The Essential Iraqi History Americans Need To Know
By Christopher Bollyn
“Now’s the time,” Bush said, “to make sure that the American people understand the stakes and the historic significance of what we're doing.”
Indeed, understanding the current Anglo-American occupation of Iraq requires knowledge of Iraqi history, particularly of Britain’s 100- year struggle to control Mesopotamia and its oil resources. Britain’s Prime Minister Tony Blair was the first European leader to meet Bush after he was installed by a Supreme Court decision. When the two leaders met in February 2001, Blair recalls the first subject he raised with Bush was the need to take military action in Iraq. “The reason we have to act is to prevent him [Saddam Hussein] from developing the capability to threaten the world again,” Blair said at the time.
“Know thy enemy” is a rule of war, yet most Americans know very little about Iraqi history. As a result the public is largely unaware that the U.S. is now embroiled in a 100-year-old British effort to control Iraq and its oil resources.
The U.S. mainstream media, for its part, ignores the “historic significance” of the century-old Anglo-Iraqi conflict.
“Fools rush in where angels fear to tread,” aptly describes U.S. involvement in the ill-advised invasion and occupation of Iraq promoted by Washington’s “neo-con” war hawks. The angels in this case would be the English, who have wisely kept their troops close to their former bases in and around Basra, while U.S. and other forces struggle in Iraq’s hostile hinterland where thousands of British troops perished in the last century.
The fact that the U.S. media ignores the history of Britain’s strategies to control Iraq has resulted in a lack of awareness among the American public about the real dangers that await the Western occupier of Mesopotamia.
As the recent violence in Fallujah shows, U.S. policy makers and occupation forces in Iraq ignore the lessons of history at their own peril.
“THE REAL FIGHT HAS JUST BEGUN”
Fallujah resident Samer Husseini, a wounded 48-year-old electrical company worker spoke to Salah Jali, one of the few reporters in the beseiged city, from his hospital bed about why he fights against the U.S. occupation.
"Our city does not accept oppression. Despite the fact that we risked torture and execution, we used to combat Saddam Hussein before the Americans,” Husseini said, “Now we are fighting for our freedom, our religion and our country. The real fight has just begun," he said. "They will be defeated,” Husseini said about the coalition troops occupying Iraq, “because they fight for material gains, whereas we fight for ideologies. We are fighting against occupation."
Husseini’s wife and four children remained in Fallujah as U.S. forces attacked the city.
"On the first day of the offensive, I told my eldest son Jamal that there was a possibility that I would die in combat, and that he should witness that in order to take my weapons when he grows up and continue the fight."
ANGLO-IRAQI HISTORY
During the carefully choreographed presidential press conference the first question raised the comparison of the Iraqi “quagmire” with the Vietnam conflict.
“Forget Vietnam, remember 1920,” British historian Niall Ferguson says about the current Iraqi revolt and the lessons of British imperialist history in Iraq. “What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised,”Ferguson wrote.
In May 1920, after it was announced that British-occupied Iraq would become a League of Nations “mandate” under British trusteeship, a full-scale revolt erupted across the country.
“By the time order had been restored in December with a combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions British forces had sustained more than 2,000 casualties,” Ferguson wrote.
“I am willing to bet,” Ferguson added, “that not one senior military commander in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events.”
COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT?
After four American soldiers-of-fortune were killed in Fallujah, U.S. troops in Humvees drove through the town of 250,000 on Good Friday, announcing by loudspeaker that the local population had until sunset to flee the coming onslaught, Lee Gordon of The Sunday Telegraph (U.K.) reported on April 11.
“The highway out of Fallujah was filled with fleeing families. The elderly, children and pregnant women clung to ancient cars and battered lorries, piled high with belongings,” Gordon wrote. “Refugees wandered along, dazed and caked in dust.”
“NO SIDE OF THE STORY”
Nearly a third of Fallujah's population fled the city during the lull in fighting, according to the Associated Press (AP). Although by the end of the first week, while CNN mentioned that some 480 Iraqis had been killed in Fallujah, it had no details or footage by Sunday, April 11.
Residents began burying the dead in the city’s soccer fields on Friday, when there was a pause in fighting.
“It looks as though the Americans have just decided to wade in and quell the demonstrations by killing people,” Eric Illsley, a member of Britain’s Foreign Affairs Select Committee told the Telegraph. “There is a growing feeling here of what the hell are we doing in there and how are we going to get out.”
Daniel Senor, the Israeli-educated Senior Adviser to Paul Bremer, U.S. proconsul in Iraq, criticized the Arab television networks Al- Jazeera and Al-Arabiya on April 12 for their reports on the U.S. siege of Fallujah.
“We encourage all Iraqis, all Iraqi journalists, to take some of the reporting that is conveyed on those channels with a grain of salt, with a skeptical eye,” the graduate of Hebrew University in Israeli- occupied Jerusalem said, “because it really is - I wouldn't even call it one side of the story. Many of the reports you're seeing are no side of the story.”
More than 600 Iraqis had been killed in Fallujah during the U.S. siege on Fallujah during the week before Easter, AP reported. Most of those killed were women, children and the elderly, according to the head of the city's hospital.
Asked about the report of 600 dead, Marine Lt. Col. Brennan Byrne said: “What I think you will find is 95 percent of those were military age males that were killed in the fighting.”
“The Marines are trained to be precise in their firepower…The fact that there are 600 goes back to the fact that the Marines are very good at what they do,” Byrne said.
U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships fired heavy machine-guns, rockets and cannons into the besieged city of Fallujah on April 13. When Britain first occupied Mesopotamia during World War I they began using airplanes in 1916. By 1919 British planes were bombing civilians to put down the growing insurrection.
The recent “insurgency” in Fallujah and the use of aerial assaults to punish its people - closely resembles the Arab Revolt of 1920 in which British occupation led Iraqis to put aside their religious and tribal differences and fight together against the British military occupation.
The British military first became engaged in Mesopotamia after the Ottoman Turks granted concessions to Germany to construct railroad lines from Turkey to Baghdad in 1899 and from Baghdad to Basra in 1902. To prevent a German presence on the Persian Gulf, Britain separated Iraq’s gulf province from the rest of the country and created its protectorate of Kuwait.
The German railroad to the Persian Gulf was seen as threatening to British lines of communication to India via Iran and Afghanistan, and British oil interests in the region.
Britain needed oil from Basra for its navy. When war broke out with Germany, Britain occupied Basra and seized its oilfields and pipelines, as it does today.
The British conquest of Mesopotamia began in November 1914 with Basra. Due to fierce resistance, however, it took another four years for Britain to conquer the provinces of Baghdad and Mosul.
In the fall of 1915, under Maj. General Sir Charles Townshend, British forces suffered a devastating defeat while trying to take Baghdad. Turkish troops and Arab fighters surrounded and besieged the British garrison at Al-Kut for 140 days.
In April 1916, the 3,000 British and 6,000 Indian troops surrendered - the greatest defeat in British military history to that time. Thousands perished in captivity.
On March 11, 1917, British troops led by Maj. Gen. Sir Frederic Stanley Maude took Baghdad with little resistance.
When Maude took Baghdad he issued a proclamation saying, “Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”
The British civil authority, however, was so arrogant that it brought Iraqis together with a sense of national identity and purpose. On May 1, 1920 when Britain received the mandate for Iraq from the League of Nations and established a Provisional Government, the Iraqi people revolted.
With the death of an important Shiite leader in May 1920, the Sunni and Shiite communities put aside their differences and joined forces to resist their common enemy the British occupiers.
The Iraqi Revolution of 1920 is seen as a watershed event in contemporary Iraqi history. For the first time Iraqis came together in a unified resistance to occupation. Today, Iraqis are working together against the U.S.-led occupation.
Alexendre Jordanov, a French journalist who was released on April 14 after being held hostage for 4-days in Iraq, said he was moved 10 times from one group to another. The groups were different but united against the U.S. occupation, Jordanov said, and had a wide network of supporters in every village.
BRITAIN’S HISTORY OF BOMBING IN IRAQ
In 1920, after using aerial bombing to quell the Iraqi revolt, the British military government was replaced with an Iraqi Council of State - under British supervision.
Britain used aerial bombing against Iraq’s Kurds and Arabs when they rebelled against British occupation and even for non-payment of taxes.
On 19 February 1920, Winston Churchill, then Secretary for War and Air, wrote to Sir Hugh Trenchard, the pioneer of air warfare. Churchill wanted gas weapons to be deployed against Iraqi Kurds and Arabs: “I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using poison gas against uncivilized tribes.”
Churchill, Colonial Secretary from 1921, believed that British bombers could control the dissident Iraqi tribesmen.
Wing-Commander Sir Arthur Harris said, “The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured.”
For 10 years, the British waged a bombing campaign in the oil-rich and mountainous northeast against Kurdish rebels. Churchill consistently called for the use of mustard gas.
The British civil administration in Iraq was similar to that in India, with British officials controlling every position.
Then, as today, a Shiite religious leader, Mirza Muhammad Taqi Shirazi, the Grand Mujtahid of Karbala, led the Iraqi resistance. The provisional regime lasted until August 1921 when Britain created a client kingdom and installed Faisal Ibn Hussain, the son of the Sharif of Mecca, as King of Iraq. An outsider, Faisal remained dependent on the British for support.
Faisal safeguarded British oil-interests and granted concessions to British companies. In exchange for his services Britain paid him the royal fee of 800,000 British pounds per month.
Finis
The British Army first occupied Iraq in 1917 after a three year military campaign in which tens of thousands of British and Iraqis were killed. When Britain was given the mandate over Iraq by the League of Nations in 1920, a violent and popular uprising erupted across the country. Britain's response was to bomb civilian areas with chemical weapons. Kurdish areas were bombed more than 10 years. The British and Iraqis know this history; can Americans afford to ignore it?
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