In my posting, 164, The first of the oil wars, I
should have realised that the Bush-Blair invasion of Iraq was not the
first of the oil wars that are to come. There was a first one over 80
years ago. And it was an invasion of Iraq, once again. The resemblances
are quite amazing and disturbing. Firstly, it was all about oil. Winston
Churchill was in charge and he knew that the future for the Royal Navy
was in substituting oil-fired boilers for coal-fired ones in the ships as
soon as possible. Secondly, the British used poison gas against the Kurds
at that time. Saddam Hussein, who knows the history of his country, from
the times of the earliest Sumerian civilisation, through Nebuchadnezzar,
and right up to the present day better than most of us know the history
of our own country, would have been well aware of the historical
precedent for his own use of toxic chemicals against the Kurds.
I am, of course, aware that there have been many other wars already
concerning oil resources. The Russian war against Chechnya can be
described as an oil war because a pipeline runs through it, and there
have been -- indeed are -- wars going on in Africa which are much
to do with the control of areas containing oilfields. But the invasions
of Iraq of both 1920 and 2003, in terms of both sheer effrontery and
savagery of attack, can hardly be equalled. What John Simpson doesn't
mention in the article I follow with below is that the British killed
over 100,000 Iraqis during their occupation usually by strafing and
bombing Shia villages from the air. This hardly justifies Saddam's brutal
killing of tens of thousands of Shia Muslims in our time, but it puts his
crime in a more realistic perspective perhaps. It is no use saying that
we Brits didn't know much better in those days. After all, in 1920,
England was probably the most vigorous and evangelical Christian country
that's existed since Jesus lived.
In fact, it wasn't the churches who protested about the British
government's action in 1920. It was the radicals, liberals and
socialists. One of the principal opponents was Gertrude Bell (yes, of the
Bloomsbury group fame, and a friend of Keynes), at that time the
assistant to the British Civil Administrator in Baghdad. This fascinating
historical vignette is presented for us in today's Financial Times
by Charles Clover.
Keith Hudson
<<<<
SADDAM OR NOT, THEY JUST DON'T WANT US THERE
John Simpson
The greatest military power on earth marched into Iraq, utterly confident
that the Iraqi people would welcome it. Within weeks, a major uprising
had begun and it was forced to start negotiating a way out.
Not the Americans in 2003, but the British in 1920. The parallels are
disturbingly close, and seem mostly to have gone unnoticed. At the end of
the First World War Britain, brimming with over-confidence, twisted the
arm of the League of Nations to give it a mandate over territory carved
from the Turkish empire and called "Iraq". The British wanted
the new country's oil, and they assumed that everybody there wanted to be
governed by them.
With remarkable speed, the British Mandate officials realised that it
wasn't going to work, and that they would have to set up a government of
Iraqis which they could hand the country over to: the first example --
apart from America itself, of course -- of a British possession achieving
full independence. The uprising against them affected every part of Iraq.
One hundred thousand people died, and the British only managed to hang on
to power by rushing in the Indian army. As the rebellion continued for
several years, the British were sometimes disgustingly brutal. Winston
Churchill advised the RAF to bomb recalcitrant Kurdish villages with
poison gas, which it duly did; thereby establishing a dubious historical
precedent.Iraq eventually achieved full independence in 1932. Its
educational system, its roads, its communications all gained remarkably
as a result of the 12-year British presence, but the British themselves
were not wanted. The one thing that the Iraqis share is a stubborn sense
of pride in themselves, and a dislike of being pushed around by
outsiders. Donald Rumsfeld, the US defence secretary, and Paul Wolfowitz,
his deputy at the Pentagon, allowed themselves to suggest that most
Iraqis were longing for the arrival of American troops and the creation
of an American link. Not so.
In 1920 there was, of course, no Saddam Hussein figure. This is the
second war in two years which the Americans have fought against a
personalised enemy, without managing to catch either of them. A year ago
we were assured in some over-credulous newspaper and magazine articles
that Osama bin Laden was unquestionably dead; last month the CTA said
that the latest tape from him, condemning the goings-on in Iraq, was
probably genuine.
Now that President Bush has done his U-tum and decided to hand over to an
Iraqi administration sooner rather than later, the appalling possibility
exists that the Americans will do a runner while leaving Saddam in a
position to influence things still.
But where is he? Combining information from several well-informed
sources, I think we can venture the following: he is in the desert to the
west or north-west of Baghdad, within striking reach of the Jordanian and
Syrian borders, and is being protected by the Bedouin tribes that he
cultivated so assiduously while he was in power. This is a vast area,
with only four or five roads crossing it Any force of armoured vehicles
or helicopters setting out to get him would be spotted long before it
arrived.
In case of attack, he probably has the option of hiding in a small
underground bunker which was built during the 1990s. The architect who
designed it and the labourers who built it will all have been disposed of
afterwards. Mafia-style, and only Saddam and perhaps two or three of his
closest associates will know where it is. It will be stocked with enough
supplies to keep them going for years, together -- we can be sure -- with
a short-wave radio set Saddam has always been an assiduous listener and
viewer of the BBC; this I found to my own cost before this last war
started.
So is he masterminding the campaign against the American presence?
Probably not; after all, like Osama bin Laden, his one great strategic
advantage is that he is still alive and uncaughf and if he is constantly
meeting people in the underground movement, he'll be betrayed at some
point It is much more likely that his deputy, Izzat Ibrahim, controls the
resistance from his hiding-place in eastern Syria.
Most of the resistance is instinctive rather than organised, and much of
it isn't even pro-Saddam. It's just that, as in 1920, large numbers of
Iraqis want to be left alone. If Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz had
done a little light historical reading beforehand, they might have
thought twice about following exactly what the British did, 83 years
before.
John Simpson is the BBC's World Affairs Editor
The Sunday Telegraph -- 16 November 2003
>>>>
<<<<
LESSONS OF 1920 REVOLT LOST ON BREMER
Gertrude Bell, Britains' deputy administrator in Baghdad, concluded 83
years ago that direct rule would not work
Charles Clover
The argument between Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner in
Baghdad from 1918-1920, and his more famous deputy, the author Gertrude
Bell, shook the British colonial establishment for a time. But if the
lessons were soon forgotten, they were destined to be repeated 83 years
later.
Right up to the end of the bloody 1920 revolt against British rule that
claimed the lives of 500 British soldiers, Mr Wilson had insisted that
the answer to the "Mesopotamian question" was direct rule in
Baghdad by a British high commissioner.
Ms Bell, more presciently, had thought since a year earlier that the
answer was to choose an Arab head of state. "I pray the people at
home may be rightly guided and realise that the only chance here is to
recognise political ambitions from the first, not to try and squeeze the
Arabs into our mould and have our hands forced in a year -- who knows --
perhaps less," she wrote to a friend in January 1920. She would
prove all too correct. Mr Wilson stepped down and, in 1921, the British
were forced to grant Iraq nominal independence under a provisional
government headed by King Faisal I.
The lessons of British rule have eerily repeated themselves since the
US-led invasion of Iraq last March. After a seven-month military
occupation costing more than 200 soldiers' lives (including non-combat
deaths), the US-led coalition has been forced to give up ambitious plans
for indefinite direct rule and promise a formal end to the state of
military occupation by next June.
After a hurried visit to Washington last week, Paul Bremer, the US chief
administrator in Iraq, returned to Baghdad on Friday and met members of
the Iraqi Governing Council. They, in turn, issued a statement on
Saturday outlining the coming transformation: by the end of next June,
the Governing Council and Mr Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority
would be dissolved, following the election of an interim government by a
transitional assembly of appointed notables.
CPA officials say they are taking these steps because of their
disappointment with the delays in writing a new constitution. Under Mr
Bremer's original plan, independence would come only after the approval
of a constitution and elections.
But it is also clear that US officials have their eye on the worsening
guerrilla war, combined with President George W. Bush's desire to show
tangible progress on an "exit strategy" from Iraq by next
year's US election.
The new strategy seems designed just as much for American voters as
Iraqis themselves. But some Iraqi politicians doubt the new steps will
end the violence. "The Iraqi street will reject this because they
see through it. They only will accept a political solution which the
people choose," said Jassem Al Essawi, spokesman for radical
Islamist preacher Ahmed al-Kubaisi, whom the US has banned from
Iraq.
Iraqi guerrilla fighters have not made their demands clear but appear to
want not only the withdrawal of US forces but the eradication of all
vestiges of the US occupation. They would probably turn their guns on a
weak interim government just as they have the Governing Council and Iraqi
police.
The US administration will not withdraw American troops from Iraq after
the formal end of the occupation next June, and the Governing Council has
made it clear that it will invite US forces to stay.
"People and groups will now start planning for the departure by the
Americans," Mr Essawi said without elaborating.
The US must carefully manage the transition -- albeit at arm's length --
to avoid losing control or creating the perception that the process is
rigged. Losing control of the process would mean the possibility of a
radical Islamist government coming to power in Baghdad, or civil strife
similar to that which plunged Lebanon into turmoil in the 1980s following
the US exit.
But if the US is seen to be manipulating the process for the benefit of a
few Iraqi exile groups favoured by the Pentagon, rapid disillusionment
would also follow.
Perhaps the most profound lesson of the 1920 revolt, according to Ms
Bell, was that all plans have a habit of changing. "No one, not even
H.M.G. [His Majesty's Government] would have thought of giving the Arabs
such a free hand as we shall now give them -- as a result of
rebellion!" she wrote in 1920.
Gertrude Bell quotations from Desert Queen by Janet Wallach,
1996
Financial Times -- 17 November 2003
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