This headline could also read "Why Iraq is so Important to the U.S. and Others". or "See How History Repeats Itself".....
I wont go into the total history of Iraq in this missive as one can find that info almost anywhere on the internet.
I will include a link that talks about pretty much everything that has to do with Iraq though via the "Wikepedia entry" below:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iraq
(FAIR USE NOTICE: This page contains some copyrighted material the use of which has not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am distibuting this material without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I believe this constitutes a fair use of any such copyrighted material as provided for in 17 U.S.C ß 107. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of their own that go beyond fair use, they should obtain permission from the copyright owner.)
Chapter One: Iraq the country and their Biggest Natural (and political) recourse-Oil
The Republic of Iraq (Arabic: العراق (help·info); Kurdish: عيَراق) is a Middle Eastern country in southwestern Asia encompassing most of Mesopotamia as well as the northwestern end of the Zagros mountain range and the eastern part of the Syrian Desert. It shares borders with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia to the south, Jordan to the west, Syria to the northwest, Turkey to the north, and Iran to the east. It has a very narrow section of coastline at Umm Qasr on the Persian Gulf.
Iraq has the world’s second largest proven oil reserves. According to oil industry experts, new exploration will probably raise Iraq’s reserves to 200+ billion barrels of high-grade crude, extraordinarily cheap to produce.
The four giant firms located in the US and the UK have been keen to get back into Iraq, from which they were excluded with the nationalization of 1972.
During the final years of the Saddam era, they envied companies from France, Russia, China, and elsewhere, who had obtained major contracts. But UN sanctions (kept in place by the US and the UK) kept those contracts inoperable.
Since the invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003, everything has changed. In the new setting, with Washington running the show, "friendly" companies expect to gain most of the lucrative oil deals that will be worth hundreds of billions of dollars in profits in the coming decades.
The new Iraqi constitution of 2005, greatly influenced by US advisors, contains language that guarantees a major role for foreign companies. Negotiators hope soon to complete deals on Production Sharing Agreements that will give the companies control over dozens of fields, including the fabled super-giant Majnoon, but no contracts can be signed until after elections, when a new government takes office.
While regional governments angle for influence over the foreign oil contracts, most Iraqis favor continued control by a national company and the powerful oil workers union opposes de-nationalization. Iraq's political future is very much in flux, but oil remains the central feature of the political landscape.
Chapter Two:The Invasions of Iraq
The United States invaded Iraq in alliance with Britain on March 20, 2003, winning a quick military victory and ousting the government of Saddam Hussein. What alot of people don't realize is that Britian also invaded Iraq once before in the last century. More on this in a few paragraphs.....
Back to the current time frame in the meantime: Though the US and the UK claimed they acted in accordance with international law, an overwhelming majority of the world’s governments and people thought otherwise.
Since then, the US-UK occupation has encountered increasing armed resistance in Iraq, and support for the war and occupation has steadily declined in the invading countries. US-UK claims about Iraqi weapons threats and terror links have proven false, and the costs of the operation have risen.
This next section looks at many aspects of the conflict in Iraq, such as the background to the war, including the thirteen years of sanctions and the importance of Iraq’s huge oil resources. It also examines the issues that have emerged since the invasion, such as the resistance to the occupation, the disputes surrounding a post-war government, and the task of reconstruction.
Chapter Three: Enemies at the Gate more than Once (History Repeats itself):
Britain set up a colonial regime in Iraq after a long military campaign during World War I.
The planning for this had started well before 1920 as you will see from the following condensed history of that "other occupation" which bears many resemblences to the current occupation of 2003 to the present times.
In response to Iraqi resistance, including a country-wide uprising in 1920, British forces battled for over a decade to pacify the country, using airplanes, armored cars, firebombs and mustard gas.
Air attacks were used to shock and awe, to teach obedience and to force the collection of taxes.
Winston Churchill, as responsible cabinet minister in the early years, saw Iraq as an experiment in high-technology colonial control. Though officials in London sometimes had qualms about the violence, colonial administrators on the ground like Gertrude Bell expressed enthusiasm for the power of the imperial military enterprise.
Circa 1917:
They came as liberators but were met by fierce resistance outside Baghdad. Humiliating treatment of prisoners and heavy-handed action in Najaf and Fallujah further alienated the local population. A planned handover of power proved unworkable. Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds uncanny parallels with today - and if we want to know what will happen there next, we need only turn to our history books...
On the eve of our "handover" of "full sovereignty" to Iraq, this is a story of tragedy and folly and of dark foreboding. It is about the past-made-present, and our ability to copy blindly and to the very letter the lies and follies of our ancestors. It is about that admonition of antiquity: that if we don't learn from history, we are doomed to repeat it.
For Iraq 1917, read Iraq 2003. For Iraq 1920, read Iraq 2004 or 2005.
Yes, we are preparing to give "full sovereignty" to Iraq.
That's also what the British falsely claimed more than 80 years ago.
Come, then, and confront the looking glass of history, and see what America and Britain will do in the next 12 terrible months in Iraq.
The story begins in March 1917 as 22-year-old Private 11072 Charles Dickens of the Cheshire Regiment peels a poster off a wall in the newly captured city of Baghdad. It is a turning point in his life. He has survived the hopeless Gallipoli campaign, attacking the Ottoman empire only 150 miles from its capital, Constantinople. He has then marched the length of Mesopotamia, fighting the Turks yet again for possession of the ancient caliphate, and enduring the grim battle for Baghdad. The British invasion army of 600,000 soldiers was led by Lieutenant-General Sir Stanley Maude, and the sheet of paper that caught Private Dickens's attention was Maude's official "Proclamation" to the people of Baghdad, printed in English and Arabic.
That same 11in by 18in poster, now framed in black and gold, hangs on the wall a few feet from my desk as I write this story of empire and dark prophecy. Long ago, the paper was stained with damp - "foxed", as booksellers say - which may have been Private Dickens's perspiration in the long hot Iraqi summer of 1917. It has been folded many times; witness, as his daughter Hilda would recall 86 years later, to its presence in his army knapsack over many months.
In a letter to me, she called this "his precious document", and I can see why. It is filled with noble aspirations and presentiments of future tragedy; with the false promises of the world's greatest empire, commitments and good intentions; and with words of honour that were to be repeated in the same city of Baghdad by the next great empire more than two decades after Dickens's death. It reads now like a funeral dirge:
"Proclamation... Our military operations have as their object, the defeat of the enemy and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators... Your citizens have been subject to the tyranny of strangers... and your fathers and yourselves have groaned in bondage. Your sons have been carried off to wars not of your seeking, your wealth has been stripped from you by unjust men and squandered in different places. It is the wish not only of my King and his peoples, but it is also the wish of the great Nations with whom he is in alliance, that you should prosper even as in the past when your lands were fertile... But you, people of Baghdad... are not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions. It is the hope of the British Government that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realised once again, that the people of Baghdad shall flourish, and shall enjoy their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and with their racial ideals... It is the hope and desire of the British people... that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown amongst the peoples of the Earth... Therefore I am commanded to invite you, through your Nobles and Elders and Representatives, to participate in the management of your civil affairs in collaboration with the Political Representative of Great Britain... so that you may unite with your kinsmen in the North, East, South and West, in realising the aspirations of your Race.
(signed) F.S. Maude, Lieutenant-General, Commanding the British Forces in Iraq."
Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army - which included Iraqi soldiers - in Mesopotamia. He spoke "often and admirably," his daughter would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at 55 had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion.
But Munro's leadership did not save Dickens's sister's nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers: "My father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his 'nephew'. I don't know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years."
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.
AT 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 Shia 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 Shia 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, Colonel 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 US 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 Shia 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".
TE 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, they couldn't ship our corpses home in the heat of the Middle East 80 years ago, so they 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. If one were to visit the cemetery in the chaotic months after the Anglo-American invasion of 2003, they would find wild dogs roaming between the broken headstones. Even the brass fittings of the central memorial had been stolen.
Chapter Four: Installing a New Government (before Saddam):
The following is an excerpt from The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978).
Hanna Batatu, one of the greatest historians of modern Iraq, here describes Iraqi parliamentary elections during the era of British colonialism. It is sometimes forgotten that the British organized elections in a number of their colonial possessions, both for external show and in order to create a certain degree of internal cohesion and legitimacy. But these elections were highly orchestrated and manipulated, in order to hold in check the forces of secular nationalism. Altogether there were 12 parliamentary elections, in addition to the elections to the Constituent Assembly of 1924. Batatu here speaks of the later period, beginning in 1943, when Iraq was nominally sovereign and independent. Then, the threat of nationalism caused the British to rely even more on their conservative Iraqi allies, the traditional rural leadership.
(from pages 102-104)
In a formal sense, it is not correct to speak of the “assignment” of seats to the tribal chiefs, as the pretense of “free elections” was always maintained. But confidential official reports throw ample light on the actual method of choosing deputies in the tribal country. “The elections,” wrote on the tenth of September, 1930, a British administrative inspector to the adviser of the Ministry of Interior, “generally can be graded into three stages.
Firstly, the Qaim-maqam [subgovernor] maneuvers himself into as strong a position as he can by arranging for the right men to be balloted for on the Committee on Inspection. Secondly, the Qaim-maqam must arrange that a smart Committee man is sent to the out-stations to ensure that the shaiky does not become too powerful by electing as secondary electors all his own relations plus the coffee man and various other hangers-on attached to the mudil. Cases have been known of sheikhs manipulating the elections so that they controlled all the secondary votes in the tribute and thus in a position to auction thirty or more votes to the highest bidder After the second stage is properly arranged the setting is then ready for the third and final stage, i.e., the election of deputies, which, as every one knows, is conducted informally before the event by the Mutasarrif [governor] in the privacy of his office and that of the Qaim-maqam concerned.”
The methods of the government scarcely improved in later years, despite the ending of the formality of indirect elections by Decree No. 6 of 1952. Except, on occasion, for some of the seats of the larger towns, royal Parliaments continued to be packed rather than elected, and to the end would possess neither moral force nor popular confidence.
The following is a description of events that took place over 80 years ago, when Great Britain conquered the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul and welded them into the new state of Iraq. The fact that there are echoes of the present and of possible future scenarios in Iraq has less to do with some irreducible essence of Iraqi history than with the logic of imperial power. The the United States is now finding itself facing choices similar to those faced by Britain between 1914 and 1921.It is worth reflecting upon those choices to understand whether the exercise of imperial power in the task of state reconstruction has a similar logic. This could throw light on the kind of Iraq which an American military occupation might bring into being.
When the British invaded Mesopotamia in 1914, they did not intend to create a state. Their immediate objective was the security of their position in the Persian Gulf. But military success led to greater ambitions and by 1918 British forces had occupied the whole of what is now modern Iraq. Throughout the territories a civil administration was established, based on the model of British India, where many of the officers and officials had gained their experience.
It was a mixture of direct and indirect rule: the enterprise was controlled by British-staffed ministries in Baghdad, but British political officers in the provinces depended upon local community leaders to guarantee social order and collect revenues.
Excluded from these arrangements were the predominantly Sunni Arab or Arabised Turkish administrative and military elites of the former Ottoman state. A distinct British imperial order began to emerge, centred on Baghdad, gradually penetrating all levels of society and appearing to consolidate British interests.
But with the end of the war in 1918, different ideas about the nature of those interests surfaced in different branches of the British state. Some held to a strong imperial vision that believed that it was part of Britain's mission to practise the micro-technologies of power, to make society fit the new administrative order. Another view, influenced both by moral doubts about the imperial project and practical questions of resources and commitment, advocated a lighter touch. Here the argument was that Britain had only two basic requirements of any government in Mesopotamia: that it should be administratively competent and that it should be respectful of British strategic requirements. It was this view which triumphed and upon which the state of Iraq was founded (1).
Events in Iraq, as well as in the wider international sphere and in Britain, contributed to this outcome.
In 1920 the principles of national self-determination created the idea of League of Nations mandates - territories of the defeated Central Powers which one of the victorious powers would bring eventually to independence as sovereign states.
The idea was taken up by those in the British government who wanted to maintain its global influence and control at minimum cost, financially and militarily. Given the changing public mood in Britain in 1919-20 about the uses of public expenditure, and the alarm in government about the cost of empire, this seemed an ideal solution.
In Iraq, many people resented the mandate as a light disguise for British imperial control; by contrast, certain British imperial servants in the country saw it as a dangerous abdication of responsibility (2). The clash between these two views led to the Iraqi Revolt of 1920.
This began in Baghdad with mass demonstrations of urban Iraqis, both Sunni and Shi'ite, and the protests of embittered ex-Ottoman officers. The revolt gained momentum when it spread to the largely Shi'ite regions of the middle and lower Euphrates. Well-armed tribesmen, outraged by the intrusions of central government and resentful of infidel rule, seized control of most of the south of the country.
It took the British several months, and cost thousands of lives - British, Indian and Iraqi - to suppress the revolt and re-establish Baghdad's control.
The revolt had two profound consequences. It persuaded the British that the cost of trying to rule Iraq would be too high and that it was imperative to set up a fully-functioning Iraqi government, army and administration. Furthermore, it made it almost inevitable that when the British looked for the cadres to govern the new state, they should choose the Ottoman administrative and military elites displaced during the war.
The British saw these men as having proven experience in running a modern state, as well as a pragmatic grasp of the importance of Britain in helping them to entrench themselves in power, and in securing Iraq in the region. The leaders of the majority Shi'ite population and of the substantial Kurdish minority were seen as potentially mutinous, as well as too encumbered by tribal and religious traditions to govern a modern state.
The above considerations shaped subsequent British policy in Iraq.
Amir Faisal of the Hijaz was installed as king, sustained by mainly Sunni Arab former Ottoman officers and officials. They took over the administration from departing British officials and formed the backbone of the new Iraqi officer corps. British influence continued through its advisers in the Iraqi ministries, through its two major air force bases in the country and through the multiple ties which bound the two countries together and sustained Britain's informal empire even after Iraqi independence in 1932.
In the sense of safeguarding British strategic interests, the advocates of the minimalist or indirect approach to the question of political order in Iraq appeared to have been vindicated. However, they had also laid the foundations for a distinctive form of state in Iraq. This was affected both by the authoritarian inclinations of the new governing class, as well as by their prejudices towards the diverse communities who formed the majority of the Iraqi population (3).
The relevance of this to the present situation is not only that Saddam Hussein's regime is a direct descendant of this pattern of government. It is also that the temptation confronting the US, as it tries to organise the future of Iraq, may be similar to that which faced the British government and its officials in 1920.
__________________________________________________________________________
Chapter Five: The Current Situation:
In the aftermath of the recent military invasion and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime, the US is now facing the same similar choices that the British faced back then and history is taking a new turn.
So what are the choices the current coalition, led by the U.S has, to bring about a new government in Iraq?
1. It can try to bring about a fundamental change in the way Iraq is governed and commit the time and resources necessary to make that happen.
2. Or it can set up an Iraqi administration which will carry out the principal wishes of the US - respect for American strategic interests and maintenance of order - thereby allowing an early withdrawal of US forces.
3. A combination of the two which some say we are now doing, but which presents a "quagmire" of sorts....
......This would mean recognising much of the existing power structure in Iraq, as well as the narrative of Iraqi history that brought the most recent regime into being.
My views on where we are headed now:
Faced by internal resistance and the escalating loss of American lives and monetary resources in a project of state reconstruction increasingly remote from the interests of the American public,the US administration is now finding itself way over it's head.
We should have learned from history but we did not.
We are repeating it again, almost the same way that happened in the early 20th century.
By putting ourselfves in the middle of Iraq's internal affairs and promising a mission to transform Iraq into a beacon of democracy in the region, we are thus fully entrenched in a situation that will now last for a very long time.
It has certainly caused despair among those Iraqis who have seen the US as their main hope of radical political change.
But for the US, as for the British 80 years ago, it behooves us to act quickly and with the utmost caution now so that we can hopefully lower any more risks to our troops, the ever increasing costs of this "mission" and the long term advantages that we thought would be brought fourth with this invasion.
In my opinion this was to secure the "oil reserves" of that region and establish a "beach head" of sorts in the Middle East where we can control the outcome of this new world order.
I have a feeling that we are just at the beginning of this long "mission" and as Bush said the other day....it will not be him who pulls our troops out of this area, but it will be up to another leader further down the road.
I have a feeling we will be living with Iraq for a very long time.
So now that you have been educated a little more, does this shed a brighter light on the situation over in Iraq?
I hope so as that was my intention when I started this post, which got to be a little too long.
Thank you for reading.
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