Mark Etherington
REVOLT ON THE TIGRIS
252pp. Hurst. £15. 1 85065 773 4
US: Cornell University Press. $25.
0 8014 4451 9
Sir Aylmer Haldane
THE INSURRECTION IN MESOPOTAMIA 1920
352pp. Nashville, TN: Battery Press. $49.95.
0 89839 339 6
Ahmed S. Hashim
INSURGENCY AND COUNTER-INSURGENCY IN IRAQ
336pp. Hurst. £15.
1 85065 795 5
US: Cornell University Press. $25.
0 8014 4452 7
General Sir Rupert Smith
THE UTILITY OF FORCE
The art of war in the modern world
428pp. Allen Lane. £25.
0 713 99836 9
Kayla Williams
I LOVE MY RIFLE MORE THAN YOU
Young and female in the US Army
290pp. New York: Norton. $24.95.
0 393 06098 5
John Crawford
THE LAST TRUE STORY I’LL EVER TELL
An accidental soldier’s account of the war in Iraq
220pp. New York: Riverhead. $23.95.
1 57322 314 X
Zaki Chehab
IRAQ ABLAZE
Inside the insurgency
277pp. Tauris. £17.95.
1 85411 110 9
“Seems to me we’ve got to start at the bottom and invade this country all over again”, a GI remarked on observing the results of training a new Iraqi police force last year. Before him was a figure in brand-new blue uniform fast asleep in a chair at his guard post at the police HQ in Kut. “Maybe we’ll get it right this time”, added the soldier, “Hell – a plan would have been good.” The episode is recounted in Mark Etherington’s diary of how the American-led coalition tried to bring order and Jeffersonian governance to southern Iraq. Revolt on the Tigris is the best account from the ground of the high intent of many of those sent forth by Paul Bremer, the American proconsul of the hour, to set things straight in post-Saddam Iraq, and where it went wrong – that is up to mid last year. In the dying weeks of 2005, things are still not going right, and there are a whole range of different issues. For Iraqis and any outsiders involved, American, British, Syrian, al-Qaeda Saudis included, the Iraq crisis now has all the attractions of Brer Rabbit’s tar- baby: it continues to cling.
With the unwieldy title of Regional Coordinator for the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA), Mark Etherington was dispatched to Kut al-Amarah, capital of Wazit Province, to introduce some semblance of government and order, in 2003. He believed in the mission set him by Bremer, and the whole United States project in Iraq, and mistrusted the obvious reservations of the British Foreign Office at the time. A Cambridge graduate who has served in the British Parachute Regiment as well as the Foreign Office, Etherington’s curriculum vitae reads like that of le Carré’s Honourable Schoolboy. He not only believed in his civilizing mission at the outset, but continued to believe in it after his team had been driven from Kut by the militia of the maverick Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in the spring of last year. It was the first major action by the Jaish al-Mahdi army of Muqtada.
As Regional Coordinator (RC), Etherington endeavoured to set up local courts, reappoint justices and put some semblance of local government in place. His team consisted of a small band of advisers, an increasingly windy Ukrainian infantry brigade, some American civil contractors, and a dedicated protection team from Control Risks. Intelligence was pretty thin on how Wazit was run, and ran itself, under Saddam, who the men of power were in the Baath Party and the tribal hierarchies.
Etherington sees the tribes as waning powers, and describes their squabbling chieftains as little better than a bunch of bickering trade-union bosses in the UK of the 1970s, a curious comparison with a strange history. The new RC picks new men to run the police, the courts, the local council – only to have to sack and replace most of them in a few weeks. Finally his team is driven out, after a day’s siege and battle, by Moqtada’s men, with casualties on both sides.
A few weeks later, Etherington returns to Kut. Though chastened, he is still not prepared to break faith with the Coalition mission. But it is time for a rethink, and it is in this context he quotes the GI’s musing about the need for a plan. Like the Irish farmer giving directions, “he wouldn’t set out from here”.
The remarkable feature about his memoir of his months on the Tigris, one of the most elegantly written to come from the conflict so far, is how remote it all seems now. Etherington’s story ends in the summer of last year, before the cycle of kidnappings and trophy executions, the car bombings and the cyber propaganda of the different branches of al-Qaeda had got fully under way. As Alan Bennett writes in The History Boys, “there is no period so remote as the recent past”.
Untangling the recent past, in fact the whole eighty-five-year history of Iraq, is a task which becomes more pertinent by the day, as the conflict there deepens and widens and threatens to take on global dimensions. Decoding the past in its deepest political and cultural aspect has been a major failure by the American and British political leadership, and the diplomats, commanders and intelligence chiefs serving them. The assumptions with which the British went into Mesopotamia at the beginning of the last century now seem as flawed as those with which the Bush Coalition forces went about overthrowing Saddam’s dictatorship two and a half years ago.
This is not merely a case of those not learning from the mistakes of history being condemned to repeat them. The crisis now bears the hallmarks of postmodern conflict: unpredictable, with surges of inexplicable violence, and no time limit. The coalition forces find themselves tied to an open-ended commitment, with the most limited political goals becoming increasingly elusive. The latest analysis from the Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence forecasts the so-called “insurgency” intensifying, with the Coalition forces becoming the principal targets. More chilling is the slowing of the political momentum. After stumbling through the constitutional referendum in October, the general election scheduled before the end of the year is expected to deliver a weak government with little ability to bring real rule to Baghdad itself, let alone the rest of the country.
When Gertrude Bell was drawing up plans for the government of the new Iraq eighty-five years ago, an American missionary warned her that to try to unite such a disparate land and people was inviting trouble. “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history”, he wrote to her in a letter (quoted by David Fromkin in A Peace To End All Peace, 1989), “if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south, They have never been an independent unit. You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet.”
With the prospect of the present violence evolving into full-blown civil war, the question of partition of Iraq is back on the agenda. In Washington, London and New York, as well as Baghdad, the notion of “benign partition” is now being given thoughtful discussion. In her day, of course, Gertrude Bell would have none of any proposals for dividing the country she was helping to create. In her view of the need for strong centralized government from Baghdad of the three former Ottoman provinces that were to make up the new Iraq she was supported, at first, by the formidable Colonel A. T. Wilson, by turn deputy and then acting Civil Commissioner. More than Bell and her mentor and friend Sir Percy Cox, who later became Civil Commissioner to the new Kingdom of Iraq, Wilson’s story and policies have a contemporary ring.
Because of his knowledge of Arabic and the Arab world, Wilson was spared service with his regiment on the Western Front and was assigned to Mesopotamia and Egypt, where his energy and expertise made him indispensable. His view of what could be done in Mesopotamia, and the later Iraq, chimes curiously with those of the circle of Vice President Cheney and Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, who are in a way his spiritual grandchildren. He believed in conscripting the support of educated Arabs of the region, and that they would support a Westernized system of government – though in Wilson’s case this would take the form of loose democracy in a British protectorate, rather than the models of American democracy of Jefferson and Madison. Ronald Storrs, later the genius behind the British mandate in Palestine, recollected a meeting with Wilson in Basra on May 2, 1917, in his memoir Orientations (1937): “Wilson tells me the Mesopotamians are as a whole adaptable, progressive and appreciative . . . . What they expect from us [the British] is just government, great material improvement and prosperity, and gradual association of their leading men with power. Their ideal is that Iraq may become another Egypt”.
Before Operation Iraqi Freedom, the supporters of Rumsfeld and Cheney, Bush and Tony Blair, were equally convinced that the Iraqis, once liberated from Saddam Hussein, would embrace a loose form of democracy chaperoned by the United States and Britain. The claque of exiles of Ahmed Chalabi’s Iraqi national Congress insisted that not only would the bulk of Iraqi armed forces surrender, but nearly half could be willing and capable partners of the Coalition. It seems the school of Arnold Wilson and Donald Rumsfeld appear to have shared a similar capacity for self-deception.
They also shared the view of what to do when things went wrong, in the form of widespread violence, resistance and insurgency: use overwhelming military force. In 1920, rebellion against the British swept from north to south, and took most of the year to extinguish. By this time, Wilson and Bell had diverged sharply about Iraq’s future. Bell wanted to give greater autonomy and power to the Iraqis; Wilson wanted tighter control by Britain, backed by a strong military presence.
When the insurgency of 1920 broke out, the British Army of Mesopotamia was commanded by Lieutenant General Sir Aylmer Haldane, a veteran of campaigning on four continents, including command of a corps on the Western Front in 1918. His memoir, The Insurrection in Mesopotamia, 1920, published only two years after the event, is remarkable – not least that today it is quite obviously more remarked upon by commentators than actually read. It was reported that Rumsfeld’s aides scoured second- hand bookshops for a copy (then going for up to $250 apiece by all accounts) to draw what lessons they could as the Coalition began facing up to the new version of insurrection in the summer of 2003. Evidently they did not have much luck.
As the reprinted edition of Haldane’s book relates, it took more than six months and a cost of 2,300 British and Indian lives to repress the rebellion, in which more than 8,000 Iraqis were killed. British columns were ambushed and attacked at night, the railways that they relied on were ripped up, with the commando tactics employed by T. E. Lawrence on the Hejaz three years before. The worst setback for Haldane was the ambush of the column of the 2nd Battalion the Manchester Regiment, in their encampment on a march for water out of Hillah, on July 24, 1920. The Manchesters were forced to make a fighting withdrawal under darkness, and in the mêlée nearly 200 British and Indian
soldiers were killed. The Adjutant, Captain
G. S. Henderson, won a posthumous Victoria Cross, for actions remarkably similar to those in which Johnston Beharry won his VC last year.
Haldane’s memoir has been given the dubious status of a primer of lessons learned about Iraq that should have been heeded today. More interesting are the lessons Haldane did not learn. His conclusion to the book is reflective and modest. It was a near-run thing, and he asks pertinent questions about the adequacy of the forces available to him, their utility and sustainability – issues very much alive today for the Coalition. His tactics were often brutal, though apparently not brutal enough for Colonel A. T. Wilson, then deputy Civil Commissioner, the exponent of the “shock and awe” doctrine of the day. Houses were blown up, tribal chiefs hanged, large fines handed down, and arms and munitions confiscated by the tens of thousands. Haldane suggested that in the future more use should be made of the RAF to make intimidating overflights of villages, and drop bombs. The recommendation was taken up, and has a legacy to this day.
