Iraq: History of the Morass, and Where to Go From Here

Iraq: History of the Morass, and Where to Go From Here

The American-led war in Iraq, which commenced in March of 2003 and continues nearly a year later, continues to spark bitter controversy and debate about its prior justification and the propriety of the current occupation. With the failure to find WMD’s and the demonstrated absence of a connection between Saddam Hussein and the 9/11 attacks and al-Qaeda, purported justifications of the war are becoming even more difficult by the day. Iraq and Saddam, in fact, did have links to al-Qaeda, but in ways far more indirect than were originally claimed by the Bush Administration: Chiefly, Saddam’s recklessness helped to foster the conditions which brought US troops into Saudi Arabia and forced the painful sanctions upon the country, two emotional issues in the Arab world which fueled the growth of al-Qaeda in the 1990s. Proponents of the Iraq War may argue that the invasion was necessary to lance the festering wound in the Persian Gulf opened by Saddam, though I for one remain skeptical that war was the only or even the best option for confronting the problem. Most importantly, however, the Iraq dilemma was going to impose painful choices no matter what, for reasons that stretch all the way back to the creation of the nation of Iraq by the British following World War I. Discussions of Iraq all too often neglect to inform about its history, without which it is impossible to understand the country’s current predicament. The painful fact is that Iraq was created as an artificial nation out of three mutually hostile ethnic groups following WWI, as part of a “divide and conquer” strategy, and we are left with the consequences of that today—in particular, a Yugoslavia-like patchwork of ethnic antipathies and a tendency for strongman to come to power as a means to supply an iron fist for unity. Confrontation of the Iraq dilemma will therefore involve considerable anguish no matter how it is undertaken.

Iraq. A California-sized two-syllable country that’s already conjuring up painful associations for people in the US, a Mesopotamian desert where we’ve sent our soldiers in the most controversial overseas intervention since the debacle in Vietnam. As anybody with a pulse and a functioning pair of ears has come to recognize, the Iraq war has elicited extreme emotions and vociferous arguments—chiefly against it outside the US, with a more multi-faceted collection of perspectives within this country. In the unremitting cacophony of all the strident debate, amidst the din of hardened opinions and below-the-belt personal affronts, there’s been a gentle stream of perspectives that pull it all together, than honestly reflect upon all the complications of policy and history in the region, and which manage to convey the Big Picture about why the US invaded Iraq in the first place, whether the decision was wise, and what we should do in the face of our current predicament. This little corner of my Website is my own attempt to provide this Big Picture, addressing first what I feel to be so woefully lacking on all sides of the debate: a historical perspective to shed light on how the morass in Iraq was engendered in the first place.

First off, in the interest of full disclosure, I can best sum up my own Iraq views most accurately as “skeptical” toward the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq in March of 2003 and the subsequent occupation. There’s been some oscillation for me, basically between outright opposition to the war at some times and a grudging recognition of the logic of at least some aspects of the casus belli at others. But consistently, I’ve been very skeptical of the war’s rationales—humanitarian and pragmatic alike—from the outset. I am immediately averse to any military objective that reeks of securing oil contracts or control of strategic fields in a foreign nation, and implacably hostile to any plans to erect permanent military bases in Iraq as an extension of a de facto American Empire. My historical perspective tells me that such endeavors can beget only undesirable consequences in the modern era since they would cast the US as an oppressor and permanently damage our country, especially insofar as they would undercut our historical role as a benevolent (if at-times self-interested) Constitutional democracy with an earnest desire, among many elites and much of the populace as a whole, to disseminate these virtues worldwide. Crass economic or imperialistic goals are thus blatantly unacceptable as justifications for this war. (In fact, as I’ll discuss, it was precisely such foolish avaricious objectives that engendered two disastrous foreign policy blunders in the Middle East by the British—in 1920—and an Anglo-American alliance, in 1953, which have trapped us in our current mess in the first place.)

What Would Constitute a Viable Casus Belli?

There are therefore only two potential viable justifications for initiating a nearly unilateral invasion against Iraq—a country which did not attack us, did not pose an immediate menace, and whose citizens did not participate even indirectly in the September 11 attacks. [None of the Sept. 11 kamikaze hijackers was Iraqi (15 out of 19 were from Saudi Arabia), and Saddam had nothing to do with the terrorist attack’s planning or execution—he was a secularist and survivalist who cared, above all, about saving his own skin and regime in Iraq.] The first possible justification is humanitarian, which can be stated simply as: Has more good been done for the Iraqi people by taking such aggressive action than refraining from an invasion of Iraq? The second possible justification is strategic/pragmatic, and can best be phrased as: Has the war in Iraq measurably helped to combat the threat of Islamist terrorism [embodied most familiarly in Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda (al-Qaida)] over and above the benefits to be accrued from a more direct and sustained focus on al-Qaeda’s cells in Afghanistan and worldwide, the presumed likely course of action in the absence of the Iraq invasion?

For either test to be passed, it must also be shown that the gains from invading Iraq also outweigh the manifest costs of the strained alliances, public opprobrium, and tough calls on intelligence that inevitably antedated the invasion itself. This condition is crucial, because it reinforces a note of caution that has set the bar extremely high to justify an invasion like that of Iraq: An invasion of a sovereign nation, especially one that does not pose a direct and immediate threat, must be undertaken only upon meeting the most stringent standards. It’s now become clear that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction (WMD’s), was not supporting al-Qaeda (whose leader, Osama bin Laden, despised Saddam in any case), and was so boxed in by international penalties that he was scarcely able to commit troops in his own country, let alone against his neighbors. Thus, only some recourse to the two casi belli above could justify the invasion of Iraq in March of 2003.

The humanitarian case has seemed alternately compelling and deceiving to me at different times. Saddam was an exceptionally and gratuitously thuggish tyrant, no doubt, but his “killing phase” had been sharply curtailed in the aftermath of the Gulf War. He was unable to wreak havoc on his neighbors upon the virtual dismantling of his military apparatus after 1991, and even within the country his tentacles were beaten back by US and British warplanes in the no-fly zones of Kurdish and Shiite Iraq. His assaults on these two populations, abhorrent as they were, were undertaken in the midst of the poisonous suspicions of treachery during the Iran-Iraq war (in the case of the Kurds) and the tragically ill-timed and unsupported uprising of the Shiites following the Gulf War. Both of these suppressions were at least tacitly condoned (if not outright approved) by the US, which refused to condemn Saddam after the gassing of Halabja in 1988 and was concerned about a Shiite ascendancy and linkage to Iran in 1991. In the absence of another major military operation—which Saddam was operationally incapable of mounting after 1992—it is highly unlikely that he would attempt another such act within Iraq’s borders, let alone beyond them.

Therefore, considering the substantial Iraqi casualties following the US-led campaign of March-April 2003, the inevitable smoldering and instability-laden conflict of a US occupation (especially in the midst of a guerrilla war), and the genuine prospect of a devastating civil war, I have severe doubts about the viability of a humanitarian argument as a defensible casus belli—it’s just too easily outweighed, in a utilitarian framework or otherwise, by the even greater prospects of humanitarian disaster in the wake of an offensive war. ((I will argue below, however, for such a casus belli in the form of the capacity to lift the Iraqi sanctions—justifiable on humanitarian and strategic grounds alike.) Thus the crux of my exploration here, and the knife’s edge on which the precarious justification for the Iraq war must rest, is on the proximate strategic case that removing Saddam may have been essential to break open and cleanse the rotting corpus of the Persian Gulf political landscape, which was the ultimate source of ideological motivation and recruitment for al-Qaeda and similar Islamist terrorist groups.

It is on this question that I lay my polemical hat, and I discuss both the case for this and the case against. The result is a Hegelian dialectic that will lead to the ultimate source of the Persian Gulf nightmare and the reason that any attempts at its resolution, involving action or inaction, will be painful and difficult: the repugnant and short-sighted acts of British imperial overreach in the 1920s and 1950s that deliberately sought to divide the region’s population against itself and render it pliable toward foreign occupation.

In the course of playing “What would you have done, Mr. President?” and wading through a plethora of policy discourses and the region’s tangled history, there’s one conclusion that I am unequivocally sure of: The decision on Iraq was and is far tougher, and much more intricate, than it may appear on the surface to both the war’s proponents and critics.

As I noted above, I’ve been profoundly skeptical of the Iraq war ever since George W. Bush’s proclamation of Iraq as a node in the “Axis of Evil” during his speech of early 2002. You just don’t go invading sovereign nations that haven’t attacked you, without an extremely compelling set of reasons. That’s why I’ve been surprised that, even in my skepticism, I myself have been able to weigh the thornbush of rationales and scenarios to realize that there’s something unique about the state of the world straddling the 9/11 attacks—something that at least forces one to seriously consider that there was indeed a reason to prosecute the war, rather than to dismiss the idea out of hand as so many have. Saddam’s supposed WMD’s have been shown to be a chimeric flight of policy fancy, and testaments in favor of a “war of liberation” have been gutted in the wake of Iraqis’ increasing hostility to US troops and bitter clashes between soldiers and civilians that are taking an increasing toll. Furthermore, all attempts to link Saddam to sponsorship of the Sept. 11 hijackers and al-Qaeda have been summarily refuted, something to which even the Bush Administration has even confessed. So what’s left after all these pro-war arguments have been demolished? The answer is that there is a crucial, fundamental link between Saddam and the Sept. 11 attacks—though not the one most people (incorrectly) think when they foolishly conflate and confuse Saddam’s secular Baathist movement with the al-Qaeda fanatics. Osama and Saddam are sworn enemies of each other and Saddam of all people had little to gain by buttressing al-Qaeda’s madness, yet Saddam’s connection to the 9/11 attacks is still very concrete, if subtle.

Iraq’s Link to al-Qaeda—Subtle and Situational, not Direct and Overt

For all of Osama bin Laden’s lunatic ravings about the tragic fall of the Islamic Caliphate with the Ottoman Empire’s disintegration after World War I, and his obsession with the “disaster” of Moorish Spain’s defeat in the Spanish Reconquists of the 12^th-15^th centuries, he and his organization invoked three grievances for their angry ideology and their attacks on the US and American allies, 9/11 and otherwise: (1) The persistent garrisoning of US troops in Saudi Arabia since the Gulf War, in close proximity to the Muslim holy cities of Mecca and Medina, a perceived affront with “infidels disgracing the sanctity of the Muslim holy land”; (2) the humanitarian catastrophe of the Iraqi sanctions, which were doing little to loosen Saddam Hussein’s iron grip but which were directly occasioning the deaths of thousands of Iraqi children each year, owing to difficulties in food and medical distribution; and (3) unabating US financial support for Israel in the midst of the bitter, intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. What do all of these have in common? All of them—the first two especially but the last to a lesser degree as well—stem from the reckless actions of Saddam Hussein in the 1990s. Interestingly, while the third issue is the “hot-button” topic in most circles, it was actually a subsidiary, expedient complaint in the case of al-Qaeda, which has cast itself as a sort of anti-imperialist enterprise with fanatical religious overtones. And while the religiously zealous Osama bin Laden cast himself as the unflinching enemy of the secular Saddam Hussein, Osama’s movement was paradoxically nourished by the noxious effects of Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990.

Al-Qaeda was, indeed, forged in the crucible of one such campaign fought in a Muslim nation—the guerrilla resistance to Soviet rule in Muslim Afghanistan—and the stationing of US troops in Saudi Arabia provided another impetus for the organization’s ideology when the garrison came to be seen, fairly or not, as merely a thinly veiled version of old-fashioned Western colonialism in the Muslim world. What matters here is perceptions in the Arab street, and the stationing of the troops alone provided more than enough fodder to draw extremists into al-Qaeda’s fold; it was a frequent, recurring source of anger in Arab television and print media, and corrupt Middle Eastern regimes were only too willing to amplify this anti-US resentment with a lens against the outsider, so as to deflect attention from the failures of their own governments. The perceived collusion of the Saudi royal family in allowing the troops on Saudi soil was viewed as the worst instantiation of a broader pattern in which corrupt, decadent Arab ruling elites, rendered feeble and prostrate by the seductive material and corporeal temptations of the secular West, effectively turned over their nations’ reins to the neo-imperialists and repeatedly frustrated their peoples’ earnest desire for functioning, independent societies.

The devastating impact of the Iraqi sanctions, meanwhile, furnished an emotional touchstone nourished by repeated references in the Arab press, with poignant depictions of the suffering of Iraqi children under 5 years old malnourished and deprived of essential medicines, for lack of adequate supplies for water filtration and medical treatment in the country. This sorry state of affairs was a consequence more of Saddam’s profligate castle-building sprees and disgusting displays of wretched opulence, than it was of American policy per se, and Colin Powell even attempted to institute “smart sanctions” early in the current Bush Administration to punish the Iraqi leader while aiding the people—a noble effort that was scotched when official attentions were distracted elsewhere. Nevertheless, the sanctions were a tool of US and UN policy, and in the all-important realm of perceptions on the Arab street, the US was culpable for the callous murder-by-neglect of thousands of vulnerable Iraqis by (in Arabs’ minds) needlessly denying the influx of essential materials into Iraq. The sanctions, as much as the American military outposts in Saudi Arabia, drove recruits into the arms of al-Qaeda, and with or without Bush’s invasion of Iraq to expel Saddam in March of 2003, a continuing sanctions regime would have impelled the same sort of festering resentment. Moreover, any strategy to effect the suspension of the sanctions stands out as a plan with appeal on humanitarian as well as strategic grounds. They tragically visited the worst consequences of war upon the country’s vulnerable children, and their mitigation and removal could not come soon enough.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a constant irritant, but not in the same way as the American Saudi bases and the Iraqi sanctions, where were perceived as direct offenses committed by the Americans against Arab Muslim peoples. While the US has provided military aid to Israel, it has also provided substantial humanitarian assistance to the Palestinian territories, Egypt, and many other locales in the Arab world—a fact which is grudgingly acknowledged even by some of the most bitter opponents of US policy in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein stirred up the lion’s den in the midst of peace forays by making monetary payments to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers—a particularly Machiavellian and pernicious inducement to regional terrorism. This undoubtedly made American efforts to resolve the conflict far more prickly than they already were, and Saddam had to be “persuaded” to stop poisoning the well; otherwise, that seemingly intractable conflict would only fester even longer. Nevertheless, it was in Saddam’s role in the first two of al-Qaeda’s grievances that he most directly contributed to the state of affairs which was so conductive to the growth of bin Laden’s organization and its atrocities.

This is the real connection between Saddam and the September 11 attacks. Saddam did not perpetrate, encourage, or collaborate in any way to aid the Sept. 11 hijackers, and he was as much a target of al-Qaeda operatives as the World Trade Center towers. What Saddam did do, however, was to foster the festering, putrid Gegendsantlitz, the ugly political face of the Persian Gulf region, which has in turn embroiled, encumbered, and ensnared the US in a way very much to the detriment of this country—turning the United States into the imperialistic Satan which Osama bin Laden reviled and believed he could target with impunity. Like a suppurating wound laden with pus, this rancid situation had to be lanced, opened, and drained of the toxins swirling within it. The question was whether a unilateral invasion of Iraq was necessary to engender such a change and, if so, whether the means employed by the Bush Administration were the best ones available amidst an unpleasant lot.

Saddam Hussein was undoubtedly making matters difficult. His repeated menacing and brandishes toward the Kurds, his feints against US and British jets enforcing the no-fly zones, his flourishes toward re-arming Iraq with WMD’s in 1998—all were emblematic of a rash, imprudent troublemaker bent on stirring up hornet’s nests out of pique alone. As we now recognize, Saddam lacked WMD’s and only pretended to possess them as a sort of strategic deterrent against invasion; but he did stockpile and use them in the 1980s against the Kurds and Iranians, and he actively took part in WMD mischief-making in 1998 prior to being disarmed by the UN inspectors led by Scott Ritter. Yes, Saddam was partly armed and supported by the US in the 1980s, and it’s fair to extract a mea culpa on that account; but this does not change the fact on the ground that, whatever the origins of his behavior, Saddam’s tantrums in the 1990s were greatly complicating efforts to engender stability in the region, and—most critically—making it increasingly difficult to extricate itself from the Gulf’s political maelstroms.

I’m still not entirely convinced that a war to topple Hussein was essential to “lance the wound” in regard to the two issues most directly fueling the rise and spread of al-Qaeda. As far as the American garrisons in Saudi Arabia, their presence was of questionable value to begin with. The Saudis had initially invited them to take shelter in the Arabian desert as a defense against invasion from Saddam Hussein following Kuwait in 1990, and the oil-rich kingdom was a major staging point for the US and multinational forces that expelled Saddam from Kuwait. Nevertheless, there was an understanding in 1991—impelled by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, no less—that the American deployment in Saudi Arabia was of a strictly transitory nature. The troops, hovering around 5,000-10,000 following the expulsion of Saddam from Kuwait, would be removed from Saudi territory within a year or two. But they never left even as Bill Clinton emptied his Oval Office desk for the last time in January of 2001.

Saddam was hardly a credible threat to Saudi territorial integrity; despite the Baathist leader’s self-styled claims to be a unifier of the Arab peoples in the vein of Gamel Abdel Nasser in 1950s Egypt, he was without the military means or the political allegiance to launch any such operation. Thus, the only reason to maintain troops in Saudi Arabia was to enforce the no-fly zones, the one over southern Shiite Iraq in particular. Most of the soldiers based in the Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia, indeed, were from the Air Force and flew sorties over northern and southern Iraq to ensure no trespassing by the Iraqi despot. Why, one might ask, was it essential to maintain these troops in Saudi Arabia? The royal family was already uneasy with their presence. The stench of colonialism engendered by the soldiers’ presence incited rage on the Arab street, exacerbated by the perceived blasphemy of a foreign military force on Muslim sacred soil. The Khobar Towers bombing in 1996 and other menaces evinced a tangible security threat. Most pertinently, the soldiers simply did not need to be in Saudi Arabia to access the Iraqi no-fly zones. There were already American bases in the Gulf “mini-states” (like Qatar), Kuwait, and Turkey which, while not exactly pleasing to Arab eyes, nonetheless kicked up far less dander than the garrisons in Saudi Arabia itself. I fail to see why an invasion of Iraq was necessary to extract the troops from Saudi Arabia; this is something that could, and should, have been done on an independent basis.

The Iraqi sanctions were a tougher nut to crack, but even here, I question whether the unilateral invasion of Iraq was an unavoidable product of the situation. Colin Powell had been actively promoting the implementation of “smart sanctions” upon Bush’s election to the Oval Office in 2000, to better facilitate transport of food and medicines to the Iraqi people while depriving Saddam Hussein of hardware and resources to fuel his megalomaniacal aspirations. Any defiance by Saddam of attempts to deliver these resources to the Iraqi people could then indeed have been met with a proportionate military response, one that (in this case) would have possessed the clear imprimatur of a UN resolution and, therefore, a measure of international support.

Saddam’s cash payments toward families of Palestinian suicide bombers were already drawing askance glances, and if there’s one thing that Saddam had learned, it was to back down when it was necessary to save his own skin. Saddam was determined to be the irritating troublemaker in the classroom, and the constant attention to his monkey business, via a “smart sanctions” regime backed by graded force responses, would indeed have constituted an ongoing nuisance and expense for the US and European powers enforcing the sanctions. But it would almost certainly have been far less costly than the hundreds of billions of dollars, shed blood, lost limbs, and international scorn which the US and its Coalition allies are now being forced to endure by the less-than-surgical removal of Saddam in April of 2003. It’s a classic case of inevitably crude means being employed toward the fulfillment of an at least arguably acceptable end—and that’s the crux of the argument. Are all the awful costs of the Iraq war justified by the strategic and humanitarian advantages of removing Saddam, thus puncturing the festering wound of the Persian Gulf political scene and removing al-Qaeda’s two chief motivations? Or has the Iraq war paradoxically made the problem worse?

No matter what the advisability of the Iraq war in an ideal world, I’m still skeptical of the way the Bush Administration went about selling the war in the first place. The gratuitous and puerile locker-room taunts against dissenting countries (particularly France), the petulant dismissal of reasonable objections, the overreliance and intentional skewing of faulty intelligence on WMD and a Saddam-al Qaeda connection, the heavy-handed bribery of Turkey, the heinous and potentially criminal retaliations against those with objections to the Iraq war—the most egregious being the outing of Valerie Plame, the wife of former Gabon ambassador Joseph Wilson, who blew the lid off George W. Bush’s allegations of Iraqi solicitation of yellowcake uranium from Niger—all of these misdeeds foster a Watergate-ish odor in the halls of power and instantly prick up the hairs of my emperor-has-no-clothes detector. I’ve also been persistently unnerved by the abiding belief by over half of the American people in poll after poll that Saddam masterminded the Sept. 11 attacks, or that most of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqi—both ridiculously false claims that even the Bush Administration has repetitively disavowed. (Not a single hijacker was from Iraq.) In truth, though, my dismay at the persistence of this false belief is more than anything a manifestation of my worry that American democracy is in danger of failing, undercut by a dangerously decreased attention span and a virtual bankruptcy in critical thinking. Even if American support for the Iraq war is based in part on such a false premise, it is possible to do the right thing for the wrong reasons—so long as, of course, the more sensible justifications as discussed above are actually motivating the policies. Because of this, as appalled as I’ve been with the Bush Administration’s charge into war and the naivete of too many on the WMD and Saddam-al Qaeda issue, I can’t entirely dismiss the position that the Iraqi invasion was necessary to excise the wounds, flush the debris, and cleanse the air in the Persian Gulf. As I mentioned above, I’m still skeptical that was the only way, but I’m at least open to reasonable arguments that removal of Saddam was the only practical course.

Which brings me to the particularly odd recognition that the neoconservatives motivating the Bush foreign policy may not be completely out to lunch. I don’t have space in this essay to delve into the Straussian and Platonic origins of the neocon movement. The gist is that there is a small cadre of neoconservative thinkers both inside the Bush Administration—Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Donald Rumsfeld, Douglas Feith, John Bolton, and Kenneth Adelman (of the infamous “Iraq will be a cakewalk” comment—and outside it in intellectual conservative journals like National Review, Commentary, and The Weekly Standard, with contributions by individuals like William Kristol, Charles Krauthammer, Mona Charen, Max Boot, and others. The overarching tenet of neoconservative foreign policy in its grandest conception is a desire for a more aggressive American countenance in the world, particularly vis-à-vis the Middle East. The neocons believe in a big US military and an active US military, period. They have no qualms about supporting US interventions, preemptive strikes, and even a modern quasi-imperialism in volatile regions, and they openly vouch for extensive dissemination of the US military base presence across the globe. And they wholeheartedly embrace the objective to control and safeguard the flow of oil, whether in OPEC nations or otherwise.

This broadly encompassing encapsulation of the neoconservative philosophy is anathema to me, as I find it to be neither sustainable nor desirable for an American nation which will soon be compelled to confront the crushing financial strains of the baby-boomer retirees over the next two decades. We can scarcely afford the exorbitant costs of such an ambitious and wide-ranging foreign policy map, which would have the insidious effect of entangling the US even further in the downward spiral of regional hatreds as its obligations multiply and insoluble conflicts intensify. I’m also skeptical of the worth of such lavish defense outlays; we should be investing more in the improvement of intelligence capabilities and the retention of human resources (i.e., the support or our soldiers) rather than coughing up countless billions on way-cool weapons systems that yield diminishing returns, as Iraq is manifestly demonstrating. Defeating al-Qaeda and loose terrorist networks, in particular, is chiefly a war of intelligence and international cooperation in apprehending scofflaws and stemming money flows, not of implementing more advanced weapons systems than the adversary. I dissent vigorously, in particular, from the neocon infatuation with the American nuclear arsenal, which I see to be a dangerous while elephant that increases the danger of a deadly accident or terrorist strike. (All those nukes were or little value in 1968 Vietnam or 1983 Lebanon, among other examples of military fiascoes.)

However, a more modest and restrained version of the neocon philosophy seems far more sensible to me. (I know this sounds like an oxymoron, but occasionally some neocons will rein in their wild ambitions to goals a bit more manageable.) I’m not entirely averse to the idea of a preemptive action under extreme circumstances; if, for example, Pakistan’s President Pervez Musharraf were overthrown in a coup and replaced by a Taliban-like cabal of fanatics bent on disseminating nuclear weapons throughout Central Asia, I would see this as grounds for considering a preemptive move. I do concur with the neocons that the changed world of the modern age, post-9/11, does at times demand more aggressive action to deracinate the roots of terrorism at their sources. I feel that the old conception of inviolable national sovereignty is trickier to defend these days owing to the capacity of hostile nations to use extremist third-party organizations as henchmen for their dirty work, or failed states to host stateless terror groups capable of training and arming infiltrators into modern societies. In short, a nation with hostile intentions need not directly attack its opponent in war to cause damage; it can let a similar-minded third-party terrorist group do the dirty work. (I also question old notions of sovereignty when massive quantities of pollutants from the US can threaten the well-being of island countries like Great Britain and Japan from global warming and acid rain but, well, that’s a topic for a separate article.) Thus in a nutshell, modern technology has altered the rules of war and greatly enhanced the capacity of non-state actors to visit tremendous damage on innocent populations, and this new menace may at times necessitate a more aggressive response than before. The question is whether such a course was necessary in the particular special case of Iraq, and on this point I’m not so certain.

Paul Wolfowitz, Bush’s Deputy Secretary of Defense who was the architect of the Iraq war in many respects, was for a while my bete noire, the guy in the center of my figurative intellectual dartboard. According to Bob Woodward in Bush at War, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Cheney were all baying for blood in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks—but for that of Saddam Hussein, not Osama bin Laden and his cronies, even though just about everyone knew that al-Qaeda was the likely culprit for the hijackings rather than Iraq. I found this to be repulsive, that Wolfowitz et al. would practically allow the perpetrators of that horrific crime (al-Qaeda and the Taliban) to go virtually scot-free while using the assaults as a crass political opportunity to whip up war fervor against Iraq, a goal waxed about dreamily in the neocon policy white paper Project for a New American Century. It seemed illustrative to me of the neocons’ Captain Ahab-like obsession with Iraq and Saddam, to the extent that they were threatening to drag down the Pequod (i.e., the United States’ international standing) in the process. Fortunately, cooler heads in the inner circle (aka Colin Powell) prevailed and President Bush elected to attack al-Qaeda in Afghanistan rather than Iraq. (Afghanistan’s reversion into disunity and warlordship after American diversion to Iraq is another story…)

I was immediately and reflexively mistrustful of Wolfowitz after this incident, and I still retain an extremely skeptical eye toward his objectives and claims. I will at the very least begrudge Wolfowitz the small concession that he recognized the acute incitement posed by the American troop presence in Saudi Arabia. As quoted by Christopher Preble in a perspicacious article back in April, Wolfowitz noted that the persistent US troop presence in the Muslim holy land had "been Osama bin Laden's principal recruiting device,” and the removal of the US soldiers from Saudi Arabia (facilitated by the forced abdication of Saddam) helped to extinguish the most raging flames to a degree. And of course, as discussed above, Saddam’s removal enabled the revocation of the punishing sanctions regime. So have these developments, indeed, made us safer, and was the war necessary to effect these two crucial changes? Is true Jeffersonian democracy even feasible for Iraq, now that we’re waist-deep in the Big Sandy? I’m still skeptical.

As I discussed above, I have yet to be convinced that removing Saddam was the only viable option for withdrawing the soldiers from Saudi Arabia. In Preble’s articles, Wolfowitz seems to affirm that the maintenance of US troops in Saudi Arabia was essential to protect the Saudi kingdom from Saddam’s aggression. I beg to differ; this would be akin to claiming that an Abrams tank is necessary to protect a bear (already capable of defending itself) from the depredations of a wounded, bloodied, shot-up wolf in the forest. Saddam was beaten into submission, enfeebled by sanctions, deprived of military hardware, and bereft of regional support; he was already a pariah. As I discussed before, and which Wolfowitz puzzlingly fails to acknowledge, the troops were in Saudi Arabia to enforce the no-fly zones. And so an executive fiat to transfer the troops to bases in more peripheral Middle Eastern countries should have required merely the lifting of a finger.

For anyone with the proclivity to slap on the partisanship label, yes I do realize what this implies: that Bill Clinton, as much as the two Bushes who flanked him in office, is responsible for the blunder of leaving US soldiers needlessly in Saudi Arabia. And I concur. Would Clinton’s putative transfer of the troops to Qatar, Turkey, Kuwait, or more distant bases from Saudi Arabia have incited selfish political protest from Republican quarters? Quite possibly. But as commander-in-chief, he had that prerogative, and I doubt that Republican remonstrances would have had any durable political effect; after all, Clinton could have simply claimed that he was shuffling the US troops around to more strategically defensible positions (especially after the Khobar Towers bombing in 1996).

The failure on the part of Clinton and the Bushes to withdraw the soldiers as promised was inexcusable, and not only because of the fodder the soldiers provided to al-Qaeda; it’s simply not sensible, as Preble notes in his article, for a country to engender frothing animosity by garrisoning its soldiers for a questionable purpose (enforcing the Southern Iraq no-fly zone, when it could have so easily been undertaken from more peripheral bases in the region) by placing them in the kingdom which houses the holy sites for the world’s second-largest religious creed. Likewise, both parties are to blame for the stalemate during the Clinton years which precluded even the most commonsensical revisions of the sanctions regime, which were visiting tremendous suffering upon the Iraqi people but doing little to help oust Saddam himself. In truth, the biggest contributor to the enmity which gave rise to Sept. 11 was probably the scapegoating that our supposed “allies” in the Middle East—Saudi Arabia and Egypt especially—had been doing vis-à-vis the U.S. in their media. Rife with corruption and anti-democratic institutions, experiencing rapid population growth with a dearth of corresponding economic expansion, the ruling officials in these nations deflected criticism of their own failures by casting an inculpatory gaze at the US, which had been supporting them nonetheless. Yet, once again, the troops in Saudi Arabia and the floundering Iraqi sanctions caused even many moderates in the Arab street to regard the US with ire, and this state of affairs could not be allowed to continue.

The failure to shift the soldiers in Saudi Arabia to more peripheral bases was a product of old-fashioned inertia on the part of the Bushes and Clinton alike. It would have been a hassle to pick up and move. Yet the value of such a prescient action was recognized by many during the 1990s, and it may well have robbed al-Qaeda of the thunder it used to fill up its international terrorist cells. In any case, the key point here is that I find Wolfowitz’s claim to be dubious; it was not essential to invade Iraq so as to remove the US soldiers from Saudi Arabia. The same goes for the sanctions. Once again, there seems to have been a failure of imagination in the Clinton Administration and the Republican-led Congress that (usually) accompanied it; many reports had filtered in of the suffering endured by Iraqi children, and the broadsides of the Arab media about the sanctions were readily apparent to anyone willing to listen. Why was something along the lines of Powell’s “smart sanctions” not seriously discussed and implemented earlier? Why, indeed, when Powell proposed the reform, was it not more aggressively implemented?

All of this is not hindsight-laden Monday-morning quarterbacking. There were many in the American and international community who had noted the resentment being engendered by the Saudi bases and the misdirected Iraqi sanctions. An Administration more respectful of the desires (and perceptions) of a foreign nation would have been more cautious about so blatantly offending its people, and it was obvious that the Saudi deployment and the sanctions were engendering a raging sense of bitterness in the Arab world, even before the canaries in the coal mine of al-Qaeda’s assorted attacks in the 1990s. The point here is that, once again, it was probably feasible to solve the Saudi deployment and Iraqi sanction issues without a direct attack on Saddam Hussein. Saddam’s secularist government had provided a bulwark, after all, against the dissemination of Islamic fundamentalism and was in some ways preferable to the alternatives.

So that’s where I stand, as of February 2004, on the whole issue of the Iraqi morass. I was appalled at the maladroit manner in which the Bush Administration barreled toward war while alienating so many of its allies. I was appalled at the way it brandished threats in the direction of neighboring countries—like Syria—even though Syria and others had been making valuable contributions to the fight against al-Qaeda by sharing intelligence. I’m angered at all the innuendo and adumbration that was so shamelessly used to lull the public into supporting the Iraq war, which in some ways even now seems to be a distraction from the difficult and unsexy task of doing the police and intelligent work to round up al-Qaeda operatives, break up cells, and cut off the organization’s supply of funds. Nevertheless, despite my indignation about this, I’m also able to recognize how a reasonable person could argue that Saddam’s regime and actions were a threat to US security. As noted above, the menace is oblique and indirect, but still quite tangible, in the way that Saddam’s recklessness continually forced the US into delicate and uncomfortable positions in volatile areas of the Middle East. I remain skeptical that Saddam’s removal by force was the only or optimal solution to the problem; but the situation in Iraq is far, far more difficult than simple-minded apologists on either side often make it out to be.

Why has Iraq become such a tangle, such a quagmire-waiting-to-happen? How did a thug like Saddam come to rule over individuals with such an ancient, otherwise progressive and well-educated culture? Why, now, are the US and its allies in Iraq stuck in a bloody occupation in a country filled, illogically, with so many mutually hateful ethnic groups ready to drive the country into civil war? The answer to all this stretches back many decades, to the early part of the 20^th century—in the 1920s, shortly after WWI. The rancid mess in Iraq is a direct consequence of a disastrous miscalculation and overreach on the part of imperial Britain, which was given a mandate for Iraq following the First World War. This, finally, takes us to the corrupt heart of the Iraq issue: The tragic state of the country today, and the nightmare that the US faces in the region, is a direct consequence of a catastrophically foolish British imperialistic policy in Iraq during the aftermath of World War I. Before we go back 80 years, to the ultimate source of the current Iraqi crisis, we have to travel back to the 1950s, to the reprehensible Anglo-American-sponsored coup which removed a popular Iranian leader … for the sake of oil contracts. The contemptible avarice and stupidity of this act are what entangled the US in the Persian Gulf in the first place, and what initially sowed the tremendous mistrust and cynicism in the region toward US and European policies. No matter what the good intentions of the Bush Administration or any other US government today, it will take a lot to overcome the suspicions stemming from the coup against Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953. (The malign and toxic effects of the 1953 coup are discussed in a separate article.)

The British Empire c. WWI and the First Iraqi Quagmire

And now for that crucial, all too often omitted history lesson about Iraq, without which it’s impossible to understand the basis for US involvement in the region, including Gulf War II of 2003. Ultimately, before the First Gulf War, before the carnage of the Iran-Iraq Conflict of 1980-88, before the ascendancy of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini in 1979, prior to the coup against Mossadegh in 1953, there was The Mandate of 1920. World War I (1914-1919), one of the most important and influential wars of the Second Millennium A.D., reshaped the world, precipitating the fall of ancient Empires, bleeding the Western European imperial powers dry, and ushering in the era of Communism in Russia. One of the fallen imperial realms was the Ottoman Empire, founded by Osman, a Turkish chieftain, in the 14^th century A.D. From its nomadic roots in Central Asia, the Ottoman Empire conquered much of the Muslim Middle East, North Africa, and even Christian Eastern Europe. For a while, in the 15^th and 16^th centuries, Europe reasonably feared an Ottoman takeover. However, corruption and rapacious infighting among the Ottoman sultans and their rivals, stalled economic development, floundering social policies, and stagnation in military technologies beset the Ottomans, who began to suffer severe defeats in the 17^th century against Eastern European and Russian adversaries. By the onset of World War I, “the sick man of Europe,” as the Ottoman state had been termed, had been stripped of many of its most valuable territories and on the brink of collapse. Though it allied with the Central Powers and achieved some victories (Gallipoli being the most notable), it was ultimately undercut by internal revolts fueled in part by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and disintegrated after World War I.

In aiding the Turks’ subject Arab peoples to escape the yoke of Ottoman rule, Lawrence and his British assistants had promised independence for the Arabs upon the overthrow of Ottoman control. Unfortunately, the European powers had no intention of liberating the peoples of the Middle East, and they simply replaced the Ottoman Turks after 1920 with their own rule, both direct and indirect. The 1916 Treaty of Sykes-Picot between Britain and France (with Russia’s assent) had already provided arrangements for the divvying-up of Arab lands, and in 1920, a year after Versailles, the two European powers were awarded a mandate over Middle Eastern lands. The French were given effective control over Lebanon and Syria, while the British gained control over Palestine, the Transjordan and the lands that would become what is today Iraq.

Partly in line with Sykes-Picot, and consequent to the Versailles Treaty and Paris Peace Conferences in 1919, a new country called “Iraq” was created out of three former Ottoman provinces or “vilayats” as they were termed within the Ottoman state: Baghdad, Mosul, and Basra. Kuwait, which had been a part of the Basra vilayat, was broken off by the Allies as a separate emirate, a product of byzantine big-power machinations and secret agreements whose status constantly changed as WWI progressed. Of course, the big draw for the Great Powers in the Middle East was spelled O-I-L in the first place, and so the oil-rich fields of Kirkuk and more northerly regions, abutting the mountainous highlands outside of the three vilayats was cobbled into Iraq for good measure—Exhibit A in the fine history of Screwing the Kurds in the 20^th century, since it was the Kurds in those highlands who had given military aid to the British in return for long-sought independence, only for the rug to be snatched out from underneath them as they were consigned to the emerging artificial state of Iraq.

T.E. Lawrence had been a party to the negotiations establishing the boundaries for Iraq and its neighbors, and Winston Churchill himself was one of the driving forces behind the forging of the new nations, but Iraq itself was chiefly a creation of a British official named Arnold Wilson and one of his remarkable subordinates, Gertrude Bell. Multilingual, energetic, quick-minded and steeped in the cultures of the region, Bell had advocated for self-rule in the new countries, and her keen observations of Iraq’s people and customs provided valuable information for the British authorities administering it. However, in carving out the borders of the new country, Bell and her fellow officials followed the script largely written by Sykes-Picot. And when Iraq was created, it threw together three antagonistic and remarkably different ethnic groups and cultures—the Shiites, Sunni Arabs, and Kurds—along with Assyrian Christians and Turkomen into a volatile demographic stew. All of these regions were far too distinct to be united into a single country with a sense of nationhood, but they were joined together by imperial fiat. Needless to say, the prospect of mutually hostile ethnic groups inhabiting a single set of borders was hardly undesirable from an imperialist’s point of view; the Iraqi people would be so consumed by infighting that they’d presumably be unable to unite against the British. Divide and conquer. Iraq was not to be an independent state in the eyes of the Allies; it would be simply the latest addition to the British Empire. Needless to say, things did not exactly proceed as planned for the British.

The people of the region sensed a raw deal in the making; they’d been promised independence but were not being compelled to swear fealty to new masters. In 1920, a bitter and bloody anti-British revolt erupted in Iraq, chiefly driven by enraged Shiites and Kurds. The rebels killed numerous British soldiers and kneecapped the fledgling British administration in the region. The British responded with a counterinsurgency campaign that would have made Saddam Hussein proud. British actions in suppressing the Shiite and Kurdish revolts were notoriously and repeatedly reprehensible. None other than Sir Winston Churchill—yes, that Sir Winston Churchill—espoused what we would regard today to be openly criminal acts against the Iraqis during the 1920s. (I’m an admirer of his, but nobody should dismiss or ignore the folly of his actions in Iraq in the coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh of Iran in 1953, in the twilight of British influence in the region just before the disaster at Suez in 1956.) Churchill unabashedly had vouched for a resort to RAF aerial bombing of Iraqi villages with mustard gas to combat the uprisings in the 1920s. Ever wonder where Saddam Hussein derived his inspiration to gas the Kurds at Halabja in 1988? Quite possibly from Sir Winston himself. If Saddam is to be (deservedly) condemned as a war criminal for his use of poison gas in Halabja, then Churchill must be duly censured for such a policy himself. Indeed, Churchill’s sordid advocacy of such repugnant tactics in Iraq has sullied the reputation of an otherwise great man—although, it should be noted, Churchill moderated his attitudes later in the decade, something that cannot be said for others.

Sir Arthur Bomber Harris, better known for his controversial firebombing of Dresden in 1944, revealed himself to be an abhorrent thug in charge of a powerful air force when, well into the anti-British revolt, he championed the saturation terror bombing of Iraqi villages as a means to cow the locals into submission. In what must be one of the most revolting quotes of the 20^th century, Harris even gloated that

“they [the Kurdish and Arab rebels] now know that within 45 minutes a full-sized village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured by four or five machines which offer them no real target, no opportunity for glory as warriors, no effective means of escape.”*

The civilian-directed terror bombing of Warsaw in 1939 was not an innovation of the Nazis; it had a precedent in Harris’s campaign against the Iraqi insurgents in the 1920s. Even Gertrude Bell, far more sensitive to the plight of the Iraqis and their aims for self-rule, seems to have been far too enamored in her memoirs of the RAF pilots undertaking bombing runs against Iraqis employing such dangerous insurgency tactics like, uh, drawing water out of wells or gathering at the local markets to purchase goods.

Needless to say, the harshness of the British response did not sit well with the Iraqi people, and the revolt was never fully quelled, especially in the Kurdish north. The British, who had suffered millions of casualties among their bravest young men in World War I, who had sacrificed centuries’ worth of assets for the war and wound up in debt, could scarcely afford a bloody quagmire in the desert. The exhaustion of the First World War had convinced the British to give up on their designs in Afghanistan, where they had suffered particularly bloody defeats, and the debacle in Iraq was now raising the same voices about that distant land as well. In 1921, the Hashemite Arab Prince Faisal was installed as Iraq’s ruler, in the knowledge that he would be officially outranked by the British High Commissioner and the hope that he would be a malleable puppet king for Britain’s officials. But Faisal disappointed his sponsors when he revealed himself to be vigorously independent-minded, and in 1932, the British Protectorate over Iraq was officially ended. The country became independent—one of the shortest periods of rule for any British colony. British influence remained in the form of British-supporting Hashemite rulers until the coup of Abdul Karim Qassem in 1958, which expelled British interests for good.

In spite of Iraq’s sovereign status in 1932, the legacy of its nonsensical creation remained: It was a patchwork quilt of quarreling and incompatible ethnic groups, tossed together by imperial powers on the outside beginning with the Sykes-Picot Treaty in 1916. The Hashemites were thrust into a position analogous to Josip Broz (Marshal Tito) in post-WWII Yugoslavia, anxiously seeking to maintain order and a semblance of unity in a country not meant to be unified in the first place. With the fall of the Hashemites in 1958, Iraq was unified by perhaps the only means that could keep its squabbling, discord-riven ethnic groups together—the iron fist of a strongman. It is therefore little surprise that megalomaniacs like Saddam or Qassem came to rule the place; the country’s origin following World War I selected for just such a state of affairs.

Iraq’s History and Its Current Story

Thus there’s a take-home message here, and it’s probably the only recognition that can engender even a semblance of mutual understanding among hawks, doves, and everyone in between in the bloodsport of the current (as of 2003-04) Iraq war debate: No matter what your views of the Iraq war, any possible resolution of the Mesopotamian morass was guaranteed to be painful, controversial, and fraught with peril, owing to the clumsy and ultimately failed machinations of British imperialists in the 1920s (and 1950s in Mossadegh-led Iran). Their actions in the region—the cobbling-together of the artificial Iraqi nation from mutually hostile ethnic groups, their treacherous duplicity in thwarting Iraqi efforts toward a promised independence, their brutal and unsuccessful suppression of popular revolts—were designed to deliberately sow internal dissension and pliancy to external rule, plans which backfired on the British in the 1920s and created the impossible situation which we encounter in Iraq today.

All three of Iraq’s three major ethnic groups were betrayed by the treachery of the British Empire. The Shiites, longing for freedom and self-rule, were suppressed and placed under the thumb of a supposed British client ruler. The Arab Sunnis, though granted a Hashemite Arab ruler of their own, were nonetheless isolated as a resented minority in a land they ruled only through the scheming of British empire-builders. Most of all the Kurds, desperately yearning for their own state, were dispersed in four different countries by the cupidity of British and French imperialists anxious to carve up the resource-rich region into an unstable conglomerate of artificial oil-rich states ripe for picking by Europeans, who would soon see all their carefully-laid plans dashed by the damage of the Second World War. It is we, the inhabitants of the present post-imperialist day and age (including latter-day, post-imperialist Americans and British, who I might add have behaved quite professionally in Iraq), who have reaped the bitter fruit and are paying the dear price for British and French imperialistic transgressions in the Middle East during the 20^th century. It is that legacy which enabled a thug like Saddam Hussein to rise to power, and which has now saddled the US and its Coalition allies with the seemingly impossible burden of engendering a unified democracy out of a country that the British intended to be divided and mutually hostile in the first place.

There’s not going to be a “clinical” solution to the Iraq problem because of this history; it’s going to be bloody and messy no matter how we go about it. It may involve a partition, or perhaps a “pseudo-partition” with the country remaining officially unified, yet divided de facto into quasi-independent regions corresponding to the original three Ottoman provinces. It is difficult to imagine the Kurds, in particular, settling for anything less than full autonomy, with or without Kirkuk within their zone of control; they’ve been sold down the river too many times to trust the powers that be. No matter what my own opinions of the Bush Administration and its war in Iraq, I’ve come to recognize how difficult the Iraq challenge would be for anybody in office, owing to the way the country originated in the first place in the aftermath of World War I. We could not simply have ignored Iraq; Saddam’s belligerent recklessness was entangling the US in the Persian Gulf in very uncomfortable ways, and this had to stop, for our own security as well as that of the region as a whole. I’m still just not sure that the Iraq war itself was the right approach.

Many hawks portrayed the Iraq predicament as offering two binary, black-and-white choices: either we go to war and get rid of Saddam, or we just sit around and let the problem fester. But there are many options available for effecting change short of war itself. As regards the garrisoning of troops in Saudi Arabia and the misdirected effect of the Iraqi sanctions—the two main motivators for al-Qaeda’s growth and recruitment during the 1990s, as discussed above—I fail to see why sensible reforms in these areas were unrealizable in the absence of war. The American strike on al-Qaeda and the Taliban had close to unanimous domestic support and tremendous international cooperation, even an understanding (if not approbation) in many Muslim countries that the action was being taken in self-defense, to break the back of al-Qaeda with its dangerous, fanatical ideology and threats throughout the world. The war in Iraq, by contrast, has been a source of heated controversy to an extent not seen since Vietnam—perhaps even worse, considered the strategic importance of the region.

In the priority list of Bush’s war on terrorism, the continuing fight against al-Qaeda is by far the most important, since that organization (unlike Saddam’s Iraq) is undeterrable and uncontainable. Yet combating al-Qaeda effectively is chiefly a matter of quality intelligence and sustained focus, not bigger and badder missile delivery systems. Has the US been diverted from this ongoing, crucially important operation by Iraq? Have precious intelligence resources (including translators) been directed away from nabbing al-Qaeda bigwigs, to capturing Baathist operatives in Iraq? Have foreign countries, offended by the heavy-handedness of many of the most hawkish American Iraq war proponents, become more reluctant to participate in counterterrorism operations against al-Qaeda? Worst of all, have we ironically created a new base for al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, to replace the one the organization lost in Afghanistan? Sometimes I wonder if the Iraq war played directly into the hands of Usama bin Laden. After all, Iraq’s secular leader and government—Saddam and his Baathists—were forcibly removed, a longtime aspiration of al-Qaeda, and fundamentalist elements appear to be particularly strong in the power vacuum that has ensued. Moderate Muslim voices have been newly muffled in the wake of regional indignation at the Iraq invasion—especially in the absence of WMD’s—and Iraq itself has become a violent hub of terrorism and insurgency, prime conditions for al-Qaeda. If anything, bin Laden would much prefer Iraq to Afghanistan as a center of operations, since it would allow him to command better resources in the heart of the region (the Arab Middle East itself) that he most wants to affect, in close proximity against his most bitter enemy—the Saudi royal family.

Whatever the advisability of invading Iraq in the first place, the US is stuck there now. The occupation of that country must be self-limited and there must be no permanent bases there, or we’ll be stuck with the same perception problem that plagued us in Saudi Arabia. There are gradual improvements in the place, but above all there must be a restoration of basic infrastructure. Even more importantly, there must be a sense among the Iraqis that they are pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, that it is not being manipulated from the outside for the gain of US construction contractors, oil interests, or military higher-ups with dreams of a long-term military presence. As we’ve come to learn since Sept. 11, a sense of humiliation is the chief wellspring for acts of terrorism, not poverty or even lack of democracy itself. Above all, we have to convince the Iraqis that we won’t commit the same blunders as the British in the 1920s, proclaiming a desire for regional independence yet then turning around to install our own de facto rule over the region.

Although there are many ways in which the Iraq occupation is souring, I am nonetheless quite impressed and heartened by the professionalism of the American and British soldiers and their coalition allies. I constantly hear of or read about cases when a GI helps provide medical care to a young Iraqi child in need, or give directions and extra cash to a pilgrim visiting a Shiite shrine, or protect a group of children heading to school in the morning. Even in the violent Sunni triangle, rife with anti-Americanism and teeming with raids of suspected guerrilla hideouts and questionable tactics to ferret out guerrillas, there seems to be a diligent resolve to minimize hardship for the Iraqi people as a whole. This contrasts starkly with the indiscriminately reprehensible treatment of civilians doled out and approved by imperial powers earlier in the 20^th century. I don’t think that Iraq will be an unqualified success no matter what; its creation in 1919, and the way in which it throws together mutually hostile ethnic groups, presage a bloody struggle of one stripe or another for control. Yet perhaps the transition to a more workable government and set of institutions in Iraq can be smoothed somewhat, provided that the country’s infrastructure is repaired and its people become self-sufficient again. We should settle for a limited success if we can manage it, and then leave the Iraqi country to the Iraqi people—no strings attached, no permanent bases, no coerced interests of foreign oil companies in the Iraqi pipelines. The more that we, in the US, ourselves become self-sufficient in regard to energy—by better conserving our fossil fuels and promoting the rapid growth of renewable alternatives—the sooner we will be able to disengage from the thicket of Persian Gulf politics altogether, and leave the people in the region to govern themselves.

-- Wes Ulm

*Incidentally, the atrocious British behavior in Iraq, coupled with similar outrages in Ireland, India, Jamaica, Australia, and elsewhere, has put the lie to the canard, newly fashionable in modern times even in the works of respectable historians like Niall Ferguson, that the British Empire was a benign, benevolent entity at root. I’ve been what one might call an “Anglophile” for many years and I still respect the extent to which the British introduced parliamentary institutions and the rule of law in many of their former colonies, but this dissemination was not nearly as successful as many believe—witness Uganda, Iraq, and Egypt, among many other examples. The same argument about “benevolent imperialism” could be proferred of the French and other imperialistic powers, who built much infrastructure, spread education, and did some good in their colonized lands but regarded them chiefly as natural resource treasure troves for their ambitions elsewhere. Many try to claim that the British Empire was far more decent and just than its European and Asian contemporaries, but the atrocities in Iraq among others demonstrate that the British were just as capable of criminal brutality as their co-imperialists in Germany, Japan, and Belgium at their own nadirs. To say that the British were somehow more “restrained” as imperialists is to proclaim naivete—the British could appear perfectly affable if the natives laid down their arms, but if the natives put up a fight, the British could become just as bloodthirsty and brutish as other frustrated imperialists, as the examples above demonstrate.

Indeed, the bitterness felt by many third-world denizens at this underrecognized history explains much of the cultural gap between the First and Third World regarding World War II. For Americans and Europeans, the cruelty of the Axis Powers during the 1940s was uniquely evil. To many in the Third World, the bestial brutality of the Axis countries was merely subjecting Europe to the unmitigated injustices which Africa and Asia had been suffering at the hands of the French, British, Belgians, and other members of the Allies for centuries. Indeed, German terror bombing of Warsaw, Rotterdam, and London is justifiably condemned across the world today, but as can be seen, the British themselves initiated the age of terror bombing against the Iraqis—one reason that countries in the Third World, rising in power today, scoff at the pretense of British or French moral superiority vis-a-vis the Germans and Japanese. The Western European powers were just as prone to invoke the indiscriminate iron fist against innocents when they felt a good jolly show of force to be useful in the intimidation of restless natives.

For Further Reading

I’d wholeheartedly recommend Charles Tripp’s excellent A History of Iraq which, while flawed, provides a concise yet comprehensive survey of Iraq’s history under British rule and the consequences of that policy today. An especially accessible and valuable resource on the topic of British policy in Iraq can be found online: http://www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/history/britishindex.htm

There’s a well-collated collection of primary sources and seasoned commentaries here which are well worth reading.

Also, Eric Margolis’s 1998 article, The Wildmen of Baghdad, delves into Iraq’s tortuous history in excellent detail and presciently anticipates the current problems facing that nation.

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