- Around this time last year I had a conversation in Washington
that summed up what was bound to go wrong for America in Iraq. I was talking
to a mid-ranking official in the US Treasury about American plans for the
post-war reconstruction of the Iraqi economy. She had just attended a meeting
on precisely that subject. "So what kind of historical precedents
have you been considering?" I asked. "The post-Communist economies
of Eastern Europe," she replied. "We have quite a bit of experience
we can draw on from the 1990s."
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- When I suggested that the problems of privatisation in
Poland might not prove relevant on the banks of the Euphrates, she seemed
surprised. And when I suggested that she and her colleagues ought at least
to take a look at the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq, her surprise
turned to incredulity. Not for the first time since crossing the Atlantic,
I was confronted with the disturbing reality about the way Americans make
policy. Theory looms surprisingly large. Neoconservative theory, for instance,
stated that the Americans would be welcomed as liberators, just as economic
theory put privatisation on my interlocutor's agenda. The lessons of history
come a poor second, and only recent history - preferably recent American
history - gets considered.
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- That's why there hasn't been a month since the invasion
of Iraq last year without some clapped-out commentator warning that Iraq
could become "another Vietnam". For many Americans - including
the Democratic contender for the presidency, John Kerry - the only history
relevant to American foreign policy is the history of the Vietnam War.
True, the Department of Defence has commissioned some ambitious historical
studies. In August 2001, Donald Rumsfeld's office produced "Strategies
for Maintaining US Predominance", which compared America's bid to
establish "full spectrum dominance" with the attempts of previous
empires. Most of it, however, consisted of pretty superficial economics
and the conclusion was that technological change has put the US in a league
of its own, so more detailed comparative study would be superfluous.
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- There was amazement last year when I pointed out in the
journal Foreign Affairs that in 1917 a British general had occupied Baghdad
and proclaimed: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands
as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators." By the same token, scarcely
any American outside university history departments is aware that within
just a few months of the formal British takeover of Iraq, there was a full-scale
anti-British revolt.
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- What happened in Iraq last week so closely resembles
the events of 1920 that only a historical ignoramus could be surprised.
It began in May, just after the announcement that Iraq would henceforth
be a League of Nations "mandate" under British trusteeship. (Nota
bene, if you think a handover to the UN would solve everything.) Anti-British
demonstrations began in Baghdad mosques, spread to the Shi'ite holy centre
of Karbala, swept on through Rumaytha and Samawa - where British forces
were besieged - and reached as far as Kirkuk.
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- Contrary to British expectations, Sunnis, Shi'ites and
even Kurds acted together. Stories abounded of mutilated British bodies.
By August the situation was so desperate that the British commander appealed
to London for poison gas bombs or shells (though these turned out not to
be available). By the time order had been restored in December - with a
combination of aerial bombardment and punitive village-burning expeditions
- British forces had sustained over 2,000 casualties and the financial
cost of the operation was being denounced in Parliament. In the aftermath
of the revolt, the British were forced to accelerate the transfer of power
to a nominally independent Iraqi government, albeit one modelled on their
own form of constitutional monarchy.
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- I am willing to bet that not one senior military commander
in Iraq today knows the slightest thing about these events. The only consolation
is that maybe some younger Americans are realising that the US has lessons
to learn from something other than its own supposedly exceptional history.
The best discussion of the 1920 revolt that I have come across this year
was presented by a young Chicago-based graduate named Daniel Barnard at
a Harvard University history conference. This week at New York University
it was the economics undergraduates who organised a question and answer
session for three senior UN diplomats, including the current (German) president
of the Security Council. Their questions - particularly about the likely
consequences of a premature American withdrawal - seemed a great deal better
informed about the realities of modern imperialism than the anodyne stuff
routinely trotted out by the White House.
-
- The high quality of political debate in the American
universities suggests that the delusion of American "exceptionalism"
may be waning. But for the time being US policy in Iraq is in the hands
of a generation who have learnt nothing from history except how to repeat
other people's mistakes.
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- - Niall Ferguson's book Colossus: The Rise and Fall of
the American Empire will be published next month by Penguin
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