Iraq: Winston Churchill and Déjà Vu

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Iraq: Winston Churchill and Déjà Vu

James Cricks: We are indebted to Christopher Catherwood for doing the homework about Iraq and the West that current policymakers should be considering.

"On one hand it is perfectly clear we cannot go on spending these enormous sums on Mesopotamia [Iraq] and that the forces that we maintain there must be promptly and drastically reduced." Letter from Churchill, 1921

We would also like to extract our military forces yet support a friendly Iraqi government as it tries to establish its credibility. It is sad we have such a short view of history that we don't see the stunning parallels with the situation Winston Churchill and the British government faced in 1921. For professionals interested in Iraq, a careful reading of Christopher Catherwood's 2004 book, Churchill's Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq, would be an illuminating guide to a failed policy which contributed to the predicament we are now in. As the British created a unilateral plan for Iraq, they made some bad compromises as they yielded to time pressures.

As Catherwood asserts, Iraq would not even exist if it were not for many of the choices which Churchill and other British officials made. Churchill was assisted by T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and other Arab experts who understood many of the regional details yet were unable to devise a workable strategy. They tried to balance Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds in a nation which had previously not existed. As the British used surrogate rulers before, they hoped to have an Arab King formally leading Iraq while they continued exerting indirect guidance. This arrangement was attempted after Churchill gave up his idea of a separate Kurdish state. We still have huge identity issues within the contrived Iraqi state.

Great Britain was driven to their untenable compromise by the pressure of military and financial overextension. They had forces stretched across an empire. Earlier, in 1916, a British expeditionary force lost more than twenty thousand lives near Baghdad when they were en route to protect the oil fields in Basra. To lessen the size of the British ground force, Churchill calculated airpower could be used as effectively and at cheaper cost. He assessed "Personally, I believe the military forces in Mesopotamia [Iraq] are out of all proportion to what is justifiable or reasonable to employ in that part of the world."

Diplomatically, the British government was also struggling. Churchill sought to balance a military solution with a more comprehensive plan worked out with the Turks and the wider Moslem world. Although he perceived Arab issues were "all one" issue, any potential outreach was stalled by British infighting.

Ultimately, Churchill's desire for a cheap solution overruled all other considerations. Training of local forces was to be accelerated as much as possible. Churchill saw to it that an Arab King, King Feisal, was installed after a highly questionable referendum process. Feisal was never able to gain the credibility needed to effectively rule Iraq. His successor was a staunch Arab nationalist, strongly opposed to British interests. I can't think of a better cautionary study for the U.S. and the Western world as we approach the new end-game.