BY GARY BRECHER. pando.com

And then all of a sudden, you go from the dashing light-armor knights of the Iraqi plain to the biggest, most vulnerable targets imaginable—thin-skinned vehicles crawling over a completely flat, treeless plain while the drones buzz overhead, armed with Hellfire missiles, just waiting for authorization from a desk jockey in suburban Virginia before they release a weapon designed to destroy much bigger, tougher, Soviet tanks. Suddenly, you, with your Sunni Lawrence of Arabia war-tourist dreams, are nothing but a bug getting zapped by an automated pest-control device.
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It’s insulting. And the kind of young men who join IS are romantics, of a sort. They might not mind dying in the abstract—most guys don’t, at that age, until they find out what it feels like to get shot in the stomach—but they hate the idea of dying in such an unchivalrous way.
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So, they take their revenge the best way they can: With a video camera, a hostage, and a short, sharp knife. Why a short knife, by the way? Why not use an ax, if you’re going to behead someone? Because with a short knife, you have to saw the head off slowly. It’s how you kill a sheep. It’s degrading to the victim.
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Beheading, done with a sharp, heavy ax or sword, was traditionally an aristocratic death in Europe; when Dr. Louis invented the guillotine, he was extending human dignity, as he saw it, by making a noble and quick death by decapitation available to the masses—a huge improvement on hanging, which was usually the “yank on a rope til he stops moving” kind, not the advanced calculation of the Victorian hangman you see in movies. The Parisians loved the new machine; they had a sweet little name for death by guillotine: “Putting your head on the windowsill.” And it was that easy—lay your head down and off it rolled!
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But decapitation by knife is a very different matter from the sharp, heavy, greased blade of a guillotine. When you saw the head off with a small knife, you’re not trying to make it quick or easy. You’re doing several things at once, aimed at several different audiences who’ll watch the video online: For the audience of IS supporters worldwide, you’re offering revenge porn, revenge for all the airstrikes hitting IS positions over the past few weeks, and for all the other American attacks over the years, inflicted on the body of this American captive.

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Suddenly, you, with your Sunni Lawrence of Arabia war-tourist dreams, are nothing but a bug getting zapped by an automated pest-control device.

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For the American/Western audience, you’re hoping to provoke disgust and horror intense enough to weaken support for any more intervention in Iraq. Finally, you’re hoping that some Kurdish and Shia Iraqi fighters will see or hear about the video, because you want them terrified of you. It was that terror that led many Iraqi Army units to bug out before they ever even saw the black flag of IS up close. As Brando intoned while the sweat dripped from his fat face in Apocalypse Now, “Terror is your friend…” When you’re a relatively small conventional fighting force like IS, terror is your best weapon.
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So these videos are eminently practical and effective. The one thing they won’t bring about is the demand the beheader makes: Getting the US to stop the air/drone strikes on IS.
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But why the emphasis on beheading? IS has used Kalashnikovs to kill low-value prisoners—Syrian and Iraqi soldiers and security men, suspected informers, collaborators—very quickly and efficiently.
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Automatic rifle fire is the best way to kill lots of people quickly, but it lacks the slow, atavistic drama of beheading—which is why IS uses the knife on its high-value prisoners, especially Americans.
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Sunni jihadism is a profoundly conservative, defensive movement, a reaction against the corrosive flood of new social rules—above all, uppity women, secularization, and the privileging of civilians over warriors.
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Sunni jihadis like the men of IS are very willing to use the latest social technology in their propaganda, but that propaganda is in the service of a deeply nostalgic struggle. So naturally, they are drawn to the most universal, powerful, familiar image in war propaganda, all through human history and across all known cultures: The severed head of an enemy.
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I doubt that the IS crew who put together these videos know much about Mesopotamian history (in fact, IS is downright hostile to history, smashing every artifact they can find)—but the fact is, there are Assyrian bas-reliefs showing the very same scene, acted out on pretty much the same patch of ground, almost 3000 years ago. Using the best visual-media technology available at the time—stone walls carved in bas-relief—Assyrian sculptors created in loving detail a portrait of their King, Sennerachib, using a short knife to saw off the head of a kneeling prisoner. All that’s missing is a link to Facebook and that Guantanamo jumpsuit.
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The Assyrians were experts in using the available media to spread terror, or respect—the distinction wasn’t so clear in their world—for their war-making ability. They used the same skill in carving bas-reliefs to show their kings blinding prisoners, impaling rebels, and otherwise displaying their familiarity with the pain centers of the human body. But those are all exotic variants; always and everywhere, the most basic form of showing your victory over a prisoner and his tribe is decapitation.
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Decapitation is the classic way of demonstrating that you have defeated your rival, once and for all. Some cultures found it more practical to take less bulky, messy trophies than the whole head, like scalps or ears. The Tibetans—who have never been anything like the sweet pacifists Hollywood Buddhists imagine them to be—named a region of their country “The Plain of Stinking Ears” because, after a victory over the Mongols, they moved among the enemy dead collecting ears, so many they filled several carts, and then laid the ears out on the ground to dry.
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…The ten myriarchies of Tibetan troops defeated the many hundreds of thousands of Stod Hor troops. As proof of having killed many thousand [Mongols], they cut off only the right ears [of the dead] and put them into many donkey loads… the ears started stinking. After they had exposed them to the sun on a cool plain, the stone enclosure…is today known as ‘stone enclosure of the ears’ (Tib. Rna ba’i lhas).
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When Tibetans called the place “Plain of Stinking Ears,” they weren’t complaining or deploring the alleged horrors of war. Deploring such things is a very, very recent trend. The Tibetans were bragging, not complaining. The stench of the enemies’ ears was a source of deep patriotic pleasure for them, and a kind of humor as well: “Whoa, we collected so many durn Mongol ears, they stank the place up for good!”
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Then there were scalps, penises, and other body parts—all ways of confirming the death of an enemy without the trouble of bringing back an entire head.
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The Mayans, always inventive where human anatomy was concerned, liked to tinker with their prisoners of war by removing their fingernails, and devoted huge, detailed frescoes to showing the unhappy, bound prisoners looking at the blood pouring from their mangled fingers.
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But the trouble with all this elaborate mangling, as compared to decapitation, is that the victim could survive the operation. When you took the head, that wasn’t a possibility. So, across the centuries, around the globe, the gold standard in war propaganda has always been the removal of an enemy’s head.
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There’s a practical side to lopping off the head, of course—it’s guaranteed to diminish the combat value of the victim—but its importance as war propaganda is much greater. It’s a show of power—“look what we can do!”—and a deterrent to future challengers (“You want this to happen to you? Then don’t mess with us!”), but it’s also a revenge movie for audiences who aren’t satisfied with fictional representations of revenge, and a demonstration, for the devout, that God is on the side of the decapitator, and has abandoned the decapitate-ee.
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The first, simplest method of displaying this trophy was to post it—literally, as in ‘stick it on a post’ and put the post up in a prominent position, like a crossroads, the entrance to the chieftan’s hut, or the border zone between two clans’ territories, as a way of saying, “You might want to stay on your side.”
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But the actual severed head, though a powerful image, had its limitations. It didn’t last, for one thing. So, as communications tech evolved—and I’m talking about the last several thousand years here, not just the last couple of decades—tribes’ ways of disseminating the image of the severed head that would reach a wider audience and last through the hot season without drawing flies.
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Stone-carving, a huge breakthrough in war propaganda tech, allowed a conqueror to leave a record of his ravages that would, in theory, last forever. Yeah, maybe your Art History class chose to focus on nice images like the bust of Nefertiti or the Pieta, but those were exceptions. As soon as human cultures discovered stone-carving, slaves were put to work carving, in loving detail, all the monstrous tortures and slow, unpleasant deaths inflicted on enemy combatants and prisoners of war.
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One of the most popular scenes carved in stone, painted on wall murals, etched into panels, and recorded in every known writing system, was the killing of prisoners taken in war. This mass ritual killing was a pre-television way of bringing the gore to the home front, as those unlucky enough to be taken alive would be marched back to the capital and killed, either by the ruler or at the ruler’s command, in front of huge, cheering crowds. The sheer number of depictions of these killings, by cultures all over the world, shows their importance as propaganda. Pharaoh Ramses II, shown four or five times life size, grabs prisoners representing three rival countries—a Syrian, Nubian, and Libyan—by their distinctly styled top-knots, bringing their necks up to a good angle for the ax he’s holding.
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Japanese troops in China, 1894, watch happily as prisoners are brought up and beheaded, their Manchu ponytails rolling in blood.
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A British Royal Marine holds up two severed heads, both Chinese-Malaysian villagers suspected of Communist sympathies, in the 1948 CI campaign.
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You could actually argue that the most basic subject for human art, across all media and all eras, is the depiction of a victorious soldier holding up the severed head of an enemy. It’s a synecdoche for victory, instantly understandable without language, across cultures.
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So it’s only natural that as communications media change, that same image will be disseminated by the new media. First came the heads-on-sticks, then stone-cutting—decapitations in bas-relief along the palace walls, to impress visitors with the wisdom of obedience. Then, with the printing press, it was possible to show the most important beheadings to people who might never leave their villages to go to the capital.
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After the near-miss of the Guy Fawkes plot to blow up Parliament in 1605, gloating Protestants found a way to combine old and new by publishing wood-block prints of the severed heads of Fawkes and his fellow Papists, stuck up on pikes like a barber’s advertisement for new beard stylings for hipsters.
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You might expect, given this long history of exploiting new tech to disseminate the beloved image of the severed head,  that when photography, then motion pictures, come into use, we would see more and more detailed images of this scene. But it didn’t quite happen that way. There was a little thing called the Enlightenment, that convinced some human cultures—not all, but disproportionately those which had the money and advanced tech to use film and photo—that we were actually nice guys, and that it was a little barbaric to devote so much artistic energy to heads without bodies.
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Beheadings still took place, on even larger scale—but they were off-stage now, as the Victorians developed a sly new way to exploit gore. As the colonial empires grew more and more powerful, they no longer needed to show the folks on the home front images of enemies’ severed heads. It went without saying that British, French, and Spanish colonial armies could slaughter hundreds of “natives” without suffering serious casualties, and showing those slaughters in detail might awaken something like pity.
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So Victorian war propaganda focused on the few, the very few, European casualties of the colonial wars. The “natives” who died at a rate of 100, or even 1000 to one, in some of those late colonial slaughters, were unfilmed, as the empires struggled to make their invasions seem like a grim moral duty rather than a bloody spree.
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Only the latecomers, the imitators, like Japan—doing its best to act like the big boys of the colonial enterprise—were naïve enough to produce beheading images. They were slow to get the message, and it cost them dearly.
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What the cutting edge empires, particularly the Anglos, had learned, was that when it comes to beheadings, it is better to receive than to give. Better to let the foolish, old-school warriors try to inspire their troops by making videos of themselves holding up a Westerner’s head. It’s the best propaganda the West could ask, in the run-up to massive air strikes.
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The high point of this new strategy was the waning British Empire’s brilliant propaganda campaign against the Kikuyu in Kenya during the Mau-Mau Uprising of the 1950s. If you watched English-language media, all the beheading, mutilating, and other low-tech bloodshed was on the hands of the Kikuyu rebels. The Empire was merely trying to restrain their bloody hands. After a few scare movies and hysterical, blood-soaked radio broadcasts, “Mau-Mau” meant sheer terror.
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Only when Caroline Elkins looked back at the records of the rebellion did the truth come out. The Kikuyu, driven from their lands, revolted with minimal violence, killing only 32 British colonists over the whole war. The Empire killed or maimed 90,000 Kikuyu over the same period, and still came away with the role of peacemaker, restorer of order.  (Click here to see this BBC account of the British counterinsurgency campaign.—Ends)

Mau-Mau prisoners. Their treatment was despicable, but the Brits had the upper hand in propaganda power. They still enjoy it, thanks to their close affiliation with the American juggernaut.

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That’s the way you do it. The good old days of severed-head videos just don’t work like they used to. It’s not that we don’t kill; we kill wonderfully, better than ever. But the tech has gotten too good for us. Now that everyone from Kuala Lumpur to Oslo can watch your knife cutting through the fat on a beheading victim’s neck, the power of the stylized depictions in earlier media is gone. What’s left is more like a surgery demonstration, and it’s out of tune with the happy tone of the social media—Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest—you’re sending it through.
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What you want on those media is to be an object of sympathy—the decapitated, not the decapitator. Well, “you,” the individual losing his head, may not particularly feel thrilled that you’re serving as excellent passive-aggressive Western propaganda and airstrike pretext. You singular, the unlucky adrenaline freak who thought it’d be a smart idea to go to Iraq, may not be pleased at all. But in the tribal sense, you are doing much more for the propaganda goals of your people—the ones with the drones—than that fool of an Ali-G-hadi with the knife is for his.
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We’re all familiar and comfortable with the second kind of propaganda, showing the devastation wrought by whatever enemy the propagandist is trying to demonize at the time. But, again, until recently, that kind of pity-based propaganda was a very minor variant on war propaganda that stressed the devastation wrought by our side. When this kind of war propaganda shows images of pain, death, and destruction, it’s a way of reassuring the home folks that we are the biggest badasses around, and they are the ones suffering devastation.
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It’s funny how many people nod their heads when someone intones Sherman’s pithy phrase about war as Hell, but forget that it’s a Hell that takes a lot of energy, one that has to be sustained by nonstop, enthusiastic human effort. That ought to tell us something most people would rather forget: We have a huge, endlessly-renewed appetite for cruelty, as long as our clan/tribe/sect/nation is the one dishing it out, rather than taking it.
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In fact, it’s only very recently that human cultures have learned to be coy about that fact. Before the Victorians came up with the brilliant notion of depicting conquest as a dreary but needful chore, war propaganda was an innocent, constant celebration of horrors committed by the victors, incised on the bodies of the losers.
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This article appears in PandoQuarterly issue three, published later this month.

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 (Original iteration Sept. 3, 2014)

Gary Brecher is the War Nerd.

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Imperialism and Iraq: Lessons from the past

Part Three

By Jean Shaoul, wsws.org
(Originally posted 31 May 2003)

The following is the conclusion of a three-part series. Part One appeared on May 29 and Part Two appeared on May 30.

RAF chief in Iraq John Salmond, in 1925. He helped King Faisal, a client of the British, suppress any and all attempts at insurrections via indiscriminate bombing.

[B]ritain provided Faisal with RAF bombers, armoured car squadrons and officers to lead the local conscripts, with which to respond to any insubordination on the part of the local population. Any uprising was handled by the bombers, which first dropped warning leaflets on the illiterate villagers and then bombed property and livestock. Bombing was even used to terrorise the peasants into paying taxes.

One the largest offensive operations mounted by the RAF was in 1923-24 in Southern Iraq. The tribal leaders responsible for collecting taxes from the semi-nomadic tribesmen and the peasants, who had become increasingly impoverished due to the diversion of the water channels by the most powerful sheikh, refused to pay up. The RAF was ordered to bomb the area in order “to encourage obedience to the government”.

Over a two-week period, 144 were killed and many more were wounded. It was by no means an isolated incident. The RAF was used repeatedly in 1923-34 against the Kurds in Mosul province, who rebelled against taxation and conscription.

One officer who had seen duty in the North West Frontier—no stranger to British brutality—feared that air control would only serve to inflame the situation: “Much needless cruelty is necessarily inflicted, which in many cases will not cower the tribesmen, but implant in them undying hatred and a desire for revenge. The policy weakens the tribesman’s faith in British fair play.”

But the British played anything but fair. One report to the Colonial office described an air raid in which men, women and children had been machine-gunned as they fled from a village. The politicians took care to ensure that the British public never learned about that incident.

Without the RAF, the regime could not have lasted, as Leo Amery, the colonial secretary, acknowledged. “If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively throughout his kingdom it is entirely due to British aeroplanes. If the aeroplanes were removed tomorrow, the whole structure would inevitably fall to pieces,” he said.

But since the RAF could not carry out normal internal security and the British required Iraqi treasury resources be spent on suppressing its own people, Faisal had to create an army. The army was to serve as an important means of advancement and social power base, providing the government or whoever controlled the army with enormous coercive powers. The degree of social discontent may be gauged by the fact that by the end of the 1920s, when the RAF had largely subdued the rebellious tribesmen in southern Iraq, the government was still spending 20 percent of its revenues on the army and 17 percent on the police.

One report to the Colonial office described an air raid in which men, women and children had been machine-gunned as they fled from a village.

Having established a regime that could secure the supply of oil, Britain could now dispense with Mandate rule and move to a treaty relationship that retained its substance. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty gave Iraq formal political independence while retaining British control of foreign, defence and economic policy with military bases and a system of advisors. Iraq became “independent” in 1930 and was admitted to the League of Nations as a full member in 1932. But while the end of the Mandate gave the ruling clique a freer hand to do what they wanted within the country, real power rested with Britain and the Iraqi people knew it.

Britain overthrows a nationalist government

During the 1930s, the Sunni ruling clique’s dependence upon Britain became ever more difficult to square with popular sentiment. The Iraqi nationalists resented the IPC’s control of Iraqi oil, while the peasants and urban workers became increasingly impoverished. British policy in Palestine—its support for a Jewish homeland, Jewish immigration and the suppression of the Arab Revolt 1936-39—served to inflame tensions even further.

Iraqis visit the Najaf Heritage and 1920 Revolution Museum in the Khan al-Shilan building on February 27, 2014 in the holy city of Najaf, central Iraq. (AFP)

This led some of the Iraqi politicians and the military that had become increasingly powerful making and breaking governments to orientate towards Nazi Germany. In part this was due to a belief that it would free Iraq from the hated British, but in part it expressed political sympathy with fascism and its exploitation of anti-Semitism, fuelled by the situation in Palestine and the British cultivation of the Jewish financiers in Iraq. This was further exacerbated with the arrival in Baghdad in 1939 of Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Palestinian nationalist leader, who had fled from the British.

The most prominent of the pro-German faction were pan-Arab nationalist Rashid Ali al-Gaylani and army officers known as the Golden Square, while the most prominent supporters of the British were Nuri al-Said and the regent for the four-year-old Faisal II. The regent, Faisal II’s uncle, was appointed on the death of the anti-British King Ghazi in a road accident in 1939 in which it was widely believed that the British had a hand.

Under the terms of the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, Iraq was bound to support Britain and break off relations with Britain’s enemies. When Britain declared war on Germany in 1939, Prime Minister Nuri al-Said immediately broke off relations with Germany—a deeply unpopular move. But he was unable to persuade the cabinet to declare war on Germany or break off relations with Italy. In March 1940, he resigned as prime minister but served in the government of his pro-German rival, Rashid Ali.

By 1940, British positions in the Middle East were becoming increasingly beleaguered. Fascist Axis troops threatened Egypt and the Suez Canal. With the fall of France, French forces in Syria and Lebanon were under the control of the Vichy government. With Axis troops on Iraq’s doorstep, the British feared that Germany would invade Iraq and Iran upon which they were dependent for their oil supplies and wealth.

Relations between Britain and Iraq deteriorated rapidly as Rashid Ali manoeuvred Iraq into a more neutral position in the war, bought weapons from Italy and Japan and refused to grant British military forces landing and transit rights as required under the treaty. The British forced him to resign in January 1941, causing political uproar. The Golden Square officers mounted a coup in April and Rashid Ali was returned to power. Nuri al-Said and the Regent fled to Transjordan.

The new Iraqi government refused to allow the British troops to land in Basra, in effect ripping up the Treaty, and declared a “war of liberation” against the British. It was conceived as part of a wider pan-Arab attempt to get rid of French rule in Syria and Lebanon and put an end to the prospect of a Zionist state in Palestine.

The British denounced the government’s action as a revolt and sent forces from Transjordan and India to Basra, overthrew Rashid Ali and restored Nuri al-Said and the regent to power. After that, with British troops occupying southern Iraq, the government cooperated fully with the British war effort. The following year Britain was able to use it as a base from which to invade Syria and Persia where it installed a pro-British government to support its war effort. In 1943, Nuri al-Said’s Iraq declared war on the Axis powers.

Although the British despatched Rashid Ali and the Golden Square with relative ease, the short-lived regime was significant because it demonstrated how little popular support there was for Britain and its arch collaborators Nuri al-Said and the royal family. The pro-British politicians were henceforth spoiled goods as far as the Iraqi people were concerned. They were forever tainted by their return to power by British bayonets. As Louis explained in The British Empire in the Middle East, “The year 1941 represents a watershed in the history of the British era in Iraq, and its significance is essential in understanding the nationalist rejection of the treaty of alliance with the British in 1948 and the end of the Hashemite dynasty ten years later.”

Britain’s decline in the Middle East—1946-1958

Although Britain emerged from World War II with its empire in the Middle East intact, it faced very different conditions to those of 1939. The pattern of oil production had changed dramatically and by 1951 the Middle East was providing 70 percent of the West’s oil. Most of the world’s oil reserves were believed to be concentrated in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf.

But at the same time as the region’s value was becoming ever more important, Britain faced rising political ferment in the emerging working class. In Palestine, Soviet and American backing for a Zionist state as a way of undermining British influence in the region and the widespread horror at the tragedy that had befallen the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis had paved the way for the United Nations vote in favour of the partition of Palestine and the establishment of the state of Israel. It incensed the Arab world. In Iraq, Egypt and Iran, where Britain’s highhanded actions in 1942 mirrored that against Rashid Ali, almost all social layers were desperate to throw off the yoke of imperialist rule.

In Iraq, with their collaborators so thoroughly discredited, the British sought out a new ostensibly more progressive stooge in the shape of the first Shi’ite prime minister, Saleh Jabr. The British hoped he would institute reforms, prevent social discontent from fuelling the growth of the Iraqi Communist Party and forestall the overthrow of the regime. They also tried to re-jig Anglo-Iraqi relations in a new treaty that would preserve their military bases and access to the oil wells and serve as a model for restructuring relations in the region.

The incoming Labour government under Clement Attlee was no more adept at judging the political tempo in Baghdad than that of the arch imperialist Winston Churchill. When the terms of the treaty that Saleh Jabr and Nuri al-Said had agreed with Britain in January 1948—which would have extended the hated 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty for another 20 years—became known, students, workers and starving townspeople poured onto the streets in protest. The police were only able to suppress the riots with an orgy of brutality that killed nearly 400 people in just one day. Nevertheless the regent was forced to repudiate the treaty. Saleh Jabr resigned and the incoming government inaugurated the most savage era of repression and martial law. Britain’s model for restructuring its alliances in the Middle East policy was in tatters.

In 1950, the rising nationalist tide brought about an agreement between the US company Aramco and Saudi Arabia to share oil profits on 50-50 basis, setting up a chain reaction throughout the Middle East. The following year, the nationalist government of Mossadeq in Iran took steps to nationalise the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, forcing the British companies that owned the IPC to concede a 50-50 profit split with the Iraqi government or risk losing both the oil and its stooges, Nuri al-Said and his ministers.

By 1952, Britain’s imperial interests in the Middle East were resting on an even more fragile base. The Hashemite King Abdullah of Jordan had been assassinated in 1951 and his son, mentally unstable, had ceded the throne to his 17-year-old son, Hussein. In July 1952, the Free Officers under the formal leadership of General Muhamed Naguib and the actual leadership of Second Lieutenant Gamal Abdel Nasser had overthrown the Egyptian monarchy and repudiated the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty.

Against this background Nuri al-Said’s support for the British set him apart as a traitor in the Arab world. He was thus forced to carry out an unprecedented wave of repression, banning all opposition parties, closing down the press and handpicking a parliament to rubberstamp his decrees. It was under these conditions oil production finally surged ahead. Oil production doubled in the five years after the war, while revenues increased tenfold as a result of the Iranian crisis of 1951-53 and the 50-50 profit share agreement with the IPC. They rose from 10 percent of GNP and 34 percent of foreign exchange earnings in 1948 to 28 percent and 59 percent respectively in 1958. But instead of transforming the social conditions of the ordinary working people, the revenues went on agricultural developments that favoured the big landowners and swelled the bank accounts of the corrupt politicians.

In February 1955, Nuri al-Said played host to the British-organised regional security alliance of Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Iraq, known as the Baghdad Pact, that completed a network of alliances spanning the southern rim of Eurasia aimed at containing the Soviet Union. It represented a bid by the British to offset their declining power and give them a say in regional affairs. It was no more acceptable to the Iraqis than the 1948 treaty had been. The other Arab countries would have nothing to do with it. Egypt’s President Nasser, who was becoming a hero in the Arab world for his opposition to the British, denounced the pact vehemently as an attempt by Britain to assert its domination over the region and split the Arab world.

The Anglo-French military campaign in support of the invasion by Israel of the Suez Canal in 1956, aimed at getting rid of Nasser and reinstating Anglo-French control of Suez, outraged the Iraqi people. There were massive anti-British demonstrations all over Iraq. No one doubted for a minute that Nuri al-Said and the regent supported the British. Notwithstanding some face-saving formal protests to Britain, the Iraqi government clamped down violently on the demonstrations and once again resorted to martial law.

The Americans, in pursuit of their own national interests, forced the British to withdraw. The Suez crisis was a turning point. It marked a humiliating end to Britain’s hegemony in the region. Coming so soon after the CIA’s coup against Mosaddeq in Iran, it left the US the uncontested Western power in the Middle East. That in turn spelt the end of Britain’s client regime in Iraq.

The opposition parties, including the Istiqlal (the nationalists), the National Democratic Party, the Iraqi Communist Party and the small Ba’ath Party, the Iraqi branch of the pan-Arab party founded in Syria, came together to form a national opposition front. In July 1958, as tensions and mass demonstrations against the regime mounted, a military group known as the Free Officers overthrew Britain’s venal political agents, the Hashemite monarchy of Faisal II and the government of Prime Minister Nuri El Said, in a military coup. The royal family and Nuri were assassinated. Such was the loathing of the ancien regime that his naked body was dragged ignominiously through the streets of Baghdad until it was reduced to pulp.

Forty years of brutal exploitation and political repression by the British and their collaborators had come to an end.

British imperialism had depended upon the political submission of the colonial people, control of the political system and the ability to prevail over or at least placate its imperial rivals. As the record has shown, it was only with the utmost difficulty that the British maintained their rule in Iraq in the 1920s and ’30s. By the late 1940s, although Britain had emerged from World War II as the strongest of the second ranking military powers, it was all but bankrupt and totally dependent upon American support to maintain its imperial interests. By the 1950s, when American interests diverged from Britain’s, Britain was edged or shoved out of Palestine, Iran, Egypt, Jordan and Iraq.

Forty-five years on, the defeat of Saddam Hussein and the Ba’athist regime, by the US with Britain as its junior partner, signifies the return of direct imperialism and the most brutal forms of repression and exploitation that the Iraqi people thought they had got rid of in 1958. It is already apparent that many of the events of the past few months could have come straight from the records of the first imperialist occupation of Iraq.

The lessons of history show firstly that the US will—with UN endorsement—impose a military occupation fronted by some corrupt émigrés, former Ba’athists and anyone else who can be bought to enable US corporations to take charge of Iraq’s oil industry. Secondly, the US’s determination to control the world’s most strategic resources will lead to further invasions and occupations.

The re-emergence of wars and colonialism demonstrates more forcibly than ever before the need to build a broad international movement against imperialism and militarism. There is only one social force that can resolve the crisis for mankind created by imperialist capitalism and that is the international working class. It must fight for its own independent programme—the reorganisation of the world on the basis of a socialist perspective.

Concluded

Bibliography:
Farouk-Sluglett, M., and Sluglett, P., Iraq since 1958: From Revolution to Dictatorship, I.B.Tauris, London, 2001.
Gallagher, J., The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: the Ford Lectures and other essays, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1982.
James, L., The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, Abacus, London, 1994.
Kent, M., Oil and Empire, Macmillan Press, London, 1976.
Louis, W. R., The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951: Arab nationalism, the United States, and post-war imperialism, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1984.
Meljcher, H., The Imperial Quest for Oil: Iraq 1910-1928, Ithaca Press, 1976.
Sluglett, P. Britain in Iraq 1914-1932, Ithaca Press, London, 1972.
Workers League, Desert Slaughter: The Imperialist War Against Iraq, Labor Publications, Detroit, 1991.
Yapp, M.E., The Near East since the First World War: a history to 1995, 2nd edition, Longman, London, 1996.

By GAVIN GATENBY, BRUSHTAIL.COM.AU
(First published draft 20 August 2004)

[I]n Iraq, few days pass without the US Air Force bombing civilian targets. In a high-profile atrocity in May, a bunch of trigger-happy fly-boys shot up a village wedding in western Iraq, killing 45 guests including many children, and a Baghdad singer loved by millions, but these things happen almost daily in towns like Najaf, Samarra and Fallujah, and in other places too far from public gaze to warrant media attention.

The explanation – on the increasingly rare occasions that one is given – is always that these are precision strikes against “terrorists” (newspeak for resistance fighters), but the injured that reach the hospitals and the bodies that turn up in the town morgues are largely women and children.

The explanations don’t play well on the Arab Street where they’re received as confirmation of the persistent anti-Arab bias of the West – a view that is essentially correct.

Before you scoff, try this general knowledge test on a few well-read, politically literate friends: Ask them to name the first town in the world where civilians were indiscriminately bombed from the air.

More likely than not, they’ll cite Guernica, the Basque town reduced to rubble by aircraft of the German Condor Legion during the Spanish Civil War. If they’re really up on their history, they’ll know it happened in 1937 and they’ll mention Picasso’s famous painting of the atrocity.

That answer is wrong, and symptomatic of a Euro-centric view of history that’s led western politicians to gravely underestimate the nationalist feeling and visceral distrust of the West that now has the US-led coalition bogged down in Iraq.

In fact the Guernica answer is wrong by a quarter of a century. It was the Italians, hell-bent on acquiring an African empire, who got the ball rolling. In 1911 the Libyan Arab tribes opposed an Italian invasion. Their civilians were the first to be bombed from the air, when the infant Italian air force bombed the oases of Tagiura and Ain Zara in a reprisal attack. The French followed in 1912, sending six planes to a “police action” in their bit of Morocco.

Pilots soon discovered that far from being a discriminating technique, aerial bombing was most effective against soft civilian targets – towns, bazaars, livestock and crops. In 1913 the Spanish began dropping shrapnel-type bombs on rebellious Moroccan villagers. Over the following years they graduated to poison gas.

The British, struggling to suppress nationalist movements in their vast empire, soon got in on the act. From 1915 onwards, the Royal Air Force bombed Pathan villages on India’s North-West Frontier. In May 1919 they attacked the cities of Afghanistan, dropping six tons of bombs on Jalalabad and inflicting 600 casualties in a dawn to dusk raid on Dacca. Then, on Empire Day, they hit Kabul with history’s first four-engine bomber raid. The British Government even offered poison gas bombs to their Indian Viceroy. Fortunately, he declined the offer.

Bombing the natives saved the RAF when post-WWI austerity measures looked like killing it off. The fly-boys proposed an experiment: if they could bomb a Somali tribal leader dubbed “The Mad Mullah” into submission at a fraction of the cost of a ground expedition, they’d survive. The aerial assault worked, and a delighted Winston Churchill told the RAF to take on rebellious Iraq, over which Britain had assumed a League of Nations mandate.

Contrary to widespread public perception, Guernica was NOT the first town in the world where civilians were indiscriminately bombed from the air.

They called it “control without occupation”, and, under Arthur “Bomber” Harris, the RAF took to “police bombing” Iraqi Arabs and Kurds with enterprise and enthusiasm.

By 1922 the RAF was deploying high-explosive and phosphorous bombs, an early form of napalm, anti-personnel shrapnel, “crows feet” shrapnel designed to kill and maim livestock and incendiaries to set alight thatch rooves. They even used bombs with time-delay fuses to prevent tribesmen from tending their crops under cover of darkness but when they stooped to machine-gunning women and children who had taken refuge in a lake, even the bellicose Churchill protested.

On other occasions, bombing was used to punish recalcitrant impoverished villagers for “non-appearance when summoned to explain non-payment of taxes”.

In 1924, in a draft report to parliament (complete with photos of what had been Kushan-al-Ajaza) Harris boasted that the RAF could wipe out an Iraqi village and a third of its inhabitants in 45 minutes.

1925 was a landmark year. The French bombed dozens of Syrian villages and even parts of Damascus, but probably the worst pre-Guernica incident occurred at Chechaouen, a Muslim holy town in Spanish Morocco. There, American mercenary fliers of the French Flying Corp indiscriminately bombed the undefended town in revenge for a severe defeat suffered by the retreating Spanish army. The London Times reporter called it “the most cruel, the most wanton, and the most unjustifiable act of the whole war”, and reported that “absolutely defenceless women and children were massacred and many others were maimed and blinded”. 

Thus it went on, until the Second World War, and afterwards, through the eight years of the French war in Algeria, the Israeli repression of the Palestinians and the bombing of Iraq during the 12 years of post-Gulf War sanctions. The technology has “improved”, but the political intention, and the outcome, in terms of dead civilians, remains the same.

So why do most of us think of Guernica was the first indiscriminate air attack on civilians? Well, the Basques were on the north side of the Mediterranean, and were thus European, whereas, in Western public opinion and international law, people outside the pale of European civilisation just didn’t count – they were “turbulent”, “rebellious”or “uncivilised” tribesmen, bombing of whom was a normal, acceptable, policing technique.

They didn’t teach you this stuff at school or show it to you on TV during phase one of the Iraq war, but don’t imagine the Arabs and Afghans don’t remember.

© Gavin Gatenby, 2004.

____________________________________

References:

Sven Lindquist, A history of bombing, Granta 2002.
Lawrence James, Raj, The Making and Unmaking of British India, TSP 1998.
Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq 1914-1932, London Ithica Press, 1976.
David Omissi, Air Power and Colonial Control: The Royal Air Force, 1919-1939, Manchester University Press.

 Text and photos: Andre Vltchek

ow outrageous, how heartbreaking, how truly grotesque! Windhoek City – the capital of Namibia – is, at one extreme full of flowers and Mediterranean-style villas, and at the other, it is nothing more than a tremendous slum without water or electricity.

 

And in between, there is the town center– with its Germanic orderly feel, boasting ‘colonial architecture’, including Protestant churches and commemorative plaques mourning those brave German men, women and children, those martyrs, who died during the uprisings and wars conducted by local indigenous people.

German church with racist depiction of history and Fidel Street.  (Click to enlarge.)

The most divisive and absurd of those memorials is the so-called “Equestrian Monument”, more commonly known as “The Horse” or under its German original names, Reiterdenkmal and Südwester Reiter (Rider of South-West). It is a statue inaugurated on 27 January 1912, which was the birthday of the German emperor Wilhelm II. The monument “honors the soldiers and civilians that died on the German side of the Herero and Namaqua ‘War’ of 1904–1907’”.

That ‘war’ was not really a war; it was nothing more than genocide, a holocaust.

And Namibia was a prelude to what German Nazis later tried to implement on European soil.

A European expert working for the UN, my friend, speaks, like almost everyone here, passionately, but without daring to reveal her name:

“The first concentration camps on earth were built in this part of Africa… They were built by the British Empire in South Africa and by Germans here, in Namibia. Shark Island on the coast was the first concentration camp in Namibia, used to murder the Nama people, but now it is just a tourist destination – you would never guess that there were people exterminated there. Here in the center of Windhoek, there was another extermination camp; right on the spot where “The Horse” originally stood.” 

The Horse and German tourists. (Click to enlarge.)

“The Horse” was recently removed from its original location, and placed in the courtyard of the old wing of The National Museum, together with some of the most outrageous commemorative plaques, glorifying German actions in this part of the world. Nothing was destroyed, instead just taken away from prime locations.

Where “The Horse” stood, there now stands a proud anti-colonialist statue, that of a man and a woman with broken shackles, which declares, “Their Blood Waters Our Freedom”.

Germany never officially apologized for its crimes against humanity in what it used to call German South-West Africa. It did not pay reparations.

*

A visit to those German genocidal relics is ‘an absolute must’ for countless Central European tourists that descend every day on Namibia. I followed several of these groups, listening to their conversations. Among these people, there appears to be no remorse, and almost no soul-searching: just snapshots, posing in front of the monuments and racist insignias, pub-style/beer jokes at places where entire cultures and nations were exterminated!

Central European, German-speaking tourists in Windhoek, appear to be lobotomized, and totally emotionless. And so are many of the descendants of those German ‘genocidal pioneers’. Encountering them is like déjà vu; it brings back memories of the years when I was fighting against the German Nazi colony, ‘Colonia Dignidad’ in Chile; or when I was investigating the atrocities and links, of the German Nazi community in Paraguay to several South American fascist regimes that had been implanted and maintained by the West.

And now the German community in Namibia is protesting the removal of “The Horse”. It is indignant. And this community is still powerful, even omnipotent, here in Namibia.

Almost nobody calls the ‘events’ that took place here, by their rightful names, of holocaust or genocide. Everything in Namibia is ‘sensitive’.

But even according to the BBC: “In 1985, a UN report classified the events as an attempt to exterminate the Herero and Nama peoples of South-West Africa, and therefore the earliest attempted genocide in the 20th Century.”

On 21 October 2012, The Globe and Mail reported:

“In the bush and scrub of central Namibia, the descendants of the surviving Herero live in squalid shacks and tiny plots of land. Next door, the descendants of German settlers still own vast properties of 20,000 hectares or more. It’s a contrast that infuriates many Herero, fuelling a new radicalism here.

This is how most of Namibians live. (Click to enlarge.)

Every year the Herero hold solemn ceremonies to remember the first genocide of history’s bloodiest century, when German troops drove them into the desert to die, annihilating 80 per cent of their population through starvation, thirst, and slave labor in concentration camps. The Nama, a smaller ethnic group, lost half of their population from the same persecution.

New research suggests that the German racial genocide in Namibia from 1904 to 1908 was a significant influence on the Nazis in the Second World War. Many of the key elements of Nazi ideology – from racial science and eugenics, to the theory of Lebensraum (creating “living space” through colonization) – were promoted by German military veterans and scientists who had begun their careers in South-West Africa, now Namibia, during the genocide…”

The Namibian government is still negotiating the return (from Germany) of all skulls of the local people, which were used in German laboratories and by German scientists to prove the superiority of the white race. German colonialists decapitated Herero and Nama people, and at least 300 heads were transported to German laboratories for ‘scientific research’. Many were ‘discovered’ in the Medical History Museum of the Charite hospital in Berlin, and at Freiburg University.

Their blood waters our freedom. (Click to enlarge)

Bizarrely, German pre-Nazi/WWII monuments and insignias literally rub their shoulders alongside those great liberation struggle tributes.

Divisions are shocking: ideological, racial, social.

In Namibia, there is segregation on an enormous scale, everywhere.

While neighboring South Africa is moving rapidly away from racial segregation, introducing countless social policies, including free medical care, education and social housing, Namibia remains one of the most segregated countries on earth, with great private services for the rich, and almost nothing for the poor majority.

“Apartheid was even worse here than in South Africa”, I am told by my friend from the United Nations. “And until now… You go to Katutura, and you see who is living there, they are all local people there, all black. Katutura literally means ‘We have no place to stay’. 50% of the people in this city defecate in the open. Sanitation is totally disastrous. Then you go to Swakop city, on the shore, and it is like seeing Germany recreated in Africa. You also see, there, shops with Nazi keepsakes. Some Nazis, who escaped Europe, came to Windhoek, to Swakop and other towns. In Swakop, men march periodically, in replicas of Nazi uniforms.”

*

Katutura is where the black people were moved to, during apartheid.

My friend, a ‘colored’ Namibian, who fought for the independence of his own country and of Angola, drove me to that outrageous slum which seems to host a substantial amount of the capital’s population, with mostly no access to basic sanitation or electricity.

South African armored apartheid era train in Namibia. (Click to enlarge.)

He has also chosen to remain anonymous, as he has explained, in order to protect his lovely family. To speak up here, unlike in South Africa, which may, these days, be one of the freest and most outspoken places on earth, can be extremely dangerous. But he clarifies further:

“In Namibia, it is very rare for people who used to suffer, to speak about it publicly. In South Africa, everyone speaks. In Angola, everyone speaks… But not here.”

Then he continues:

“What we can see in Namibia is that many German people are still in control of big business. They are ruling the country. They have hunting farms and other huge estates and enterprises. Germans bring money to Namibia, but it stays with them, and it consolidates their power – it does not reach the majority. You cannot even imagine, how much local people working on their farms, are suffering. It is still like slavery. But it is all hushed up here.”

Commemorating the people’s battles for independence. (Click to enlarge)

*

“Sprechen Sie Deutch?” A black Namibian man intercepts me, as I am walking down the Fidel Castro Street.

“I do, but I would rather not, here”, I explain.

“But why not?” He grins at me. “You know… It is not only them… Germans… I grew up; I was educated, in East Germany during our fight for independence. And my friend that you see over there – he was flown to Czechoslovakia and he went to school there. Communist countries did so much for us, for the Africans: Cuba, North Korea, Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and East Germany. We are so grateful!”

“Yes”, I say. “But it is over, isn’t it? Czechoslovakia, East Germany… They joined the imperialists, the rulers. They exchanged ideals for iPads.”

“Yes”, he said. “But one day… who knows… things could be different, again.”

Yes, definitely, I think. But most likely not in Europe…

*

At the new and lavish National Museum in Windhoek, I salute the Namibian and foreign fighters against apartheid – those who struggled and died for freedom, and the independence of Africa.

Cuba and N Korea fighting for freedom of Namibia. (Click to enlarge.)

Then, I descended to the “Goethe Institute”, the German cultural center, a colonial building surrounded by barbed wire.

There, a local starlet is loudly rehearsing for something called ‘a night under the stars’, or something of that sentimental, over-sugary pop nature. These are basically evenings designed to bring together the pampered international crowd and those ‘feel-good-about-life’ local elites.

I ask the starlet, whether this institute is trying to address the most painful issues of the past and present, all connected to Germany, of course.

She is black but she speaks and behaves like a German. She gives me a huge and pre-fabricated smile:

“At Goethe we don’t want that… We are trying to get away from all this (meaning colonial and segregation issues). We are just trying to get Germans and Namibians together, you know…”

I later peek at those Namibians who are being brought together with the Germans. No Katutura here, naturally…

And for some reason, what came to my mind is a conversation I had, on the phone, many years ago, with one of the editors of the German magazine, Der Stern, after I offered him my findings and photos from Nazi Colonia Dignidad in Chile. He said: “Oh, Colonia Dignidad! Hahaha! Never again, ja?”

*

One evening I eat at Angolan/Portuguese restaurant in Windhoek, O Portuga; an institution known for its great food and mixed crowd. What an evening, what a place!

After dinner, I dive into German ‘Andy’s Bar’, a nearby place that was described to me as “An institution, which not even a black or a colored person from the embassies or the UN would dare to enter”.

The Beer is flat, but the conversation of the local crowd is extremely ‘sharp’. Patrons are freely giving black Namibians names of local farm animals. Their spite is open and sincere. I listen, I understand. Eventually I leave.

I catch a taxi, driven by a corpulent black man. The radio is blasting and I hear the socialist, anti-imperialist lyrics of ‘Ndilimani’, a brilliant local political band.

It is now well past midnight, and despite the warnings from all those ‘well-meaning Germans’ that I met in Windhoek, I feel much safer in this taxi than in Andy’s Bar and in so many other similar institutions.

“Is this country really governed by Marxist SWAPO?” I wonder aloud.

“No way”, the driver points back, towards the bar. “’They’ never left. ‘They’ are still controlling the country. The revolution is not over.”

I tell him that I am beginning to understand what drove Robert Mugabe mad and angry, in Zimbabwe. The driver nods. I push my seat back, and make it recline.

“It is all fucked up”, I say.

The driver thinks for a while, but then replies, using almost the same words as the man who spoke to me on Fidel Castro Street: “Yes, brother, yes! But one day… who knows… things could be different, again.”

*

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ABOUT CORRESPONDENT ANDRE VLTCHEK

Andre Vltchek is a novelist, filmmaker and investigative journalist. He covered wars and conflicts in dozens of countries. The result is his latest book: “Fighting Against Western Imperialism”.  ‘Pluto’ published his discussion with Noam Chomsky: On Western Terrorism. His critically acclaimed political novel Point of No Return is re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in the South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and the market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear”. His feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit” is about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website or his Twitter.