The
Arabs, a people generally defined by a common Arabic
language, having been awakened with the new faith of
Islam by Mohammed, gained control of Syria, Mesopotamia,
Persia and Egypt in AD 640, took Roman Africa in AD 700
and reached Spain in AD 711, when they overthrew the
Germanic kingdom set up by the West Goths. The Arab
realm then stood as the more advanced third component of
a triangulated non-Asian world culture consisting of
Arab, Byzantine and collapsed West Roman roots.
Mesopotamia, a Greek word that means the land
between the rivers, the Tigris and Euphrates, meeting at
the cradle of Western civilization, known today as Iraq,
was and is inhabited predominantly by these Arab tribes.
Iraq is an Arabic word that appears in the Koran and has
been a geographical term for the Mesopotamia area
throughout the Muslim era. Iraq became a target of
rivalry between the Persian and Ottoman empires, both
Islamic, for almost five centuries beginning around
1500. Shah Ismail, the Safavid ruler of Persia, put Iraq
under Persian occupation in 1508. The Ottoman Sultan
Selim I regained control of Iraq in 1514, after the
battle of Jaldiran. In 1529, Iraq was reoccupied by
Persia, but was retaken by the Ottoman Sultan Suleyman
the Magnificent in 1543.
This recurring
tug-of-war over Mesopotamia reflected the precarious and
changing military balance between the two Islamic
empires on the one hand, and the administrative
difficulty in occupying alien lands on the other.
Neither could decisively defeat the other and achieve
permanent military control over Iraq; nor could either
establish effective, lasting administrative control over
the local Arabic population when in possession of it.
Since the rivalry could not be resolved through military
means, a political solution was attempted in the first
treaty between the two empires through the Amassia
Treaty of 1555. The treaty endured for 20 years with the
region remaining an Ottoman province until 1623, when it
was again occupied by Persia. However, in 1638, the
Ottoman Sultan Murad IV drove the Persians out of Iraq
by capturing Baghdad. In 1639, the Treaty of Zuhab was
signed establishing a peace and defining the border
between the two empires.
With this background,
conflict between the two Islamic empires was contained
in a frontier zone and manifested in shifting tribal
allegiances, inter-tribal conflicts and avenging raids.
In the Treaty of Zuhab, the frontier zone was over 100
miles wide, between the Zagros Mountains in the east and
the Tigris and Shatt al-Arab rivers in the west. While
its role in containing armed conflict was short-lived,
the Treaty of Zuhab was significant because it became
the basis for future treaties and established the
framework for future disputes over legitimate borders.
By 1730, the two empires were again engaged in
full-scale war, with the possession of Iraq a key focus
of conflict. A treaty in 1746 between the two empires
re-established the century-old 1639 Zuhab boundaries,
affirming them as points of reference of future
negotiations and foci of future conflicts. A common
Islamic culture did not unit the nations of the Middle
East any more than a common Christian culture prevented
war among the nations of Europe, a historical fact that
refutes the current doctrine of a clash of
religion-based civilizations that threatens world order.
Geopolitics beyond religious bounds was and remains the
controlling factor in world armed conflicts.
Enter the West By the 19th century,
British imperialist expansion in the region had
transformed the Ottoman/Persian power balance and
changed the geopolitical nature of the conflict. During
the 17th and 18th centuries, British imperialist
interests had pushed back in succession Portuguese,
Dutch and French commercial and political penetration of
the Middle East. By 1820, Britain had turned the Persian
Gulf into a British lake and had begun to focus its
attention on Ottoman Iraq and Persia in its efforts to
protect British India against threats from European
imperialist rivalry, particularly expansionist Czarist
Russia, to develop a secure line of communication and
commerce between British India and the Britain Isles via
the Middle East, and to expand commercial markets for
British trade in the region.
This all came to a
head as war erupted in Europe. In the course of World
War I, British forces invaded what is now southern Iraq
in late 1914 as part of Britain's offensive against the
Ottoman Empire (which later collapsed after having
suffered the misfortune of being on the losing side of
the war). By mid 1914, a stalemate had developed on the
Western Front between Allied forces and those of the
Central Powers. Following the initial free-flowing
operations, the opposing sides found themselves facing
each other along a line of defensive trenches that
stretched from Switzerland to the Belgian coast. The
effective defense of positional warfare forced
policymakers in both opposing camps to find new ways to
prosecute a war that threatened to drag on without end.
Under these circumstances, the need for an alternative
approach was becoming pressing before continuing heavy
casualties without the promise of victory would begin to
threaten the internal security of the opponent
governments.
Forcing the
Dardanelles On the Central Powers side, Germany,
the ultra-conservative lead member, was pushed to help
Lenin, the detested Bolshevik, to return from exile in
Switzerland through Germany in a sealed train to Russia
to lead a communist revolution that, if successful,
would withdraw Russia, a member of the Allied Nations,
from the war between capitalist powers. On the Allied
side, the search for a strategic alternative was
encouraged by the pride of the British in their
invincible sea power. With the German High Seas Fleet
contained in the North Sea, the possibility of launching
naval attacks on the enemy was particularly appealing to
the British First Lord of the Admiralty, through the
hawkish imperialist persona of Winston Churchill. Eager
to use unmatched British naval resources to maximum
advantage against land powers, Churchill advanced a
series of provocative proposals, among them a sea
assault on the Dardanelles, the nearly 50-kilometer-long
strait separating the Aegean Sea from the Sea of
Marmara, which at the Narrows was less than two
kilometers wide. The object was to drive an overwhelming
naval force into the Sea of Marmara and capture
Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, which
on October 29, 1914, had the foolish audacity to ally
itself with Germany and the Central Powers against
Britain and the Allied Nations. For the Ottomans, the
alliance with the Central Powers was a geopolitical
natural, since Britain, France and Czarist Russia had
been the Western powers that, in the Crimean War, had
most recently taken less-than-honorable actions to
dismember the Ottoman Empire.
The Crimean War
(1854-56), like so many of the later Ottoman conflicts
with Europe, was instigated not by the Ottomans but by
inter-European rivalry. Czarist Russia, Westernized by
Peter the Great (1682-1725), was primarily interested in
territory as part of a quest for warm-water ports to the
Mediterranean Sea. Throughout the 17th and 18th
centuries, Russia had been gradually annexing Muslim
states in Central Asia. By 1854, Russia found itself
edging toward the shores of the Black Sea. Anxious to
annex territories in Eastern Europe, particularly the
Ottoman provinces of Moldavia and Walachia (now in
modern Moldova and Romania), the Russians forced a war
on the Ottoman Empire on the pretext that the Ottomans
had granted Catholic France, rather than Greek Orthodox
Russia, the right to protect Christian sites in the Holy
Land, which the Ottomans then controlled.
The
Crimean War was unique in Ottoman history in that the
conflict was not motivated, managed or even influenced
by Ottoman policy or interests. The war was a European
conflict fought on Ottoman territory, with Britain and
France allying with the Ottomans in order to protect
their own lucrative economic concessions in the region
from Russian infringement. The war ended badly for the
Russians, with unfavorable terms in the Paris Peace of
1856, but the Ottomans as victors fared even worse. From
that point onward, the Ottoman Dominion fell under
direct European domination and earned the derisive label
as "the sick man of Europe". The Crimean War marked the
decline in Ottoman morale and self-respect. In 1914, 58
years later, the former European rivals of Britain and
Russia were united in a world war to once again threaten
the Ottoman Empire.
Europeans, for their part,
no longer saw, as they had three centuries earlier, the
Ottoman state as an equal force that could manipulate
intra-European rivalry to enhance Ottoman geopolitical
advantage, but as a pliant victim that could be
manipulated for larger European geopolitical purposes.
This Eurocentric geopolitics permeated beyond Ottoman
territories, throughout the whole world, especially in
the final decades of dynastic China, and in most of Asia
and Africa.
Constantinople (now known as
Istanbul), which stands guard on the Bosphorus, a narrow
waterway into the Black Sea, was viewed by Churchill as
being vulnerable to attack by sea. Such naval actions
had precedents. In 1807 a small British naval squadron
had forced the Narrows only to be marooned and
eventually had to retreat before it could attack
Constantinople. As recently as the Italian-Turkish War
of 1911-12, an Italian force had attacked the
Dardanelles and penetrated as far as the defenses of the
Narrows. Now, an invincible British navy would bring
these promising naval operations to successful
conclusion. Even before the Ottoman Empire entered the
war on October 13, 1914, the possibility of a joint
Greek-Russian assault on the Dardanelles had been
canvassed. Once hostilities began, Churchill wasted no
time ordering a naval bombardment of the forts guarding
the Narrows. This operation, carried out before Britain
formally declared war on the Ottoman Empire, reminded
the Ottoman Turks of the threat to the Dardanelles, and
impelled them to seek German help to improve its
defenses, especially by the laying of sea mines in the
Narrows.
Churchill first urged a naval attack on
the Dardanelles at the meeting of the British War
Council in London on November, 1914, but his brash naval
war plan was rejected. Pre-war studies had indicated
that such an operation would be too risky and for no
strategic purpose, since Ottoman forces were no threat
to British interests in the region. The issue was soon
brought back to the fore by the military stalemate on
the Western Front. The Ottoman Turks' advance northwards
in the Caucasus caused panicky Czarist Russia to
urgently appeal to her Western allies for counter action
to relieve the pressure. The need turned out to be
fleeting since Russian forces were able to drive the
Turkish advances back without help. But these events
provided impetus for Churchill's precarious plan of a
naval attack on Ottoman Turkey. The tempting idea of
inducing, with a spectacular British naval victory, the
Balkan states newly separated from Ottoman rule to join
the Allies and attack Austria-Hungary from the
southeast, never more than a wishful illusion, was also
part of Churchill’s grand strategy of naval glory. A
successful naval campaign in the Eastern Mediterranean
with minimum casualties might, moreover, encourage
opportunistic Italy to enter the war on the Allied side.
Still, no serious thoughts had been given to any
possible use of tribal Arabs against the Ottoman Turks,
for rule over the disunited Arabs was a war prize to be
won from the Ottomans. Britain was not about to
jeopardize her coveted post-war rule of the Middle East
by fanning the ugly spark of Arab nationalism.
Britain's reckless strategic calculations for
Arabic territories in the Ottoman Empire, to be
accomplished without Arab participation, were reinforced
by the promise of the limited nature of Churchill's
proposed naval action on the Dardanelles, requiring no
need for a sizable land force. Despite the strong
reservations of the commander of the Royal Navy's
Eastern Mediterranean Squadron, Churchill proposed a
naval attack in force on the forts guarding the Narrows,
a maneuver supposedly well within the ample range of the
world's unmatched naval superpower up to that time in
history. His plan, expressed with Churchillean
grandiloquence, had the irresistible attraction of not
requiring any substantial land forces for its
implementation at a time when military manpower was
emerging as the decisive factor on the western front.
Nor would it diminish Britain's position of naval
strength in the vital North Sea against the German
fleet, since only surplus older battleships on the verge
of obsolescence would be used against the second-rate
Ottoman military devoid of a navy. The British War
Council approved Churchill's proposal on January 15,
1915. Just as President George W Bush, in 2003, trapped
by overzealous, hawkish neo-conservative advisors who
subscribed to the fantasy that Iraqis would welcome US
liberators with flowers and hugs, sold Congress on the
ill-advised invasion of Iraq by claiming not to need any
sizable force to occupy Iraq for long periods, Churchill
in 1915 was trapped by his blind faith in the myth of
naval power replacing the need for land troops for
imperialist conquest. Churchill forgot that while the
Battle of Trafalgar won by Lord Nelson at sea might have
saved Britain from French invasion, it was the Battle of
Waterloo won by Duke Wellington on land that finally
defeated Napoleon.
In 1915, in the sea campaign
against the Ottoman Empire as planned by Churchill, the
Royal Navy, supplemented with ships of her French ally,
with a total of 247 floating cannons, was supposed to
destroy the Ottoman defense of 150 land guns positioned
over 40 bases along the Narrows, blast its way through
the Dardanelles, the Sea of Marmara and then the Narrows
with Nelsonian daring, reducing the defending forts to
rubble as it went. Then, anchoring in the shadow of
Constantinople, its sheer invincible presence and threat
of destructive navy cannons trained on Topkapi Palace
would induce panic in the Ottoman court and cow the
Ottoman government into surrender. The flanks of Germany
and Austria-Hungary would then be exposed and with the
sea lanes to the Black Sea opened, Czarist Russia could
be supplied with much-needed munitions, and the Czar's
rejuvenated massive armies would steamroller westward
into Berlin, breaking the stalemate on the Western
Front. A similar strategy had worked in China in 1840,
when, faced with stiff Chinese resistance in the
southern coast, the British fleet steamed north to
threaten Peking and forced the Qing court to negotiate
an unequal treaty that yielded, among other war prizes,
the British colony of Hong Kong. The navy campaign on
the Dardanelles was to be Churchill's Trafalgar.
When, with Churchill's urging, the British War
Council reversed its earlier plan to send even the 29th
Division to the East Mediterranean campaign; it was
decided to deploy to Mudros on the Aegean island of
Lemnos untested Dominion troops from Australia and New
Zealand. The French government, meanwhile, had also
decided to deploy to Mudros a specially composed
division of new recruits. All these troops were intended
as garrison forces which might occupy the forts (and
later Constantinople) after the "shock and awe" naval
bombardments had been successfully completed in short
order. Since an amphibian assault on Gallipoli was not
envisaged in the war plans of the naval campaign through
the Dardanelles, this Allied Mediterranean Expeditionary
Force, to be commanded by General Sir Ian Hamilton, was
not adequately manned, nor its troops trained for heavy
combat.
By the time Hamilton arrived in the
Eastern Mediterranean on March 17, 1915, the slow
progress of the naval operations had raised doubts about
Churchill's plan of easy victory by naval means alone.
The Ottoman land bases with 150 guns dispersed over 40
well-protected forts were largely immune from naval
bombardment. In addition to land bases, the strait was
protected by some 610 mines set into deep water in the
Narrows. And two underwater nets against submarines had
been set. Pushed by an impatient Churchill who demanded
quick action from London, a heroic attempt to subdue the
forts and incapacitate their guns guarding the
intermediate defenses was made on March 18 by the
British fleet with French support, before the sea mines
were cleared by minesweepers whose operation had been
hampered and delayed by effective Ottoman gun fire. The
sea assault proved disastrous when six of the16 capital
ships taking part struck mines, and three sank, carrying
700 sailors to their death. The sea mines remained
insurmountable for the British naval force.
The disastrous assault on
Gallipoli Within four days, Hamilton, the supreme
commander on the spot, had to shift the emphasis from a
predominantly naval to a land operation, to launch an
amphibious assault on Gallipoli, a 50-mile long
peninsula in the European part of Ottoman Turkey,
extending southwestward between the Aegean Sea and the
Dardanelles, to use British troops to disarm the Ottoman
guns to let the British fleet through. The result was
the infamous Gallipoli campaign. It was a change of war
plan approved by a desperate Churchill who refused to
admit the failure of his foolhardy faith in naval power
and rationalized that Ottoman resistance to an
amphibious landing had nevertheless been greatly
weakened by earlier British naval bombardment. British
prestige had to be preserved with bulldog tenacity. The
Gallipoli campaign turned out to be a military failure
costly in human lives. But the damage to British
prestige was decidedly greater.
Just like US
President George W Bush's disastrous occupation plans of
Iraq, the disastrous outcome of Gallipoli was
predetermined by the strategic error of not having
enough troops available for the task at hand. Hamilton
launched the amphibian invasion campaign with five
divisions against a roughly comparable Ottoman force
that enjoyed the advantage of operating on interior
lines. The rough parity was sustained as the campaign
progressed with 13 divisions of the Triple Entente
(Britain, France and Russia) eventually facing 14
Ottoman divisions. The half-hearted British approach was
dictated by Churchill's faulty premise that the
objective could be attained by the navy with only a
small land force, and with London viewing the Ottoman
front as a crazy idea of an overzealous but politically
astute hawk, and as an insignificant side show hardly
worth any significant sacrifice in manpower and
resources even after July 1915. This attitude ensured
that the Entente build-up was always too little, too
late to secure more than a foothold on the landing on
the narrow peninsula. Hamilton, saddled with undeserved
blame, was replaced by Sir Charles Munro, who withdrew
from the area on January 9, 1916. Just like the
desperate British retreat from Dunkirk in World War II,
the evacuation from Gallipoli was hailed by British
propaganda as having been brilliantly executed, albeit
the campaign that should have prevented the need to
retreat itself was not. Wrongheaded leadership on the
part of Churchill played a key part in the Entente
failure, and many men, inadequately trained and poorly
led, who nevertheless fought bravely, mostly Dominion
troops from Australia and New Zealand, were sacrificed
in futile attacks on strong Ottoman positions.
The Gallipoli campaign had no significant effect
on the outcome of the war, which could only be resolved
where the main forces of the opponents confronted each
other on the western front and finally not until the
United States entered the war on the side of the Allied
Nations on April 6, 1917. And the prospect of a Balkan
coalition forming to lead a mighty offensive from the
southeast was illusory, if only because of the pitiful
state of the Balkan militias. Moreover, there was no
certainty that the Ottoman Turks would necessarily have
capitulated had their capital come under threat from
Allied naval forces. In pursuit of Churchill's hawkish
chimera, 120,000 British and 27,000 French troops became
casualties in the first months of landing. For the
Ottomans, whose casualties probably numbered as many as
250,000, including 87,000 dead, it was the beginning of
a process of national revival. The Ottoman hero at
Gallipoli, Mustafa Kemal, would eventually become the
founding president of the Republic of Turkey, and would
later be bestowed the name Ataturk (meaning Father of
the Turks).
The beginnings of the Jewish
state It was the disaster at Gallipoli that forced
the British to accept the idea that an Arab revolt would
be useful against the Ottoman Turks. The British then
disingenuously began promoting Arab nationalism as a
device against the Ottoman Empire, posing as progressive
friends who had come to liberate the Arabs from Ottoman
oppression. It was the forerunner of a US policy three
decades later after the Second World War to promote
fundamentalist separatism and bogus democracy as devices
against global communism. In late 1915 in the
Anglo-Hejaz treaty, Britain promised that the Middle
East would become an Arab state. In 1916, T E Lawrence,
the famous Lawrence of Arabia, joined Arab forces under
Faisal al-Hussein, third son of Hussein ibn Ali, the
Sharif of Mecca, in their revolt against the Ottoman
Empire. Faisal would later become Faisal I of Iraq. In
the same year, the secret Sykes-Picot treaty between
Britain and France divided post-war Middle East between
the two imperialist powers. Britain would protect Egypt
and the newly created state of Saudi Arabia, France
would protect the Syrian-Lebanon state. Palestine would
be international, with a new Jewish state earmarked
there in the future.
Geopolitically, to prevent
an alliance between the 56,000 Jews in Palestine and the
well-established and influential Jewish population in
Germany, the British, with the Balfour Declaration in
1917 agreed to advocate a Jewish homeland in Palestine.
Insulating infiltration of German influence into the
Middle East through the more liberal German Jews was a
factor in British policy towards Palestine, which
quietly favored immigration of Russian and Slavic Jews
into the region. In addition, the possibilities of a
pro-British Jewish state in Palestine to help counter
Arab nationalism in the Middle East were not idle
thoughts at No 10, Downing Street. The British never
seriously contemplated effective resistance from Arabs
to a Jewish state in Palestine. Arab nationalism was not
a significant consideration in the initial geopolitics
behind the Balfour Declaration. A Jewish state in
Palestine under British Mandate did not conflict with
British plans because the British never intended to give
back the Ottoman Arab provinces ,to the Arabs. Still, it
took another world war and a horrifying Holocaust which
essentially destroyed the liberal influence of the
German Jews, to finally bring the new Jewish state into
reality.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement In
the late stage of the multi-front, four-year-long First
World War, Britain and France had secretly reached the
Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, with the acquiescence of
Czarist Russia, to partition the Arab provinces of the
Ottoman Dominion between the two Western powers. The
secret agreement spelled out the division of Ottoman
Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine into various French
and British-administered areas. The agreement conflicted
directly with pledges already given by the British to
the Hashemite leader Hussein ibn Ali, the Sharif of
Mecca, who had been persuaded to lead an Arab revolt in
the Hejaz against the Ottoman rulers on the
understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive
much of the territory won. The Sykes-Picot Agreement,
the Paris Peace Conference and the Cairo Conference were
examples of the political hegemony of the European
imperialist powers, which shifted borders and annexed
territories, inventing dependency through mandates and
protectorates. The British had persuaded the Arabs to
rise up against the Ottoman rulers. The British high
commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, corresponded
with the Sharif of Mecca, promising an independent Arab
state in return for fighting the Ottoman Turks. Unaware
of the secret Sykes-Picot agreement, the Sharif of Mecca
initiated a revolt against Ottoman rule in 1916 with the
help of British advisers, training and munitions, and
proclaimed himself king of the Hejaz until Mecca fell in
1924 to ibn Saud of Nejd, descendant of the puritanical
Wahhabi rulers, who laid the basis of the present Saudi
Arabia kingdom.
Wahhabis are a puritanical Saudi
Islamic sect founded by Mohammed ibn-Abd-al-Wahhab
(1699?1792), which regards all other sects as heretical.
His life gave birth to the term "Wahhabi". Mohammed Ibn
Abdul Wahhab Najdi was supported by the British who were
looking for dissidents to weaken the Islamic Caliphate
from within itself. The Wahhabis took Mecca with the
help of the British in 1924 and bombarded the Shrine of
the Holy Prophet in Medina which they took in 1931. And
in 1932, the Wahhabis founded the state of Saudi Arabia.
By the mid-20th century, Wahhabism had spread throughout
the Arabian Peninsula, and it is the official religion
of the Saudi Arabian kingdom. Oil was struck in Saudi
Arabia in 1936 and commercial production began during
the Second World War, in which Saudi Arabia remained
neutral until the end when it became a member of the
Allies against the Axis powers. Oil changed the
geopolitical importance of Saudi Arabia and the Middle
East.
The disclosure of the secret Sykes-Picot
agreement provided indisputable evidence of British
diplomatic duplicity. The Arabs learned about the
agreement only in 1917, the year of the Balfour
Declaration, when the new Soviet Union published
diplomatic documents from the Czarist archives. The
secret agreement deprived the Arabs of the right to rule
their own territories, newly won with blood. Most of the
Middle East came under British and French control. The
vision of a free and united Arab realm had been a
manipulated illusion perpetrated by Western imperialism.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement set the scene for a century of
border conflicts that continue today. The Paris Peace
Conference in 1919 legitimized the imperialist
partitions. Britain was entrusted with mandate powers
for Iraq and Palestine, while Syria and Lebanon came
under the French mandate. Under Article 22, the League
of Nations stated: "Territories inhabited by peoples
unable to stand themselves would be entrusted to
advanced nations until such time as the local population
can handle matters." Peoples unable to stand themselves
were apparently quite able to die for the advanced
nations in a war of imperialist rivalry, the prize for
which was the right to dominate these same people.
Britain occupies Iraq By 1917, British
occupation of Iraq began. In the aftermath of the war
and the subsequent dismantling of the Ottoman Empire,
the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia was divided
between France and Britain in accordance with the secret
Sykes-Picot Treaty. After the war, Britain was given
formal control of a territory of 171,600 square miles
known as Iraq under a League of Nations mandate, despite
widespread popular resentment from the then local
population of 7 million, which has since grown to 25
million. Iraq inherited 1,472 kilometers of the old
Ottoman-Persian border, 700 kilometers of which passes
through Kurdistan, a border resulting from diplomatic
intrigue that dated back to the Zuhab settlement in
1639. The mandate encompasses three former Ottoman
wilayas, or administrative districts: Mosul, Baghdad and
Basra, which historically included Kuwait. The British,
being ever conscious of the need for naval bases, carved
out Kuwait as a separate nation, whose legitimacy has
never been accepted by Iraq. Since 1779, the British
East India Company, backed by British naval power, had
exercised de facto control over Kuwait.
As World
War I ended, Britain and France both sent troops to
enforce their claims and peace conferences subsequently
confirmed this wartime division. Palestine was the
exception, becoming part of the British zone and not, as
was originally planned, an international zone. Britain
merged the Ottoman provinces Baghdad, Basra and Mosul
into a new state of Iraq, inhabited by three different
groups of people: Shi'ites, Sunnis and Kurds. Under
British rule, the new Iraqis were subjected to more
taxes than under Ottoman rule and pilfering of Iraqi
national wealth occurred on a scale that the Ottoman
Empire never contemplated.
Arabs in southern
Iraq, having helped the British against the Ottoman
Turks in World War I, began resistance in 1920 against
the British, who failed to honor their promise to end
British occupation after the defeat of the Ottoman
Empire. To crush the Iraqi national liberation movement,
Winston Churchill, as British secretary of state for
war, introduced new military tactics with massive
bombing of villages as the original "shock and awe"
doctrine, revived eight decades later by the US
military. Churchill ordered the use of mustard gas
against the Iraqi civilian population, stating: "I do
not understand the squeamishness about the use of gas. I
am strongly in favor of using poison gas against
uncivilized tribes." Churchill argued that the military
use of gas was a "scientific expedient" and it "should
not be prevented by the prejudices of those who do not
think clearly". Whole villages were bombed and gassed.
There was wholesale slaughter of civilians. Men, women
and children fleeing from gassed villages in panic were
mercilessly machine-gunned by low-flying British planes.
The Royal Air Force routinely bombed and used poison gas
against the Kurd, Sunni and Shi'ite tribes without
discrimination. President George W Bush was highly
selective when he proclaimed that the world was a better
place with Saddam Hussein removed from power because
Saddam used gas on the Iraqi Kurds. To be consistent,
history without a double standard would have to say that
the world would have been a better place had Churchill
been removed from power. According to Churchill, Bush in
calling Saddam evil for gassing Kurdish civilians merely
"did not think clearly." Needless to say, no regime
change was imposed on Britain.
Notwithstanding
the ruthless British response to Iraqi nationalist
resistance with overwhelming military force, Britain
soon was forced to face the inescapable fact that it
would be impossible to effectively control the Arab
country by military means. To avoid heavy casualties to
the occupational force, the British were forced to
restrict their control to only critical neighborhoods in
key urban centers. This in turn allowed more attacks of
British occupation forces. Britain then decided to form
a pro-British Iraqi government as a proxy to protect
British interests, just as the US is doing now in Iraq.
The delineation of Iraq's borders was framed by
Britain's objective of securing communication between
British India and British Egypt. British commitment in
the Balfour Declaration that the British government
"views with favor" the establishment of a Jewish state
in Palestine provided the context for additional
political and strategic calculations. Britain aimed at
turning her war-time obligations to her war-time Arab
allies into a chain of proxy states across post-war
northern Arabia ruled by branches of the pro-British
House of Hashim under the protection and control of
Britain. When it became clear that Iraq would not have a
common border with the newly established communist
Soviet Union, conflict between Britain and France over
Mosul surfaced for lack of a common ideological enemy
and was resolved by Britain's agreeing to grant France
10% of future oil revenue from the region. In exchange,
British-controlled Iraq would be guaranteed access to
water from the upper Tigris in French-controlled areas
for use in the south and for irrigation needed for the
cultivation of agricultural produce, such as tobacco,
timber and grain, grown mostly in the north.
An
unnatural mismatch between Arabic/Iraqi history and the
political borders imposed by European powers to resolve
European rivalry affected Iraq's relationship with its
surrounding neighbors as well as distant Western powers.
Some 12 states were created in the Arabian Peninsula and
22 states divided the Arab world as a result of World
Wars I and II. The borders between these states were so
contested by local tribal inhabitants that peace had
been maintained only by the creation of neutral zones.
Justice was frequently preempted by arbitrary
geopolitical decisions imposed by the side most able to
enforce a solution militarily. This militaristic
geopolitical game continues today.
Next: Iraqi Geopolitics After World
War II
Henry C K Liu is
chairman of the New York-based Liu Investment Group.
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