Robert Fisk - The Great War for Civilisation - The Conquest of the Middle East

Commanding the British Forces in Iraq

Private Dickens spent the First World War fighting Muslims, first the Turks at Suvla Bay at Gallipoli and then the Turkish army – which included Arab soldiers – in Mesopotamia. My father Bill was originally in the Cheshire Regiment but was serving in Ireland the year Charles Dickens entered Baghdad, and would be sent to the Western Front in 1918. Dickens had a longer war. He ‘spoke, often & admirably’, his daughter Hilda would recall, of one of his commanders, General Sir Charles Munro, who at fifty-five had fought in the last months of the Gallipoli campaign and then landed at Basra in southern Iraq at the start of the British invasion. But Munro’s leadership did not save Dickens’s married sister’s nephew, Samuel Martin, who was killed by the Turks at Basra. Hilda remembers ‘my father told of how killing a Turk, he thought it was in revenge for the death of his “nephew”. I don’t know if they were in the same battalion, but they were a similar age, 22 years.’ *

The British had been proud of their initial occupation of Basra. More than eighty years later, a British Muslim whose family came from Pakistan sent me an amused letter along with a series of twelve very old postcards which were printed by the Times of India in Bombay on behalf of the Indian YMCA. One of them showed British artillery amid the Basra date palms, another a soldier in a pith helmet, turning towards the camera as his comrades tether horses behind him, others the crew of a British gunboat on the Shatt al-Arab river and the Turkish-held town of Kurna, a building shattered by British shellfire, shortly before its surrender. As long ago as 1914, a senior British official was told by ‘local [Arab] notables’ that ‘we should be receivedin Baghdad with the same cordiality [as in southern Iraq] and that the Turkish troops would offer little if any opposition’. But the British invasion of Iraq had originally failed. When Major-General Charles Townshend took 13,000 men up the banks of the Tigris towards Baghdad, he was surrounded and defeated by Turkish forces at Kut al-Amara. His surrender was the most comprehensive of military disasters and ended in a death march to Turkey for those British troops who had not been killed in battle. The graves of 500 of them in the Kut War Cemetery sank into sewage during the period of UN sanctions that followed Iraq’s 1990 invasion of Kuwait when spare parts for pumps needed to keep sewage from the graves were not supplied to Iraq. Visiting the cemetery in 1998, my colleague at the Independent , Patrick Cockburn, found ‘tombstones … still just visible above the slimy green water. A broken cement cross sticks out of a reed bed … a quagmire in which thousands of little green frogs swarm like cockroaches as they feed on garbage.’ In all, Britain lost 40,000 men in the Mesopotamian campaign.

Baghdad looked much the same when Private Dickens arrived. Less than two years earlier, a visitor had described a city whose streets

gaped emptily, the shops were mostly closed … In the Christian cemetery east of the high road leading to Persia coffins and half mouldering skeletons were floating. On account of the Cholera which was ravaging the town (three hundred people were dying of it every day) the Christian dead were now being buried on the new embankment of the high road, so that people walking and riding not only had to pass by but even to make their way among and over the graves … There was no longer any life in the town …

The British held out wildly optimistic hopes for a ‘new’ Iraq that would be regenerated by Western enterprise, not unlike America’s own pipedreams of 2003. ‘There is no doubt,’ The Sphere told its readers in 1915, ‘that with the aid of European science and energy it can again become the garden of Asia … and under British rule everything may be hoped.’

The British occupation was dark with historical precedent. Iraqi troops who had been serving with the Turkish army, but who ‘always entertainedfriendly ideas towards the English’, found that in prison in India they were ‘insulted and humiliated in every way’. These same prisoners wanted to know if the British would hand over Iraq to Sherif Hussein of the Hejaz – to whom the British had made fulsome and ultimately mendacious promises of ‘independence’ for the Arab world if it fought alongside the Allies against the Turks – on the grounds that ‘some of the HolyMoslem Shrines are located in Mesopotamia’.

British officials believed that control of Mesopotamia would safeguard British oil interests in Persia – the initial occupation of Basra was ostensibly designed to do that – and that ‘clearly it is our rightand duty, if we sacrifice so much for the peace of the world, that we should see to it we have compensation, or we may defeat our end’ – which was not how General Maude expressed Britain’s ambitions in his famous proclamation in 1917. Earl Asquith was to write in his memoirs that he and Sir Edward Grey, the British foreign secretary, agreed in 1915 that ‘taking Mesopotamia… means spending millions in irrigation and development …’ Once they were installed in Baghdad, the British decided that Iraq would be governedand reconstructed by a ‘Council’, formed partly of British advisers ‘and partly of representative non-official members from among the inhabitants’. Later, they thought they would like ‘a cabinet half of nativesand half of British officials, behind which might be an administrative council, or some advisory body consisting entirely of prominent natives’.

The traveller and scholar Gertrude Bell, who became ‘oriental secretary’ to the British military occupation authority, had no doubts about Iraqi public opinion. ‘… The stronger the holdwe are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased … they can’t conceive an independent Arab government. Nor, I confess, can I. There is no one here who could run it.’ Again, this was far from the noble aspirations of Maude’s proclamation eleven months earlier. Nor would the Iraqis have been surprised had they been told – which, of course, they were not – that Maude strongly opposed the very proclamation that appeared over his name and which was in fact written by Sir Mark Sykes, the very same Sykes who had drawn up the secret 1916 agreement with François Georges Picot for French and British control over much of the postwar Middle East.

By September of 1919, even journalists were beginning to grasp that Britain’s plans for Iraq were founded upon illusions. ‘I imagine,’ the Times correspondent wrote on 23 September, ‘that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and English money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination … from the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilisation, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.’

Within six months, Britain was fighting an insurrection in Iraq and David Lloyd George, the prime minister, was facing calls for a military withdrawal. ‘Is it not for the benefitof the people of that country that it should be governed so as to enable them to develop this land which has been withered and shrivelled up by oppression. What would happen if we withdrew?’ Lloyd George would not abandon Iraq to ‘anarchy and confusion’. By this stage, British officials in Baghdad were blaming the violence on ‘local political agitation, originated outside Iraq’, suggesting that Syria might be involved. For Syria 1920, read America’s claim that Syria was supporting the insurrection in 2004. Arnold Wilson, the senior British official in Iraq, took a predictable line. ‘We cannot maintainour position … by a policy of conciliation of extremists,’ he wrote. ‘Having set our hand to the task of regenerating Mesopotamia, we must be prepared to furnish men and money … We must be prepared … to go very slowly with constitutional and democratic institutions.’