To Baghdad 1917 to 2003 – Why is knowledge of the British Empire particularly relevant to the study of US relations and American Imperialism especially in the last twenty years?

Emy Ibrahim
Washington D.C. Public Policy Seminar-Research Paper
April 17th, 2007
Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators. ... It is [not] the wish of [our] government to impose upon you alien institutions. ... [It is our wish] that you should prosper even as in the past, when your lands were fertile, when your ancestors gave to the world literature, science, and art, and when Baghdad city was one of the wonders of the world. ... It is [our] hope that the aspirations of your philosophers and writers shall be realized and that once again the people of Baghdad shall flourish, enjoying their wealth and substance under institutions which are in consonance with their sacred laws and their racial ideals.[1]

The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you. ... We will end a brutal regime ... so that Iraqis can live in security. We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq's future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent, and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world. You are a good and gifted people -- the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.[2]

Britain's 1917 occupation of Iraq holds worrying parallels with today.[3] After the euphoric 1917 capture of Baghdad and expulsion of the Ottoman Empire, Iraq soon became an ever deepening financial drain and graveyard for Britain. The same situation faces the US and to some degree Britain today.[4] As the quotes above show, President Bush, when he addressed the Iraqi people on television shortly after the United States seized Baghdad earlier this year, unmistakably echoed the rhetoric used by the British commander who occupied the city in 1917. The US invasion of Iraq is often pointed to as a defining moment in the recognition and confirmation of American Imperialism. The echo of British Imperialism, which seized Baghdad in 1917 and then created Iraq, is striking and curious. In both cases, troops swept from the south of Iraq to Baghdad in a matter of weeks.[5] In both cases, the governments rejected any desire to rule Iraq directly and hastened to install a government with at least the appearance of popular legitimacy. In both cases, imposing law and order proved harder than achieving military victory (the British had to use air power to quell a major insurrection in the summer of 1920). In both cases, the liberating powers claimed insurgents made up of foreign fighters were crossing the borders from Syria to fight.[6] Both encountered difficult religious clerics and leaders.[7] And in both cases, the presence of substantial oil reserves (confirmed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1927)[8] was not an irrelevant factor, despite protestations to the contrary. The global power of the United States today resembles that of Britain roughly a century ago.[9] British and American imperial rule possess a number of similarities.[10] Although little now lingers of the British Empire's political supremacy, its cultural and economic legacy remains. Britain’s Empire, which at one point ruled over four hundred million people, laid the foundation for global capitalism, her language the standard for much of the world’s business and culture. America is, in fact, that Empire's legacy, and consequently an understanding of the British Empire is relevant to the study of US foreign relations and American Imperialism. My springboard for this investigation will be a comparison of the British invasion of Baghdad in 1917 and the American invasion of Baghdad in 2003. From this point of investigation this paper will look to illustrate the similarities between the two and then briefly conclude what lessons the US can learn. What will turn out to be most concerning is that the British mistakes of the past in Iraq are being repeated by the US with a seeming disregard for history.

How Iraq became Iraq Iraq is not an ancient nation, but the product/invention of the victorious European statesmen and diplomats dividing the ruins of the vast 500-year-old Ottoman Empire after World War I. Iraq was created by the British and has always been at the centre of a complex political arena. [11]

In 1921 it was a British woman, Gertrude Bell, the British Oriental Secretary, who sculpted out the political and national construct of modern Iraq and the Middle East.[12] Bell was an Arabist, a brilliant scholar, mountaineer, archaeologist and imperialist. She created an Arab state from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. This state was importantly too weak to be independent of Britain.[13] Bell played a leading role in Iraq's transformation from Ottoman domain to British mandate to a new sovereign nation. We shall, I trust, make it a center of Arab civilization and prosperity, she enthused in 1917, as British troops poured into Baghdad, expelling the defeated Ottoman rulers. [14] Three years later, the country was struck by an uprising against the British occupation. The Shia tribes of the entire middle Euphrates rose in revolt the next month. Hundreds of British soldiers and 8,000 Iraqis were killed before it could be suppressed. Bell had believed in Arab independence and persuaded London that Iraq could provide an administrative facade. But she underestimated the force of religion in Iraqi affairs and the Shia clergy. She also possessed colonialist beliefs - the idea that distant peoples would be enlightened by a British presence and was fervent in her adoration of the country she called her second native land.[15] She (like others)[16] even realised that there was no way back: things look so black now... the fact that we cannot abandon this country to its fate needs insisting upon, wrote Bell.[17] Bell constructed a constitutional monarchy with King Faisal, the Hashemite scion whom she helped elevate to the Iraqi throne.[18] But Bell infuriated superiors by siding with the Iraqi government when it refused to accept the British mandate in 1922, arguing that it must be free of foreign interference in order to be legitimate. Sadly her superiors responded by ignoring her view and phasing her out of the Iraqi administration. The British legacy in Iraq did not end with the departure of the British. Bell and her superior as British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, laid down policies of state in Iraq that were later taken up by Saddam Hussein’s Arab Ba'ath socialist party. Those policies were to retain, if necessary by violence, the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to promote Sunni Muslims and other minorities over the Shia majority; to repress the Shia clergy in Najaf, Kerbela and Kazimain, or expel them to Iran; to buy off the big landowners and tribal elders and to deploy air power as a form of political control. In many ways the British left and created more problems than they solved; some of these are problems that the U.S. is now encountering.
The British in Iraq

‘I hate Iraq. I wish we had never gone to the place.’[19]

Churchill had always advocated withdrawing from Iraq and stopping pouring money into the sand. Iraq may have been a British creation, from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, but Churchill quickly realised that Britain's involvement had little success to gain. After World War I, the new League of Nations gave Britain a mandate to run Iraq (as well as Trans-Jordan, Palestine and Egypt). This disappointed Arab nationalists who had hoped for independence in Iraq. Iraqi propaganda portrays Britain's period of dominance as rapacious colonialism, driven by a desire for oil. In fact, in Iraq, the British proved reluctant and inept imperialists. They could never decide how to govern it and were constantly debating withdrawal. Britain's one abiding principle was to run the country with as little expenditure as possible. Britain's involvement in the region began during the First World War when Turkey was allied to Germany. Britain invaded the Ottoman provinces of Mesopotamia in 1915 to wrest the port of Basra[20] from Turkish control. In order to strike Turkey, Britain then invaded the rest of Mesopotamia.[21] The initial offensive ended in humiliation in July 1916 in Kut when a column of British and Indian troops abandoned the graves of thousands of comrades and marched into Turkish captivity.[22] With the disaster at Kut behind it, the British Army recovered and marched into Baghdad in March 1917:
A state of anarchy had existed for some hours, Kurds and Arabs looting the bazaars and setting fire indiscriminately at various points. Infantry guards provided for in advance were, however, soon on the spot, order was restored without difficulty, and the British flag hoisted over the city.[23]
Welcoming the self styled liberators, 140,000 people came out cheering the conquering army. [24] While it presented little strategic value to the British, its fall was of huge propaganda value.[25] By the close of 1918, Britain had occupied all three Mesopotamian provinces - Basra in the south, Mosul in the north and Baghdad in between. Churchill, then War Secretary, believed this expansion was pointless.[26] Churchill was overruled, the British stayed, and the Mesopotamian provinces were merged into a single state, known as Iraq. Contrary to Iraq's official myth, oil had a lesser role to do with this. At that time, the country's immense reserves were largely unknown. Instead, Britain created Iraq to curb a resurgent Turkey under Kemal Ataturk. In doing so, Britain created an inherently unstable country comprising three mutually incompatible groups; Mosul, a mountainous region largely inhabited by the fiercely independent-minded Kurds, Basra in the south at the head of the Persian Gulf, ruled by the Shia Muslims and the Sunnis ran Baghdad, which faced across the deserts to Syria and east to Persia. Welding them into one nation risked chaos and political turmoil and made Iraq, a complex mix of ethnic and religious groups. The League of Nations mandated Iraq to Britain at the San Remo conference in April 1920. Within weeks, this provoked a brutal uprising and the declaration of a jihad against the British in the Shia holy city of Kerbala.[27] The revolt spread and it took 20,000 British troops and four squadrons of RAF bombers nine months of hard fighting to restore control.[28] A British colonel, Gerald Leachman declared that the only way to deal with the tribes was wholesale slaughter.[29] The British were not tolerant of opposition to what they called their liberation. Repression simply deepened the revolt. Minister for the colonies Winston Churchill complained even louder that subduing the locals was wasting troops and money. So he discovered a cheaper method to quell the problem – dropping poison gas from aeroplanes. Churchill brushed aside those who questioned the morality of poison gas.[30] Thus within six months of their arrival, Britain was fighting a military insurrection in Iraq and Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to anarchy and confusion; a similar view is held by George Bush and Tony Blair.[31] British officials in Baghdad now as American officials then blamed the violence on local political agitation, originated outside Iraq. After crushing the rising, Churchill again recommended withdrawal and was again overruled. Putting down the revolt had cost £32 million (more than £500 million today)[32] so Churchill chose to save money by running the country through a puppet ruler Faisal I, who was installed as King in 1921.[33] Faisal Ibn Husayn, the new monarch had no connection with Iraq and, as a Hashemite Sunni[34], little in common with its people, but had helped T E Lawrence against the Turks during the war.[35] The British rewarded him with the Baghdad throne. Despite Faisal's Islamic and pan-Arab credentials, he was not an Iraqi and nationalists viewed the monarchy itself (Iraq had never had a king) as an illegitimate British-created institution.[36] Constant unrest dogged Faisal and running Iraq proved expensive and troublesome for the British, despite the oil concessions. In 1929 a newly elected British Labour government promised independence and in 1932 it was granted, with Faisal as king. One year later Faisal suddenly died. By then, the country's oilfields had become of vital strategic importance and the British remained dominant until King Faisal II and his family were butchered in a 1958 revolution. After that, a succession of coups and counter-coups meant alternately America[37], France and the Soviet Union displaced Britain as the power behind the scenes. Little good can be said for Britain's record in Iraq. But by the standards of Iraq's later regimes, Britain was a relatively benign ruler. Thus in Saddam's Iraq, there was a striking absence of hostility towards Britain. This was one of the reasons British support for the US led war in Iraq was important, not for military reasons but (in theory) for the hearts and minds. British involvement added legitimacy and inscribed the invaders as liberators once again.
British Lessons of Iraq

The British military cemetery in Baghdad is filled with hundreds of British gravestones that attest to the price of imperialism in Iraq. Most are the result of the Shiite revolt of 1920.[38] Today the US casualty list is growing as it faces the same dilemma that dogged the British: how to grant self-rule to Iraqis as promised, while keeping overall control.[39] It is the fundamental contradiction that comes from an American/British belief in democracy, but not believing in its results. Britain and America are ruled by the ballot box, but by not allowing others to do so as freely breeds resentment. Changing Iraqi attitudes nowadays will require the US to learn lessons from the British experience in Iraq post 1917. Military solutions were not that effective a tool when employed by the British. The British relied on air power to quell dissent – at great cost to the civilian population and to its credibility. Americans, too, are often accused of heavy-handed tactics. British cabinet papers from 1921 raised doubt about keeping peaceful control of Mesopotamia if it ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children.[40] An added thought can be noted from the British commander in charge of quelling the revolt, Lt. Gen. Sir Aylmer Haldane. He wrote in 1922 of the vanity in confiscating 63,000 rifles from Iraqi tribes. According to him, the Iraqis not only rearmed themselves but acquired weapons of more modern type. Gen. Haldane concluded of Mesopotamia that it was folly to think, not in one year but even in many years, to draw the teeth of its inhabitants. The British found that local leaders, seen as puppets only furthered resentment. One element that contributed to the 1920 revolt and future unrest was a British plan that relied heavily on putting pliable but unpopular Arabs in sham authority. This echoes complaints today among Iraqis that the Governing Council is a tool of US policy, under Washington's thumb in the same way that powerful British advisers decades ago controlled handpicked Iraqi ministers. The British also created new enemies. The British were initially greeted with open arms by Iraqis after forcing out Ottoman troops, but after time they found fierce resentment – precisely the misjudgement made by American planners, who believed that gratitude over the fall of Saddam Hussein, would overcome Iraqi uneasiness about a new occupation. The British saw the Shia religious establishment in the 1920s as a direct rival for power, so they fled back into the arms of the Sunni elite. Despite London's detailed efforts to win the support of tribes, anti-British resentment grew to the point where Iraq's majority Shiite and Sunnis put aside their differences, and unified. Likewise, US Administrator Paul Bremer, in his effort to scrub away Hussein's Baath regime, has given reason to broaden anti-US resistance. The Americans have wound up uniting enemies, the Army, the Baathists, and Sunnis, against themselves.
The Imperial Comparison

U.S. presidents, from Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush, have put their power to work promoting the great liberal ideals of economic openness, democracy, limited government, human dignity, and the rule of law. This strategy of openness is remarkably similar, to the aspirations of the British Empire in the second half of the nineteenth century.[41] What is distinctive about American imperialism is that it has been pursued in the name of anti-imperialism. Kennan's doctrine of containment – provides the ultimate example of this fusion of anti-imperialism and hard power.[42]

Nowadays then it is fair to say that the United States has inherited the torch of Empire.[43] Britain’s progeny, the United States, has become the world’s sole superpower, exporting its message of democracy and free-market capitalism to nations around the world. Pax Britanica can conveniently be perceived as having grown into Pax Americana. The comparison of Iraq shows us key differences between the British and American Empires. There are important differences in their ideological base, but also important similarities. Both imperial powers possess and possessed the arrogant certainty of colonization (certainly more economic and less territorially for the United States), the presumption of an obligation to guide the destiny of the world, that some might claim to be the central stain of imperialism. In Britain, the argument is commonly put forward that if the British had not taken over the world, others surely would have.[44] These days, if not America, then who? One of the key diffrences is that the British Empire was developed and bolstered through mass emigration while the contradiction for the American Empire, with America’s greater land mass, is that it is an empire of mass immigration. A century ago, the United Kingdom could draw wealth and personnel from the 15 million of its subjects who had settled in the temperate zones of the empire. [45] The differences in economic and military terms seemingly favour the United States as an imperial power. The United States accounts for a much higher share of global output than Britain ever did, and in military terms, the United States enjoys a greater lead over its rivals (one even bigger than that enjoyed by the British immediately after 1815). But in other respects, the two countries' positions are reversed. A century ago, the Britain was a net exporter of capital, on such a scale that it truly deserved to be called the world's banker. Today, the United States is a net importer of capital on almost as large a scale. A century ago, British leaders could devote their attention and taxpayers' money to imperial defence and grand strategy, since before 1910, government provided only minimal care for the sick and elderly. Today, Washington spends its money on social security, defence and welfare. Both empires meet under the support of a considerable economic pillar. America is the number one global economy (although China will be a rival by 2040) and military power.[46] The naval dominance of the British Empire is equal to the current military dominance of the United States. Both were military super-powers without rivals. However with the sole exception of the Crimean War, the British avoided military interventions, preferring to placate the sensitivities and political antagonism of European governments. American diplomacy could learn some important lessons from this. Christianity also has a crucial religious significance in the formation and goals of both the American and British Empires.[47] Christian religion is an important foundation on which much of Western Imperial thought and obligation of action is based. Now that pluralism has beaten communism, they say, the next great battle is between Islam and Christendom: or rather between the two geographical areas of the world that have grown out of those two different ideas of God and man. There is a distinction between the role of religion in the United States and the British Empire. Religion played an essential role in the lives of the British who went abroad and formed colonies. The further they strayed from home, the more comfort they could receive from the familiarity and conservatism of the institution.[48] Many of the churches of the imperial era have survived into modern times and demonstrate an attempt of trying to create a home from home. The United States is not a colonising empire and in fact, finds itself in a global situation where Christians and Muslims are increasingly becoming polarised into religious extremism. Throughout history this religious conflict has arisen.[49] The (certainly debatable) benefits of the British Empire aside from the internationalisation of the English language, were the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization in the world; the Anglicisation of North America and Australia; the enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity; and the worldwide adoption and ultimate survival of parliamentary institutions, which far worse empires were poised to extinguish in the 1940s; related to that, we should also credit Britain with promoting the idea of liberty, an ironic benefit of imperialism. History will reveal the benefits of American Imperialism. One of the most interesting ideas when comparing the two empires is the matter of will. In American political culture, there is a strong diffidence toward exercising world leadership as a continuing element. This was never a handicap for the British.[50] But the ideology of imperialism, the sense of a British mission to rule, was remarkable for its longevity. It can be discerned even in the Elizabethan period, before an empire had been acquired, and it did not really expire until the humiliation of the Suez Crisis. Many Americans, on the other hand, have always been reticent about their nation's global role. This reluctance in some ways limits the potency of the United States.[51] Unlike the British, many Americans are not willing to accept that they operate an empire.[52] As a result, the United States makes am insecure, impatient imperial power in contrast to the British, who acquired a cultural mentality for global rule. Whereas the British were quite open that they were running an empire, few American politicians today would use that word. Americans, in short, don't do empire; they do leadership, or in academic terms hegemony:
We're not an imperial power, as nations such as Japan and Germany can attest. We are a liberating power, as nations in Europe and Asia can attest, as well. America's objective in Iraq is limited, and it is firm: We seek an independent, free and secure Iraq.[53]

It is of course, a euphemism for empire, and does not describe the role of a primus inter pares, a country that leads its allies but does not rule subject peoples. This difference in comfort with the word empire leads into one of the most distinct differences between the two empires. There is an important and now widely accepted distinction between a formal (British) and informal (American) empire. A century ago, the formal British Empire was very large indeed, covering nearly a quarter of the world's surface and ruling roughly the same proportion of its population. Today, on the other hand, the United States' formal empire includes just 14 dependencies (of which the largest is Puerto Rico) and covers less than 110,000 square kilometres. However this distinction is a too simplistic one. The British Empire was often a sophisticated combination of the two. The British did not formally govern Argentina, but the merchant banks of the City of London exerted a powerful influence on that country's fiscal and monetary policy so that its independence was heavily qualified. British colonial administrators such as Lugard clearly understood the distinction between direct and indirect rule; large parts of the British Empire in Asia and Africa were ruled indirectly, through the agency of local potentates rather than British governors. The United States though is an empire[54], albeit one that has, until now, unlike the British more formal imperial structure[55], generally preferred indirect and informal rule (whether recent invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq suggest a transition to more direct and formal imperial structures remains to be seen). Comfort level with the usage of the word empire is a reflection of deeper sociological differences between the two empires. Class and social status were and are more open concepts in Britain than they are in the United States (this is due in part to American founding ideology/myth and the guilty shadows of the blot of slavery). The British Empire revolved around a complicated hierarchy of status maybe even class rather than a simple division of race. The British view of race was often as subtle and complicated as their view of status and the two hierarchies sometimes intersected – for example, in their conceptions of hereditary aristocracy and breeding. The fact that the British did not see matters in black and white (no pun intended) does not mean that they were indifferent to race. On the contrary, the British granted Arabs or high-caste Indians a degree of respect that would never have been accorded to natives, however well-born, of sub-Saharan Africa. In Orientalism, Cannadine, argues that empire was the vehicle for the extension of British social structures - to the ends of the world. The constructs that the British made in the Empire were primarily the mirror images of the traditional, individualistic, unequal society that existed in the metropolis. This does not mean the United States does not need to view the world as its Raj and deploy a colonial service to the vast periphery; it needs to find ways to exercise its power in sustained, legitimate ways, working with others and developing more complex forms of cooperative international governance as it is learning slowly in Iraq. It is doubtful that the American people would accept such a massive imperial undertaking: last September, as soon as President Bush revealed the price tag for occupying Iraq, public support plummeted immediately. The dangers and costs of running the world as an American empire are great, but the nation still has a deep faith in the rule of law. Perhaps Americans are less interested in ruling the world than they are in creating a world of rules? So what lessons could the US (particularly as an imperial power) draw then from the British experience in Iraq about shaping another people’s policy? An awareness that people do prefer a bad government of their own to a good government given them by foreigners. Iraqis certainly have reason to feel that they were liberated, although comparisons to Paris in 1944 were not apt. But the American goal of establishing democracy in Iraq and elsewhere in the Muslim states of the Middle East involves all sorts of risks. First, if free elections were held in almost any of those countries, with rare exceptions Muslim fundamentalists would win - in every country, probably, except Iran, where the experience with Muslim fundamentalism has soured people on it. The war in Iraq is not exactly colonization, as President Bush says, but it's very close to it. The aim is not to make Iraq safe for American settlers but, instead, to make the region safe for American interests and the country safe for Western-style democracy — a chief stated aim of past empires. The challenge for the US now is to produce not Arab nationalism, but a sense of Iraq as a nation.[56] Democracy may not be the answer as the British discovered, almost a century earlier.[57] The point of this paper has been to illustrate the paradox. On the one hand some of American foreign policy seems to have copied British policy/approach of 1917, but on the other hand the same mistakes have been made, suggesting an ignorance. Overall there seems to have been a startling lack of awareness in the U.S. of how Iraq was created, the problems the British encountered in 1917 and what worked and didn’t work. My paper and much of American foreign relations in Iraq is best summarised in an anecdote, Ferguson wrote in an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph in 2004:
Around this time last year I had a conversation in Washington that summed up what was bound to go wrong for America in Iraq. I was talking to a mid-ranking official in the US Treasury about American plans for the post-war reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. She had just attended a meeting on precisely that subject. "So what kind of historical precedents have you been considering?" I asked. "The post-Communist economies of Eastern Europe," she replied. "We have quite a bit of experience we can draw on from the 1990s."[58] In addition to the conclusion I wanted to add a quote by Presidential Candidate Dennis Kusinich. This was during an interview given by the press people at Center for American Progress when he was asked a question on Iraq. I find the comments on the Iraq invasion in 2003 given by a U.S. Congressmen interesting as far as this topic goes. I also agree with his strategy to address the Iraq situation in 2007 and so this is how I would address the question of my opinion on what to do with Iraq today. “We could use it to either keep the war going or we can use it to bring them home. To me its an easy choice, bring the troops home. But you can not leave the Iraqi people in you know, in larch. So how do you do it? Once the United States determines that it will not continue to fund the war, that it will bring the troops home, end the occupation, close the bases, we set in motion a parallel process to stabilize Iraq with the help of the international community, and frankly they aren’t interested in being involved as long as the U.S. is occupying. I’ve gone to people at the U.N. who have a lifetime of experience in peace and security forces, and they say if the U.S. changes direction we can get the world community involved and we should have diplomacy that involves that region so that we can move in that peace keeping and security force. We can also then take steps to stabilize Iraq through a process of reconciliation with the Shi’ites, the Sunnis and the Kurds, which can not happen as long as the U.S. is occupying. We need an honest reconstruction program that doesn’t steal from the Iraqi people, and make sure the projects get done by hiring the Iraqi people. We need reparations paid for the incredible damage that has been done to Iraq and the loss of lives. Of, over 650,000 innocent Iraqi’s, stabilization of food and energy prices, making sure Iraq has total control of their oil, this will set the stage for privatization of Iraqi’s oil. And we need to make sure that Iraq is not going to be strapped with structural readjustment policies of the World Bank or the IMF which cripple nations and force them to privatize their assets after a nation has experienced what Iraq is experiencing”

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1996

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Primary Sources http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/ - Gertrude Bell’s letters. http://web.jjay.cuny.edu/~jobrien/reference/ob70.html - Joseph Chamberlain, British Secretary of State for the Colonies’, Speech on March 31 1897. http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1189906,00.html - Tony Blair’s famous article in the Observer magazine, defending the war.
Horne, C. Source Records of the Great War, Vol. V (1923) – Inluding General Stanley Maude’s Proclamation and British Cabinet Papers. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/documents/0,12962,916659,00.html - An online catalogue of key Iraq documents/speeches. http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/churchill_papers/ - All the archived materials and papers of Winston Churchill.

Title Page photographs:

The photograph was taken on 12th March 1917. It shows the 1st Division of the 4th Hampshire Regiment entering the city past a crowd of local onlookers. The division was, in fact, based at a garrison just outside Baghdad and was ordered to march into the city specifically for the purpose of this staged photograph.

The photograph shows the serried ranks of coffins of American servicemen and women who have lost their lives in Iraq.

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[1] Proclamation to the People of Baghdad on March 19th 1917 by British Commander, General Stanley Maude in Horne (1923).
[2] President George W. Bush to the people of Iraq, April 4, 2003.
[3] Coming as self-titled liberators to Baghdad, who were welcomed but resented, treating prisoners badly, alienating the populations in Najaf and Fallujah with military action, being accused of oil grabbing or installing freedom and finding that a planned handover of power proved difficult, are all details that both Britain (in 1917) and now America (in 2003) have encountered.
[4] See Tony Blair’s famous article of Sunday April 11th in the Observer magazine defending the war: http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1189906,00.html [5] Conquering Baghdad city is not a big deal, as became obvious again in 2003. The real problems come/came afterwards.
[6] Terrorists from other countries have infiltrated Iraq to incite and organize attacks. Speech to Nation by George Bush 2004.
[7] E.g. In Najaf, the British tried to arrest a Shiat leader called Badar, and in 1920, it was a radical Shia cleric terrorising British occupying forces - Mohammad al-Sadr, whose great-grandson Moqtada al-Sadr is currently leading a second revolt. For more see the Daily Telegraph newspaper article: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2004/04/13/wirq513.xml. [8] We went there chiefly to protect the Anglo-Persian oil-fields upon which our navy was so largely dependent. Bourdillon (1924) 274.
[9] It is worth noting that there are considerable similarities and relevancies to the Roman Empire too which will not be explored in this paper.
[10] Kennedy, in The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, argues that the British Empire had been overstretched before 1914 and World War I and hence its decline after that conflict. He famously argues that the United States might be in a similar predicament of being overstretched today.
[11] The country lies in the global centre between two rivers, the Tigris and the Euphrates and was the birthplace of the ancient civilisations of Sumeria, Babylon and Nineveh.
[12] Bell saw in Arab male society, and what US President Woodrow Wilson called the whole disgusting scramble for the Middle East after the first world war, opportunities that were unthinkable at home.
[13] I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq, she wrote to her father on December 4 1921 (http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/). Senior Indian officials, such as the formidable AT Wilson, argued that the religious and tribal divisions in Iraq would for ever undermine an Iraqi state.
[14] http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/
[15] My heart is in it, she wrote to her father in 1924, I live and die for it (http://www.gerty.ncl.ac.uk/).
[16] We could not withdraw at once and leave chaos. There we were, and there we had to remain and to administer, for the time being at any rate. Bourdillon (1924) 274.
[17] The rhetoric is worryingly similar to that of the current policy makers of the US: The failure of freedom would only mark the beginning of peril and violence. But, my fellow Americans, we will not fail. We will persevere, and defeat this enemy, and hold this hard-won ground for the realm of liberty. George Bush Speech, May 25 2004.
[18] That monarchy was wiped out in 1958 in a bloody military coup that eventually led to Saddam Hussein seizing power. Ironically the British dealt with his ancestor in the previous formation of Iraq: This brings me to the third factor – our promises to Hussein, the Sherif of Meca,…..’ (Bourdillon (1924) 275).
[19] Winston Churchill in 1926 when, as Chancellor, he was asked to sink yet more millions into Britain's ‘Mesopotamian entanglement’. See http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/churchill_papers/
[20] As currently shown, a key position to hold in Iraq.
[21] The British had been, since November 1914, in the possession of Basra, in the south of Iraq, and held its oilwells. They had also occupied the terminal of the oil pipeline and the refineries on the island of Abadan in the river of Shatt El Arab, in the south-western corner of Persia (Iran).
[22] 13,000 diseased and demoralized British and Indian soldiers surrendered to Turkish troops at Kut-al-Amara (Al-Kut), halfway to Baghdad, the Turks annihilated the 6th Indian Division.
[23] Sir Frederick Maude on Operations leading to the fall of Baghdad, December 1916-March 1917 in Source Records of the Great War (1923).
[24] According to Edmund Candler of The Guardian newspaper, 16 March 1917: Crowds of Baghdadis came out to meet us: Persians, Krabe, Jew, Armenians, Chaldeans and Christians of diverse sects and races. They lined the streets, balconies and roofs, hurrahing and clapping their hands. Groups of schoolchildren danced in front of us, shouting and cheering, and the women of the city turned out in their holiday dresses. In Horne (1923).
[25] A good comparison would be the Tet Offensive of January 1968 in Vietnam. Although that was a military defeat for the NVA and completely annihilated the VC, its effects on American morale were dreadful.
[26] Why are we compelled to go on pouring armies and treasures into these thankless deserts? He famously asked in 1919.
[27] This suspicion was, of course sedulously fostered by those who wished to create trouble for us in Iraq,….the Shiah divines, whom saw in our presence in Iraq a fatal barrier to that domination in temporal matters to which they aspired. Bourdillon (1924) 276.
[28]In an ironic twist given Saddam Hussein’s tactics against the Kurds, the British were driven to consider extreme methods. T E Lawrence wrote to The Observer saying: It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. The RAF when asking Churchill for permission to gas the rebels received this reply: I do not understand this squeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favour of using gas against uncivilised tribes.
[29] T E Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, wrote, we have killed ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. See Brown (1994).
[30] We shouldn't be stopped by the prejudices of those who don't think clearly, he said. I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes.
[31] Look, this is hard work. It's hard to advance freedom in a country that has been strangled by tyranny. And, yet, we must stay the course, because the end result is in our nation's interest. George Bush answer to question at press conference April 14th 2004. We promised Iraq democratic government. We will deliver it. We promised them the chance to use their oil wealth to build prosperity for all their citizens, not a corrupt elite, and we will do so. We will stay with these people so in need of our help until the job is done. Tony Blair Speech to US Congress, 18 July 2003.
[32] Conservative estimates of the cost of the war in Iraq for the US at $222 billion.
[33] There are no kings to impose on Iraq today (the former Crown Prince Hassan of Jordan pulled out just before the invasion), so the US has installed Iyad Allawi, the former CIA "asset", as prime minister in the hope that he can provide the same sovereign wallpaper as Faisal once did.
[34] The Hashemites were about to be expelled by Ibn Saud and the Wahhabis from the Hejaz where they had been keepers of the two holy cities of Mecca and Medina. Faisal himself had been expelled from Syria, of which he had briefly been king.
[35] King Faisal promised to safeguard British oil-interests and he indeed granted large oil-concessions to British firms. For that Britain paid him £800,000 per month.
[36] We have been accused frequently and vigorously of foisting an alien king upon a people unwilling to receive him. That is sheer nonsense. Bourdillon (1924) 278.
[37] See Juster (1994) for an interesting view on Iraqgate.
[38] The uprising surprised the British, and led to the deaths of more than 2,200 occupation troops and an estimated 8,450 Iraqis and cost, by one account, three times as much as the British financing of the entire Arab revolt against the Ottomans.
[39] Although rapid steps were taken to replace British executive officials by Iraqis, and thus to place the details of administration directly in the hands of the peoples themselves, the powers of the High Commissioner under the Provisional Government remained considerable. Bourdillon (1924) 277.
[40] http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/churchill_papers/
[41] It was a young Winston Churchill who argued that the aim of British imperialism was to give peace to warring tribes, to administer justice where all was violence, to strike the chains off the slave, to draw the richness from the soil, to place the earliest seeds of commerce and learning, to increase in whole peoples their capacities for pleasure and diminish their chances of pain. ... See http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/churchill_papers/
[42] Ferguson's (2005) most interesting claim is that the world needs more of this liberal American empire.
[43] Architecturally America demonstrates the emphatic physical power of a new empire. Every Empire attempts to be impressive and recognisable and so that is why 9/11 was such a devastating blow. Not only was it an attack on America, it was an attack at its very symbolic heart and structure.

[44] India, when the British turned up, was already ruled by an empire - the Mogul Empire. The Mogul Empire was an organization which existed to tax peasants in order to pay for the Moguls' consumption. It's completely illogical to imagine that if the British hadn't been there, India would have been some kind of liberal democratic Indian nationalist government of the kind that it has today.
[45] By contrast, fewer than four million Americans reside abroad, and nearly all of them live in Canada, Mexico, or Western Europe.
[46] US military might, is backing an unrivalled degree of economic power. Hollywood and Silicon Valley to Wall Street and is a commercial empire that would have been the envy of the British East India Company or Cecil Rhodes.
[47] It is an ideological element that brings Bush and Blair together. For more see Goldstein 2003.
[48] It would have been difficult to entice servants of the crown (and their families) to foreign climes without providing some sort of ability to practice the important Christian rites.
[49] Some have even gone so far as to call Bush and Blair modern day crusaders. Conflicts have ranged from the eight century when an Arab army hot with a new religion swept through North Africa into Spain and France to the eleventh century crusades to Jerusalem of a newly confident western Europe. Later in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a then all-powerful Europe swallowed up almost the entire Muslim world into its various empires.
[50] Of course there were always domestic critics of the way the empire was run, from Edmund Burke to George Orwell.
[51] A foreign policy oriented around the use of military force against rogue states, Barber argues, reflects a misunderstanding of the consequences of global interdependence and the character of democracy. Washington cannot run a global order driven by military action and the fear of terrorism. Simply put, American empire is not sustainable. The logic of globalization trumps the logic of empire. In most aspects of economic and political life, the United States depends heavily on other states. The world is thus too complex and interdependent to be ruled from an imperial center.
[52] The rhetoric of Washington insists that America is not an empire.
[53] Speech to US nation by George Bush on 14th April 2004
[54] No one can deny the extent of the American informal Empire - the empire of multinational corporations, of Hollywood movies and even of TV evangelists.
[55] How did 70,000 British soldiers and policemen and a little over 60,000 civilians rule over an Indian population of some 300 million with relative ease? This is an idea which is inconceivable nowadays.
[56] The British quickly learnt that there was a pre-existing Arab nationalist movement (Bourdillon (1924) 274).
[57] Imperialism and democracy are at odds with each other. The one implies hierarchy and subordination, the other equality and freedom of choice. Throughout their imperial history, the British, would generally fight to defend their own freedom but did not feel obliged to introduce it in their colonies so long as democracy was in prospect for their subjects one distant day.
[58] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2004/04/10/do1003.xml

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Bell and King Faisal