Iraq 1920 and Today

In the post below I wrote about The Peace to End All Peace, but I thought the Iraq section of the book deserved a separate post. The book was written in 1989, so before either Iraqi War, but the language Fromkin uses to describe the British troubles could just as easily be used by a journalist today. I'm just going to list a few quotes below:



"A fundamental problem, as Wilson saw it, was that the almost two million Shi'ite Moslems in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Muslims community, yet 'no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.'"

"Battlefield professionals and dedicated opponents of Britain, they could have been expected to constitute a more serious potential threat to British plans than did the politicians and orators of Damascus or Jerusalem. At first the British administration in the Mesopotamian Provinces did not see it that way. Tensions between the diverse populations of the area seemed to pose greater problems, and the lawlessness of groups such as the Kurds and the Bedouin tribes seemed to pose greater threats. Incoherence, communal strife, and habitual disorder--rather than organized nationalism--were perceived as the challenge."

"In a leading article on 7 August 1920, The Times demanded to know "how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavor to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?"



Again, if the Bush administration had read a little history before this war, it could have gone a long way towards avoiding our present situation.