‘Liberation’ is not Freedom
Avi Shlaim
The Observer, March 30, 2003
Iraqis mistrust the intentions of the West, and a history of failures supports their attitude
The fierce resistance that our troops encountered in Iraq must have
come as a very unpleasant surprise to Tony Blair and George Bush.
They assumed that Saddam Hussein is so unpopular and isolated that the
Iraqi people would welcome the British and American troops as
liberators and help them to overthrow Saddam’s regime. But
the popular uprising has not materialised. However much they detest
Saddam’s tyrannical regime, a great many Iraqis view the allied
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
that Iraqi history plays in shaping popular attitudes to current
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. Tony Blair has repeatedly emphasised the moral argument
behind the resort to force to depose an evil dictator. Over
the last century, however, Britain rarely occupied the high moral
ground in relation to Iraq. As for the Americans, they have even
less of a claim on the trust and goodwill of the Iraqi people after
their calamitous failure to support the popular insurrection against
Saddam and his henchmen in March 1991.
Iraq was just 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 Britain’s 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 oil wells, Kirkuk and Mosul, by uniting three widely
separated peoples: the Kurds, the Sunnies, and the Shiis.’
The man handpicked 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, we
procured for him the throne of Iraq as a consolation prize. We
cleared Faisal’s path to the throne by neutralising the local
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. The only way
to bring about political change was by violence. The key feature
of this settlement 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 our own folly over
Suez, we witnessed the defenestration of our royal friends in Baghdad
in a bloody military coup.
In 1980 Saddam Hussein attacked Iran. During the eight years of
the Iran-Iraq War, we and all our Western allies, tilted increasingly
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 at the time that
Saddam was a monster in human form. We did not manufacture
this monster but we turned a blind eye to the savage brutality of his
regime. We also knew that Saddam had chemical and biological
weapons because Western companies sold him all the ingredients
necessary to produce this nasty kit.
Saddam was known to be gassing Iranian troops in their thousands in the
Iran-Iraq War. Failure to subject Iraq to international sanction
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, 1988 was
that time. Yet no Western government even suggested
intervention. Nor was an arms embargo imposed on Iraq.
In 1990 we belatedly turned against Saddam only because he trod on our
toes by invading Kuwait. He had a point when he said that 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 much-vaulted ‘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 the
majority of the Arab states.
On 28 February 1991, Papa Bush gave the order to ceasefire.
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 out of Kuwait and the Kuwaiti government was
restored. But Saddam kept his deadly grip on power in
Baghdad. After the ceasefire, Bush encouraged the Iraqi people to
rise up against the tyrant, 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 that
Kurdish and Shiite 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 Iraq in one piece.
Once again, the Iraqis were the victims of the cruel geopolitics of the
region.
In order to topple Saddam Hussein, it was not necessary for the allied
forces 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 the butcher of Baghdad and of his nefarious
regime. The Kurds in the north were crushed and fled to the
mountains. The Shiites in the south were crushed and fled to the
marshes.
In calling for Saddam’s overthrow, Bush evidently had in mind a
military coup, a reshuffling of Sunni gangsters in Baghdad, rather than
the establishment of a freer and more democratic political order.
As a result of his moral cowardice, Bush snatched a defeat from the
jaws of victory. Saddam remained in power and continued to
torment his people, while Kuwait remained a feudal fiefdom. A quick and
decisive war was followed by a messy peace. Few wars in history
had achieved their immediate aims so fully and swiftly and 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 explain why the Iraqi people are not playing their part in our
script for the liberation of their country. This is why Tony
Blair, in his press conference on Tuesday, was so anxious to persuade
ordinary Iraqis that this time we are determined to overthrow Saddam
Hussein. Blair directed his appeal particularly at the Shiite
Muslims who make up 60 per cent of Iraq's 24 million inhabitants.
‘This time we will not let you down,’ he pledged
solemnly. But it is naïve 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.