| |
SPEAKING FREELY
Lessons unlearned in the Middle
East
By M Iftikhar Malik
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times Online
feature that allows guest writers to have their say.
Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
To a
Westerner, it is hard to fathom why events that happened
half a century or even 1,000 years ago still hold such
significance that they dominate Arab perceptions of
Europeans and the American adventures in the Middle
East.
There were crusades in medieval times
lasting over 200 years, all aimed at "liberating"
Christianity's holiest sites from Muslim control. There
is the 20th century history of Christian Europe's
conquests of Arab land, in the dying days of the Muslim
Ottoman empire's presence in the Arab world. Though each
was unique in its own way, they all had one thing in
common: in one way or the other, they turned out to be
failures.
This is fundamentally why Arabs hold
the lore of the victory of a great Arab warrior,
Saladin, over Christian crusader Richard the Lionhearted
in the 12th century, in such awe. Memory is long, and
resentment runs deep in this part of the world. Many
Arabs put great faith in a mysterious process they call
"the forces of history". They feel Western invaders may
commit aggression in the sands of the Middle East, they
may kill thousand of Arabs and they may occupy Arab
lands for years or decades. But in the end, they all
must leave, get absorbed or get obliterated.
Of
the five Crusades, the first and the third were the most
significant. In the first, Jerusalem was captured from
the Arabs from 1095 to 1098. But widespread massacres,
sanctimony and the vicious nature of the invading forces
tainted that military victory. When the Crusaders poured
over the walls of Jerusalem, they slaughtered tens of
thousands of Arabs and Jews who remained in the city.
Streets ran ankle deep in blood, the victors celebrated
by dropping to their knees in self-congratulation and
piety.
The Christian God, they said, had guided
them to triumph. This conquest led to the establishment
of the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem, which lasted 80
years, supported by Crusader castles and fortresses
whose ruins dot the Middle East today. The construction
of those castles and monuments nearly bankrupted the
Europeans, but money for the occupation was not the only
problem. After the victory, finding men willing to stay
and populate the cities proved a daunting task. Victory
was incomplete.
Unfortunately, the promoters of
the present preemptive unilateral war in Iraq appear
never to have read history books. The violence and
carnage in Iraq today confirms that Arab nationalism
came into the 21st century as fierce as ever, with Arabs
ready to shed both their own blood and the blood of the
occupiers.
A review of British presence in the
region from the end of the 19th century to the middle of
20th century is warranted to remind us of how even the
experienced imperialists blundered badly. For Britain's
failed effort to master Iraq earlier contains a warning
to American policymakers of what to expect down the
road.
In 1915, the second year of World War I,
British columns drove confidently into was then
Mesopotamia, a remote Ottoman province. Stopping short
of Baghdad, they retreated down the Tigris to the
well-protected town of Kut, where their troops,
scandalously ill equipped, dug in. Britain was
astonished when more than 500 soldiers were killed in
skirmishes and another 500 died of poorly treated
wounds, while about 700 died of disease and
malnutrition. No one had foreseen the necessity of
providing a decent field hospital.
Does this
absence of preparation sound familiar? The Turks were
the principle foe, but they were supported by Arab
scavengers and scouts, who hung about on the horizon,
poured in to take advantage of the chaos and confusion,
picked off stragglers, and inflicted heavy damage on the
invading forces. The Arabs, improvising against an enemy
who was better trained and equipped, fought as what is
currently regarded as "guerillas", though some would
less generously call them "terrorists".
After
the war, the victorious British pasted together three
incompatible Ottoman provinces - Shi'ite, Sunni and Kurd
- into a state, to which they imparted the ancient name
of Iraq. But they had no idea how to govern it.
Britain had earlier given the Arabs solemn
pledges of independence, without mentioning that they
intended to confine that independence within imperial
limits. But as occupiers, few of the British saw reason
for any independence at all.
"The country was so
obviously unready for self-government that no one on the
spot could possibly have advocated anything ... but the
substitution of British and Turkish control," wrote one
high official from Baghdad. Another claimed
condescendingly, "The stronger the hold we are able to
keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased."
Though a laudable effort was made at what would
today be called "nation building", Iraqis rode through a
wave of resistance to the European colonialism that was
rising throughout the Arab world. By the summer of 1920,
Iraq was in open revolt.
The first postwar
killing of British troops took place in Mosul, in the
Sunni north, but disorder spread quickly to Najaf and
Karbala in the Shi'ite south. Normally antagonistic,
these two regions, despite British efforts to divide
them, bonded on the common ground of Iraqi nationalism.
The rebels specialized in hit-and-run warfare. Conceding
the cities to Britain's military power, they did not
initiate pitched battles, but instead attacked
installations throughout the countryside, undermining
colonial rule by disrupting communications and services.
Rebel casualties were about 8,500, as against 1,000 for
the British - but that was far more than London was
prepared to suffer. No less important, the rebels tied
up an army of 100,000 men, at a cost that the British
treasury could ill afford.
The uprising ended in
a compromise, in which the British with their natural
preference for "royalty" created a throne on which they
placed an Arabian chieftain. They hovered so tightly
over him, however, that few Iraqis came to think of him
as one of their own. The British built a government on
their own model, with a parliament, political parties
and a press - a government no worse than colonial
regimes elsewhere - and for nearly 40 years it reigned
over a more or less stable society. Pleased with their
achievement, the British assumed that the Iraqis were
too. One report to London noted that under British
guidance, the Iraqis had even learned to eat with knives
and forks. Yet the Iraqis' resistance to accepting the
monarchy as legitimate doomed it to eventual
destruction.
In 1942, this resistance exploded
in a pro-Axis coup. Though spread thin by the war, the
British had to divert a contingent from the Pacific,
reinforcing it with units originally deployed against
the Nazi army then advancing across North Africa. It
took a month of fierce fighting for the British to
regain control of Iraq. Baghdad's response to defeat was
an orgy of looting and killing, with the main victims
being Christians and Jews.
Restored to office,
the powers behind the king proceeded to execute officers
who had participated in the coup, confirming in Iraqi
eyes the monarchy's image as an agent of the colonial
oppression. An officer named Khairallah, cashiered by
the throne, angrily took a job as a schoolmaster. He
later adopted a nephew named Saddam Hussein, whom he
raised in his home.
By 1948, Britain, its empire
echoing the Ottoman death rattle of 30 years earlier,
had concluded that it was time to offer Iraq a new
arrangement. But throughout the Arab world, nationalists
knew that neither colonialism nor the regimes it
supported could hold on much longer. The fight against
Zionism in Palestine (nothing has since changed much)
only inflamed them further. Britain proposed to cede
some political power and cut back on the troops and
bases it maintained, but few Iraqis were willing to
accept such a deal. When a treaty foisted on Iraq's
prime minister was announced, Baghdad erupted into a
general strike. The prime minister fled into exile, and
only after thousands more vanished into prisons was calm
restored to the streets. Nothing more was heard of the
treaty, but the massacre left the public without doubt
that the dynasty had become indistinguishable from the
foreign oppressors.
The revolution took place in
July 1958, amid a period of turbulence throughout the
Middle East that included a nationalistic Arab leader's
seizure of power in Egypt, the Suez crisis and
heightened Soviet-American tensions. Headed by an army
junta, it was a bloody affair. But, unlike Nasser's, it
was far more that a military coup. After the army gunned
down the young king and his entourage in the streets,
all of Baghdad rose up. Crowds seized the most powerful
officials, killed them and dragged their bodies through
the streets. Most symbolic was the burning of the
British embassy. Though the present conquerors were not
welcomed with the flower petals that US Vice President
Dick Cheney predicted for America's forces last spring,
there was - in contrast to Baghdad today - a sense of
exultation, with banners and dancing in the streets.
But it is important to note that what Baghdad
cheered was not impending democracy or liberty - which
Bush keeps promising today. Under the British they had
those things - or at least some resemblance of them.
Instead, they cheered the freedom to pursue their own
destiny without foreign intrusion, particularly the
intrusion of a Western Christian power. Notwithstanding
the unspeakable cruelty of the regimes it produced, the
1958 revolution is still regarded by most Iraqis as a
huge leap forward. Though the Iraqis may have loathed
Saddam, he embodied their nationalist yearning. Did
Americans believe that Iraq was willing to trade him in
for a return to foreign hegemony? Such a belief, is,
without a doubt, self-deception.
History has a
strange way of repeating itself. The "axis of evil" in
Washington - made up of the Pentagon, the Jewish lobby
and the neo-conservative Christian-right - having
hijacked the White House and US foreign policy, remain
the chief proponents of the adventure of illegal and
unjustified war against a sovereign nation, and continue
steering a great nation like America down a perilous
path. Mounting casualties, the cost of occupation and
post-war reconstruction, increasingly negative public
opinion at home and abroad, not to mention the fact the
Iraqis - whether Shi'ites or Sunnis - clearly despise
the idea of being ruled by a foreign power. Open
hostility towards the occupying troops patrolling the
streets of every major Iraqi town, should be a wakeup
call for the US/British leaders to start accepting the
realities of failed misadventures in Iraq, and exit
gracefully.
The irony of the whole affair is
that of all foreign powers, Britain once again sent its
own troops to be slaughtered alongside the American
forces, in the same part of the world half a century
later - lessons of history all but forgotten!
The question then needs to be asked not if
history will repeat itself in Iraq, but at what scale.
Almost 100 US soldiers have been killed, and thousands
more wounded just since the end of "major combat", as
declared by President George W Bush. Countless Iraqis
have needlessly perished trying to resist the
occupation. Billions have been spent trying to pacify
the resistance. Billions more will be spent to
reconstruct Iraq from the ashes. As things stand today,
the outcome this time around is not likely to be any
different than that suffered by the conquerors of the
Ottoman and British empires.
Speaking Freely
is an Asia Times Online feature that allows guest
writers to have their say. Please click here if you
are interested in contributing.
|
| |
|
|
 |
|
