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Lessons of 1920 Revolt Lost on Bremer - UN Security Council Security Council - Documents, Analyses, Comments, Reports, Issues, DebatesSecurity Council - Documents, Analyses, Comments, Reports, Issues, Debates

Lessons of 1920 Revolt Lost on Bremer

By Charles Clover

Financial Times
November 17, 2003

The argument between Arnold Wilson, the British civil commissioner in Baghdad from 1918-1920, and his more famous deputy, the author Gertrude Bell, shook the British colonial establishment for a time. But if the lessons were soon forgotten, they were destined to be repeated 83 years later. Right up to the end of the bloody 1920 revolt against British rule that claimed the lives of 500 British soldiers, Mr Wilson had insisted that the answer to the "Mesopotamian question" was direct rule in Baghdad by a British high commissioner.

Ms Bell, more presciently, had thought since a year earlier that the answer was to choose an Arab head of state. "I pray the people at home may be rightly guided and realise that the only chance here is to recognise political ambitions from the first, not to try and squeeze the Arabs into our mould and have our hands forced in a year - who knows - perhaps less," she wrote to a friend in January 1920. She would prove all too correct. Mr Wilson stepped down and, in 1921, the British were forced to grant Iraq nominal independence under a provisional government headed by King Faisal I.

The lessons of British rule have eerily repeated themselves since the US-led invasion of Iraq last March. After a seven-month military occupation costing more than 200 soldiers' lives (including non-combat deaths), the US-led coalition has been forced to give up ambitious plans for indefinite direct rule and promise a formal end to the state of military occupation by next June.

After a hurried visit to Washington last week, Paul Bremer, the US chief administrator in Iraq, returned to Baghdad on Friday and met members of the Iraqi Governing Council. They, in turn, issued a statement on Saturday outlining the coming transformation: by the end of next June, the Governing Council and Mr Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority would be dissolved, following the election of an interim government by a transitional assembly of appointed notables.

CPA officials say they are taking these steps because of their disappointment with the delays in writing a new constitution. Under Mr Bremer's original plan, independence would come only after the approval of a constitution and elections. But it is also clear that US officials have their eye on the worsening guerrilla war, combined with President George W. Bush's desire to show tangible progress on an "exit strategy" from Iraq by next year's US election.

The new strategy seems designed just as much for American voters as Iraqis themselves. But some Iraqi politicians doubt the new steps will end the violence. "The Iraqi street will reject this because they see through it. They only will accept a political solution which the people choose," said Jassem Al Essawi, spokesman for radical Islamist preacher Ahmed al-Kubaisi, whom the US has banned from Iraq.

Iraqi guerrilla fighters have not made their demands clear but appear to want not only the withdrawal of US forces but the eradication of all vestiges of the US occupation. They would probably turn their guns on a weak interim government just as they have the Governing Council and Iraqi police.

The US administration will not withdraw American troops from Iraq after the formal end of the occupation next June, and the Governing Council has made it clear that it will invite US forces to stay. "People and groups will now start planning for the departure by the Americans," Mr Essawi said without elaborating.

The US must carefully manage the transition - albeit at arm's length - to avoid losing control or creating the perception that the process is rigged. Losing control of the process would mean the possibility of a radical Islamist government coming to power in Baghdad, or civil strife similar to that which plunged Lebanon into turmoil in the 1980s following the US exit.

But if the US is seen to be manipulating the process for the benefit of a few Iraqi exile groups favoured by the Pentagon, rapid disillusionment would also follow. Perhaps the most profound lesson of the 1920 revolt, according to Ms Bell, was that all plans have a habit of changing. "No one, not even H.M.G. [His Majesty's Government] would have thought of giving the Arabs such a free hand as we shall now give them - as a result of rebellion!" she wrote in 1920.

(Gertrude Bell quotations from Desert Queen by Janet Wallach, 1996)


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