Adrian Daily Telegram

GUEST COLUMN: Can we succeed in Iraq? The long view

By Edwin Black—Special to The Daily Telegram

America cannot succeed in Iraq until we understand the history we ignored and recently repeated. For the past century, Iraq has offered only one attraction to the Western powers: oil. It has been a fatal attraction.

During WWI, Britain invaded Mesopotamia (as the three neglected Turkish provinces were called) for oil and only for oil. Despite this, the British declared in their May 18, 1918 proclamation, read aloud in Baghdad: Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.

As part of that liberation, the British illegally seized the most valuable oil lands in Mesopotamia, the Kurdish Mosul region, this on November 7, 1918, a full week after the general armistice with Turkey. This invasion enabled Britain to cobble three ethnically separate provinces together—Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad and Shiite Basra—into a single land that London would rename Iraq. The name Iraq came from the ancient Arab cartographic designation.

The British then established Iraq as a nation for the sole purpose of structuring the exploitation of its oil. Arnold Wilson, the British civil administrator of Mesopotamia, the man who authorized General William Marshall's unauthorized push into Mosul, wrote, Thanks to General Marshall, we had established de facto, the principle that Mosul is part of 'Iraq,' to use the geographical expression ... Whether for the woe or weal of the inhabitants, it is too soon to say.

Wilson added, that had General Marshall waited just 24 hours for the restraining instructions from London to arrive, history would be otherwise. But, Wilson continued, Marshall did not wait to invade Mosul, and so laid the foundation stone of the future State of Iraq.

But Arab and Islamic nationalists in the newly invented Iraq did not want to share their land with infidel European Christians. Nor did they choose to share European values of democracy and pluralism, ideals that had never taken root in the Islamic Middle East for 7,000 years. It did not take long for the Iraqis to rise up in terror raids, burning, bombing, kidnapping and massacring westerners, including those sent to commercially develop the land and its waterways.

The outraged British response to such horrors was aerial bombardment to shock and awe the villages. But the Iraqi violence and the British resolve to combat it with troops and tanks persisted, all for the oil wealth of Iraq.

After WWI, the British and the French, becoming ever more dependent upon oil, engineered a secret petroleum pact, sanctioned by the League of Nations, which divided up oil drilling and pipeline rights in Syria and Iraq.

The oil pact was announced at San Remo the same day the League of Nations granted mandates to Britain to rule oil-rich Iraq, and France to rule Syria where the pipelines would run to the Mediterranean. The British worked hard to instill democratic values in Iraq, thus creating a stable environment for the oil to flow. But it was a governance disaster because the people did not want it. Genocide against minorities, ethnic cleaning, repression, corruption and neglect was the rule in Iraq for years.

Major John Glubb, the British officer who organized the Arab Legion, complained bitterly in a letter to Whitehall. We ... imagined that we had bestowed on the Iraqis all these blessings of democracy ... Nothing could be more undemocratic than the result. A handful of politicians obtained possession of the machinery of government, and all the elections were rigged ... In this process they all became very rich.

For eight more decades, the West—now with the United States joining France and Britain—has tried to hang onto its oil lifeline in the Middle East, using our diplomats, corporate surrogates and militaries. That has only fueled the cycle of insurrection and now world terrorism from a people who resent our presence and resource exploitation, and have always understood better than anyone exactly why we are there. It is not sand we crave in Iraq, it is oil.

America will never succeed in Iraq, if we once again naively expect democracy to take root there and flourish. The only way to succeed in Iraq is to survive long enough to intelligently withdraw, and then rapidly—at breakneck speed—develop alternative energy resources to detach us from this far-off place where we are not wanted, where we should not be, and upon which our industrialized world is now dependent.

Edwin Black is the New York Times bestselling and award-winning author of IBM and the Holocaust. This article is adapted from his book, Banking on Baghdad, Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit and Conflict.