Baghdad, British and Bush:
The Same Old Deadly Song
30 March 2004
By O. Max Gardner III
It's hot. It's deadly.
And it's most certainly lethal. It's Iraq and it's summer.
And, as Summer temperatures reach 105 degrees each day, the Shiite Arabs
from Basra, the Kurds from Mosul, and the Sunni Arabs from Baghdad resume
their deadly dance that has characterized the history antiquity's "cradle
of civilization." Today it is American troops that are trapped in
the cross-hairs of this lethal conflict. The Americans, however,
are only the most recent victims of Iraq's modern political history, which
has been marked by nationalist fervor, ethnic uprisings, tribal conflicts,
palace treacheries, warfare and deadly oppression.
It all began hundreds of years
ago. More recently, it was the start of World War I when Great Britain
first occupied Mesopotamia, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The
Ottomans had allied with Germany, and Britain justified its 1914 invasion
as a move to protect its oil fields in neighboring Iran and its access
to Persian Gulf shipping lanes to India. The British led an Arab
Revolt against the Ottoman Turks, encouraged by the British military liaison-officer
T.E. Lawrence (better known today as Lawrence of Arabia). And to
court Arabs throughout the Middle East, the British vowed to end three
centuries of Ottoman rule, which had grown corrupt, repressive and economically
stifling. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors
or enemies but as liberators," proclaimed General Stanley Maude, commander
of the British forces, as his troops triumphantly marched into Baghdad
in 1917.
In 1920, the newly formed and
now defunct League of Nations granted the British a "mandate" over Iraq
that amounted to a kind of pre-independence trusteeship. It gave
Britain the right to raise and spend revenues, to appoint officials and
to make and enforce laws. As nationalist protest increased throughout
Iraq one leader, Imam Shirazi of Karbala, issued a fatwa, or religious
decree, that British rule violated Islamic law. He called for a jihad,
or holy war, against the British-and for once Sunnis, Shiites and rival
sheikdoms united in a common cause. The armed rebellion spread from
Karbala and Najaf, in the center, to the south of the country, with uprisings
by the Kurds in the north as well.
The British came down hard on
the insurgents, ordering aerial bombardments, the machine gunning of rebels
and the destruction of whole towns. "The British overreaction made
things much worse," said Janet Wallach, author of the Desert Queen, a book
about one of the British Colonial rulers, Gertrude Bell. Some 6,000
Iraqis and 500 British and Indian soldiers perished before the revolt was
finally put down in October 1920.
The British were dumfounded by
the extent of the hatred for them and the religious zeal of the Iraqi resistance
fighters. Ms. Bell described the situation as follows in a letter
to her mother, "We have underestimated the fact that this country is really
an inchoate mass of tribes which can't as yet be reduced to any system.
The Turks didn't govern and we have tried to govern-and failed."
It was not long thereafter until the British public had turned against
the Colonial Office plans to run Iraq. As the Times of London put
it, "How much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor
to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration
which they never asked for and do not want?"
The same questions must be asked
today of President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfelt,
and their War Cabinet. Make no mistake about it; the footprints of
history are clear. The only safe road to Baghdad is to take the first
exit sign out of the country! |
