GENERAL F. S. MAUDE to the people of Mesopotamia, March 19, 1917
The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you…. We will end a brutal regime … so that Iraqis can live in security. We will respect your great religious traditions, whose principles of equality and compassion are essential to Iraq’s future. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave. Iraq will go forward as a unified, independent and sovereign nation that has regained a respected place in the world. You are a good and gifted people—the heirs of a great civilization that contributes to all humanity.
PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH to the people of Iraq, April 4, 2003
Wheresoever the Roman conquers, he inhabits.
SENECA
MESOPOTAMIA REVISITED
Anyone who doubts that there are at least some resemblances between the liberal empire of the United States today and that of the United Kingdom roughly a century ago should consider the epigraphs to this chapter. The very rhetoric used by the British commander who occupied Baghdad in 1917 was unmistakably, though doubtless unconsciously, echoed by President Bush in his television address to the Iraqi people shortly after the American occupation of Baghdad began. In both cases, Anglophone troops had been able to sweep from the south of the country to the capital in a matter of weeks. In both cases, their governments disclaimed any desire to rule Iraq directly and proceeded, after some prevarication, to install Iraqi governments with at least the appearance of popular legitimacy. In both cases, imposing law and order proved much harder than achieving the initial military victory: British troops were being picked off by gunmen throughout 1919, and massive airpower had to be used to quell a major insurrection in the summer of 1920, which left 450 British personnel dead.1 In both cases, there were times when it was tempting to pull out altogether rather than incur further costs.2 Finally, in both cases, the presence of substantial oil reserves— confirmed by the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1927—was not a wholly irrelevant factor, though it was not the main reason for the occupation.3
Yet there are differences. One of these is the tension that has arisen between the United States and the United Nations over the future of Iraq. Britain did not have such difficulties after the First World War, when the League of Nations, the UN’s forerunner, more or less unquestioningly legitimized British rule in Mesopotamia by designating Iraq as one of its “mandates.”4 It is impossible to imagine Winston Churchill, as colonial secretary, appealing to the League of Nations for reinforcements in 1921 in the way that President George W. Bush was forced to appeal to the United Nations for assistance in September 2003. Nor is that the only difference between the British and American experience in Iraq. In two fundamental respects, British rule was based on a long-term commitment. Whatever the formal arrangements—and the British conceded in 1923 that their mandate would run for just four years rather than the twenty originally envisaged—their intention was to stay in control of Iraq for the foreseeable future. Secondly, there were enough Britons willing to spend substantial portions of their lives in Baghdad to make British influence an enduring reality there for forty years. The British and American occupiers both promised they would soon hand over power to Iraqis and leave. The difference is that the Americans mean it. They sincerely want to go home.
“Don’t even go there!” is one of those catchphrases heard on a daily basis in New York. It sums up the problem exactly. Despite their country’s vast wealth and lethal weaponry, Americans have little interest in the one basic activity without which a true empire cannot enduringly be established. They are reluctant to “go there”—and if they must go, then they count the days until they can come home. They eschew the periphery. They cling to the metropolis.
DISPOSABLE EMPIRE
The world did not have to wait long for a perfect symbol of the transience of American rule in Iraq. On April 9, 2003, the day Baghdad fell, Marine Corporal Edward Chin draped an American flag over the head of the statue of Saddam Hussein in al-Firdos (Paradise) Square. Seconds later, however, Chin removed the Stars and Stripes and replaced it with a pre—Gulf War Iraqi flag.5 The quick change was presumably intended to reassure watching Iraqis that they were indeed experiencing liberation rather than conquest. As President Bush put it in his television address to Iraq aired shortly after the fall of their capital city, “The government of Iraq, and the future of your country, will soon belong to you…. We will help you build a peaceful and representative government that protects the rights of all citizens. And then our military forces will leave.”6
But when exactly? In the last letter that Corporal Kemaphoom Chanawongse sent home before he and his unit entered Iraq, the young soldier joked that his camp in Kuwait reminded him of the television series M*A*S*H—except that the acronym in this case would need to be M*A*H*T*S*F: “Marines Are Here to Stay Forever.” Corporal Chanawongse was killed a week later, when his amphibious assault vehicle was blown up in Nasiriya. The implication of his poignant final joke was that he and his comrades could not wait to get their mission over and come home. It was a desire to which President Bush directly alluded in his somewhat premature victory speech on board the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier on May 1: “Other nations in history have fought in foreign lands and remained to occupy and exploit. Americans, following a battle, want nothing more than to return home.”7
The duration of an American occupation of Iraq remains, at the time of writing, clear in only one respect: it will be short. In a prewar speech to the American Enterprise Institute, President Bush kept his options open: “We will remain in Iraq as long as necessary and not a day more.”8 It was striking, however, that the unit he used was a “day.” Speaking a few days before the fall of Baghdad, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz suggested that General Jay Garner, the first American put in charge of the country, would run his Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance for at least six months; Garner himself talked of ninety days.9 Since then the time frame has varied from week to week. The outgoing commander of the U.S. Central Command, General Tommy Franks, seemed to suggest an occupation of between two and four years. In July, however, the new “occupation administrator,” L. Paul Bremer, told reporters: “The timing of how long the coalition stays here is effectively now in the hands of the Iraqi people,” adding, “We have no desire to stay a day longer than necessary.”10 Later that same month he predicted that elections would take place by the middle of 2004, followed by a handover of power from Bremer’s Coalition Provisional Authority to an elected government, after which, as he put it, “my job here will be over.”11 On September 26 Secretary of State Colin Powell told the New York Times that the American-appointed Iraqi Governing Council would be given six months to draw up a new constitution for the country; after that, elections would be held and power handed over to the winners.12 Bremer reiterated on November 1 that it was his aim “to turn sovereignty to the Iraqi people as quickly as practicable.”13 Later the same month he was summoned back to Washington to discuss how the transfer of power might be expedited. On November 15 it was announced that an Iraqi provisional government—to be nominated rather than elected—would take over this July, leaving elections and the constitution for next year.
In short, when the Americans say they come as liberators, not conquerors, they seem to mean it. If, as so many commentators claim, America is embarking on a new age of empire, it is shaping up to be the most ephemeral empire in all history. Other empire builders have fantasized about ruling subject peoples for a thousand years. This would seem to be history’s first thousand-day empire. It is not so much “lite” as disposable.
Besides the obvious constraint imposed on American administrations by the electoral system, which requires that overseas interventions show positive results within two or at most four years, an important explanation for this chronic short-windedness is the difficulty the American empire finds in recruiting the right sort
of people to run it. America’s higher educational institutions excel at producing very capable young men and women. Indeed, there is little question that the best American universities are now the best in the world. But few, if any, of the graduates of Harvard, Stanford, Yale or Princeton aspire to spend their lives trying to turn a sun-scorched sandpit like Iraq into the prosperous capitalist democracy of Paul Wolfowitz’s imaginings. America’s brightest and best aspire not to govern Mesopotamia but to manage MTV; not to rule the Hejaz but to run a hedge fund. Unlike their British counterparts of a century ago, who left the elite British universities with an overtly imperial ethos, the letters ambitious young Americans would like to see after their names are CEO, not CBE.*
Like the United States today, the British after the First World War felt compelled by both domestic and Iraqi opinion to hand over power to an Iraqi government. But they did it slowly and incompletely. In the first three years of their occupation, the country was run by a civil commissioner, Sir Arnold Wilson.14 He and his assistant, Gertrude Bell, were skeptical about the viability of Mesopotamian self-rule. They drew up a scheme for a unitary Iraqi state with almost no local consultation, simply ignoring those who advised against yoking together Assyria and Babylonia, Sunni and Shia. “There was no real desire in Mesopotamia for an Arab government,” Wilson confidently assured the British cabinet in 1920. “The Arabs would appreciate British rule.”15 Only after the insurrection of 1920 and a fierce public denunciation of official policy by T. E. Lawrence, the hero of the Arabian campaign, did policy change. At a conference held in Cairo in March 1921, it was decided to offer Lawrence’s friend and wartime ally the Hashemite Prince Faisal the throne of the country, which would be transformed into a British-style constitutional monarchy.16 A tame Council of Ministers presided over by the Naqib of Baghdad invited Faisal to Baghdad as a “guest” of the nation and on July 11 unanimously adopted a resolution declaring him king. Sayyid Talib of Basra, the most dangerous of the rival contenders, was arrested and deported to Ceylon for daring to use the slogan “Iraq for the Iraqis.”17 A plebiscite was duly held that endorsed Faisal’s elevation and on August 23 he was crowned. Thus did the British create the country henceforth known as Iraq, which means, ironically, “well-rooted country.”18
Faisal was no mere puppet. It was he who insisted that the British mandate be reduced from twenty to just four years. But even after the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922, there was no doubt who was really running the place. Controlling Iraq was strategically vital. It gave Britain a position of unrivaled dominance in the Middle East. It was also economically attractive. When two geologists from the American Standard Oil Company entered Iraq on a prospecting expedition, the British civil commissioner handed them over to the chief of police of Baghdad.19 In 1927 the British takeover paid a handsome dividend when oil was struck at Baba Gurgur. Although they formally relinquished all power to the ruling dynasty, the British remained more than merely influential in Iraq throughout the 1930s. In April 1941 they had little difficulty in sending an expeditionary force from Amman to reverse a pro-Axis coup in Baghdad. Indeed, they only really lost their grip on the country with the assassination of their clients Faisal II and his prime minister Nuri es-Said in the revolution of 1958. In short, there were British government representatives, military and civilian, in Baghdad uninterruptedly for almost exactly forty years. When the British went into Iraq, they stayed.
Will there be Americans playing such a role in Baghdad in 2043? It seems, to put it mildly, improbable.
Gertrude Bell was the first woman to graduate from Oxford with a first-class degree. She learned to speak Arabic during an archaeological visit to Jerusalem in 1899 and, like T. E. Lawrence, became involved in British military intelligence. In 1917 she was appointed oriental secretary to the British civil commissioner in Baghdad. It was a posting she relished. “I don’t care to be in London much,” she wrote. “I like Baghdad, and I like Iraq. It’s the real East, and it is stirring; things are happening here, and the romance of it all touches me and absorbs me.”20 Dotted all over the British Empire were thousands of “Orientalists” like Gertrude Bell, simultaneously enamored of the exotic “Other” and yet dominant over it. Her account of Faisal I’s coronation in 1921 perfectly illustrates their mode of operation: “Faisal looked very dignified but much strung up—it was an agitating moment. He looked along the front row and caught my eye and I gave him a tiny salute. Then Saiyid Husain stood up and read [the British commissioner’s] proclamation in which he announced that Faisal had been elected king by 96% of the people in Mesopotamia, long live the King! with that we stood up and saluted him, the national flag was broken on the flagstaff by his side and the band played God Save the King—they have no national anthem yet.”21 To a woman like Gertrude Bell, being there, in order discreetly to supervise this carefully choreographed regime change, was evidently very good fun. She had absolutely no desire for an “exit strategy” that would have sent her back to England.
Admittedly, most Britons who moved abroad preferred to migrate to the temperate regions of a select few colonies—Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa—that soon became semiautonomous Dominions. Between 1900 and 1914 around 2.6 million Britons left the United Kingdom for imperial destinations (by 1957 the total had reached nearly 6 million); three-quarters of them went to Canada or the Antipodes.22 Nevertheless, a significant number went to the much less hospitable climes of Asia and Africa. There were around 168,000 Britons in India in 1931.23 The official Colonial Service in Africa was staffed by more than 7,500 expatriates.24
The British went abroad in multiple roles: not only as soldiers and administrators but also as businessmen, engineers, missionaries and doctors. Like America’s informal empire today, Britain’s empire had its nongovernmental character; there were Victorian multinational corporations and Victorian “nongovernmental organizations.” But the key point is that whichever role the British played, they generally stayed—until retirement or, as countless colonial cemeteries testify, death. The substantial expatriate communities they established were crucial to the operation of the British Empire. These were the indispensable “men on the spot” who learned the local languages, perhaps adopted some local customs—though not to the fatal extent of “going native”—and acted as the intermediaries between a remote imperial authority and the indigenous elites upon whose willing collaboration the empire depended.
Of crucial importance in this regard was the role of the Indian Civil Service, which became a magnet for the very best products of the university system. The proportion of Oxford and Cambridge graduates in the Indian Civil Service was remarkably high, rising steadily after the 1880s to over 70 percent. Two-thirds of ICS men who served in the 1930s had been educated in England’s exclusive public schools; three-quarters had attended either Oxford or Cambridge. All but one of the eight provincial governors in India in 1938 were Oxonians.25 John Maynard Keynes, who by the 1920s had become quite disparaging about the empire, experienced one of the few reverses of his dazzling Cambridge career when he came in second rather than first in the ICS examination.26 Oxbridge products also staffed the less exalted Colonial Service, which administered the British colonies in Africa and other parts of Asia. Of the 927 recruits to the Colonial Service between 1927 and 1929, nearly half had been to Oxford or Cambridge.27 There were also significant numbers of Oxbridge graduates in the other governmental and private-sector agencies that operated in the colonies.28
The key question is why so many products of Britain’s top universities were willing to spend their entire working lives so far from the land of their birth, running infernally hot, disease-ridden countries. Consider the typical example of Evan Machonochie, an Oxford graduate who passed the ICS exam, set off for Bengal in 1887 and spent the next forty years in India.29 One clue lies in his Celtic surname. The Scots were heavily over-represented not just in the colonies of white settlement but also in the commercial and professional elites of cities like Calcutta and Hong Kong and Cap
e Town. The Irish too played a disproportionate role in enforcing British rule, supplying a huge proportion of the officers and men of the British army. Not for nothing is Kipling’s representative Indian Army NCO named Mulvaney. This was because Scotland (especially the north) and Ireland (especially the south) were significantly poorer than England. For young men growing up on the rainy, barren fringes of the United Kingdom, the empire offered opportunities. The potential benefits of emigration seemed to outweigh the undoubted risks of the tropics. Like the “porridge traps” that Hong Kong banks were supposed to set in order to recruit their predominantly Scottish clerks, Balliol College functioned as a channel through which ambitious young Scots could pass from “North Britain” via Oxford to the empire.
Yet economics alone cannot explain what motivated a man like Machonochie or, indeed, a female Oxonian like Gertrude Bell. The imperial impulse arose from a complex of emotions: racial superiority, yes, but also evangelical zeal; profit, perhaps, but also a sincere belief that spreading “commerce, Christianity and civilization” was as much in the interests of Britain’s colonial subjects as in the interests of the imperial metropole itself.
The contrast with Americans today could scarcely be more stark. To put it bluntly, one of the most serious difficulties the United States currently faces is its chronic manpower deficit. There are simply not enough Americans out there to make nation building work.
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