The occupation of Iraq begins with strong military victories. Soon, however, the goal of creating a united and stable Iraq begins to seem elusive. The population at home loses patience. The young Iraqi government, heavily assisted by the occupiers, seems incapable of achieving benchmarks toward true independence. Iraqi leaders’ motives are hard to make out, and observers fear that the minority Sunni government is too divisive to command the support of the Shi’a majority. The military presence in Iraq is costly, draining an already strained national budget. Yet despite elections at home where Iraq is the central issue, and despite opposition candidates vocally advocating immediate withdrawal, the misadventure drags on with no end in sight.
Am I describing our current fiasco in Iraq? Certainly. But I am also describing the dilemmas faced by Britain in the period of its “Mandate” in Iraq, which stretched roughly from the end of the First World War until 1932 - or, depending on how you look at it, for the decades afterwards when Britain maintained military bases in Iraq and kept “advisers” in the Iraqi government.
Cross-posted at The Seminal: Independent Media and Politics.
A glance through the histories of this time period, such as Toby Dodge’s Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and a History Denied, is eerily disconcerting. Consider, for example, this description of Commissioner Percy Cox’s testimony during the winter of 1922-3 before a government committee that was debating withdrawal from Iraq:
His testimony proved critical. Cox set out to persuade the committee and with it the cabinet, that British policy in Iraq was working, would bear dividends great enough to justify its continuance, and that, if prematurely curtailed, the result would be disastrous. He claimed that the majority of Iraqis welcomed the British role and that withdrawal would lead inevitably to anarchy…If Britain turned its back on Iraq, he argued, the negative effects would be felt across the entire Muslim world. (p. 25)
Remind you of anything?
The similarities between British and American exploits in Iraq run deep, and they are disturbing. The most disturbing question, in fact, is whether we are now what Britain was then: a declining superpower that is squandering its resources as we blindly attempt to win at a game whose rules have changed. The British neither “won” in Iraq nor nurtured a stable government there. In fact, the British were compelled to intervene diplomatically and military up through World War II. For its part, the Iraqi state faced wave after wave of revolts and coups up until Saddam Hussein came to power. Britain’s failures in Iraq were not the cause of its decline as a superpower - but they were certainly a revealing symptom of it.
The long historical view, upon close reading of books like Dodge’s, suggests that America, like Britain, will not be able to accomplish its aims in Iraq. The same debates raged in Britain in the 1920s that we see in American politics now - Will withdrawal create anarchy? Will it hurt our national interests? - and in the end, they led nowhere. Britain’s prolonged occupation of Iraq achieved little, and the disruption that British policies caused in Iraqi society did significant harm to national unity and political and economic progress. Had the British left in 1920 instead of 1932, Iraq might well have been better off.
Is America in decline? Anxiety on this question is beginning to spread in our society, and is enough of an issue worldwide that it prompted some speculation in an Economist article specifically devoted to the subject. No one is really in a position to answer the question definitively, but I will say that we do not have to take the path the Britain took in the interwar period. We do not have to fritter our time and wealth away in places like Iraq. From the perspective of national interest, in fact, we should withdraw from Iraq, and unlike the British we can admit that we need help, attempt to draw in the international community, and hopefully withdraw with a modicum of responsibility.
The world in 2007 does not have to be what it was in 1927 - and if it seems that nothing has changed in 80 years, that is because we have failed to imagine a new world into being. Superpowers may be slow, lumbering, and stubborn, but they do have room for choice and change. Perhaps we can start by reflecting on the words of a British official in Iraq, struck with doubts over his country’s “mission” there:
“[These politicians] continue to demand that the nations of Asia and Africa should make a clean cut with their past, and at one fell stroke, adopt the mentality and traditions of the Western democracies…Would it not be more practical, as well as more polite, if we left these nations to govern themselves in their own way?”