A FATAL ATTRACTION

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 World War I, Britain invaded Mesopotamia (as the three neglected Turkish provinces were called) for oil and only for oil. Despite this, the British declared in their 1917 proclamation, read aloud in Baghdad: "Our armies do not come ... 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, a week after the October 1918 armistice with Turkey. This enabled Britain to cobble three ethnically separate provinces together - Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad and Shia Basra - into a single land that London renamed Iraq. The name 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 Gen. William Marshall's 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." This unauthorized invasion, Wilson assured, "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. The Arab world sided with the British against the Turks in World War I as expedience to obtain their independence.

Arab nationalists were willing to speak the lingo of democratic values, and trade access to cheap oil, which was worthless to them. The British were willing to blithely promise any variant of Arab national independence for that oil. But when the British liberated Mesopotamia - and then stayed on as occupiers - the betrayed Iraqis exploded with terror raids, burning, bombing, kidnapping and massacring Westerners, including those sent to commercially develop the land. Islamic militants have never hesitated to terrorize the enemies within their grasp, be they Assyrians, Shias, Armenians, Europeans or Jews.

The outraged British response to the daily 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, until it petered down to a temporary cease-fire.

Shortly after World War I, the British and the French, becoming ever more dependent upon oil, engineered a secret petroleum pact - dividing up oil rights in Syria and Iraq. The British then 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 Iraqi people did not want democracy, and resented Western efforts to impose it. Genocide against minorities, ethnic cleansing, repression, corruption and neglect were the rule in a cycle of victimizing and victimization.

Maj. John Glubb, the British officer who organized the Arab Legion, complained 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. The Arabs have learned that all the talk of democratic values is just a shibboleth of the infidel.

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. What can possibly occur next week to transform that society that has not occurred for 7,000 years?

The only way to succeed in Iraq is to survive long enough to intelligently withdraw, and then - 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 author of "Banking on Baghdad, Inside Iraq's 7,000-Year History of War, Profit and Conflict," from which this article is adapted.