistan.

  As for the British soldiers of the 1920s, we couldn’t ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East eighty years ago. So we buried them in the North Gate Cemetery in Baghdad where they still lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties, opposite the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy. Among them is the mausoleum of General Maude, who died in Baghdad within eight months of his victory because he chose to drink unboiled milk: a stone sarcophagus with the one word “MAUDE” carved on its lid. When I visited the cemetery to inspect it in the summer of 2004, the Iraqi guarding the graves warned me to spend no more than five minutes at the tomb lest I be kidnapped.

  Feisal, third son of the Sherif Hussein of Mecca, was proclaimed constitutional monarch by a “Council of Ministers” in Baghdad on 11 July 1922 and a referendum gave him a laughably impossible 96 per cent of the vote, a statistic that would become wearingly familiar in the Arab world over the next eighty years. As a Sunni Muslim and a monarch from a Gulf tribe, he was neither an Iraqi nor a member of Iraq’s Shia Muslim majority. It was our first betrayal of the Shias of Iraq. There would be two more within the next hundred years. Henceforth, Mesopotamia would be known as Iraq, but its creation brought neither peace nor happiness to its people. An Anglo-Iraqi treaty guaranteeing the special interests of Britain was signed in the face of nationalist opposition; in 1930, a second agreement provided for a twenty-five-year Anglo-Iraqi alliance with RAF bases at Shuaiba and Habbaniya. Iraqi nationalist anger was particularly stirred by Britain’s continued support for a Jewish state in its other mandate of Palestine. Tribal revolts and a 1936 coup d’état created further instability and—after a further coup in 1941 brought the pro-German government of Rashid Ali al-Gaylani to power—Britain reinvaded Iraq all ov
er again, fighting off Luftwaffe attacks launched from Vichy Syria and Lebanon—and occupying Basra and Baghdad.38 British forces paused outside the capital to allow the regent, the Emir Abdullah, to be first to enter Baghdad, a delay that allowed partisans of Rashid Ali to murder at least 150 of the city’s substantial Jewish community and burn and loot thousands of properties. Five of the coup leaders were hanged and many others imprisoned; one of the latter was Khairallah Tulfah, whose four-year-old nephew, Saddam Hussein, would always remember the anti-British nationalism of his uncle. The German plan for a second Arab revolt, this time pro-Axis and supported by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini—whose journey to Berlin will be told later in our story—came to nothing.

  But Iraq remained an inherently weak state, young King Feisal the Second having no nationalist credentials—since he was anyway not an Iraqi—and since the government was still led by a group of former Arab Ottoman officials like Nuri es-Said, who contrived to be prime minister fourteen times before his most bloody demise. On 14 July 1958, Iraqi forces under Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qassim stormed the royal palace. Es-Said was shot down after trying to escape Baghdad dressed as a woman. Feisal, the regent and the rest of the royal family were surrounded by soldiers and machine-gunned to death after trying to flee the burning palace. Qassim’s new military regime enraged the United States. Not only did Qassim take Iraq out of the anti-Soviet Baghdad pact but he threatened to invade Kuwait. He also failed to quell a mass Kurdish uprising in northern Iraq and was eventually brought down by another coup in February 1963, this one largely organised by the Baath party—but with the active assistance of the CIA. Qassim was taken to the radio station in Baghdad and murdered. His bullet-riddled body was then shown on television, propped up on a chair as a soldier laughingly kicked its legs.