The Making of Modern Iraq (Interesting backgrounder on Iraqi history since WW I)

The Wilson Quarterly ^ | Spring 2004 | Martin Walker

[quidnunc]

In the early spring of 2003, a quarter of the British army was based in Kuwait, advancing north into familiar territory. In 1916, these soldiers’ great-grandfathers had first advanced up the river Tigris, to defeat and humiliation at Turkish hands. The following year the British returned, advancing to Baghdad and beyond. With General Edmund Allenby’s forces thrusting north through Palestine, aided by an Arab uprising, the British toppled the Ottoman Empire. They stayed on for another 40 years, briefly interrupted by a pro-Nazi seizure of power in Baghdad in 1941. It was a period marked by considerable social and economic progress in Iraq — and by a tangled, painful, and often bloody series of political events that demand the attention of anybody contemplating the Iraqi future.

Modern Iraq was an invention of British military and administrative convenience in the wake of World War I. The British had held no coherent view of their war aims against the Ottoman Empire, simply wanting to defeat it. During the most desperate days of the struggle, the government’s Arab bureau in Cairo issued letters and proclamations promising independence under British protection to Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia (as Iraq was then called) if they would help defeat the Ottomans. British officials in India, who traditionally ran foreign policy east of Suez, were appalled, dreading the impact of such involvement in Islamic affairs.

When the war ended, the British found themselves faced with a number of facts on the ground. First, the Ottoman Empire had collapsed, and outside Turkey, the British army was in occupation. But so were the Arab allies who had fought alongside the legendary British officer T. E. Lawrence, already known to an admiring world as Lawrence of Arabia, and Lawrence encouraged them in the vision of an independent pan-Arab state, stretching from the Persian frontier to the Suez Canal. Second, the French wanted a share of the Ottoman spoils, Lebanon and Syria at a minimum, though President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his enormously popular principle of self-determination made the establishment of an outpost of empire highly problematic. Finally, the war had also demonstrated the importance of the internal-combustion engine, and thus the high strategic value of the oil supplies needed to fuel it.

The British had to contend with an Arab civil war between the Hashemite dynasty, the original custodians of the holy shrines of Mecca and Medina, and the house of ibn Saud, adherents of the puritanical Wahhabi sect of Islam. They bumbled their way to a solution of this crisis after the House of ibn Saud took over Arabia by force (in the process deliberately destroying as idolatrous many of Mecca’s shrines and graves of the Prophet’s family) and established Saudi Arabia. London compensated the Hashemites by giving Prince Abdullah the country now known as the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and giving Syria to his brother, Prince Faisal, who had helped wrest it from the Turks during the Great War.

Then, in the summer of 1920, the tribes of Iraq rose in revolt against the British, who had not kept their wartime pledge to grant Iraq independence. “There has been a deplorable contrast between our profession and our practice,” the now-retired Lawrence wrote in a We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government, and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil. We spent nearly a million men and nearly a thousand million of money to these ends… . Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats, and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer.”

-snip-

[Lyford]

bump for later

[happygrl]

The past is prologue.

[RobbyS]

The problem with historical surveys like this is that rgwue abalysis seems to ignore the changes in the country, the most important being the size of the populations, and also the details of the relations among the tribes and between the Kurds and the Arabs. Pan-Arabism could hardly have been a welcome development to as large a nation as the Kurds.