What Britain learned: and how America can build, in Iraq

National Review, Dec 8, 2003 by David Pryce-Jones

EXTREMISTS in Iraq, especially in the Sunni areas around Falluja and Ramadi, are blowing up convoys and armored trains, attacking police posts, and killing our soldiers and political officers, in addition to Arabs prepared to work with us. Very familiar, right? Only these events took place in the second half of 1920, at a time when the British were making a first attempt to create a modern country out of what had previously been the Ottoman Turkish provinces of Mesopotamia.

The British had invaded these provinces during the First War in order to protect India. Muslims everywhere--but particularly in India, it was feared--might be susceptible to an Ottoman call for jihad. The Turks fought a hard defensive war, but there was no jihad. By the end of 1918 the British, or the French, had control of all the Turkish provinces.

Centuries of Ottoman rule had not left much to show. Benign neglect had triumphed over efforts to develop. The inhabitants of these provinces defined themselves as they had done immemorially, by their various tribal and religious and ethnic affiliations. The central schism in Islam between Sunnis and Shia had particular importance in the Mesopotamian provinces. Sunni themselves, the Ottomans had made sure to promote the Sunni Arab minority as a ruling class at the expense of the Shia majority. Shia ayatollahs had long wanted to have a state of their own, but had never been able to break through the Sunni oppression and stranglehold on power. In their holy cities of Najaf and Karbala, the downtrodden Shia masses consoled themselves with religious demonstrations that verged on violence. In the northern province of Mosul, the Kurds also aspired to a state of their own. They are Muslims but not Arabs, and their further division into feuding tribes and clans remains an obstacle to political compromise to this day.

Nobody in London had given thought to this patchwork of identities, as strong as they were mutually exclusive. In peacetime, Gertrude Bell, a well-connected society lady, had learned Arabic and ridden through these provinces. Enrolled as an adviser during the war, she put her finger on the flux of official opinion. "The real difficulty here is that we don't know exactly what we want to do in this country."

The international climate of the day supported independence for all peoples everywhere. President Wilson, the other Versailles treaty-makers, and the new League of Nations were happily redesigning the defeated empires on that principle. In an expansive mood, the British and French governments, winners of the war in the Middle East, issued a joint declaration in favor of the "establishment of national governments and administrations drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of indigenous populations." Some officials knew that this was wishful thinking. A Colonial Office paper, for instance, noted all in its own euphemistic style that it could not be said "that any clear ideas of the duties and privileges of democratic citizenship had been widely spread among all classes of the people." The Mesopotamian provinces might be refashioned into a unitary Iraq, but the British saw themselves retaining ultimate responsibility there.

The British were practiced in replacing military rule in their empire with civilian administration. In the new Iraq, from 1917 to 1920 Sir Arnold Wilson was appointed Civil Commissioner. High-minded and classically educated, he had served for years in India. Many of his staff of political officers shared this Indian experience. Linguists, delighting in the customs of tribes and clans, explorers, soldiers, dedicated to their mission, they were the best the British empire had to offer. Gertrude Bell was posted to Baghdad as Oriental Secretary. She spoke for many when she said that the British now had to make efforts "to squeeze the Arabs into our mold." Loyalties, Sir Arnold Wilson's account in two volumes of his time as Civil Commissioner, is a great book, a classic of its kind well worth reading today. Wilson quickly came to terms with reality. The idea of Iraq as an independent nation, he wrote, "had scarcely taken shape." Talk about independence and the "free choice of indigenous populations" was empty--or more dangerously, an encouragement to everyone with ambitions or grievances to take up arms. To speculate openly about the role of the British, future forms of government, and the possible selection of an Arab candidate to rule only emphasized that power was up for grabs.

Sunni Arabs continued to claim the monopoly of power that they had been accustomed to since Ottoman rule. Their leaders spoke the new nationalist language of independence and the free choice of the people, but to Sir Arnold they were taking up arms for the sake of their personal careers. "A vigorous offensive," he wrote, "was the only practical means open to them of realising their political ambitions." At one point he had a clandestine midnight meeting with some of these nationalists in Baghdad. When he warned them not to use force, they replied that the nations of Europe always yield to force, and would do so again, granting Iraq full independence. None of his superiors wanted to listen to Sir Arnold's prediction that the Shia would never willingly accept Sunni rule.