The fierce resistance that British and American
troops have encountered must have come as a very unpleasant surprise to Tony
Blair and George Bush. They assumed Saddam Hussein was so unpopular and
isolated that the Iraqi people would welcome the troops as liberators and help
them to overthrow his regime.
But the popular uprising has not materialised.
However much they detest Saddam’s regime, a great many Iraqis view the
coalition forces as invaders rather than liberators. Our leaders gravely
underestimated the force of Iraqi nationalism.
Blair and Bush seem unaware, or only dimly aware, of
the crucial role Iraqi history plays in shaping popular attitudes to the
conflict. Iraqis are not an inert mass whose sentiments can be switched on and
off to serve the agenda of outside powers.
They are a proud and patriotic people with a long
collective memory. Britain and America feature as anything but benign in this
collective memory. Blair has repeatedly emphasised the moral argument behind
the resort to force to depose an evil dictator. Over the past century, however,
Britain rarely occupied the high moral ground in relation to Iraq.
The US has even less of a claim on the trust and
goodwill of the Iraqi people after its calamitous failure to support the
popular insurrection against Saddam and his henchmen in March 1991.
Iraq was only one element in the victors’ peace which
was imposed on the Middle East in the aftermath of World War I without any
reference to the wishes of the people. Iraq’s borders were delineated to serve
British commercial and strategic interests.
Originally, Iraq was made up of two Ottoman
provinces: Basra and Baghdad. Later, the oil-bearing province of Mosul was
added, dashing hopes of Kurdish independence. The logic behind the enterprise
was summed up by one observer as follows: ‘Iraq was created by Churchill, who
had the mad idea of joining two widely separated oilwells, Kirkuk and Mosul, by
uniting three widely separated peoples: the Kurds, the Sunnis and the Shias.’
The man hand-picked by Britain to rule over this
unwieldy conglomerate was Faisal, a Hashemite prince from Arabia and one of the
leaders of the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks.
After the French evicted Faisal from Syria and put an
end to his short-lived kingdom, Britain procured the throne of Iraq for him as
a consolation prize. It cleared his path by neutralising opposition, deporting
the leading contender and organising a plebiscite in which 96 per cent of the
people were implausibly said to have voted for Faisal as king.
The 1921 settlement not only sanctioned violent and
arbitrary methods: it built them into the structure of Iraqi politics. Its key
feature was lack of legitimacy: the borders lacked legitimacy, the rulers lacked
legitimacy and the political system lacked legitimacy.
The settlement also introduced anti-British sentiment
as a powerful force in Iraqi politics. In 1941, Rashid Ali al-Gailani led a
nationalist revolt against Britain which was put down by force. In 1958, as a
direct result of its folly over Suez, Britain witnessed the defenestration of
its royal friends in Baghdad in a bloody military coup.
In 1980, Saddam attacked Iran. During the eight years
of the Iran-Iraq War, Britain and its Western allies increasingly tilted
towards Iraq. The Scott inquiry of 1996 documented the Thatcher Government’s
duplicitous record in selling arms to Iraq and in providing military credits.
A billion pounds of taxpayers’ money was thrown away
in propping up Saddam’s regime and doing favours to arms firms. It was
abundantly clear Saddam was a monster in human form. Britain did not
manufacture this monster, but it turned a blind eye to the savage brutality of
his regime. Britain also knew Saddam had chemical and biological weapons
because Western companies sold him all the ingredients necessary.
Saddam was known to be gassing Iranian troops in
their thousands in the Iran-Iraq War. Failure to subject Iraq to international
sanctions allowed him to press ahead with the development of weapons of mass
destruction.
In March 1988, Saddam turned on his own people,
killing up to 5,000 Kurds with poison gas in Halabja. Attacking unarmed
civilians with chemical weapons was unprecedented. If ever there was a time for
humanitarian intervention in Iraq, it was 1988. Yet no Western government even
suggested intervention. Neither was an arms embargo imposed on Iraq.
In 1990, Britain belatedly turned against Saddam only
because he trod on our toes by invading Kuwait. He had a point when he said Kuwait
was an artificial creation of British imperialism. But Iraq’s other borders
were no less arbitrary than the border with Kuwait, so if that border could be
changed by force, the entire post-World War I territorial settlement might
unravel.
The main purpose of the Anglo-American intervention
against Iraq was not to lay the foundation for the ‘New World Order’ but to
restore the old order. The fact that the UN explicitly authorised the use of
force in Resolution 678 - ‘the mother of all resolutions’ - made this an
exercise in collective security and gave it legitimacy in the eyes of the
world, including most Arab states.
On 28 February 1991, Papa Bush gave the order to
cease fire. Britain was informed of this decision but not consulted. The
declared aims of Operation Desert Storm had been achieved: the Iraqi army had
been ejected from Kuwait and the Kuwaiti government was restored. But Saddam
kept his deadly grip on power.
After the ceasefire, Bush encouraged the Iraqi people
to rise up, only to betray them when they did so. When the moment of truth
arrived, Bush recoiled from pursuing his policy to its logical conclusion. His
advisers told him Kurdish and Shia victories in their bids for freedom may lead
to the dismemberment of Iraq.
Behind this theory lay the pessimistic view that Iraq
was not suited for democracy and that Sunni minority rule was the only formula
capable of keeping it in one piece. Once again, the Iraqis were the victims of
cruel geopolitics.
In order to topple Saddam, it was not necessary for
the allies to continue their march to Baghdad, my hometown. It would have been
sufficient to disarm the Republican Guard units as they retreated from Kuwait
through the Basra loop. This was not done. They were allowed to retain their
arms, to regroup and to use helicopters to ensure the survival of Saddam and
his regime. The Kurds in the North were crushed and fled to the mountains. The
Shias in the South were crushed and fled to the marshes.
In calling for Saddam’s overthrow, Bush Snr evidently
had in mind a military coup, a reshuffling of Sunni gangsters in Baghdad,
rather than establishing a freer and more democratic political order. As a
result of his moral cowardice, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
Saddam stayed in power and continued to torment his people, while Kuwait
remained a feudal fiefdom.
A quick, decisive war was followed by a messy peace.
Few wars in history had achieved their immediate aims so fully and swiftly, yet
left behind so much unfinished business. The war’s aftermath was a reminder
that military force, when used to tackle complex political problems, is merely
a blunt instrument.
The war also demonstrated that Americans are better
at sharp, short bursts of military intervention than at sustained political
engagement aimed at fostering democracy in the Middle East.
This inglorious history of Western involvement in
Iraq goes a long way to explaining why the Iraqi people are not playing their
part in our script for the liberation of their country. This is why Blair, in his
press conference last Tuesday, was so anxious to persuade ordinary Iraqis that
this time Britain is determined to overthrow Saddam.
He directed his appeal particularly at the Shia
Muslims who make up 60 per cent of Iraq’s 24 million people. ‘This time we will
not let you down,’ he pledged solemnly. But it is naive to expect mere words to
erase the bitter legacy of the past.
Given their own experience of oppression by Saddam
and betrayal by the Western powers, it is only natural that ordinary Iraqis
prefer to let the two sides fight it out among themselves.
Avi Shlaim is professor of international relations at
Oxford University and author of ‘The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World’.
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