Governing Iraq: Modern History and ”The Day After“, Part 1

Much of the debate over a possible US war with Iraq has focused on what has come to be known as “the day after” — the question of what happens once Saddam Hussein is gone. The US is reportedly planning an occupation period of anything from 18 months to two years, under a US military governor, a scenario which has provoked sharp criticism from several anti-Saddam Iraqi exiles who insist Iraqis themselves should govern Iraq. That will certainly be one issue the US will have to contend with (since it easily can be turned into a charge of neocolonial aspirations), and of course all discussions of the “day after” assume a relatively easy war. A war in which Saddam uses scorched-earth tactics and leaves Iraq a smoldering ruin, or in which chemical or biological weapons are used against portions of the Iraqi population, or in which the US has to fight house-to-house in Baghdad, would make for a very different “day after” scenario.

But assume, for the sake of argument, that the war does end relatively quickly and cleanly. Even then, how does one govern Iraq? Britain had barely taken over its mandate at the end of World War I when it was faced with pervasive and stubborn revolts. Winston Churchill himself, no man to run from a fight, as Colonial Secretary lamented the “burden and odium of the Mesopotamian entanglement”, and eventually, the British essentially handed control of the Iraqi hinterland to the Royal Air Force, which used bombing as its main coercive instrument. Little in the modern history of Iraq encourages one to believe that a pluralist, democratic society will be easy to build. Though Iraq has a rather well-educated population, it is deeply divided by ethnic and religious divisions, has a history of political change through violence (the first military coup in the Arab world was in Iraq in 1936), and has usually known stability only through a strong central government, though little other than a federal system could possibly be acceptable to the Kurds, who have enjoyed autonomy for a decade now. It will not be easy to find a means of governing Iraq, whether those trying to govern it are Iraqi or American, or some United Nations force.

Sometimes the Iraq debate seems to assume that modern Iraqi history began in 1991, at the end of the last Gulf war, or in 1980, when the Iran-Iraq war broke out, or in 1968, when the Ba’ath Party came to power. Admittedly, a state configured as modern Iraq is, including both Mesopotamia and Kurdistan, is a creation of the post-World War I era, so (despite Saddam’s fondness for identifying himself with Nebuchadnezzar and Saladin) the history is not that lengthy. But it carries some lessons for those who would create a new Iraq out of the old one, for that has been tried before. This Dossier, the first in a series, looks at some of the issues involved in deciding on how to handle the day after, in the light of the far from edifying history of 20th Century Iraq. This Dossier, and those which will follow it (possibly with interruptions as events occur), will look at the less than encouraging history of trying to govern modern Iraq.

Gertrude Bell, please call your office. Confronted with revolt and other problems in Iraq in 1921, Bell, one of the stars of Britain’s wartime Arab Bureau, set about creating the Kingdom of Iraq. The story is well-enough known, but the manipulations and dubious elections involved in making the Hashemite Prince Faisal the first King of Iraq seem embarrassing to a post-Imperial age. Though some may dream of a new American imperium in the region, in a 21st century context it is unthinkable that anyone could be quite as openly manipulative as Bell was eight decades ago. Even if Ms. Bell were somehow available to the intelligence staff of a future American occupation force, her talents were those of a more unapologetic imperial age.

For those who tuned in late to Iraqi history, let us begin with a vignette from 1921. Faced with massive revolt — both Sunni and Shi‘i — among the Iraqi tribes and the inability to control by military force anything other than the major cities, Britain decided to more or less accept the commitments it had made during World War I to Arab self-governance in Iraq. (This was not in fact its first instinct, but as the Churchill quote noted in the introduction recognized, it was made necessary by the impossibility of imposing direct rule on Iraq.)

Britain therefore needed an Arab leader for Iraq. Its ally and client during the war, Prince Faisal of the Hashemite house ruling in Mecca, had recently been kicked out of his chosen patrimony of Damascus by the French, who claimed Syria and Lebanon as their own. The British needed a King of Iraq, and they had a frustrated Faisal on their hands. So Faisal became the British-favored candidate for King.

Faisal was not, of course, an Iraqi: he was from Mecca in the Hijaz, in what is today’s Saudi Arabia. He had a number of loyalist officers who had served in the Arab revolt against the Ottomans, and a few were in fact Iraqi, but he had no real core constituency in Iraq.

Under the League of Nations Mandate which Britain had for Iraq, they determined in 1921 to choose an Arab ruler for the country. Gertrude Bell and other British officials (though not all) favored Faisal. T.E. Lawrence, Faisal’s advisor and ally in the war, was among them, but H. St.John Philby, who had allied ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Ibn Sa‘ud with Britain, favored the latter or some Iraqi figure. The Naqib or local ruler of Baghdad, a prominent figure, was too old to stand in his own right and favored Sayyid Talib, a prominent figure from Basra who had been Interior Minister in the transitional government Britain formed at the end of the war.

Sayyid Talib seems to have had some real domestic Iraqi support, and the phrase ‘Iraq li’l-‘Iraqiyyin, or “Iraq for the Iraqis” (as opposed to the Hijazis) was soon heard.

Sayyid Talib seems to have drawn considerable local Iraqi support, and despite a British-sponsored tour of the country for Faisal, the latter’s popularity was anything but clear. On April 13, 1921, Sayyid Talib invited the French Consul, the Persian Consul, several trigbla chiefs, the correspondent of London’s Daily Telegraph, and a British oilman to dinner. During this dinner he reportedly insisted that Britain was deliberately biased towards Faisal and that the tribal leaders had the power to take matters into their own hands. Many of the British figures at the dinner did not know any Arabic, but within a day or two Ms. Bell, who had not attended, informed Sir Percy Cox, the British agent in charge of Iraq at the time, that Talib had made inflammatory, revolutionary remarks.

What happened next is singularly typical of the colonial era: Talib was due to attend an afternoon tea with Sir Percy on April 16. He arrived, Sir Percy begged off, and Lady Cox entertained Sayyid Talib. As he left the tea, however, he was arrested in the street by British officers, at least one of whom had attended the tea. Though Britain insisted his remarks had been utterly unacceptable, they waited three days, and until tea, to do anything about it. (Those who know the Arab world will immediately recognize the offense against hospitality; Britons should recognize a singular offense against the etiquette of an afternoon tea as well.)

Talib was taken to the docks, shipped down the Tigris to Basra, and put on a boat for Ceylon (now Sri Lanka); his family soon joined him. (He later made it to Europe, and ultimately died in Munich, but that was not the point: the point was that he missed the referendum.) The main challenger was gone. Oddly, though he was bundled off after tea as if he were an explosion waiting to happen, no one did anything in the first three days after his alleged subversion.

The curious removal of Sayyid Talib left only one real candidate for King of Iraq, Faisal. He arrived in Iraq shortly after Talib’s deportation, was nominated King by the Council of Ministers, and this was put to a yes-or-no referendum. And (astoundingly enough) he won. With 96% of the vote. Most Iraqis then were illiterate, and most had never heard of Faisal until recently, so there have been those (even many of them British) who have doubted the reliability of those results. In fact, Britain may have invented the outrageous electoral result in the Arab world, which has been seen so frequently since then in the region, with Arab Presidents usually winning between 96% and 99% of the vote (but with the astounding performance last year of Saddam Hussein taking the all-time record with a 100%, unanimous result). It is not a precedent of which the British need to be proud.

There are, almost certainly, some in the US Administration who will read this story with envy and hope of emulation, but Sri Lanka today is not accepting exiles, and kidnapping one of the major candidates has tended to fall into disrepute if the occupying power claims to be establishing a democratic regime (something the British did not assert in 1920). Blatant imperialism has become somewhat outdated, and unlikely to be repeated so unapologetically.

And there are other lessons to be learned: let us review the events before and after the Sayyid Talib affair for some of those lessons.

Mespot and All That
The 1921 Annointing of King Faisal — it is hard to call it anything else, and few today would claim that the referendum was a genuine one — followed on what had already been a truly disastrous British experience in “Mesopotamia”, as they called what is today Iraq. The soldiers, with a bit more aptitude and a lot more understanding, just called it “Mespot”: for more, see the lead story, “Mespot”, in The Estimate for August 16, 2002.

And why was “Mespot” such a popular name? Well, the fact that in 1916 General Sir Charles Townshend surrendered 10,000 British and Indian troops at Kut al-‘Amara might have had something to do with it. No larger British force had ever been taken into captivity before, nor would any again until Singapore in 1942. Of those 10,000 Anglo-Indian troops, the majority never came home. For the Indians, it was a massive loss.

The British high command that brought about Kut al-Amara was so horrifically bad that no one today studies the campaign, except as a case of what not to do (and one presumes, the Iraqi War Colleges pay some attention).

Yes, by the end of the war the British had fought their way up the Tigris and Euphrates, beaten the Turks there (with the help of the flanking movements of Allenby in Palestine), and even pushed up towards the oilfields of Baku. But the Ottoman Sick Man was dying, by then, and despite their earlier failures, the British managed to win “Mespot” as well as other theaters.

The Revolt of 1920
Before the Sayyid Talib incident occurred and before Faisal was given the throne, Britain had already had to fight a major revolt in Iraq. From the Sykes-Picot agreement and the subsequent peace accords, the British were supposed to have a League of Nations Mandate in Iraq. But by 1920, before any of this was formally established, the whole country was in flames. The Iraqi revolt of 1920 started among various tribal and Shi‘ite groups but by the time it had reached full flower there was almost no part of the country, outside some of the major cities, which Britain could control. It was at this point that Churchill complained against the “burden and odium of the Mesopotamian entanglement” to the British government. Never a man to flinch from a challenge, even Churchill could not see much to gain in Iraq.

At the end of the war, Arab leaders, both Shi‘i and Sunni, had demanded independence; when the British sought to enforce the Mandate through direct rule, they rose. Traditional Shi‘ite religious leaders in Najaf and Karbala’ led the uprising, but were soon joined by tribal leaders and others, Sunni as well. For three months the country was in full revolt. Soon the British approach was twofold: install (or impose) an Arab government with some semblance of legitimacy, and let the Royal Air Force put down the revolts in the hinterland.

Perhaps few Britons and almost no Americans today are aware of the 1920 revolt. Iraqis are, however: it is traditionally called the “Great Iraqi Revolution of 1920". Oh yes: that rifle you frequently see Saddam Hussein posing with and firing in the air is a captured British Enfield from the 1920 revolt.

Faisal was an ally of the British from the war, and of course, a Sunni Arab from Hijaz. He came to preside over a country which had been formed from three separate provinces of the Ottoman Empire and which consisted of three major and numerous minor ethnic groups. It was not to be an easy task.

Forming Iraq: Mosul, Baghdad, Basra
Most people who follow Iraq surely know by now that the present country consists of a mix of Shi‘ite Arabs, Sunni Arabs, and Sunni Kurds. The exact mix is somewhat debatable as the country has long been dominated by the Sunni Arabs, but reasonable figures would be something along the lines used by the CIA’s World Factbook: 60-65% Shi‘ite, 32-37% Sunni, with the population ethnically divided roughly 75-80% Arab and 15-20% Kurdish. There are grounds for argument; some references place the Shi‘ite figure at more like 55%, but all agree they are a majority. The Kurds insist they form at least 25% of the population, and they may be right.

Today Iraq is about 97% Muslim. The remainder are mostly Christians: Assyrians, Chaldeans, and members of other ancient Christian churches of the east. Some, especially the Assyrians, arrived in Iraq after pogroms in Turkey and subsequently also faced massacres in Iraq in the 1930s. Until 1948 Iraq had a significant Jewish population, perhaps as much as 6 or 7% of the total; that population has almost entirely migrated to Israel. Besides the mainstream Sunni and Shi‘i groups there are also some smaller Muslim sects (or syncretist sects like the Yazidis).

Ethnically, besides Arabs and Kurds, there is a Turkoman population (Turkish-speaking, of Central Asian origin), especially in the north, and many Turkish speakers who remain from the Ottoman era in the north as well. Assyrians still speak, in a few small places, eastern Aramaic and thus can claim a separate linguistic/ethnic identity as well.

In addition, geographically this population is distributed among the formidable mountains of the north (largely Kurds and Turkomans), the broad river valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates (Mesopotamia: mostly Arabs, with Sunnis heavier in the north and Shi’‘is in the south), and the marshlands of the far south, now largely drained. The western deserts have only a few small settlements and military bases.

This agglomeration of peoples and religious groups constituted three separate vilayets (governorates or provinces) under the Ottoman Empire: those of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. The British combined the three to form the new Mandate of Iraq, taking the Arabic name long used for parts of the Mesopotamian valley.

Another complicating factor is that the status of the northernmost province, that of Mosul, was never completely accepted by Turkey. On October 30, 1918, when the Ottoman Empire signed an armistice ending World War I, British troops had not yet reached Mosul. Under the punitive Treaty of Sèvres of 1920 dismantled the Empire and left only a small Turkish rump state in central Anatolia. Mustafa Kemal rejected that and fought back, until in 1923 the Allies signed the more equitable Treaty of Lausanne. Lausanne defined the boundaries of modern Turkey, except for the boundary with Iraq. That was left to be separately decided between Turkey and Iraq and Great Britain, since Iraq was still a Mandate. After Turkey faced a major Kurdish revolt in 1925 (which also affected Iraq), Turkey agreed to cede Mosul in a Treaty of 1926, in exchange for a share of oil revenues (oil was not actually discovered until 1927). Though many believe Britain insisted on keeping Mosul because they suspected the presence of oil in Kirkuk, an added reason (the oil wealth not yet being proven) was the British insistence (based on experience on India’s Northwest Frontier) on controlling the mountains in order to pacify the river valleys.

The Turkish Parliament ratified the 1926 treaty but Turkey has always maintained a latent claim to sovereignty over parts or all of the old vilayet of Mosul. In 1995 then-Turkish President Süleyman Demirel, in the wake of a Turkish operation against PKK Kurds in northern Iraq, reasserted a claim to Mosul. Iraqi Kurds suspect that the Turks hope to use a war against Iraq to increase their presence in the north; Turkish leaders of course fear the Iraqi Kurds will achieve independence. Once again, the legacy of the post-World War I settlement — which David Fromkin memorably called “A Peace to End All Peace” — haunts us still.

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