Neo-Conned! Again

by D Liam O'Huallachain

  In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign. The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than 80 years later, Shameem Bhatia, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan, would send me an amused letter, along with a series of 12 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 Kurna, one of its buildings shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. The ruins then looked, of course, identical to the Iraqi ruins of today. There are only so many ways in which a shell can smash through a home.

  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, ending 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 United Nations sanctions that followed Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait, when spare parts for the pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague 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.”

  Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived in 1917. 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 occupation was dark with historical precedent. There was, of course, no “cordial” reception of British troops in Baghdad. Indeed, Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army but who “always entertained friendly ideas towards the English” were jailed – not in Abu Ghraib, but in India – and found that while in prison there they were “insulted and humiliated in every way.” These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand Iraq over to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz – to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of “independence” for the Arab world if he 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 Lt-Gen 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.” Which is precisely what President George Bush was forced to do only months after his illegal invasion in 2003.

  Those who want to wallow in even more ghastly historical parallels should turn to the magnificent research of the Iraqi scholar Ghassan Attiyah, whose volume on the British occupation was published in Beirut long before Saddam's regime took over Iraq, at a time when Iraqi as well as British archives of the period were still available. Attiyah's Iraq, 1902–1921: A Socio-Political Study, written 30 years before the Anglo-American invasion, should be read by all Western “statesmen” planning to occupy Arab countries.

  As Attiyah discovered, the British, once they were installed in Baghdad, decided in the winter of 1917 that Iraq would have to be governed and reconstructed by a “council” formed partly of British advisers “and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants.” The copycat 2003 version of this “council” was, of course, the Interim Governing Council, supposedly the brainchild of Maude's American successor, Paul Bremer.

  Later, the British 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 issued 11 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 in fact had been written by Sir Mark Sykes – the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with F. Georges-Picot for French and British control over much of the post-war Middle East.

  But, by September 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain's plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. “I imagine,” the correspondent for The Times 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 a military 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.

  Come again? Could history repeat itself so perfectly? For Lloyd George's “anarchy,” read any statement from the American occupation power warning of “civil war” in the event of a Western withdrawal. For Syria – well, read Syria.

  A.T. Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq in 1920, took a predictable line. “We cannot maintain our position … by a policy of conciliation of extremists. 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 British 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
target. “Badr must be killed or captured, and a relentless pursuit of the man till this object is obtained should be carried out,” a British political officer wrote.

  The British now realised that they had made one big political mistake. They had alienated a major political group in Iraq – the ex-Turkish Iraqi officials and officers. The ranks of the disaffected swelled. For Kufa 1920, read Kufa 2004. For Najaf 1920, read Najaf 2004. For Yazdi, read Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani. For Badr, read Muqtada al-Sadr.

  In 1920, another insurgency broke out in the area of Fallujah, where Sheikh Dhari killed a British officer, Col. Leachman, and cut rail traffic between Fallujah and Baghdad. The British advanced towards Fallujah and inflicted “heavy punishment” on the tribe. For Fallujah, of course, read Fallujah. And the location of the heavy punishment? Today it is known as Khan Dari – and it was the scene of the first killing of a U.S. soldier by a roadside bomb in 2003.

  In desperation, the British needed “to complete the façade of the Arab government.” And so, with Winston Churchill's enthusiastic support, the British gave the throne of Iraq to the Hashemite King Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein, a consolation prize for the man the French had just thrown out of Damascus. Paris was having no kings in its own mandated territory of Syria. 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.

  There are no kings to impose on Iraq today (the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan pulled his hat out of the ring just before the invasion), so we have installed Iyad Allawi, the former CIA “asset,” as Prime Minister in the hope that he can provide the same sovereign wallpaper as Faisal once did. Our soldiers can hide out in the desert, hopefully unattacked, unless they are needed to shore up the tottering power of our present-day “Faisal.”

  And so we come to the immediate future of Iraq. How are we to “control” Iraq while claiming that we have handed over “full sovereignty”? Again, the archives come to our rescue. The Royal Air Force, again with Churchill's support, bombed rebellious villages and dissident tribesmen in Iraq. Churchill urged the employment of mustard gas, which had been used against Shiite rebels in 1920.

  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 [sic], 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 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”

  T. E. Lawrence – Lawrence of Arabia – remarked in a 1920 letter to The Observer that “it is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions.” Air Commodore Lionel Charlton was so appalled at the casualties inflicted on innocent villagers 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. After the RAF had bombed the Kurdish rebel city of Sulaymaniyah, 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.”

  Already, we have seen the use of almost indiscriminate air power by the American forces in Iraq: the destruction of homes in “dissident” villages, the bombing of mosques where weapons are allegedly concealed, the slaughter-by-air-strike of “terrorists” near the Syrian border, who turned out to be a wedding party. Much the same policy has been adopted in the already abandoned “democracy” of Afghanistan.

  As for the soldiers, we couldn't ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East 80 years ago, so we buried them in the great North Wall Cemetery in Baghdad, where they lie to this day, most of them in their late teens and twenties. We didn't hide their coffins. Their last resting place is still there for all to see today, opposite the ruins of the suicide-bombed Turkish embassy.

  As for the gravestone of Samuel Martin, it stood for years in the British war cemetery in Basra with the following inscription: “In Memory of Private Samuel Martin 24384, 8th Bn, Cheshire Regiment who died on Sunday 9 April 1916. Private Martin, son of George and Sarah Martin, of the Beech Tree Inn, Barnton, Northwich, Cheshire.”

  In the gales of shellfire that swept Basra during the 1980–88 war with Iran, the cemetery was destroyed and looted and many gravestones shattered beyond repair. When I visited the cemetery in the chaotic months after the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, I found wild dogs roaming between the broken headstones. Even the brass fittings of the central memorial had been stolen. Sic transit gloria.

  THE EDITORS' GLOSS: The “West” has given much of immense value to the world. Traditions of achievement in law, government, science, the arts, craftsmanship and religion are just a few examples. Yet that very history acts as a severe temptation to pride and self-satisfaction for modern politicians, like George Bush and Tony Blair, who see themselves as heirs to those traditions, although grasping nothing of their spirit. Such traditions provide them with the opportunity to pose as the defenders of “civilization” from “its enemies” – those who “hate freedom” – even while employing methods of war and “diplomacy” that contradict everything those traditions stand for. When the “West” that Bush and Blair claim to represent betrays its own origins, when it replaces loyalty to religious and moral ideals with a fanatical attachment to an ideology of “freedom” and obsession with the external machinery of plutocratic “democracy,” it appears rightly to many people – not merely Muslims – as the “Great Satan.”

  The shift in the orientation of the “West” has its roots in a number of different but converging forces, all of which are evident in the contemporary treatment of Iraq. This is what makes the case of Iraq so tragically interesting and illustrative, and Blondet's piece so compelling.

  Blondet quotes the neoconservative Edward Luttwak, who pushed for war with Iraq in 1990 and was quite candid about why. He was no less honest in 2003, even admitting that the focus on al-Qaeda and WMD stemmed not from the facts themselves, but from the fact that the Bush administration could not admit openly that its real desire was to dispose of Saddam Hussein. “Cheney was forced into this fake posture of worrying about weapons of mass destruction,” Luttwak told Mother Jones reporters Vest and Dreyfuss. “The ties to Al Qaeda? That's complete nonsense.”

  Given the change in American foreign policy evident in the post-9/11 era, we thought that readers would appreciate a postscript excerpt from Blondet's book, Who Really Governs America?, dealing with Dr. Luttwak's best-selling Coup d'État. In view of the widespread suspicion that the Bush administration, or parts of it, has “hijacked” the Pentagon and much of the American political structure, the excerpt will provide food for thought for those who want to think for themselves in these dangerously unstable times.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Global Democracy …

  Through Superior Firepower

  ………

  Maurizio Blondet

  IT WAS 1991. President George H. W. Bush had opened a war of words with President Saddam Hussein of Iraq, a war that was becoming more likely by the hour to become a war of death and destruction. The situation throughout the world was tense, with television stations, newspapers and magazin
es presenting the arguments of pundits, analysts and “experts” of every conceivable kind around the clock. The sun never set on the propaganda barrage that sought to convince world public opinion that an international coalition was necessary to evict the Iraqi Armed Forces from the tiny Gulf State of Kuwait.

  At the same time there was a steady buildup of American and “coalition” troops in the Gulf, accompanied by colossal volumes of arms and ammunition. Within a few months, nearly half a million men stood poised to confront Iraq.

  Yet, strange as it may seem in retrospect, there were people in Europe who were not wholly convinced that Bush was serious about launching a war in an area of the world that is volatile, one might even say predisposed towards instability because of historical, political and economic circumstances. Was this another, though much more elaborate, case of saber-rattling designed to get Saddam to back down, leave Kuwait with his tail between his legs, and bring crushing humiliation upon him in the eyes of the Arab world? Who could I ask for an informed view on this question?

  I put through a call to Dr. Edward Luttwak, the internationally renowned author, lecturer, historian, military strategist and Pentagon consultant. Well-known in political circles in Italy, he had studied the military power of the Roman Empire here and was thus well able to express himself in Italian. I asked him whether the White House really was prepared to invade Iraq with all its attendant risks? “We are very serious,” he answered. He continued: “We are going to bomb Iraq back into the Stone Age!” But why is this necessary, I answered, finding Luttwak's bluntness somewhat at variance with his reputation for subtle thinking and expression. Almost warming to the subject, he continued: