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Article Excerpt
The British created Iraq in 1918, confident it would become a beacon of enlightenment unto the Middle East, that it would nurture moderate Arab regimes, that its monarchs would serve as peacemakers between Zionists and Arabs in Palestine, and that it would anchor the region in the wider interests of a far-flung empire. The experiment persisted for forty years, and it failed.
The United States has occupied Iraq for more than two years now. Our stated ambition there is to "spread freedom," nurture moderate Arab regimes, act as a peacemaker between Israel and its neighbors, and anchor the region in the wider interests of American national security. Yet the lessons of Britain's failure have eluded the American promoters of Operation Iraqi Freedom, who remain strangely uncurious about Great Britain's chastening moment in the Mesopotamian sun.
Historical parallels are slippery; still, it is not often that one nation has the benefit of learning from the blunders of another so similar to it, with much the same goals, in the very same country, and within just a few decades of its own attempt. If Britain's experiment in Iraq offers a harbinger of things to come, will it take thirty-eight more years before Americans learn the same lessons?
Britain began its own adventure from a similar position of overwhelming might in the Middle East, where its armies swarmed for the first time through the crumbling Ottoman Empire. By the end of World War I, Anglo-Indian troops had captured Baghdad and Jerusalem. Although France played a role in Syria and Lebanon while an emerging Saudi Arabia remained aloof, Britannia was otherwise unchallenged in the region. Her writ extended from Egypt, ostensibly sovereign but in fact her puppet protectorate; through the new kingdoms of Iraq and Transjordan, whose monarchs she handpicked; and into Palestine, reborn by her decree as a "national home" for the world's Jews.
British rulers assumed their mastery would benefit subject peoples, possibly with divine benediction. George Nathaniel Curzon, the future foreign secretary and viceroy of India, memorably pronounced his nation's unrivaled power in 1894 as an expression of God's will. The Empire was "under Providence, the greatest instrument for good the world has seen." Speaking in Crawford, Texas, in August 2002, President George W. Bush inadvertently echoed Lord Curzon: "Our nation is the greatest force for good in history." In Britain's case, this presumption of superiority was not lost on subject races, and their resentment fanned the bonfire that ended Britain's moment.
Why did it all end so badly? From the outset, a hard choice confronted Britain's political leadership. Having occupied much of the Middle Fast, how were the British to govern it? In this instance, as in others, crucial decisions not only were based on national security and access to oil but also were influenced by personal ambition, vanity, and accident. Much that is relevant to Iraq's contemporary situation can be traced not to the needs of the people of Iraq but rather to the career ambitions of a handful of Britons.
First among them was Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson, KCIE, CMG, DSO, and MP, the forgotten territorial architect of today's Iraq. Like Curzon, Wilson was a quintessential believer. In a memoir written shortly before his death as an aging RAF gunner during the Battle of Britain, he thus characterized his credo: "Before the Great War my generation served men who believed in the righteousness of the vocation to which they had been called, and we shared their belief. They were the priests, and we were the acolytes, of a cult--Pax Britannica--for which we worked happily and, if need be, died gladly."
Six feet tall, with a commanding gait and gaze, Wilson was bred to his role. His father was an Anglican canon who became headmaster of Clifton, the boarding school that likely groomed more British generals than any other. Posted to India in 1903, at the age...
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