Citizens concerned with the ongoing violence in the Middle East are right to blame Western leaders for the mess that is modern-day Iraq. They’ve just been blaming the wrong men.
Long before the world had heard of Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld, it was a team of British politicians — named Arnold Wilson, Gertrude Bell and Prime Minister Lloyd George — who set Iraq on the path of instability that we see today.
At World War I’s Paris Peace Conference of 1919, peacemakers made the mistake of lumping together into a new country three provinces of the deceased Ottoman Empire that should never have been combined.
The British took Mosul, Baghdad and Basra and, apparently without much forethought, made them into the modern-day country of Iraq.
As University of Toronto history professor Margaret MacMillan writes in “Paris 1919,” the combination of these three provinces has proved to be a major error.
“It never seems to have occurred to [them] that a single unit did not make much sense …,” MacMillan wrote. “In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked to the south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria.”
In fact, it was the same recipe for unrest that Europe would later see in the Balkans.
“Putting together three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs make one country,” she wrote. “As in the Balkans, the clash of empires and civilizations had left deep fissures.”
Almost immediately, the newly formed country of Iraq was plagued by problems. Rebellions broke out in 1920 in more than one-third of the country. After gaining independence in the 1930s, the country saw a coup d’etat in both 1941 and 1958, and the Anglo-Iraqi war with the British.
Eventually, the country gave way to the rise of Saddam Hussein, who attacked neighboring Iran throughout the 1980s; invaded Kuwait in 1990; and killed hundreds of thousands of his own people, most notably in the harsh campaign of “Arabization” on Mosul’s Kurds in the late 1980s.
And, of course, after the U.S.-led invasion, the country is now experiencing sectarian violence as those same groups of people wrongly united in 1919 vie for power once more.
Summing up the World War I peacemakers’ actions in Iraq, MacMillan wrote: “If they could have done better, they certainly could not have done much worse.”
It is sometimes true that history can change its course. Old fault lines between peoples and cultures can be mended and those people can learn to live in peace. The U.S. and, indeed, most of the world is praying for that to happen in Iraq these days.
But the British actions in Mesopotamia, almost a century ago, have made that goal much more difficult — if not nearly impossible.
Luke Broadwater is a staff writer for The Baltimore Examiner. He can be reached at [email protected].
