ON 8 MARCH 1917, Lieutenant- general Stanley Maude issued a
"Proclamation to the People of the Wilayat of Baghdad".
Maude's Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigres had just invaded and occupied
Iraq - after storming up the country from Basra - to "free"
its people from their dictators. "Our armies do not come into
your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as
liberators," the British announced.
"People of Baghdad, remember for 26 generations you have
suffered under strange tyrants who have ever endeavoured to set one
Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your
dissensions. This policy is abhorrent to Great Britain and her Allies
for there can be neither peace nor prosperity where there is enmity or
misgovernment."
General Maude, of course, was the General Tommy Franks of his day,
and his proclamation - so rich in irony now that President George Bush
is uttering equally mendacious sentiments - was intended to persuade
Iraqis that they should accept foreign occupation while Britain
secured the country's oil. General Maude's chief political officer,
Sir Percy Cox, called on Iraq's Arab leaders, who were not identified,
to participate in the government in collaboration with the British
authorities and spoke of liberation, freedom, past glories, future
greatness and - here the ironies come in spades - it expressed the
hope that the people of Iraq would find unity.
The British commander cabled to London that "local conditions
do not permit of employing in responsible positions any but British
officers competent... to deal with people of the country. Before any
truly Arab facade sic can be applied to edifice, it seems essential
that foundation of law and order should be well and truly laid."
As David Fromkin noted in his magisterial A Peace to End all Peace
- essential reading for America's future army of occupation - the
antipathy of the Sunni minority and the Shia majority of Iraq, the
rivalries of tribes and clans "made it difficult to achieve a
single unified government that was at the same time representative,
effective and widely supported". Whitehall failed, as Fromkin
caustically notes, "to think through in practical detail how to
fulfil the promises gratuitously made to a section of the local
inhabitants". There was even a problem with the Kurds, since the
British could not make up their mind as to whether they should be
absorbed into the new state of Iraq or allowed to form an independent
Kurdistan. The French were originally to have been awarded Mosul in
northern Iraq but gave up their claim in return for - again, wait for
the ironies - a major share in the new Turkish Petroleum Company,
newly confiscated by the British and recreated as the Iraq Petroleum
Company.
How many times has the West marched into the Middle East in so
brazen a fashion? General Sir Edward Allenby "liberated"
Palestine only a few months after General Maude "liberated"
Iraq. The French turned up to "liberate" Lebanon and Syria a
couple of years later, slaughtering the Syrian forces loyal to King
Feisel who dared to suggest that French occupation was not the kind of
future they wanted.
What is it, I sometimes wonder, about our constant failure to learn
the lessons of history, to repeat - almost word for word in the case
of General Maude's proclamation - the same gratuitous promises and
lies? A copy of General Maude's original proclamation goes under the
hammer at a British auction at Swindon this week but I'll wager more
than the pounds 100 it is expected to make that America's forthcoming
proclamation to the "liberated" people of Iraq reads almost
exactly the same.
Take a look at Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations
- on which Mr Bush claims to be such an expert - that allowed the
British and French to divide those territories they had just
"liberated" from Ottoman dictators. "To those colonies
and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to
be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them,
and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by
themselves... there should be applied the principle that the
well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of
civilisation... the best method is that the tutelage of such peoples
should be entrusted to advanced nations who, by reason of their
resources, their experience or their geographical position, can best
undertake this responsibility..."
What is it about "liberation" in the Middle East? What is
this sacred trust - a ghost of the same "trusteeship" the US
Secretary of State, Colin Powell, now promotes for Iraq's oil - that
the West constantly wishes to visit upon the Middle East? Why do we so
frequently want to govern these peoples, these "tribes with
flags" as Sir Steven Runciman, that great historian of the 11th-
and 12th-century Crusades, once called them? Indeed, Pope Urban's call
for the first Crusade in 1095, reported at the time by at least three
chroniclers, would find a resonance even among the Christian
fundamentalists who, along with Israel's supporters, are now so keen
for the United States to invade Iraq.
Urban told his listeners the Turks were maltreating the inhabitants
of Christian lands - an echo here of the human rights abuses which
supposedly upset Mr Bush - and described the suffering of pilgrims,
urging the Christian West's formerly fratricidal antagonists to fight
a "righteous" war. His conflict, of course, was intended to
"liberate" Christians rather than Muslims who, along with
the Jews, the Crusaders contentedly slaughtered as soon as they
arrived in the Middle East.
This notion of "liberation" in the Middle East has almost
always been accompanied by another theme: the necessity of
overthrowing tyrants.
The Crusaders were as meticulous about their Middle East invasions
as the US Central Command at Tampa, Florida, is today. Marino Sanudo,
born in Venice around 1260, describes how the Western armies chose to
put their forces ashore in Egypt with a first disembarkation of 15,000
infantrymen along with 300 cavalry (the latter being the Crusader
version of an armoured unit). In Beirut, I even have copies of the
West's 13th-century invasion maps. Napoleon produced a few of his own
in 1798 when he invaded Egypt after 20 years of allegedly
irresponsible and tyrannical rule by Murad Bey and Ibrahim Bey. Claude
Etienne Savary, the French equivalent of all those Washington pundits
who groan today over the suffering of the Iraqi people under President
Saddam, - wrote in 1775 that in Cairo under Murad Bey "death may
prove the consequence of the slightest indiscretion". Under the
Beys, the city "groans under their yoke". Which is pretty
much how we now picture Baghdad and Basra under President Saddam.
In fact, President Saddam's promises to destroy America's invasion
force have a remarkable echo in the exclamation of one of the
18th-century Mameluke princes in Egypt, who, told of an eminent French
invasion, responded with eerily familiar words: "Let the Franks
come. We shall crush them beneath our horses' hooves."
Napoleon, of course, did all the crushing, and his first
proclamation (he, too, was coming to "liberate" the people
of Egypt from their oppressors) included an appeal to Egyptian
notables to help him run the government. "O shayks, 'qadis',
imams, and officers of the town, tell your nation that the French are
friends of true Muslims... Blessed are those Egyptians who agree with
us." Napoleon went on to set up an "administrative
council" in Egypt, very like the one which the Bush
Administration says it intends to operate under US occupation. And in
due course the "shayks" and "qadis" and imams rose
up against French occupation in Cairo in 1798.
If Napoleon entered upon his rule in Egypt as a French
revolutionary, General Allenby, when he entered Jerusalem in December,
1917, had provided David Lloyd George with the city he wanted as a
Christmas present. Its liberation, the British Prime Minister later
noted with almost Crusader zeal, meant that Christendom had been able
"to regain possession of its sacred shrines". He talked
about "the calling of the Turkish bluff" as "the
beginning of the crack-up of that military impostorship which the
incompetence of our war direction had permitted to intimidate us for
years", shades, here, of the American regret that it never took
the 1991 Gulf War to Baghdad; Lloyd George was "finishing the
job" of overcoming Ottoman power just as George Bush Junior now
intends to "finish the job" started by his father in 1991.
And always, without exception, there were those tyrants and
dictators to overthrow in the Middle East. In the Second World War, we
"liberated" Iraq a second time from its pro-Nazi
administration. The British "liberated" Lebanon from Vichy
rule with a promise of independence from France, a promise which
Charles de Gaulle tried to renege on until the British almost went to
war with the Free French in Syria.
Lebanon has suffered an awful lot of "liberations". The
Israelis - for Arabs, an American, "Western" implantation in
the Middle East - claimed twice to be anxious to "liberate"
Lebanon from PLO "terrorism" by invading in 1978 and 1982,
and leaving in humiliation only two years ago. America's own military
intervention in Beirut in 1982 was blown apart by a truck- bomb at the
US Marine headquarters the following year. And what did President
Ronald Reagan tell the world? "Lebanon is central to our
credibility on a global scale. We cannot pick and choose where we will
support freedom... If Lebanon ends up under the tyranny of forces
hostile to the West, not only will our strategic position in the
eastern Mediterranean be threatened, but also the stability of the
entire Middle East, including the vast resources of the Arabian
peninsula."
Once more, we, the West, were going to protect the Middle East from
tyranny. Anthony Eden took the same view of Egypt, anxious to topple
the "dictator" Gamal Abdul Nasser, just as Napoleon had been
desperate to rescue the Egyptians from the tyranny of the Beys, just
as General Maude wanted to rescue Iraq from the tyranny of the Turks,
just as George Bush Junior now wants to rescue the Iraqis from the
tyranny of President Saddam.
And always, these Western invasions were accompanied by
declarations that the Americans or the French or just the West in
general had nothing against the Arabs, only against the beast-figure
who was chosen as the target of our military action. "Our quarrel
is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world," Anthony Eden
announced in August of 1956. "It is with Colonel Nasser."
So what happened to all these fine words? The Crusades were a
catastrophe in the history of Christian-Muslim relations. Napoleon
left Egypt in humiliation. Britain dropped gas on the recalcitrant
Kurds of Iraq before discovering that Iraq was ungovernable. Arabs,
then Jews drove the British army from Palestine and Lloyd George's
beloved Jerusalem. The French fought years of insurrection in Syria.
In Lebanon, the Americans scuttled away in humiliation in 1984, along
with the French.
And in Iraq in the coming months? What will be the price of our
folly this time, of our failure to learn the lessons of history? Only
after the United States has completed its occupation we shall find
out. It is when the Iraqis demand an end to that occupation, when
popular resistance to the American presence by the Shias and the Kurds
and even the Sunnis begins to destroy the military "success"
which President Bush will no doubt proclaim when the first US troops
enter Baghdad. It is then our real "story" as journalists
will begin.
It is then that all the empty words of colonial history, the need
to topple tyrants and dictators, to assuage the suffering of the
people of the Middle East, to claim that we and we only are the best
friends of the Arabs, that we and we only must help them, will
unravel.
Here I will make a guess: that in the months and years that follow
America's invasion of Iraq, the United States, in its arrogant
assumption that it can create "democracy" in the ashes of a
Middle East dictatorship as well as take its oil, will suffer the same
as the British in Palestine. Of this tragedy, Winston Churchill wrote,
and his words are likely to apply to the US in Iraq: "At first,
the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end
the very stones crumbled under their feet."
