The Long Imperial History Of Trying To Manufacture Consent In Iraq
Roger Owen Al-Hayat - 28/08/08//
Just over ninety years ago in January 1918, in the last year of the First World War, Sir Mark Sykes submitted a draft memorandum to the high level Middle East Committee of the British government entitled 'Our position in Mesopotamia in relation to the spirit of the age'. Sykes was the author of many of the main ideas to be found in the Sykes/Picot Agreement dividing the Arab world into spheres of British and French influence. Mesopotamia was the name given to the Iraqi provinces of Baghdad and Basra then under British military occupation.
The memorandum, which was supposed to be a guide to future British policy in the area, is of great interest for two reasons. First, as its title suggests, it was response to the new international political atmosphere produced by the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 and Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Point speech in January 1918, in which, although not actually mentioning the words 'self-determination', the American President made explicit reference to the need to settle colonial questions in the interests of the 'native populations'. Second, Sykes's suggested response to the new atmosphere represents an ingenious, if also staggeringly cynical, set of suggestions designed to demonstrate how Britain could maintain post-war control in the new Iraq but behind a façade of what was then called 'native government'.
The problem, as Sykes correctly anticipated, was that in a new world in which, as he put it, protectorates, spheres of influence, annexations, bases, etc., had been consigned to the Diplomatic lumber room, the British had to find a new, up-to-date formula to convince its own people, as well as those of the rest of the democratic world, that it should be entrusted to run Iraq. His answer: that Britain must be in a position to show the world not only that some outside agent had to run this globally important country but that this agent should also be Britain.
As far as the first part was concerned, Sykes was already an advocate of what was coming to be called 'development' in its modern usage. Mesopotamia, he argued, was a potential storehouse of fuel (oil) and food for the whole world. Nevertheless, the departing Turks had shown no interest in developing these invaluable resources, while the Mesopotamian people were incapable of doing it by themselves.
As for Britain, it would need to base its claim not just on its superior skills as an economic developer, but also on its ability to convince the world of two basic facts. First, that the people of Mesopotamia would prefer British administration either to the return of the Turks or the immediate exercise of independence. Second, that, for these reasons, British rule had the consent of these people, although on the understanding that it would lead, eventually, to a British withdrawal.
Sykes then provided a long list of policies designed to make what he calls this plan 'work'. Some of these came from the standard repertoire of colonialist management developed by the British in Egypt and India. They included encouraging trade at Baghdad so as to get the merchant classes to feel that their property interests would be damaged if the British departed, getting the minorities to demand a perpetuation of British rule and seeing that there was plenty of employment. Others followed Ottoman/Turkish practice such as giving direct subventions to the beduin chiefs of the desert. Others again were startling new. Britain should start an Arab Nationalist party, he suggested, as well as an Arab educational department based on Arab nationalist principles.
Taken together such proposals involved a deliberate effort to build consent by working with all those Iraqi elements which, in his opinion, had an interest in a continuing British presence. These included people who wanted jobs, people who wanted security of life and property, Christians and Jews, people who wanted low taxation and no military service (the peasants) and people who wanted government positions (the notables). All should be encouraged to move along converging lines leading to a 'native state under British protection'.
Why does reading such a Memorandum on microfilm in the basement of a university library ninety years after the event still leave such an unpleasant taste in the mouth? First, there is its secrecy. Not only was it obviously not intended for public knowledge but actually designed to mislead the public about what was actually going on. Second, it played an enormous role in how things eventually turned out, with the League of Nations Mandate over Iraq awarded to Britain for just the purpose of hiding colonial control behind some appearance of international trusteeship, good for Iraq, good for the world in general.
But there is more to it than that. What Sykes was wrestling with was the problem of veiling three of the most blatant, and inter-connected, features of modern colonial imperialism: the fact that it is based on military occupation, that it cannot have the consent of those occupied and that the whole enterprise is under-pinned, as well as often justified, by a unusually overt form of racism. And then, just as we might have thought that such shabby manoeuvres had been exposed for what they were during the great period of post-second World War colonial independence, they have repeated themselves for all to take note of in Iraq, not to speak of countries like Palestine, Chechnya and Afghanistan. Nor is it just the work of Europeans and Americans, Arab states have proved just as capable of occupying parts of other Arab states, just as Asian and African ones have done, with only slight difference in the attempts made to portray evil and dangerous leaders as responsible for their own invasion.
If there is any comfort in all this it is that most foreign occupations contain the seeds of their own destruction. Not only are they resisted on the ground but, after a while, the population of the invading country begins to perceive the secrecy with which they are accompanied as a cover for far worse cruelties and corruption involving the army and special interests than even the few crusading journalists have yet managed to reveal. Behind the amateur torturers of Abu Guraib stand the real torturers employed by the CIA. Behind the crude assumptions that the Americans and the British can make and build better than the Iraqis stands a flawed, profit-driven approach to development which Mark Sykes himself disapproved of but was powerless to stop.
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