ate last year
the Council on Foreign Relations invited 25 academics,
corporate executives, oil industry consultants, retired
military men and American diplomats to meet at the James A.
Baker III Institute for Public Policy on the oak-shaded campus
of Rice University. Co-chaired by two former career foreign
service officers, Edward P. Djerejian and Frank G. Wisner, the
group was charged with mapping out a plan for the U.S.’s role
in Iraq after the anticipated war. The final report which
followed, Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict Policy
in Iraq, outlines a 3-phased, at least 2-year process by
which Iraq would be “liberated,” cleansed of Baathists and
weapons of mass destruction and transformed into a democratic,
free-market republic fully integrated into the community of
nations. The authors of the report never challenge the wisdom
of war on Iraq; rather their plan is built within the
framework of what is presumably a “best case scenario”: a
short and swift war with low casualties and relatively little
urban warfare. The authors also concede that full compliance
by the Iraqi state with relevant UN resolutions or a coup
might eliminate the need for an invasion.
While the
Council on Foreign Relations is adamant in its assertion that
it has no affiliation with the U.S. government, the Baker
Institute’s close association with the current administration
suggests that the report itself will contribute to the shape
of any post-war American occupation of Iraq. This is
especially the case with the involvement of Djerejian, who
served for much of the 1980s as ambassador in Damascus and Tel
Aviv and has often been used to open back channel contacts in
the Middle East and Caucasus. Djerejian is a careful and
sanguine thinker who is deeply sensitive to the history and
culture of the region; he understands intimately the explosive
power of sectarian and ethnic conflict and how corrosive the
asymmetries of American policies towards Israel have been. The
report bears his unmistakable imprint in the way it envisions
“quiet U.S.-Iranian cooperation,” notes that the elimination
of Saddam will not cure all the ills of Iraqi society and
concludes that the U.S. “must avoid imposing Versailles-style
conditions on Iraq.” (13)
By the same
token, the report’s emphasis on the stabilization of Iraq’s
oil industry—partially for the redevelopment of the
country—and the use of American power to level “the playing
field for awarding energy sector contracts by supporting a
transparent and competitive process” (10) reflects the
contribution of among others, Djerejian’s co-chair Frank
Wisner. Wisner has had various jobs in the State and Defense
Departments since the Vietnam era and most recently served as
ambassador to New Delhi. He was appointed to the Board of
Directors of the now-bankrupt Enron in 1997 and currently
works as Vice Chairman of External Affairs for American
International Group, one of the world’s largest insurance and
financial services company. His involvement is a tacit
acknowledgement that post-war Iraq policy is predicated less
on disarmament or democratization and more on the interests of
the American energy sector.
The report
envisions a “superintending role” for the U.S. over a
UN-supervised Iraqi administration:
One that maintains low visibility but is clearly committed to
protecting law and order and creating a breathing space for a
nascent Iraqi government to take shape. The U.S. role will be
best played in the background guiding progress and making sure
that any peacekeeping force is effective and robust enough to
do its job…While moving the process along as quickly as
possible, the United States must not be limited by
self-imposed timelines, but should rather adopt an
objectives-based approach (6)
The “behind
the scenes” strategy of America’s efforts—which would be led
by an “Iraqi Coordinator”—are calculated so as to preclude any
appearance of colonialism. The anxiety over U.S. actions being
interpreted as neo-imperialist courses through the document
(“A heavy American hand will only convince them, and the rest
of the world that the operation against Iraq was undertaken
for imperialist, rather than disarmament. It is in America’s
interest to discourage such misperceptions.” [10-11]). To
counteract any “misperceptions” that might arise, the report’s
authors advocate the use of “vigorous public diplomacy” not
just in the Arab and Muslim worlds, but also in the U.S. and
Europe to “deflate… local criticism in the region and help
deny terrorist and extremists the ability to use the military
action to their own political advantage.”(3) “Public
diplomacy” is a euphemism for highly coordinated pro-American
propaganda that has gained wider use since the aftermath of
9/11 and the appointment of Charlotte Beers, a distinguished
advertising executive as the Under Secretary of State for
Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs.
The stress
placed on issues of appearance and the borrowing of the
vocabulary and personnel of Madison Avenue amounts to a
concession that American plans for Iraq in the least resemble
colonialism and at most constitute the formulation of a
neo-modern version thereof. What is left unsaid in the
report’s analysis and a telling lacuna in a document whose
authors seem so sensitive to history is that Iraq itself, and
indeed all the states of the Eastern Mediterranean—Syria,
Lebanon, Jordan and Israel— are the end products of a similar
style of colonialism, the inter-war phenomenon of League of
Nations’ Mandates. While from a comparative perspective the
parallels are striking, what is a constant in the historical
experience of the Mandate system in the Middle East and the
planned American Mandate for Iraq is that both are predicated
on Orientalist and essentialized conceptions of Arab and
Muslim society and the unique identification of liberalism
with Western hegemony. And just as the Mandate system
contributed to the destabilization of colonial and
post-colonial Middle Eastern society, the lack of democratic
structures and the failure of the inter-war international
system, the cost of the American Mandate for Iraq will be
similar, especially in the weakening of the UN and the way it
will make permanent the radicalization of the region.
Colonialism in Drag: Sykes-Picot in the Wilsonian Moment
During WWI,
and long before its outcome was clear, representatives of
France and Britain met to divide the Ottoman Empire (1916).
The plan, remembered as the Sykes-Picot agreement for the two
civil servants who drew it up, assigned to the two states
areas of “direct control” and “indirect control.” France’s
area of direct control was along the Eastern Mediterranean
from southern Lebanon into Anatolia, with inland Syria under
indirect influence. Britain was given exclusive control over
southern Mesopotamia—primarily the oil producing regions
adjacent to Kuwait and Iranian oilfields, and indirect control
over inland Iraq. Palestine was to be placed under
international control.
Growing
American influence and pressure at home forced a shift in the
way the British and French portrayed themselves in the
region. Less as conquerors, they began to situate themselves
as the humanitarian liberators of the Arabs from the
authoritarian oppression of the Ottoman Empire. The British
instigation of the Arab revolt, which has become a permanent
feature of Western popular culture in the form of David Lean’s
film “Lawrence of Arabia,” was, in part, a consequence of this
shift.
With the
collapse of the Ottoman Empire colonial and military officials
sought to persuade the local inhabitants that the European
liberation/conquest of the region had been done on their
behalf. Sykes and Picot themselves toured Syria in late 1918
and early 1919 delivering speeches calculated to lower local
expectations of complete independence, no doubt in
anticipation of the implementation of the territorial
arrangements outlined in the once secret treaty which the pair
had engineered. All of their presentations insisted on the
existence of a separate Arab nation that, Picot maintained,
had been oppressed “for four centuries by the government of
Istanbul.” Both claimed that the liberation of the Arabs and
other peoples from this oppression had motivated them to make
war on the Turks and that the Arabs were a nation among
nations; nations that had joined together to “end Turkish
despotism and return freedom to the people.”
Stanley
Maude, the British General who conquered Mesopotamia expressed
similar sentiments before the incredulous inhabitants of
Baghdad:
O people of Baghdad, remember that for 26 generations you have
suffered under strange tyrants who have endeavored to set one
Arab house against another in order that they might profit by
your dissensions. This policy is abhorrent to Great Britain
and her allies, for there can be neither peace nor prosperity
where there is enmity and misgovernment. Therefore I am
commanded to invite you, through your nobles and elders and
representatives, to participate in the management of your
civil affairs in collaboration with the political
representatives of Great Britain who accompany the British
Army, so that you may be united with your kinsmen in North,
East, South, and West in realising the aspirations of your
race…
By the time
of the Paris Peace Conference, and fearing that Wilsonian
notions of national self-determination would scuttle their
colonial interests, the British and French seized upon a
system of temporary “Mandates” as a compromise solution that
would appear less “colonial.” Article 22 of the League’s
Covenant explained the need for Mandates:
To those colonies and territories which as a consequence of
the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the
States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by
peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the
strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be
applied the principle that the well-being and development of
such peoples form a sacred trust of civilisation and that
securities for the performance of this trust should be
embodied in this Covenant.
In order to
bring these peoples into that “strenuous modern world,”
“advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their
experience or their geographical position can best undertake
this responsibility,” would take on the burden of “tutelage.”
And while the League recognized the “existence [of the Arab
states of the Eastern Mediterranean] as independent nations”
they would be “subject to the rendering of administrative
advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they
are able to stand alone.” Even though the League’s guidelines
included a clause that the people of the soon-to-be-mandated
territories should have some say in their Mandatory, Britain
and France were given those areas first coveted in
Sykes-Picot. Ultimately, the Mandate system envisioned the
tutelage/ superintending role as temporary. At the time of
the their establishment, however, the voluntary exit of a
colonial power was unprecedented and most considered the
French and British presence permanent.
The most
immediate consequence of the imposition of the Mandates was
the drawing of new boundaries and the creation of
unprecedented geographical constructs like Syria and Iraq.
The new borders often had disastrous economic impacts and
disrupted trade and migration patters for thousands throughout
the region. The territorial divisions cloaked a more
concerted effort to create nonviable states (Trans-Jordan) or
states in which potentially loyal religious minorities would
amount to a plurality (Lebanon.) Iraq was the most curious of
these creations, binding together three Ottoman provinces of
Baghdad, Basra and Mosul into a new state.
In the
fiction of the Mandate system, these new states would run
themselves with advice and guidance from the Mandatory power.
Consequently, parliaments were convened, constitutions
written, elections held. In the case of Iraq, a new king was
imposed. Faysal ibn Hussein (no relation to Saddam), who had
briefly ruled in Syria, was elevated to the new throne of Iraq
by the British following a questionable plebiscite. The
states were systematically prevented from developing
independent militaries, and instead, colonial troops from
other imperial holdings were often employed to establish
control. In the case of Syria and Iraq, men from non-Sunni
Muslim minority groups like Alawites, Ismailis, Armenians and
Assyrians were often used to bolster military units commanded
by European officers. Foreign policy, security apparatuses,
antiquities and tariff and trade policies were the domain of
the Mandatory power. Education, court systems, and most
middle management position were left to the locals. In what
must have been seen as one of the more humiliating dimensions
of the Mandate system, Mandated states were responsible for
paying the salaries of those officials “advising” them. The
Guiding Principles outlines a similar plan to reimburse
nation building costs with the Iraqi oil revenue (11-12).
Nevertheless,
in a departure from their previous colonial enterprises, the
French and the British sought for the most part to remain
“behind the scenes.” Not only was this done to fulfill the
letter of the Mandate, but it made sense from an
administrative perspective. Still, the ultimate power in each
of the Mandate states was the resident “High Commissioner” who
could and would employ the military to enforce colonial will.
Among the many responsibilities of the High Commissioner was
periodic reporting of the improvement of conditions in the
areas under his tutelage to the League. Rarely did the League
challenge the veracity of these reports or criticize the
practices of Mandatories; consequently the organization’s
credibility as an anti-imperialist, liberal entity diminished
through the course of the inter-war period. A caricature of
its former self, and thus weakened, the League failed to
prevent the brutal Italian colonization of Ethiopia or stand
against Japanese militarism in China.
Resistance to the Mandates and Inter-War Politics
Before the
ink was dry on the documents establishing the various Mandates
on the new states of the Middle East, resistance to French and
British neo-colonialism had begun throughout the region.
While many of these movements resembled proto-typical national
resistance movements, and would become more formalized in the
course of the inter-war period, opposition also arose in ways
that were less easily understandable in the idiom of
nationalism and made more sense when seen through the lens of
late-Ottoman forms of religious authority and patterns of
legitimacy. Regardless of form, the movements against
European colonialism pivoted on two major themes: first, the
whole notion who liberated whom; and second, whether those
societies now liberated by the West were in need of
“tutelage.”
With the
exception of a very tiny group of Arab nationalists, British
and French efforts to liberate the Arabs from Ottoman
suzerainty rang hollow. The Arab identity was itself of
little relevance to most, and until very recently the term
Arab would be more commonly associated with desert-dwelling
Bedouin. The urban, urbane, cosmopolitan inhabitants of
cities like Damascus or Beirut would have bristled at the
notion of being called Arab. More substantively, notions of
identity followed lines of religious affiliation. Indeed the
post-war efforts to enforce an Arab identity stemmed from the
need to create Arabs, and Turks for that matter, in order to
obscure the religious bond between the two groups and to
disengage the newly imagined ethnicities from an historical
dependence on Islam and the very real possibility of an
ongoing anti-imperialist solidarity within its structure.
When seen
from another direction the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire,
despite the authoritarian dimensions of its rule, were loyal
to the state inasmuch as the state defended and protected
Islam. The British and French—as Christians and Westerners—by
definition could not accomplish this. Thus, as resistance
took shape in the former empire, it acquired an explicitly
Islamist character. Exemplary of this moment was a
declaration made by one of the various groups fighting the
French in Northern Syria in the early 1920s. The French
should leave, because of the existence of the government of
the paramount Islamic Caliphate which is giving aid to it [the
people], [this people] who consider themselves one part of the
several parts of the general Islamic community and fight under
its flag
Clearly sectarian in tone, the document makes mention neither
of Arabs nor Turks and but instead embraced a vital Islamic
community. As the French abandoned parts of Anatolia to this
resistance, campaigns of ethic cleansing followed in which the
residual Armenian population—which had survived the Genocide
of 1915—was forced to flee again.
The British
liberators of Mesopotamia were also greeted by a revolt.
Equally expressing itself in terms of local autonomy and
Islamic legitimacy, this revolt would bind together urban
Muslims with Arab tribal confederations along the Euphrates
and last several months. Following a brutal campaign of
suppression which left over 10,000 Iraqis (and 450 British
soldiers) dead, the resistance was broken. Other comparably
bloody moments of resistance would occur later, most notably
the Great Revolt in Palestine in the 1930s. It is not
unreasonable to suspect that American efforts at liberation
will be met by similar sentiments—not just in Iraq, but in
other predominately Muslim countries.
The assertion
that the societies of the Eastern Mediterranean were in need
of tutelage was likewise met with derision. The territory
conquered by the British and the French had been the stage for
nearly a 100-year process of modernization and state
centralization. Certainly the level of development of the
region compared favorably with those European states once part
of the Empire of Austria-Hungary—Czechoslovakia or
Yugoslavia—slated for complete independence in the post-war
settlements. The entire region had been fully
integrated—though in a subordinate position—into international
patterns of trade. Schools and universities were established,
and chambers of commerce and industry had been formed. With
the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Ottoman Empire had even
begun to embrace liberal notions of political and intellectual
freedom and the creation of a national economy which rejected
the debilitating economic concessions imposed on the state by
the Europeans during the course of the 19th
century. The various social and economic reforms left the
Ottoman Empire as one of the strongest non-Western states on
the globe and the Ottoman military, far from collapsing in the
face of the Allied assault, withstood successfully the two
major expeditionary forces sent against it in the initial
years of the war—Gallipoli—and the first invasion of Iraq,
both of which left thousands of British, Australian and
Anglo-Indian soldiers dead or captured. The inherent strength
of late-Ottoman society—and the fact that the Ottoman Empire,
were it to be left intact, would have controlled vast amounts
of oil—no doubt contributed to the Western efforts to force
its division. Thus divided, the residual states still
possessed layers of bureaucrats, local notables and an
emerging middle class of liberal professionals and businessmen
who formed the backbone of resistance to European colonialism.
As the Mandates evolved, the British and French turned to
older strategies of divide and conquer to moderate the
position of those antagonistic to their rule. Such techniques
included the encouragement of compradorial cadres within
minority groups and the use of bureaucratic strategies to make
more acute sectarian and ethnic divisions within the areas
under their control. The formation of Lebanon by the French
and early British cooperation with Zionists are the most
pertinent examples of this phenomenon. This form of rule was
later adopted by most of the post-colonial governments of the
region and fully integrated into styles of authoritarian
rule.
As both the
French and British grew exhausted by their colonial endeavor,
they moved to more open cooperation with the least liberal
parts of Middle Eastern society, primarily the semi-feudal
notability of the Ottoman period who still dominated much of
urban life. Ironically, this elite was itself under tremendous
threat from an emergent urban middle class that peopled civil
society and ideologically and culturally resembled more the
Europeans themselves. Thus colonialism contributed the
persistence of the Middle East’s ancien régime and the
political marginalization of a liberal-minded middle class.
Planks in the Guiding Principles have the potential to
do the same. While the authors of the report seem less
committed to the idea of an ethnic division of Iraq, their
continued advocacy of a separate de facto Kurdish “enclave” in
a federal system is equally support for the Kurdish notability
who, despite taking on the mantle of political leaders, have
divided Iraqi Kurdistan into fiefs. The report’s intention to
employ “consultative councils” made up of “leaders at the
national and local level” and “representatives of external
opposition” (7) upon the occupation of the country strikes me
again as an attempt to use a newer version of Mandate-era
illiberal notable politics to identify a pliant clientele and
suppress dissent. This strategy when deployed in
Afghanistan—i.e., the Loya Jirga—did nothing to instill
democracy, but rather ensured continued warlord hegemony.
Exit Strategies
The gradual
turning over of authority in British and French controlled
Mandated areas to the semi-feudal elite anticipated their
final “exit strategies.” In the case of the French, the
election of a socialist premier in 1936 led to a period of
direct negotiations between the notable elite of both Syria
and Lebanon but not a complete withdrawal. The Second World
War and post-war French efforts to reclaim parts of their
empire made their final departure a clumsy affair. The basic
colonial ethos of the permanence of sectarianism was left
behind in the organic document establishing the Lebanese
Republic—taking sectarianism a fact of Lebanese political
culture and a contributing factor of the 1975 civil war. In
Syria, the urban notables who ruled briefly were replaced
almost immediately by military strong men drawn from the
minority groups from which the French built the armed forces.
The ascendancy of the Alawites in the person of the recently
deceased Baathist dictator of Syria, Hafez al-Assad is a
residue of this aspect of French colonial policy.
Great
Britain’s failures in Palestine are legendary and in 1948 they
merely abandoned it to the United Nations. However, the
British exit strategy for Iraq most closely resembles that
implicit in the Guiding Principles. By the early
1930s, the British had grown confident that their imposed
king, Faysal, would be able to rule by employing a mix of
divide and conquer and the British Royal Air Force. The
treaty negotiated between Baghdad and London that followed is
itself a blueprint for neocolonialism and anticipates the way
various European states and the U.S. would deal with former
colonies or conquered states in the post-WWII era. By the
terms of the 1930 Treaty, the British retained two air bases
in the country and reserved the right to unilateral
intervention in Iraq. The Iraqi military would be developed
under close British supervision: all military hardware was to
be purchased from British companies, foreign trainers were to
be British and if Iraqi military personnel traveled abroad for
training, they were required to go to the United Kingdom. The
question of oil had been handled previously in a 1925
agreement by which the Iraqi Petroleum Company—a British
firm—had exclusive rights to the development of Iraqi oil
reserves in return for the payment of modest royalties. Far
from completing the developmental and liberal process
envisioned at the award of the Mandate, the British had merely
identified a limited number of strategic interests in
Iraq—access to oil and military assets—and abandoned Iraqi
society to those who could best dominate it. Exemplary of
this British abandonment was their failure to stop the
immediate post-independence genocidal massacres of the
Assyrian Christian community of Iraq. The Assyrians, most of
whom were refugees from Anatolia had made up a significant
portion of the colonial military and served as a convenient
stand-in for anti-British anger. Bakr Sidqi, the officer most
responsible for the massacres, used his newly acquired
prestige to mount a military coup in 1936, thus setting the
stage for Iraqi political instability for the next 45 years.
And while the British did intervene in Iraqi affairs in 1941,
it was not to reassert civilian constitutional rule but rather
to suppress the government of Rashid Ail al-Gaylani, an Iraqi
nationalist who expressed pro-German sympathies, and moreover
sought to abrogate the terms of the 1930 Treaty.
The
Guiding Principles report includes a similar strategy to
disengage access to oil from the process of democratization.
In the short-term, the report advocates “Isolating the [oil]
industry from domestic turmoil.” (16) While the report
envisions this isolation as only temporary, American
withdrawal from the oil fields would be contingent on the
stability of Iraq, defined here as an Iraqi commitment to the
“depoliticization” of the oil industry and again, the
“leveling of the playing field.” In this sense, the American
plan copies the underlying sense of the 1930 Treaty: the
Iraqis will have sovereignty over their oil resources, as long
as sovereignty does not interfere in the American strategic
access to those resources. The physical format of the report
itself seems to mimic this stance. The working group’s report
fills pages 1-14. The sole addendum, “Oil and Iraq:
Opportunities and Challenges” take up the next 13.
Conclusion
Perhaps
hoping to make the best of a terrible situation, the authors
of the Guiding Principles have failed to imagine a
solution for Iraq that transcends the basic formulas of 20th
century colonialism. The inherent illegitimacy which will
adhere to any U.S. occupation of Iraq—no matter how sheltered
by “public diplomacy”—will tar any who seek to cooperate in
democratization as collaborators. That the plan includes the
obvious limitation of Iraqi sovereignty means any Iraqi leader
who cooperates will again be viewed as a servant of American
interests, no matter how enlightened. Other questions remain:
would the U.S. allow an Iraqi government to continue to oppose
Israeli policies, perhaps even force it to recognize Israel?
To facilitate security, would it place permanent bases on
Iraqi soil like those in Turkey, Qatar or Afghanistan? More
to the point, any ruler who rules only with the aid of
American—Christian—occupation forces would lack, in a prima
facie sense, any effective legitimacy. Consider for a moment
Osama bin Laden’s criticism of the Saudi royal family’s
support of American troops in Arabia.
Certainly the
use of the UN to “supervise” an American Mandate on Iraq will
add credibility to those who denounce that body as a tool of
Western imperialism. Likewise, the use of “crimes against
humanity” trials to purge the upper echelon of Iraq’s domestic
oil industry as the Guiding Principles advocates (17)
is a conscious perversion of international norms of justice
for purely corporate ends. Any such efforts would turn
farcical the whole system of human rights jurisprudence.
Ultimately
the plan points to some of the reasons why colonialism in any
form must be opposed. By the late-1930s the peoples of the
Middle East had only experienced the liberal age promised to
them by the League of Nations as an oppressive mixture of
brutish colonialism, political instability, social and
cultural dislocations and Great-depression era economic
hardship: liberalism had lost credibility and grown hollow. It
was in that context that young educated Arab men began to turn
to more radical and racist Pan-Arab ideologies like Baathism.
Simultaneously, it was the era in which more conservative
Islamic movements emerged that were opposed to both the
secularizing dimensions of nationalism and Western
Imperialism. Present day radical Islamists like al-Qaeda and
Islamic Jihad trace their lineage to groups like the Muslim
Brotherhood of the inter-war period of European colonialism.
The people of Iraq, and by extension, those in the remainder
of the Arab world stand to suffer promised American liberation
in the same way.
___________________
A full text
version of the Guiding Principles for U.S. Post-Conflict
Policy in Iraq is available at:
http://www.cfr.org/pdf/Iraq_TF.pdf
Suggested
Reading:
Philip Khoury,
Syria and the French Mandate: The Politics of Arab
Nationalism 1920-1945 (Princeton, 1987)
Peter
Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, 1914-1932 (London, 1976)
Hanna Batatu,
The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of
Iraq (Princeton, -1978)
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