‘Liberating’
the Mideast:
Why Do We
Never Learn?
by
Robert Fisk
Dissident Voice
March 10, 2003
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.”
Robert Fisk is an award winning foreign
correspondent for The Independent
(UK), where this article first appeared. He is the author of Pity Thy
Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon (The Nation Books, 2002 edition)