iviews.com, History, it is said, repeats: first as tragedy, then as farce. As events unfold in Fallujah and the Iraqi occupation continues its awful course, parallels emerge with another failed occupation of the country some 100 years earlier.
Almost everything-from the invasion, the imposition of provisional government, the violent insurrection, to the aerial bombardment of towns-represents a tragic rerun of the British occupation of Iraq in the early 20th century.
Like the US invasion, the British invasion began, in 1917, with the promise of “liberation”. In his “Proclamation to the People of Baghdad”, General Stanley Maude promised the Iraqi people that after 26 generations had “suffered under strange tyrants”, the armies of the British Empire “do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.”
It was, of course, a lie. The intent was not to “liberate” the Arabs from Turkish Ottoman rule, but to occupy oil-rich Mesopotamia; a fact made clear when, on April 28th, 1920, the League of Nations awarded Britain a mandate over Iraq, thus legitimizing the occupation.
The British appointed Sir Percy Cox and his assistant, Gertrude Bell as the colonial administers of Iraq. Demonstrating the same self-delusion that characterizes contemporary discussion on Iraq, Bell wrote that soon the “uncivilized tribes” of Iraq would come to love and adore the British Empire and its ways. The Iraqi people, Bell wrote, “want us to control their affairs and they want Sir Percy as high commissioner”.
The blinding hubris was shattered when, in July 1920, the Iraqi people revolted. The resistance was, like today, largely religiously-inspired. In a letter dated August 21, 1921, Bell complained of a “a tall black bearded alim (cleric) with a sinister expression. We tried to arrest him early in August but failed. He escaped from Baghdad and moved about the country like a flame of war, rousing the tribes.” His name was Sayyid Muhammad al-Sadr and it is his descendent Muqtadar al-Sadr who likewise vexes the occupiers.
Faced with a growing problem of anti-colonial violence in what it is today called the Sunni Triangle, the British called for Lt. Col. Gerald Leachman, a specialist in putting down native uprisings in the far flung corners of the Empire. His methods were effective but brutal, having said, “the only way to deal with the tribes is wholesale slaughter.”
It was, however, Leachman who got slaughtered; shot dead by a Sunni cleric named Sheikh Dhari. The killing of Leachman made Dhari a folk hero and sparked an uprising that would leave 10,000 Iraqis and 1,000 British soldiers dead in its wake. Today, Sheikh Harith al-Dhari, the descendent of Leachman's killer, heads the Association of Islamic Scholars-the organization widely regarded as the
