'Liberation' is not freedom
Iraqis mistrust the intentions of the West, and a history of failures
supports their attitude
by Avi Shlaim
Sunday March 30, 2003
Comment in The London Observer
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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