Imperial muddle

After World War I, the British attempted to bring self-rule and political stability to the people of Iraq. The lessons for the United States are far from encouraging.

By Ken Stier, 3/2/2003

HE FIRST SHOTS have yet to be fired in the impending war against Saddam Hussein, and already American leaders confront difficult questions about its aftermath. How should a foreign authority exercise power, and how should that power later be transferred to returning exiles-or to experienced (and possibly tainted) local elites? On what terms should rival ethnic and religious groups share power? And what happens if Iraq becomes a democracy and elects anti-Western leaders?

US policymakers might find some consolation-or some concern-in the fact that they are not the first outsiders to face these thorny dilemmas. In the aftermath of World War I, the British faced very similar questions about Iraq. Their own answers were not very satisfactory.

The modern Middle East was born at the end of World War I, when the British and French took over many of the Ottoman Empire's far-flung territories. Britain wrested for itself the areas that were to become Palestine and Jordan, and also the three provinces of Mesopotamia that now make up Iraq. The British did not regard this as a naked power grab; according to the Treaty of Versailles and the League of Nations, Mesopotamia was not a colony but a British "mandate." Arab claims to independence were recognized, but they would not be immediately realized. First, the Arab people had to learn the arts of self-rule from the Western powers.

But how would this political education take place?

Arnold. T. Wilson, a senior British official, strongly argued for a form of direct British control. Though professing to be a democrat himself, he said his main concern was that bestowing the trappings of constitutional self-rule too early would likely result in the very "antithesis of a democratic Government." In a country racked by ethnic and religious divisions, where "people do not argue but shoot," he said it was better for the British to benevolently provide what was most important to most people in the largely agricultural country: peace and low taxation.

Among those articulating a more sanguine view of the Arab capacity for self-governance was the flamboyant archaeologist and intelligence officer Gertrude Bell [see sidebar]. The Iraqi people, she believed, had to be free to work out their own destiny-albeit with some careful parenting. The British must recognize, she claimed, that "infant states will insist on running before they can walk, and that every adage to the contrary notwithstanding, they must within limits of safety be allowed to do so."

The debate turned urgent with the Arab Revolt in Mesopotamia in the summer of 1920. It was mostly an uprising of southern Shi'a tribes-semi-nomadic, widely armed, and fiercely independent-who resented the tightening grip of British administration, particularly its insistence on stringent tax collection. The revolt would take three months to suppress, at high cost. Some 600 British soldiers (mostly Indian), and as many as 10,000 Iraqis, were killed-and a small fortune was spent.

The toll prompted T.E. Lawrence, a champion of Arab independence during the war, to churn out a series of newspaper articles unfavorably comparing British rule with that of the reviled Ottoman Turks. "How long will we permit million of pounds, thousands of Imperial troops, and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but its administrators?" demanded Lawrence.

Lawrence's campaign triggered calls from Liberals and Laborites for an outright British withdrawal. But in the end, the British, exhausted and financially drained by the world war, decided to follow a middle course of indirect rule-they would neither evacuate nor impose more expensive direct rule. Britain sought to retain its lucrative oil interests in the region with as little military and financial commitment as possible, while at the same time taking some measures to appease Iraqi nationalist aspirations. It was a strategy of Empire Lite.

At the Cairo Conference of March 1921, Winston Churchill, then the newly appointed colonial secretary, gathered together the empire's best Arabists and devised a plan. The British would install the 36-year-old Faisal ibn Hussein as king of Iraq.

Following the Cairo conference, Churchill enthusiastically told the House of Lords that Faisal and his family represented the best chance for rebuilding "an Arab State which can revive and embody the old culture and glories of the Arab race."

Who was this new monarch? Faisal belonged to the venerable Hashemite family which claimed custodianship of the holy sites at Mecca. His father, Sherif Hussein ibn Ali, had been Britain's chief Arab ally during the war. In 1918, Faisal had conquered Damascus with T.E. Lawrence at his side-albeit with decisive help from the Australian cavalry, as historian Elie Kedourie pointed out in his book "England and the Middle East." After the war, however, the British had broken their promises to the Hashemites, and allowed the French to reclaim Syria and depose Faisal. So they owed him.

Though Faisal had never been to Mesopotamia, and spoke Arabic with an unfamiliar accent, the British smoothed his way. His most significant rival for power was Sayyid Talib, a Basra businessman and a known murderer who at the time was serving as the British-installed Interior Minister in a provisional government. Talib was arrested (just after taking tea with Bell and the wife of the High Commissioner) and packed off indefinitely to Ceylon. A rigged 1921 plebiscite registered 96 percent approval for Faisal.

Although he knew he was a British pawn, Faisal was determined to make the best of it. He spent his 12-year-long reign maneuvering with some success to generate his own authority and to win independence for Iraq. But he was less successful in his other goal: instilling a sense of shared nationhood into Iraq's disparate communities.

For years, the Sunni Ottomans had used fellow Sunnis to administer the provinces, and the British had adopted this proven imperial technique. Faisal, a Sunni, didn't alter this system; as a result, he failed to foster national unity between the Sunni, who made up 20 percent of the population, and the Shi'a, who made up roughly 60 percent of the population. According to one tally, recorded in 1933, there was one Shi'a minister in the government, and 6 Sunni. At the next highest civil-service level, there were 14 Sunni director generals but no Shi'a at all.

Even when the British tried to be even-handed, problems arose. Take conscription, for example. The army was widely seen as a vehicle for modernization and diffusing a common sense of identity. But the Shi'a and other groups saw national service-invariably under Sunni commanders-as anathema, and resisted conscription, sometimes violently. Disturbed by this resistance, the British told Sunni officers they would not support forced conscription, or help put down disturbances triggered by it. The Sunni officers saw this as a British scheme to keep Iraqi forces weak, adding more resentment to the increasingly combustible Anglo-Iraqi relationship.

The British did not especially enjoy such binds. And when they felt there was enough order in the country to ensure their primary interests, they prepared to leave. After winning a round of oil concessions in 1931, they helped Iraq achieve independence in 1932, well ahead of the original League of Nations timetable. Faisal and other Iraqis of the political class were happy to see the British go, even if the terms of departure emphasized Iraq's subordinate status: The British leased two air force bases and retained sweeping access rights in time of war.

But even as the Brits packed up, it was clear that their stewardship was incomplete. Almost immediately after independence, Iraqi troops, joined by Kurdish tribesmen, carried out massacres against the Christian Assyrians, who had been employed by the British as a police force. The British tried to put the best face on the situation, and blocked a League of Nations inquiry into the violence. But they were not optimistic about Iraq's future. Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who served as adviser at the Baghdad interior ministry, said: "My own prediction is that they will all fly at each other's throats and that there will be a bad slump in the administration which will continue until someone strong enough to dominate the country emerges, or alternatively, until we have to step in and intervene."

These words were to prove prophetic. Faisal spoke despairingly about the future of his beloved new kingdom before he died in 1933, and just three years later, Iraq was convulsed with the first of many coups. Faisal's son, King Ghazi, who made the first public Iraqi claims to Kuwait, was murdered in 1939-probably with British connivance. Two years later, the British were provoked to reoccupy the country to head off a drift toward fascism.

In 1958, a nationalist military coup massacred nearly the entire royal family. With the Ba'ath party's first power grab, in a 1963 coup, the country's politics became bloodier still. (The CIA furnished the Ba'ath plotters with lists of leftists to eliminate.) Saddam Hussein himself returned from exile in Cairo to supervise torture and executions, securing his rise in the security ranks of the party before formally taking over as president in 1979.

As we await another Western (or at least Anglo-Saxon) intervention in Iraq, the historical echoes are unmistakable. After World War I, the Western powers maintained that their involvement in the region represented a mission civilisatrice. But the British did not help to bring about any Arab renaissance: They built valuable roads, schools, and hospitals, but they did not help to build durable institutions. Outside the small political class of urban Sunnis, the vast majority of Iraqis benefited little.

Today, American pundits and officials speak boldly about democratic nation-building, about remolding Iraq into a model state for the entire Middle East. Of course the outcome of any US intervention is unknowable, and it's possible that the Bush administration might succeed where Churchill and Faisal failed. But we would do well to understand the bitter legacy left behind by previous Western involvements, particularly as those interventions are understood by Iraqis.

Ken Stier is a reporter who spent over a decade reporting overseas, most recently from the Caucasus, for Newsweek, Time, UPI, and other wire services, newspapers, and magazines.

This story ran in the Boston Globe on 3/2/2003.
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