Enemy on the Euphrates (59 page)

And although the revolutionary war of 1920 was eventually to become rightfully reinstated in Iraq’s national history, most of its participants were not. By the 1980s the predominantly Shi‘i affiliation of those participants had been airbrushed out of its narrative and under the dictatorship of Saddam Husayn and the Ba’ath Party, marginal Sunni figures like Sheikh Dhari of the Zauba‘ became elevated to the pantheon of martyrs of the 1920 uprising. Indeed, in 1983 a state-financed film about the revolution focused almost exclusively on Dhari’s ‘heroic’ stand against the British and in particular against Leachman, inaccurately portrayed as a drunk, a role played by actor Oliver Reed.
²⁰

In conclusion, it may be said that, for the Iraqis, the enduring legacy of the 1920 uprising lies in the consequences of its failure. Although
it resulted in the creation of a ‘state’ rather than a mere protectorate, the state which came into existence following the defeat of the uprising had virtually no roots among the predominantly Shi‘i cultivators who constituted the majority of Iraqi ‘civil society’ at that time.
²¹
The British made sure that the machinery of the state was placed in the hands of Sunni Baghdad notables and Sunni ‘Sharifian’ military officers, many of whom openly despised the majority of their rural fellow countrymen. This is not to deny that many tribal sheikhs, both Shi‘i and Sunni, were co-opted into that state machinery – but, in general, their motives were personal and financial advancement rather than to be genuine representatives of their constituencies.

Most importantly, control of the newly formed Iraqi army was monopolised by Sunnis, and from its foundation it was envisaged by both the British and their Iraqi puppets as a force for suppressing internal unrest rather than external aggression. In other words, the ‘friendly native state’ which Britain had eventually created by defeating the 1920 uprising was ‘friendly’ only insofar as that state had little or no foundations in the wider Iraqi society: it was entirely based on a small number of individuals from an equally small proportion of the Iraqi population (Sunni Arabs constituted around 19 per cent of the total).
²²
Thus, while the British became dependent on this group for the furtherance of their interests, as a minority, the Iraqis’ rulers became equally dependent on the British for their survival. Indeed, the policy of favouring a minority to control the remainder of the population was a widespread imperialist
modus operandi
employed, for example, in Syria where the French favoured the Alawites over the majority Sunni population.

This absence of representative state formation at the birth of the Iraqi nation established a dark precedent for the future conduct of Iraqi politics. Since the Sunni military officers who formed the backbone of the regime could rely on bombing by the RAF to ‘solve’ political problems in the Shi‘i (and Kurdish) regions, there was little incentive to develop peaceful democratic methods of conflict resolution.
²³
As Toby Dodge has observed, ‘Governance was delivered from two hundred feet
… This meant that state institutions never managed to fully penetrate society, mobilize resources or ultimately engender legitimacy.’
²⁴

At the same time, while the state became predominantly an instrument of violence
against
the population, it also became an arena in which corrupt political cliques and personalities – men who had few or no genuine roots in Iraqi civil society – would struggle against each other to seize the material spoils of power. So, from Iraq’s nominal independence in 1932 and throughout successive decades, a queue of military and ex-military ‘strongmen’ followed each other (punctuated by rigged elections), culminating in the despotism of Saddam Husayn, who became president of Iraq in 1979 (having been de facto ruler since 1976). At the same time, the role of the tribes who had fought and suffered in 1920 became increasingly that of useful pawns to be manipulated as collective weapons against this or that political opponent.
²⁵

Oil – that object of imperialist interest which first enticed a western power into the Middle East – continued to be a very mixed blessing for the people of Iraq. Although Iraq finally achieved full sovereignty over its oil resources in 1972, the state into whose hands they fell only used them to further exercise its power over civil society and to finance two disastrous foreign wars (against Iran in 1980–88 and Kuwait in 1990–91). Meanwhile, oil has continued to be an enduring source of attraction to foreign powers and foreign companies. Not only did the desire to exercise control over Iraq’s huge oil resources provide the principal motive behind the US invasion in 2003, but subsequently the recognition that Iraqi Kurdistan has a much larger endowment of oil and gas resources than previously believed has prompted the involvement of foreign powers in that region – in particular Turkey
²⁶
– while encouraging the forces of separatism and exacerbating already difficult relations with the federal government in Baghdad.

Sadly, that same federal government has studiously ignored the noble aims of the leaders of the revolution of 1920 – the unity of all Iraqis in the cause of independence regardless of religion or sect. Instead the Shi‘i politicians have preferred to totally exclude Sunnis from the state apparatus, ensuring that it is now the minority part of Iraqi civil society
which is excluded from participation in the governance of
its
country. This failure to follow in the footsteps of their heroic predecessors has undoubtedly fed the barbaric terrorism and near civil-war in Iraq which has followed the withdrawal of US occupation forces and which continues to this day.

Several of the actors in our narrative were to meet untimely or violent deaths. Sykes’s death from influenza in February 1919, aged only thirty-nine, and the violent deaths of Colonel Leachman and Lieutenant Faruqi have already been mentioned. With the accession of King Faysal, Gertrude Bell found her role in Iraq’s political life considerably reduced. For a time she found solace in safeguarding the immense archaeological heritage of Iraq and was appointed the first director of antiquities in 1923. She still had hopes of marrying and for while looked to Kinahan (Ken) Cornwallis, chief personal advisor to Faysal, as a future matrimonial partner – only to be rejected. From then on, her increasing loneliness and depression – exacerbated by the death of her brother Hugo from typhus in February 1926 – overwhelmed her. On Sunday 11 July 1926, three days before her fifty-eighth birthday, she retired to bed and took a large overdose of sleeping pills.

T.E. Lawrence died on 19 May 1935 following a motorbike accident six days earlier. The later years of his life are perhaps – like those of his war experiences – far too well known to bear repetition. It therefore suffices to make one further observation relevant to those events in Iraq which have been the subject of this book. By 1921, Lawrence had become a convert to Trenchard and Churchill’s doctrine of colonial control via air power. In spite of his previous outrage against the killing of Arab men, women and children during Wilson’s administration, he apparently turned a blind eye to events such as the merciless bombing of the Bani Huchaym tribe’s villages for non-payment of taxes in 1923, in which 144
men, women and children were killed and an unspecified number were wounded – or perhaps he simply was no longer interested in finding out about such things.
¹
Commenting on the later bombing of rebel villages on the North-West Frontier, he claimed that ‘destroying those few poor villages hurt no-one’, and in a truly damning judgement, Lawrence’s official biographer – broadly sympathetic to his subject – was forced to conclude that, ‘air control continued in the Middle East until the late 1950s. It was one of Lawrence’s lasting legacies to the region.’
²

Arnold Wilson’s employment as local managing director of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company ended in 1932 and two years later he was elected as the National Conservative MP for Hitchin. During the remainder of that decade he was strongly sympathetic to Nazi Germany and the policy of appeasement. However, when the Second World War broke out, he volunteered for the Royal Air Force as a rear gunner at the age of fifty-five. In spite of his age, he was accepted and, on the night of 31 May 1940, flying over northern France near Dunkirk, his aircraft was shot down and Wilson declared ‘missing, believed killed’. Although Wilson’s record in Iraq and his political opinions during the 1930s are viewed with distaste by many today, when his country was, once again, at war, this old-fashioned English patriot (his biographer, John Marlowe, dubbed him a ‘Late Victorian’) clearly had no doubt where his duty lay.

Emir ‘Abdallah met Churchill on 26 May 1921 in Jerusalem, where he agreed to support the candidature of his brother Faysal for the throne of Iraq. In return he accepted the emirate, later the kingdom, of Transjordan. ‘Abdallah ruled as an autocrat under British protection throughout the 1930s and 40s. During the Arab–Israeli war of 1948–9, his British-officered Arab Legion occupied the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, ‘Abdallah had no interest in an independent Palestinian state and these captured areas were annexed to Jordan (newly named as such in May 1949). Distrusted by most other Arab leaders for his continued loyalty to Great Britain and his peace talks with the Israelis, he was shot dead by a Palestinian outside the Al ‘Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem on 20 July 1951.

Iraq in the 1930s witnessed a succession of oligarchic and repressive governments made up of Sunni military officers and rich landowning
sheikhs interspersed with military coups and attempted coups. In one of these – in 1936 – Ja‘far al-‘Askari, who had held the premiership in 1923–4 and 1926–8, was murdered. Nuri al-Sa’id headed a number of pro-British governments during the 1930s, 40s and 50s and was responsible for the violent repression of popular demonstrations against the regime’s subservience to British interests. In 1958 the Hashemite monarchy was overthrown in a military-civilian revolution. The royal family were executed and Nuri al-Sa’id was captured while trying to escape; he was killed and his mutilated body dragged through the streets.

At the end of the war, Sharif Husayn was left only with the stony and unproductive Hejaz, in which he imposed a regime of ultra-strict shari‘a, restoring punishments such as hand and foot amputation which had fallen into disuse in the region long before the Young Turk revolution. At the same time he began to behave increasingly like the archetypal ‘oriental despot’, alienating rich and poor alike. In March 1924 Husayn proclaimed himself caliph after the Turkish Nationalist government had formally abolished the role. In response, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa‘ud of Najd sent his feared Ikhwan fighters into Husayn’s realm and the king was forced to flee to ‘Aqaba in ‘Abdallah’s Transjordan, from where the British removed him to Cyprus. He later returned to Transjordan’s capital, Amman, where he died in 1931.

After returning to Iraq, Sayyid Muhsin Abu Tabikh maintained his opposition to the mandate, the treaty and participation in the elections for a constituent assembly. As a result he was briefly exiled to Syria. On his return, however, he began to pursue a strategy of political involvement of bewildering complexity and opportunism which was to remain his chief characteristic for the rest of his life. He was frequently involved in plots against the government and plans to raise his tribal levies against it, but he was also not averse to siding with whatever clique was currently in power in furtherance of his economic interests. During the long years of conservative governments dominated by the figure of Nuri al-Sa’id between 1941 and 1958, Muhsin Abu Tabikh occupied a variety of political and diplomatic roles, ending his career as leader of the Senate. He survived the 1958 revolution and died in Baghdad in May 1961.

Of the four principal leaders of Haras al-Istiqlal in Baghdad, Yusuf al-Suwaydi played only a minor part in political events after his return to the capital, dying in 1925. Sayyid Muhammad al-Sadr initially campaigned strongly against the treaty with Britain and in August 1922 he was arrested by the British along with a number of other mujtahidin and opposition political figures and exiled to Persia. There is some evidence that in Tehran he had contacts with representatives of the Bolshevik government. However, in May 1924 he returned to Iraq having reached a rapprochement with King Faysal. Thereafter his main objective was to obtain greater political rights for the Shi‘is via parliamentary action and loyalty to the Hashemites. In 1929 he was elected president of the Senate and was briefly prime minister between January and June 1948. He died of natural causes in 1956.

The one veteran of the 1920 uprising who remained loyal to the best ideals of the revolution was Ja‘far Abu al-Timman. In 1922 he founded a nationalist party, al-Hizb al-Watani, and launched a major campaign against the proposed treaty with Britain. As a result he too was arrested along with a group of fellow nationalists including Sheikh Habib al-Khayizran of the ‘Azza, and was sent to Henjam island. He was released the following year and for the remainder of his life he struggled to achieve the two objectives which had motivated his participation in the great uprising – the national unity of the Shi‘i and Sunni Muslims and an end to British control, both de jure and de facto. During the 1930s he allied himself with the group of left-wing, anti-imperialist journalists, intellectuals and labour leaders associated with the newspaper
Al-Ahali.
In 1936–7 he was briefly minister of finance and attempted to develop a more egalitarian economic policy with a larger role for the state. In 1941 he supported the short-lived Nationalist government which attempted to end the British military presence in Iraq. He died in Baghdad in 1945 at the age of sixty-four.

General Haldane returned to London in 1921 and for his services in Iraq was invested as a Knight Grand Cross, Order of St Michael and St George (GCMG). Meanwhile he had been writing his own account of the uprising and its defeat,
The Insurrection in Mesopotamia
, in which, on a number of occasions, he strongly criticised the conduct of Wilson’s
administration. He retired from military service in 1925; he never married and spent the rest of his life living with his sister, Alice. He died, aged eighty-seven, in April 1950.