MB Civic

EDINBURGH

Americans are notorious for ignoring historical precedents because they believe in American exceptionalism to such a degree that what befell other countries in the past can have no relevance to the present or the future. I once asked an American general in Vietnam if he had read anything about the French experience in Indochina, and he said there was no point because the French had lost and, therefore, had nothing to teach us. But the fate of the British in Iraq after the First World War, when they cobbled together three provinces from the old Ottoman Empire, has ironies piled upon ironies for both Britons and Americans.

The commander of the Mesopotamia Expeditionary Force, Sir Stanley Maude, whose bones rest in Baghdad, is quoted these days for having told the Iraqis in 1917 that “our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.” T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote scolding articles in the Times of London in 1920 insisting that Britain’s Iraq policy was on the wrong track.

Gertrude Bell, the intrepid nation-builder whose bones also lie in Baghdad, is remembered for having drawn up the map of modern Iraq to suit Britain’s imperial needs. Bell believed strongly in staying the course in the newly formed Iraq. She died before the British finally abandoned the effort.

As it was with the Americans more than 80 years later, the British never seemed to get their act together. British administrators, each with a new line, succeeded one another as have Americans from Jay Garner, to Paul Bremer, to Zalmay Khalilzad.

At first the British assumed that they would annex oil-rich Basra and create friendly entities to the north. Oil, then as now, was important to imperial designs. But the world had changed following WWI. A colonial administrator, Mark Sykes, caught this shift when he wrote: “Imperialism, annexation, military prestige, white man’s burdens, have been expunged from the popular political vocabulary. Consequently protectorates, spheres of interest or influence . . . bases, etc., have to be consigned to the diplomatic lumber room.”

Most of the above would creep out of the lumber room some eight decades later when American neo-imperialists such as Vice President Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, et al sold the white man’s burden to an inexperienced president, and the British prime minister went along for the ride.

When British patience began to weary of Iraq in the ’20s, Britain’s man in Baghdad, Sir Percy Cox, argued that British policy was actually working, and if “prematurely curtailed, the result would be disastrous . . . Withdrawal would lead inevitably to anarchy, a rise of Russian influence, and ultimately the return of the Turks.” If Britain turned its back on Iraq the “negative effects would be felt across the entire Muslim world,” Cox argued.

But Britain’s Iraq policy ultimately changed from nation-building to doing anything to get out. Unrealistically optimistic reports of progress in Iraq became the order of the day. US Army Major Joel Rayburn, writing in Foreign Affairs, quotes Britain’s then- colonial secretary, Leopold Amery, as saying that “the politics of scuttle” would create far greater dangers for his countrymen than “fulfilling their obligations.” A mery argued back in the ’20s that “Iraq could be a model for development and democracy for the entire region.” But according to Major Rayburn, Britain concluded that “the only way to leave with honor would be to redefine the standards of success and overstate Iraq’s achievements.” From 1925 until the British finally pulled out in 1932, progress reports “increasingly diverged from reality.”

We have seen the same divergence from reality in our own time, and one has to wonder if the British debate back then isn’t replicating itself now when George Packer, in The New Yorker, recently wrote: “It’s an open secret in Washington that [Donald] Rumsfeld wants to extricate himself from Iraq. But President Bush’s rhetoric . . . remains resolute. For three years, the administration has split the difference between these two poles, committing itself halfheartedly to Iraq.” And in Afghanistan, which might have been a Bush administration success if it were not for resources being pulled away to service Iraq, anti-American riots in the capital recall even older ghosts of the British in Kabul. But that is another story for another day.