Remember the Mesopotamia

In recent weeks much noise has been raised over the CIA detainee flights that criss-crossed the world to deliver Islamic prisoners-of-war into jurisdictions where torture had some local flavor. In response to these allegations, Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice has tried to argue that the U.S. is not a torturing country. That said, anyone who has seen those orange-clad jihadists in Guantanamo Bay, kneeling on their chains in what look like dog kennels, knows that most American citizens have one definition of what constitutes torture while the Bush administration has printed up its own set of rules, using small type unfamiliar to anyone attending to Geneva conventions.

In most cases, I suspect, those languishing in Polish or Australian no-man’s land prisons tend to be abducted from terrorism’s enlisted army—cell members snatched from Hamburg study groups or Muslim brothers deported from Egypt. Already the US is exempt from the International Court in the Hague, and at the time that the anonymous CIA charter flights were delivering their passengers to places like Bulgaria, the Bush administration was threatening to veto U.S. legislation that would outlaw “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment,” as such amenities were the principal attractions of the CIA package tours.

I have my doubts that the torture underground has yielded much in the way of useful information. Most of those grabbed from half-lit rooms in Karachi probably know little about the whereabouts of Osama bin Laden or al-Qaida’s command and control centers, for the reason that those flying Blindfold Class are recruits for a nebulous set of ideas—Allah, eternity, those 72 virgins, the purity of Mecca, etc.—not German general staff officers of 1914, getting ready to unleash the von Schlieffen Plan against Belgium.

In my view, modestly proposed, the Bush administration would get more bonus miles out of its night flights if it were to kidnap Arabic scholars from around the world and make them deliver lectures on Middle Eastern nationalism or the history of Iraq to another set of detainees—ones hustled from the corridors of power around the White House and Capitol Hill. Alas I am not sure those in power ever do much reading or listening, but even a short history of Mesopotamia makes it clear why the Bush administration is not having much luck with its fortified sand castles.

For the most part, we can thank the messianic President Woodrow Wilson for the modern idea of Iraq. After the war to end all wars, Wilson pounded the peace conference tables of Paris in 1919 to reapportion Ottoman Mesopotamia into a single nation, initially run under a British mandate.

Forgive me for not having a higher view of Wilson, but I have always thought him a pedantic, self-righteous academic who made judgments about the world not so much to achieve peace in our time, but to prove the Princeton faculty wrong for scoffing at his mojo. In Paris, he held forth on European and Near Eastern borders as if he were lecturing freshman seminarians on the Treaty of Westphalia, although his world experience consisted mainly of a few parades through the streets of London and Paris. In Iraq, he thought that Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul should be “regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes.” Then, presumably, he adjourned for lunch, although probably not with the French president, George Clemenceau, who confessed to Wilson’s friend, Colonel House: “I understand you but talking to Wilson is something like talking to Jesus Christ.”

In the past year, I have spent a lot of pleasurable time reading and rereading Peacemakers by Margaret MacMillan, an account of the Paris peace conference. Many modern problems, from the Balkans to Iraq, have their origins in the settlements often lumped together under the Treaty of Versailles, although in the Paris peace accords, there were also treaties named for the palaces of Trianon, St. Germain, Neuilly, and Sèvres. My paperback edition of the book identifies MacMillan as a Canadian professor and provost with a doctorate from Oxford, but more than that she is an excellent writer and researcher, and the 574-page history has flashes of wit and humor. I learned subsequently that she is also the great granddaughter of David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, although she writes about him without fear or favor.

In Peacemakers, MacMillan writes eloquently about Wilson’s ignorance in Mesopotamia: “In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked southwards toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the 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. As in the Balkans, the clash of empires and civilizations had left deep fissures. The population was about half Shia Muslim and a quarter Sunni, with other minorities from Jews to Christians, but another division ran across the religious one: while half the inhabitants were Arab, the rest were Kurds (mainly in Mosul), Persians or Assyrians….There was no Iraqi nationalism, only Arab.”

Wilson’s ally in Paris was Lloyd George, who came to the peace conference with the idea of “making the Hun pay” and keeping the French out of the colonial Middle East possessions of the British empire. He also showed up in Paris with his mistress, Miss Francis Stevenson, which Clemenceau or another wag compared to “bringing a sandwich to a banquet.” Lloyd George’s dream of a Pax Britannia washing over the tribes of the Middle East forecasts the same mirages seen simmering in the Bush White House. As MacMillan writes: "Lloyd George, a Liberal turned land-grabber, made it worse. Like Napoleon, he was intoxicated by the possibilities of the Middle East: a restored Hellenic world in Asia Minor; a new Jewish civilization in Palestine; Suez and all the links to India safe from threat; loyal and obedient Arab states along the Fertile Crescent and the valley on the Tigris and Euphrates; protection for British oil supplies from Persia and the possibility of new sources under British control; the Americans taking mandates here and there; the French doing what they were told."

Enter Winston Churchill. During World War I he was cashiered from the Admiralty and the war cabinet for the fiasco at Gallipoli. Subsequently he had done time in the trenches of France and written memoirs, but in the 1920s he was again in the cabinet, first as minister of colonial affairs and later as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Under his colonial ministerial hat, Churchill had taken Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence to Cairo, and there drawn lines in the sands of the British Arab mandates, including those around Mesopotamia. But a history of Churchill’s gambit, Winston’s Folly by Christopher Catherwood, echoes MacMillan’s thesis that Iraq has never been a country: “Iraq was created out of three Ottoman vilayets that had previously been quite separate. The Kurds are Sunni, like the Arabs in the middle of the country, but ethnically they are Indo-European, like the Iranians. The Shiite majority in the south might be Arabs, but religiously they are the same branch of Islam as Iran—Shiite—and therefore have loyalties that are quite distinct from those of the rest of Iraq’s people.”

Arab nationalists who had supported the Allies and read Wilson’s Fourteen Points felt betrayed when the Paris peace conference divided up the Middle East into European spheres of influence. That anger lingers to this day, in the politics of those like Osama bin Laden or the Palestinians. In Iraq, Churchill adopted the similar strategy of divide and rule, hoping to keep larger Arab blocs from uniting against Western colonial interests, if not their shares in local oil companies. A Hashemite, Feisal, was anointed king, and he presided over an Iraq that gave disproportionate influence to the mid-country Sunnis and limited autonomy to the Kurds. (Through the rule of Saddam Hussein, that same coalition, in varying forms, ran the country.) Not that such gerrymandering ended that era’s war on terror. As Churchill noted: “It is an extraordinary thing that the British civil administration should have succeeded in such a short time in alienating the whole country to such an extent that the Arabs have laid aside the blood feuds that they have nursed for centuries.” I have read that I. Lewis (“Scooter”) Libby is a great Churchill admirer, although I have to doubt that he recalled these words during his entangling moments with the Times’ Judith Miller.

Winston’s problems in Iraq were a lot like those of Donald Rumsfeld today: those of bleeding an imperial treasury to win hearts and minds in places like Falluja. As minister for colonial affairs, Churchill had sympathy for the navy’s craving for Kurdish oil (“the greatest oil field in the world extends all the way up to Mosul and beyond”), but as the Exchequer, he needed to prove he could balance a postwar budget then under pressure to ditch the gold standard. He confessed: “The cost of the military establishment in Mesopotamia appears to me to be out of all proportion to any advantage we can ever expect to reap from that country.” Churchill wrote: “We are at wits’ end to find a single soldier." His novel solution was to replace the depleted British infantry in Iraq with squadrons from the newly founded air forces. Whenever rebels infiltrated a village, cost-efficient bombers were sent to rain even more terror on the local population. Even before the war in Vietnam, bombers were destroying villages to save them.

Over the next thirty years, without redrawing the country’s internal or external borders, the British Empire muddled its way in and out of Iraq. King Feisal ruled until 1933, when his son, described by MacMillan as “a cheerful playboy,” succeeded him. He died in a car accident in 1939. His son ruled Iraq until a coup in 1958 declared the country a republic. A year later Saddam Hussein made his political debut, participating in an attempted assassination of the country’s prime minister. In 1968, Hussein’s Ba’athist party finally ousted the country’s republican government, with Saddam assuming the position of Vice-Chairman of the Revolution Command Council. In 1979 he was “elected” president.

The next year Saddam ordered the invasion of Iran, a war that lasted until 1988 (thanks, in part, to U.S. military assistance), because he despised the same Islamic fundamentalism that the Bush administration so opposes in Arabia. Hussein also feared Iranian support for Iraq’s Kurds and the Shiites in the south (another current American preoccupation). In 1990, citing disputed oil reservoirs, Saddam invaded Kuwait. The occupation that lasted five months liberated most of that country’s luxury cars and color televisions: conspicuous jihadist consumption. The Allied coalition that drove Iraq out of Kuwait, however, left Hussein in power to run Iraq. During the next decade, as was said of King Feisal’s father, the sharif of Mecca, Saddam proved “interested more in the fortunes of his own family than Arab self-determination.” But after September 11, 2001, the Bush administration needed ‘a good, safe menace’ for its war on terrorism, and it selected Hussein for the photograph under the Hearst headline: “You furnish the pictures and I'll furnish the war.”

The Bush dilemma is that of Churchill or, ironically, that of Saddam Hussein, who knew that the only way to hold together the artificial construct of Wilson’s Iraq was to brutalize the population, gas the Kurds, and declare war on Iran. As Catherwood writes: “Churchill and Lloyd George were wrestling with the same issues the U.S. administration is facing in 2004: how to have a genuinely democratic Iraq that did not at the same time deliver the nightmare scenario of a clericalist and theocratic Shiite regime on the Iranian model.”

In time for the sound bites of the 2006 mid-term election, Bush could declare victory in the Sunni triangle, “Vietnam-ize” Iraqi forces into the front lines, and head for the exit. But disintegration in Iraq might leave Iranian mullahs the dominant Middle East power, not to mention a newly declared republic of Kurdistan at war with its neighbors, led by Turkey. As they say in commodity markets, the Bush administration would like to be long the oil and short the political turmoil, but since President Bush got his invasion orders from God and is in Iraq, as Wilson would understand, to “to rid the world of evil,” most of the those contracts are out-of-the-money.

No wonder that, when faced with the prospect of Iraqi civil war whether the U.S. stays or departs from Mesopotamia, Bush recently cleared the decks of the Oval Office to receive many of the former secretaries of defense and state, stretching back to the Kennedy administration. Posing for the photo-op later in front of the president’s desk (Maureen Dowd called the picture “a mesmerizing blend of "Sunset Boulevard," "The Last Supper" and a "Sopranos" ad”), there are the likes of Robert McNamara, Mel Laird, James Schlesinger, Alexander Haig, Madeleine Albright, Lawrence Eagleburger, James Baker, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George Schultz, all of whom fought savage wars of peace as ill-defined as the current Iraqi mandate.

Even if everyone around desk had wandered through the same fogs of war, conversation during the old-timers’ day was perfunctory, as deferential to authority today as it was when they were giving warrior council to earlier presidents. Clearly a smiling President Bush was happy for the company, as if to reverse President’s Kennedy observation, after the Bay of Pigs, that while success has a number of fathers, “failure is orphan.” This gathering looked like failure's paternity clinic, hosting the fathers of so many splendid little wars. But here also was a roomful of individuals who, although wily in the ways of Washington power, often found the world a confusing abstraction—in the manner of Lloyd George, who asked in 1916: “Who are the Slovaks? I can’t seem to place them.”

Looking at the photo—and then recalling the white men’s burdens in Vietnam, Cambodia, Granada, Panama, Kosovo, and Iraq—I couldn’t help but think of the assembled best and brightest as just another group of CIA detainees. They had flown the world on unmarked government planes, landed during the night in places like Shannon and Geneva, and ordered fanatical death on symbolic battlefields. But when later questioned in the press or before Congress, they could no more explain their leaders’ actions or goals than could your average al-Qaida suspect getting blasted with rap music in Abu Ghraib. Nor do I think the secretaries would have grown more eloquent if they had been chained to a Guantanamo fence or piled up in front of Lyndie England.

I do think, however, that all them would have been comfortable seconding Woodrow Wilson in Paris, dividing up the world or briskly showing him maps of Wallachia or Bessarabia (“No, sir, it’s near the Ukraine, not Baghdad. With respect, sir.”) At the same time they probably would have run afoul of the old Tiger, George Clemenceau, who one day during the Paris conference asked: “Who is Pichon?” The answer came back that Stéphen Pichon was his foreign minister, to which Clemenceau replied: “So he is. I had forgotten it.”