If we think there is a fast solution to changing the governance
of Iraq, warned U.S. Marine General Anthony Zinni in the months
before the United States and Britain invaded Iraq, "then we don't
understand history." Never has the old line about those who fail to
understand the past being condemned to repeat it seemed more
urgently relevant than in Iraq today, with potentially catastrophic
consequences for the Iraqi people, the Middle East region, and the
world. Examining the construction of the modern state of Iraq under
the auspices of the British empire -- the first attempt by a
Western power to remake Mesopotamia in its own image -- renowned
Iraq expert Toby Dodge uncovers a series of shocking parallels
between the policies of a declining British empire and those of the
current American administration.
Between 1920 and 1932, Britain endeavored unsuccessfully to
create a modern democratic state from three former provinces of the
Ottoman Empire, which it had conquered and occupied during the
First World War. Caught between the conflicting imperatives of
controlling a region of great strategic importance (Iraq straddled
the land and air route between British India and the Mediterranean)
and reconstituting international order through the liberal ideal of
modern state sovereignty under the League of Nations Mandate
system, British administrators undertook an extremely difficult
task. To compound matters, they did so without the benefit of
detailed information about the people and society they sought to
remake. Blinded by potent cultural stereotypes and subject to
mounting pressures from home, these administrators found themselves
increasingly dependent on a mediating class of shaikhs to whom they
transferred considerable power and on whom they relied for the
maintenance of order. When order broke down, as it routinely did,
the British turned to the airplane. (This was Winston Churchill's
lasting contribution to the British enterprise in Iraq: the
concerted use of air power -- of what would in a later context be
called "shock and awe" -- to terrorize and subdue dissident
factions of the Iraqi people.)
Ultimately, Dodge shows, the state the British created held all
the seeds of a violent, corrupt, and relentlessly oppressive future
for the Iraqi people, one that has continued to unfold. Like the
British empire eight decades before, the United States and Britain
have taken upon themselves today the grand task of transforming
Iraq and, by extension, the political landscape of the Middle East.
Dodge contends that this effort can succeed only with a combination
of experienced local knowledge, significant deployment of financial
and human resources, and resolute staying power. Already, he
suggests, ominous signs point to a repetition of the sequence of
events that led to the long nightmare of Saddam Hussein's murderous
tyranny.
General
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