Iraq: history repeating itself...

[acroyear]

NYTimes Select has an article yesterday from columnist David Brooks that basically shows that all of the problems in trying to "leave" the mess that is Iraq have already been encountered over 60 years ago as the British Empire was dissolving in the years leading up to WW2.  It's a summary from an essay, “The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect.” by Baghdad-born Jew, Elie Kedourie, from his essay collection, The Chatham House Version: And Other Middle Eastern Studies.

Choice cuts:

Same Old Demons - New York Times:

In 1927, a British officer asked a tribal leader: “You now have a government, a constitution, a parliament, ministers and officials — what more can you want?” The tribal leader replied, “Yes, but they speak with a foreign accent.”

The British tried to encourage responsible Iraqi self-government, to no avail. “The political ambitions of the Shia religious headquarters have always lain in the direction of theocratic domination,” a British official reported in 1923. They “have no motive for refraining from sacrificing the interests of Iraq to those which they conceive to be their own.”

At one point, the British high commissioner, Sir Henry Dobbs, argued that if Britain threatened to withdraw its troops, Iraqis would behave more responsibly. It didn’t work. Iraqis figured the Brits were bugging out. They concluded it was profitless to cultivate British friendship. Everything the British said became irrelevant.

The Iraq of his youth, Kedourie concluded, “was a make-believe kingdom built on false pretenses.” He quoted a British report from 1936, which noted that the Iraqi government would never be a machine based on law that treated citizens impartially, but would always be based on tribal favoritism and personal relationships. Iraq, Kedourie said, faced two alternatives: “Either the country would be plunged into chaos or its population should become universally the clients and dependents of an omnipotent but capricious and unstable government.” There is, he wrote, no third option.

Those who ignore their history...