Iraq War: An Historical Comparison

Business Week magazine has been running some good commentary and coverage on Iraq. This commentary by Stanley Reed in the current issue looks at some of the lessons the US might take from earlier British experiences in Iraq:

<< The similarities between British efforts in Iraq in the 1920s and America's now are "striking," writes British political scientist Toby Dodge in a new book called Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-Building and a History Denied. Like the Bush Administration today, the British claimed to have the noblest of intentions toward Iraq, which they were liberating from the despotic and backward Ottomans. But Iraqis then, like many today, did not appreciate the virtues of English tutelage. The British faced a bitter and bloody revolt in 1920 in which some 6,000 Iraqis and 500 British and Indian soldiers died. When the beleaguered British gave Iraq nominal independence in 1932, they left a legacy of instability that continues to the present. The Hashemite royal family installed by the British, starting with King Faisal I in 1921, was extinguished in a hail of bullets in 1958, giving way to a succession of dictators that culminated with Saddam Hussein.

<< Like their British counterparts in the 1920s, American policymakers failed to understand that by invading Iraq they weren't so much liberating a bunch of democrats-in-waiting but stirring up a hornets' nest. Saddam was a brutal leader, but he needs to be placed in the context of Iraqi history. Saddam, writes Dodge, a fellow at London's Royal Institute of International Affairs, "must be understood less as the cause of Iraq's violent political culture and more as the symptom." Iraqi political institutions are so poorly developed that the country's rulers have come to rely on a mixture of extreme violence, networks of patronage and graft, and the exploitation of religious and ethnic divisions to maintain their grip. >>

One of the things that impressed me - in a sad way - during the build-up to the Iraq War is the facile way that historical analogies were tossed about. The same caution applies here. But the history is very relevant to today's situation.

Tags: iraq war