In his latest essay, John Pilger evokes the US bombing of Cambodia in the 1970s, which gave rise to Pol Pot and the genocidal Khmer Rouge, in examining the rise of the equally fanatical ISIS in Iraq and Syria, the role of Western governments, and the urgent need for solutions that include a truce in Syria, and justice for the Palestinians.

Part One

Col. Lawrence in Arab garb. He felt a true affinity for the Arab tribesmen he encountered.

By Jean Shaoul , wsws.org
(Originally published 29 May 2003) |  (Reposted by reader request)

[A]nyone looking at the events today in Iraq cannot but be struck at the obvious parallels with what happened there in the first half of the twentieth century.

The roll call of imperialist powers with an interest in the region was similar, but the dominant imperialist power at that time was Britain not the United States. British armed forces invaded Mesopotamia, as Iraq was then known, in 1914 with promises of freedom—from the Turks. But the promises were just for public consumption. Behind the rhetoric lay, as ever, material interests—oil. Like the US today, the British vigorously denied any such motive.

The Hollywood blockbuster Lawrence of Arabia only timidly suggested that Lawrence’s quest for an independent Arab nation had been betrayed. The British were presented as the civilized liberators of Arabia from a backward and brutal master. (Peter O’Toole won an award for his portrayal of Lawrence.)

The military odds enjoyed by the British army were also just as favourable. And after a war to “liberate the Arabs” from Turkish control, came not freedom, but a British occupation.

Then too, horrific aerial bombing marked the occupation. Then too, there was a series of sordid deals between the imperial powers—the US, Britain, France and Italy—over how the spoils of war should be divided up as Britain sought to steal a march on its so-called allies, with the League of Nations (forerunner of the United Nations) shamelessly endorsing the carve up.

More importantly, defence of its oil interests meant British rule over Iraq in all but name—under a League of Nations Mandate until 1932, and later as the power behind the throne, with the Iraqi people bearing the financial burden of Britain’s war, occupation and rule.

British rule finally ended in 1958, when massive street demonstrations threatened to get out of control, and the army stepped in, overthrew the monarchy, seized power and took action to gain control of Iraq’s oil.

It is instructive to examine this earlier period and the role the imperialist powers played in shaping the political, economic and social conditions in Iraq. While all the powers sought to control the oil resources of the Middle East, it was only after the deaths of millions of workers in the first imperialist world war and countless acts of skullduggery that the British were able to establish their hegemony.

Such an analysis confirms that far from liberation and any progressive future, the US occupation of Iraq in the aftermath of the most recent Gulf war bodes only the return to direct rule and control of country’s oil resources by imperialism—this time by the US with Britain as its junior partner.

Imperialist interests in Mesopotamia before World War I

The first imperialist power to establish itself in the Middle East was Britain. Its initial connection with the region was the result of its interest in protecting the route to India and Indian trade. To this end, British naval forces mounted repeated attacks on the Arabian coast and by the 1840s established colonial possessions in the Persian Gulf and Aden. Britain’s domination of the coast opened up the hinterland to Western imperialism.

Mesopotamia, as the three vilayets or provinces of Basra, Baghdad and the predominantly Kurdish Mosul that make up modern day Iraq were then known, had been the easternmost part of the Ottoman Empire for several centuries. A backward rural economy, many of its peoples were semi-nomadic. By the end of the nineteenth century, the opening of the Suez Canal and the development of river transport by the British had led to Mesopotamia’s increasing integration into the wider capitalist economy. The Basra province became ever more important for the export of cereals and cotton to Manchester and Bombay.

At the same time, there was an increasing interest in the region’s oil resources. While it had been known for thousands of years that certain areas in Mesopotamia and Persia, as Iran was then known, contained oil springs and seepages, apart from primitive local uses there was no developed industry.

European interest in exploiting Mesopotamian and Persian oil commercially began in the last quarter of the nineteenth century when capital began to flow into the region. Permission for numerous explorations was sought from Constantinople, often under cover of archaeological excavations. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company discovered the first commercially exploitable oil in southern Persia in 1908.

While British and Indian trade dominated the region, accounting for 75 percent of the total, German capital began to pour into Mesopotamia—particularly after Germany won the concession to build the railway from Turkey to Baghdad in 1903. Since the intention was to carry it on to Basra and Kuwait, this would have created a direct link between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf and posed a strategic threat to Britain’s position in India.

The railway took on an additional significance after the discovery of commercially exploitable oil in Persia, since the concession included exclusive rights over minerals in the 20 kilometres on either side of the track.

With the start in 1904 of the British Royal Navy’s conversion from coal to oil, which made transport both cheaper and faster, the government sought supplies that were nearer than the Gulf of Mexico and had a more long-term future. The British government’s advisors believed that since the exports from the main oil producers were set to decline, the oil majors would be in a position to dictate terms to the Royal Navy upon which the Empire depended. Over the next 20 years, government policy increasingly focused on the need to control both the sources and suppliers of Britain’s oil. The government therefore provided full diplomatic support to British nationals in their bids to secure oil concessions in Mesopotamia.

In 1911, an Anglo-German consortium (Royal Dutch Shell, the entrepreneur C. S. Gulbenkian, the (British) National Bank of Turkey and Deutsche Bank) secured an exclusive concession from Turkey to exploit all the oil within the empire’s borders. The Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC), as it soon became known, merged with Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1913, with the ownership shared between British, German, Dutch and Gulbenkian interests. In August 1914, after protracted negotiations, the British government took a majority shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (the forerunner to BP, now Britain’s largest corporation) for £2.2 million, thereby gaining the oil rights to Mesopotamia as well and further strengthening its interests in the region.

At the same time, numerous other international groups had begun to seek oil concessions around Baghdad and Mosul. These commercial tensions played a crucial role in precipitating World War I at whose heart lay the division of Turkey’s eastern lands. As far as Britain was concerned, the fact that new sources of oil, a resource so vital to the Empire, lay outside its boundaries led to the inevitable conclusion that the Empire must be expanded.

Britain seizes control of Mesopotamia in World War I

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, British imperialism’s “Eastern Policy” had been based on propping up the bankrupt Ottoman Empire as a bulwark against Tsarist Russian expansionism. But when World War I broke out and Turkey joined the war on the side of Germany and Austria, British policy underwent a complete change.

Fearing that at Germany’s behest Turkey would hamper oil supplies and trade, the British authorities in India sent an expeditionary force to Basra to prevent Turkey from interfering with British interests in the Gulf, particularly its interests in the oil fields in southern Persia. This was to turn the Middle East into an important theatre of war. It became explicit policy to break up the Ottoman Empire and bring its Arab territories under British control.

After a series of ignominious defeats, it became clear that taking control of the Turkish territories was not going to be a walk over. So Britain entered into a series of cynical, fraudulent and mutually irreconcilable agreements designed to secure Turkey’s defeat and further her own commercial and territorial ambitions in the region.

First, Britain calculated that an Arab uprising would be invaluable in attacking and defeating the Turks from the south, and opening a route into Europe from the east, thereby breaking the bloody stalemate in the trenches in Flanders. Its initial contacts were with the Hashemites, a desert dynasty in Hejaz, now part of Saudi Arabia, which controlled the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina and sought to replace Ottoman rule with their own. Britain reasoned that such an alliance would prove useful in securing the loyalty of its Indian Muslim conscripts in the Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force whom it was using as cannon fodder in its war against Germany. The disastrous defeats at Gallipoli led the British to accept the conditions spelt out under the Damascus Protocol: British support for the Arabs in overthrowing Turkish rule in return for Arab independence for the territories now known as Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia. In 1915, they made an agreement with the Hashemite Sherif Hussein of Mecca, promising independence in return for their support against the Turks.

Secondly, at the same time as Britain was using the Arabs to further its aims, it was facing rival claims from her wartime allies, France and Russia, for control over the Ottoman Empire after the war and was forced to cut a deal with them. In May 1916, Britain signed the Tripartite Agreement, better known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, according to which Russia would get Istanbul, the Bosphorus and parts of Armenia. France would take what is now Syria and Lebanon while Britain would take Baghdad, Basra and Trans-Jordan (Jordan). Britain evidently took her eye off the ball when she ceded part of the potentially oil-rich Mosul province to France, and spent the next period trying to bring Mosul into her own sphere of influence. Palestine would be separated from Syria and placed under an international administration and its ultimate fate would be decided at an international conference at the end of the war. Only in the most backward and impoverished part of the region, the Arab peninsula, would the Arabs be given independence.

Needless to say, the peoples affected by this disposition would have no say in deciding their future and the terms of the treaty were kept secret. After the Russian Revolution, when the Bolsheviks published the secret agreement to expose the imperialists’ conspiracies against the oppressed peoples of the region, Sherif Hussein demanded an explanation. But right up to the end of the war, the British and French promised full independence to the Arabs.

“The end that France and Great Britain have in pursuing in the East the war unloosed by German ambition is the complete and definite freeing of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national Governments and Administrations deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous population,” stated the joint Anglo-French declaration of November 7, 1918. “France and Great Britain have agreed to encourage and assist the establishment of indigenous Governments and Administrations…. And in the territories whose liberation they seek.”

Thirdly, in November 1917, Britain, intent on stealing a march over France and securing her own interests in the region by holding on to Palestine, made yet another commitment under the cynical subterfuge of humanitarian concerns for the Jews. It issued the deliberately vague Balfour Declaration, which “viewed with sympathy the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine”.

With the aid of the Arabs, the British were able to reverse their misfortunes and take Baghdad in March 1917, and later Jerusalem and Damascus, from the Turks. The Arab Revolt against the Turks, led by Faisal, the son of Sherif Hussein of Hejaz, was of strategic importance to the British. It tied down some 30,000 Turkish troops along the railway from Amman to Medina and prevented the Turko-German forces in Syria linking up with the Turkish garrison in Yemen.

Perfidious as ever, British military forces in Mesopotamia ignored the Armistice signed with Turkey at Mudros on October 30, 1918, and continued their march north, capturing the predominantly Kurdish province of Mosul a few days later. This was because it made little sense to keep the central and southern provinces of Mesopotamia without the oil rich northern province. Mosul was also important as an intermediate staging post on the route to the Russian controlled oil-rich Caspian and Caucasian states. Britain then expropriated the 25 percent German share in the Turkish Petroleum Company, which was planning to develop the oilfields.

Thus, by the end of 1918, British forces from Cairo had conquered Palestine and Syria and helped to drive the Turks out of the Hejaz. British forces from India had conquered Mesopotamia and brought Persia and Ibn Saud of Nejd in the Arabian Peninsula into Britain’s orbit. These forces pushed north through Persia to hold the Caucasus against the Turks, while another force moved north and fought the Red Army in support of “independence” for the White-controlled, oil-rich states Azerbaijan, Armenia, Georgia and Daghestan, until forced to withdraw in 1920.

Promises of liberation prove fraudulent

With the victors forming queues to take over the former Ottoman provinces and German and Austrian colonies in Africa and the Far East, the British were determined to hang onto their conquests in the Middle East to defend the trade routes to India and secure the region’s oil. They had set their sights firmly on keeping Palestine, the three provinces of Mesopotamia, renamed Iraq, ruling Kuwait from Iraq while maintaining their sphere of influence over Persia and the southern and western coasts of the Arabian peninsula. The Persian Gulf and Red Sea would thus become British lakes.

The central and southern provinces of Mesopotamia came under direct British rule from India and were administered under military law pending a peace settlement. Following the pattern set in India, the British turned to the old tribal leaders, whose influence had declined by the end of the nineteenth century, to collect the taxes and control the predominantly rural population in return for long term security of tenure. This only served to exacerbate landlordism, the impoverishment of the peasantry and the deep-seated hostility to the British occupation. They also cultivated the small but important minorities, particularly the Christians and the Jewish community that played a key financial role and whose relations with the British were to have important repercussions later with the rise of Zionist-Palestinian conflict.

The Kurds in the newly captured Mosul province took the British at their word and immediately set up an independent state that Britain spent nearly two years brutally suppressing with British and Indian troops. The Royal Air Force was sent in to bombard the guerrillas and Churchill, then Secretary of State for War, approved the use of poison gas.

Mosul was to be incorporated into the Iraqi state, abandoning the idea of Kurdish autonomy included in the Treaty of Sevres. In the words of one British official, “any idea of an Arab state is simply bloodstained fooling at present.”

But Britain’s plans to incorporate the Arab world into the Empire were repeatedly thwarted. Firstly, her wartime Allies, particularly the Americans, were determined to prevent her walking away with the lion’s share of the spoils. President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points, issued in 1917 on the eve of the US entry into the war, were the price that Britain and France would have to pay for US support.

They signified a new world order in which America’s political and economic interests would predominate over those of the old imperial powers. There would be no secret diplomacy or annexations by the victors and former colonies must have the right to self-determination. But above all else, there would have to be an Open Door policy with respect to trade. That meant an end to exclusive rights to resources and trade. In the context of the Middle East and Iraq, what was at issue was the future of the oil concessions the British had extracted from the Turks. The British viewed Wilson’s policy as such a threat that they forbade the local publication of the Fourteen Points, which only appeared in Baghdad two years later.

READ PART 3 OF THIS SERIES HERE

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 Gary Corseri 

“One death is a tragedy. A million is a statistic.”

“Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?”
—Joseph Stalin

On the same day that hundreds of US citizens were arrested, while peacefully protesting for a living wage for fast-food workers, in 150 cities across the United States, I channel-surfed the evening news reports. Every single channel—ranging from Right to Far Right—from ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN to FOX led their “news” broadcasts with tributes to the deceased “comedy legend” Joan Rivers!

This happened 3 days after “Labor Day,” the day even Huckabee proclaimed was to commemorate the achievements of our Labor Movement! (And on a snippet of his Labor Day show—which, again, I caught while channel-surfing—the Huck solemnly noted some of the gains made by the decades-long struggles of Labor: the 8-hour day; minimum wage; safety standards; abolishing child-labor.)

Well… that was then… and this is now! The US minimum wage is now hockey-puck! A man or woman working at one job, 40 hours a week, makes barely more than $15,000 per year—about $5,000 below the poverty line for a family of three in an “average” (i.e., not Washington, New York, San Fran, etc.) American city. And, most of those workers are not kids; they do have a family to support—one or two kids, or a spouse and a kid, a sick parent, etc.

But, these, of course are “statistics.” And Stalin seems to be having the last laugh here, because most Americans’ eyes glaze over at the mere mention of any statistics besides sports statistics!

Personally, it has been about 40 years since I thought Joan Rivers somewhat amusing. How in hell does the news of her passing take priority over the lives and concerns of millions of working Americans? Didn’t there used to be a separation between “real” news and sports and entertainment? And, if they had to share a format at all, wasn’t the trivia shuffled to the bottom, put on the back burner, until serious people could prioritize and relate the important stuff?

Oh, how I miss Walter Cronkite and Ted Koppel! (Note: When Cronkite called America’s adventurism in Vietnam a failure, LBJ lamented: If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost Middle America, I’ve lost the war… During the long days of the Iran Hostage Crisis, Koppel would often begin his broadcasts with an Iranian ambassador or spokesperson—addressing him with all due respect, and letting him have his say. During one of the far-too-many wars between Israel and the Arabs, Koppel would have reps from both sides, giving each one a chance to present his country’s or his party’s viewpoint!)

How in hell does the news of her passing take priority over the lives and concerns of millions of working Americans?

A few days ago, every American newscast began with the depressing news that another American journalist had been beheaded. American politicians and media spokespersons dutifully gravely cited the “barbarism” of ISIS (or ISIL or IS—mostly—them! The Other!) Apropos speeches were made about the need to “wipe out” our enemy (wipe them off the map?), etc.

As one who has himself worked as a free-lance journalist, I’m especially grieved at the loss of these two men.

But, one wonders: Of the 2100+ human beings recently killed in Gaza—including over 500 innocent children—how many were “beheaded” by bombs or shrapnel or falling rubble?

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Gary Corseri has published novels and poetry collections; his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere, and he has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Center. He has taught in US prisons and public schools, and at US and Japanese universities, and has worked as an editor in the US and Japan. His work has appeared at The Greanville Post, Uncommon Thought Journal, Cyrano's Online, Counterpunch, The New York Times, The Village Voice and hundreds of periodicals and websites worldwide.

Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net.