by Robert Fisk
On March 8, 1917, Lt. Gen. Stanley Maude issued a "Proclamation to the
People of the Wilayat of Baghdad". Maude's Anglo-Indian Army of the Tigres
had 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."
Gen. Maude, of course, was the Gen. 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.
Gen. 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 Shiite 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 fulfill 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, ironies � a major share in the new Turkish Petroleum Company,
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? Gen. Sir Edward Allenby "liberated" Palestine only a few months
after Gen. Maude "liberated" Iraq. The French turned up to "liberate"
Lebanon and Syria a couple of years later, slaughtering the Syrian forces
loyal to King Faisal who dared to suggest that French occupation was not the
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 Gen.
Maude's proclamation � the same gratuitous promises and lies? A copy of Gen.
Maude's original proclamation went under the hammer at a British auction at
Swindon last week, but I'll wager more than the 1,400 pounds sterling it
made 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 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
civilization... 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 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 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 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 a looming 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, Gen.
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.
And always, without exception, there were those tyrants and dictators to
overthrow in the Middle East. In World War II, 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
Gen. 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, 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.
So what happened to all these fine words? The Crusades were a catastrophe
for Christian Muslim relations. Napoleon left Egypt in humiliation. Britain
dropped gas on the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq before discovering Iraq was
ungovernable. Arabs, then Jews, drove the British from Palestine and
Jerusalem. The French fought years of insurrection in Syria. In Lebanon, the
Americans scuttled away 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 Shiites 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: In the months and years that follow the invasion
of Iraq, the US, 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."