The Iraq War

by John Keegan

  Saddam had tested his dictatorship to its limits. Had he been content merely to modernize, spending his country’s vast oil revenues for the benefit of all, he might have made Iraq a successful country. Modernize he did, but out of megalomaniac ambition he also attempted to establish Iraq as the dominant Middle Eastern state, a regional military superpower. He waged internal war against the Kurds. He dragooned his population into a costly invasion of neighbouring Iran over a trivial border dispute. He finally provoked a war with the world by an aggression against Kuwait designed to pay his debts.

  Defeated and humiliated, he persisted in playing the big man, refusing to demonstrate to the United Nations that he had desisted from developing the weapons of mass destruction with which he had buttressed his ambition. For twelve years, between 1991 and 2003, he fenced with the United Nations and its supporters, the United States foremost, over inspection and disclosure. Eventually, having exhausted American patience, he was confronted by the challenge of war again. He declined to offer the facilities and guarantees that would have staved off the consequences of his intransigence. He thus brought war on himself.

  It was not a war into which the peoples of Iraq would follow him. In one sense Western military theorists were right. Ordinary Iraqis ought to have been willing to fight to defend their homeland, as theory dictated, had Iraq been an ordinary country. Iraq, however, was not an ordinary country. It was not merely an artificial creation; it was also a monstrosity. Artificial states, of which there are many in the world, can survive for long periods through the medium of carefully calculated concessions by the dominant centre to the minorities. Saddam did not concede. He brutalized. Not only were individual opponents of his régime tortured and murdered; whole sections of the population were murdered also, while those not currently chosen for Saddam’s cruelties were held in check by fear of his disfavour.

  Ultimately there is no mystery about the collapse of Saddam’s régime and the failure of his people to fight his last war. Saddam had waged war against Iraq itself, repeatedly, relentlessly, revengefully. He had exhausted the will of the population to do anything for him and it was entirely appropriate that he should have been driven as a last resort to seek refuge underground in the soil of his tortured country.

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  Iraq Before Saddam

  ‘Iraq’ in Arabic means the shore of the great river and the fertile land surrounding it. The word has been used since at least the eighth century AD to describe the alluvial plain of the Tigris and Euphrates valley, known in Europe since Antiquity by the Greek term ‘Mesopotamia’, the land between the rivers.

  Long before the Greeks, the land between the rivers was of local, and far wider than local, importance. Mesopotamia has genuine claims to be the cradle of civilization. There are other river valleys to dispute the title. The Indus is one, the Nile another, and in both power rested with rulers who controlled or appeared to control the life-bringing flood. Geography made Mesopotamia different. The central valley is so flat, descending only 34 metres in 338 kilometres (112 feet in 210 miles), that the annual snowmelt from the surrounding highlands spreads across the whole face of the land and can be utilized only by constantly renewed irrigation work. The ‘irrigation societies’ which consequently grew up were eventually unified under a succession of dynasties, Akkadian, Sumerian and Assyrian. Assyria became a great power and it was under the Assyrian kings that the magnificent works of temple and palace architecture, some still surviving, were created. Assyria was eventually overthrown in the seventh century BC by barbarian invaders from the Central Asian interior but Mesopotamia was restored to civilization by incorporation in the Persian Empire.

  Briefly Hellenized under Alexander and his successors, Mesopotamia became a borderland between the later Persian Empire and Rome and thus remained until conquered by the Arabs in the early expansion of Islam in the eighth century AD. After the transfer of the seat of the Islamic Caliphate from Damascus to Baghdad in the tenth century, Iraq became the centre of the most powerful state west of China and Baghdad a city of wealth and splendour under its Abbasid rulers, particularly under the famous vizier Nizam al-Mulk. This was the era of the Arabian Nights and the Thousand and One Tales, when Abbasid life was a byword for luxury and extravagance wholly at variance with the austerity of the early Muslim régime. Baghdad’s time of glory was brought abruptly to an end in 1258 when the Mongols, the latest wave of interlopers from the Steppe, terrorized the last Abbasid Caliph into surrender and had him strangled within his own city.

  Mongol power did not last and Iraq, having temporarily fallen under the power of Tamerlane, last of the great Steppe conquerors, reverted to Persia. Persian rule was ended at the beginning of the sixteenth century by the arrival of the Ottoman Turks, under whom Iraq was to be governed until the beginning of the twentieth century. The Ottomans, though originally a horse people of the Steppe, had absorbed from the Byzantines, after their capture of Constantinople in 1453, a sophisticated understanding of statecraft and ran their enormous empire, stretching from the Red Sea to the Balkans, on lines that owed much to those descendants of Rome. They understood the mechanisms of taxation, they were masters of the principle of divide and rule and they made the maintenance of an efficient imperial army the basis of their authority.

  The Ottomans divided Iraq into three vilayets, or governorships, centred on Mosul, in the Kurdish north; Baghdad, a largely Sunni city in the centre; and Basra, in the Shi’ite south. Iraq was ready-made for the exercise of their skills in manipulating minorities. In both the Mosul and Basra vilayets a traditional tribal society predominated and the Ottomans ruled indirectly through chieftains and heads of leading families. The situation was further complicated in the Baghdad vilayet because of the city’s proximity to the Shi’a holy places of Najaf and Karbala. The Shi’a religious leaders, though disfavoured by the Sunni Ottomans, had to be respected because of the readiness of the Shah of Persia, the most important Shi’a ruler in Islam, to intervene on their behalf. In the Basra vilayet, from the seventeenth century onwards, the most significant locals were the merchants trading with the British East India Company. Throughout the country there was a scattering of religious and ethnic minorities, including Eastern Rite Christians, heretical Muslims, such former Steppe people as the Turkomans and an ancient and large Jewish community, present since the Babylonian captivity.

  A final complexity of the Ottoman system in Iraq was that rule was exercised, until the nineteenth century, through a slave, or mameluke, class. The mameluke principle had been devised in early Islam to evade the Koranic prohibition on Muslim fighting Muslim; since conflict is an irrepressible feature of human life, pious Muslims sought to get round the ban by buying slaves to fight for them. Boys were purchased from the Steppe horse people, trained as soldiers and inducted into the Caliph’s army; after the conquest of the Balkans boys were forcibly recruited there from Christian families and taken to Constantinople, where they formed the formidable Janissary corps. Inevitably slave soldiers soon came to exercise power. In Constantinople the Janissaries dominated the court; in Egypt and Iraq, farther from the centre, the mamelukes achieved autonomous power. Outwardly obedient to the Caliph, effectively they governed in their own right. It was a peculiarity of the mameluke régime in Iraq that its members were brought from the mountain region of Georgia, to which the recruiters constantly returned to refresh their numbers. The position of mameluke was not hereditary.

  Even though not hereditary power-holders, Ottoman government slaves, Janissaries and mamelukes alike, were deeply reactionary in outlook. Their position depended upon resisting change of any sort and theirs was the principal influence which kept Ottoman society static and increasingly backward. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, after several hundred years of military success, the Ottoman Empire – Turkey as it was now often called – faced defeat by the Christian world. The Caliphs bestirred themselves. In 1826 the Janissary corps was bloodily disbanded and Western institutions introduced. The reform
s spread progressively to the empire’s outer provinces. In Iraq, in 1831, the mameluke governor of Baghdad was turned out of office for disobedience and by 1834 all three provinces, Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, had been brought under the direct rule of Constantinople. The new Ottoman officials brought with them procedures designed to recruit soldiers to the imperial army by conscription, to superimpose secular courts over those of the religious and tribal authorities and to organize land-holding, the basis of the economy, through a government-controlled land register. All these reforms met local resistance, often local revolt, but the tanzimat (reforms) proceeded inexorably and by the last decades of the nineteenth century the Nizam-i Celid (New Order) was established.

  What impeded its complete realization was reaction at the centre, as so often the response of traditional power to a reform movement. Abdul Hamid II, who became Sultan-Caliph in 1876, was temperamentally absolutist and resented the rate at which central power was slipping from the absolute ruler’s hands. He attempted a confrontation with the reforming Young Ottomans, as the reformists were known, and suspended the constitution his predecessor had been obliged to grant. Too late; in 1908 a new group of reformists, the Young Turks, members of the undercover Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), formed largely of Ottoman subjects from the European provinces, staged a revolution and seized power. They accelerated the pace of reform but without conceding power to the empire’s non-Turkish subjects. That was to prove a mistake. The Young Turks looked to Europe for example, to Germany for alliance and sought to heighten the Westernization of the empire. They were secularists, not practising Muslims, were ethnic Turkish nationalists devoted to the idea of a greater Turkey pushed into Central Asia (Turanianism) and they adopted an imperialist policy towards the empire’s Arab subjects. As Ottoman Arabs equalled or even outnumbered the empire’s Turks, the policy was unpopular and was particularly resented by the educated Arabs who, though few in number, were influential, particularly in Syria and Lebanon. There lay the heartland of what was to become known as ‘the Arab Awakening’, a movement mounted by idealists who looked forward to the reunification of the Arab lands as a single political unit, to the liberation of the Arabs from imperialist rule, Ottoman, British, French and Italian, and to their intellectual emancipation through the pursuit of Western education but within Muslim belief. Many of the nationalists were Ottoman officers who by 1914 had formed a secret society within the army’s ranks, al-‘Ahd (the Covenant). To it belonged several men destined to become prominent in post-Ottoman Iraq, notably Nuri al-Sa’id.

  The first stage in the detachment of Iraq from Turkish rule came in November 1914 when, following the Ottoman entry into the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, Britain despatched an expeditionary force from India to seize Basra. The move had two aims: to open a front against the Turks to assist the Russians, but also to protect British oil interests at the head of the Gulf. The expeditionary force was well received in Basra, where many of the merchant houses had a long association with their British and Indian equivalents, going back to the Honourable East India Company. The ease of occupation tempted the British to push farther and by November 1915 the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force (MEF) had advanced to within fifty miles of Baghdad. There it was counter-attacked and pushed back to Kut on the Tigris and besieged. Kut proved a humiliating disaster. After four months the garrison was starved into surrender. Not until 1917 did the advance resume. Progress then accelerated and by October 1918, when the Ottomans agreed to an armistice, the whole of Iraq came under British occupation, including the oil-rich north around Kirkuk and Mosul, ethnically Kurdish territory.

  In the immediate aftermath of the Ottoman collapse the British imposed a military and semi-colonial administration, proclaiming regulations based on those operating in the Indian empire. It was clear that the arrangement would be only temporary, though there was a nascent acceptance among many Arab Iraqis of the idea of Iraq becoming a unitary state. It was not shared by the Kurds who quickly began to demand separate political status. The most prominent Kurdish leader, Shaikh Mahmud Barzani, was appointed governor of part of Kurdistan but proclaimed independence in May 1919. After his removal by military force, the British resumed control.

  In Baghdad and the surrounding central provinces, the al-‘Ahd society, of which the Iraqi branch was now localized in the city, attracted considerable support from the urban notables, who were anti-British and opposed also to the aspirations of both the Kurds and the southern Shi’a; another Sunni faction, however, of which Nuri al-Sa’id was a leader, while better disposed to the British, advocated unification under Faisal, one of the sons of the Sharif of Mecca who had led the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Nuri and many of his associates had served under the Sharif and looked to his Hashemite family to head the future Arab kingdoms. Nuri enjoyed the advantage of intimacy with the officials of the British administration, from whom he had detected that they too were divided over the future of Iraq. While some favoured maintaining direct rule, others hoped to elevate the Hashemites to kingship, chiefly as a means of curbing the Islamicism of the southern Shi’a.

  Ironically what precipitated the decisive postwar crisis was not division between the Sunni and Shi’a but a sudden recognition by some of them of shared interests. During 1919 the victorious Allies, meeting at the Versailles conference, had begun to formalize plans for imposing European rule on the former possessions of the German and Ottoman empires, under authority devolved by mandate from the new League of Nations. The mandate for Iraq was to be allotted to the British. Foreseeing a return to imperial subject status in a new guise, the southern Shi’a, under their religious leaders, and then the Baghdad Sunni, showed their opposition. There were large-scale demonstrations which led to armed resistance. British garrisons were brought under attack. By June 1920 the revolt affected most of the Sunni centre and the Shi’a south, while there was a recurrence of rebellion in the Kurdish north.

  Support for the revolt, however, proved patchy; many notables and tribal leaders were chiefly concerned to safeguard their traditional position. By July the revolt had largely subsided, though at the cost of 6,000 Iraqi deaths and 500 in the British and Indian Army garrison. The Shi’a had suffered the brunt of the repression, an experience that heightened their disaffection from the Sunni minority in and around Baghdad.

  The British, now empowered by the League of Nations to administer the Iraq mandate, chose to react to the revolt by establishing a form of indirect rule, which it was hoped the population would find more acceptable than the military administration. A council of Iraqi ministers was appointed, with Iraqis also replacing British political officers in the old Ottoman districts. Perhaps inevitably, however, a majority of the appointees at all levels were chosen from the Sunni minority, since they were identified by the British as more dependable and experienced than Shi’a or Kurds. Sunni domination was particularly evident in the new Iraqi army, which was officered almost exclusively by men who had held rank in the Ottoman army; the Chief of Staff was none other than Nuri al-Sa’id, the most prominent Sunni in the old al-‘Ahd society.

  In a typical exercise of imperial divide-and-rule practice, moreover, the British decided to create a parallel army to the new national force, which would be under their direct control. The Iraq Levies, which during the first decades of the mandate would be the real instrument of central power, were raised not from the major but the marginal Iraq communities. Those chosen were Kurds, Marsh Arabs and Assyrians, a Nestorian Christian people who had fled Turkey during the First World War and were not Iraqi at all. The Assyrians nevertheless made excellent soldiers and proved fiercely loyal to the British. Eventually history caught up with them and almost all left post-mandate Iraq, where they had acquired a reputation as colonial lackeys, to make a new communal life in the United States.

  The creation of the council of ministers and the national army did not solve the principal problem in postwar Iraq: sovereignty. The mandate system was posited on th
e principle that the countries adopted by the League of Nations for mandate rule were already sovereign and, as soon as sufficiently developed, should emerge into independence. The most evolved were to be furnished with appropriate heads of state from the outset. In the case of Iraq, by reason of the sophistication of its urban population and its potential wealth clearly a candidate for early release from mandate rule, the choice fell upon the Amir Faisal, a Hashemite prince and son of the Sharif of Mecca, who had taken part in the Arab Revolt and had originally been appointed to the throne of Syria (until the French, who administered the Syrian mandate, fell out with him). There was much to favour him as a future king of a sovereign Iraq. He descended from the family of the Prophet and so, though a Sunni, enjoyed respect among the Shi’a; he had authentic nationalist credentials, as a leader of the Arab Revolt; and he was well-known to the British, among whom he had friends. He was, moreover, personable, charming and politically astute. Nevertheless he was not by birth or affiliation Iraqi; by origin he was an Arab of the distant deserts, by upbringing a child of Ottoman society in Istanbul.