Why do the US and Britain still claim the invasion of Iraq was to spread democracy?
The hostility towards elections and democracy by the US-British military administration that brutally overran the nation in 2003 was well documented at the time — as was the mass movement for free elections, writes
A little late to the party, I recently watched Once Upon A Time In Iraq, the BBC’s 2020 five-part documentary series about the US-British invasion and occupation of the Middle East nation.
During the episode about the capture of Iraqi president Saddam Hussein in December 2003, the narrator noted: “Though Iraq was still governed by the [US-led] coalition, the intention was to hold democratic elections as soon as possible.”
This fits with the common understanding of the Iraq War amongst the media, academic and political elites. For example, speaking on the BBC News at 10 in 2005, correspondent Paul Wood stated: “The coalition came to Iraq in the first place to bring democracy and human rights.”
Likewise, writing in the Guardian in 2013, the esteemed University of Cambridge Professor David Runciman claimed: “The wars fought after 2001 in Afghanistan and Iraq were designed… to spread the merits of democracy.”
No doubt similarly benign framing of the West’s intentions and actions will be repeated as we approach the 20th anniversary of the invasion on March 20 2003.
But is it true? As always it is essential to compare the narrative pumped out by corporate and state-affiliated media with the historical record.
We know that soon after US-led forces had taken control of the country, Iraqis began holding local elections. However, in June 2003, the Washington Post reported “US military commanders have ordered a halt to local elections and self-rule in provincial cities and towns across Iraq, choosing instead to install their own handpicked mayors and administrators, many of whom are former Iraqi military leaders.”
The report goes on to quote Paul Bremer, the chief US administrator in Iraq: “I’m not opposed to [self-rule], but I want to do it in a way that takes care of our concerns… in a postwar situation like this, if you start holding elections… it’s often the best-organised who win, and the best-organised right now are the former Baathists and to some extent the Islamists.”
On the national level, Professor Toby Dodge, who advised US General David Petraeus in Iraq, notes one of the first decisions Bremer made, after he arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, “was to delay moves towards delegating responsibility to a leadership council” composed of exiled politicians.
Writing in his 2005 book, Iraq’s Future, the establishment-friendly British academic goes on to explain “this careful, incremental but largely undemocratic approach was set aside with the arrival of UN special representative for Iraq, Vieira de Mello” who “persuaded Bremer that a governing body of Iraqis should be set up to act as a repository of Iraqi sovereignty.”
Accordingly, on July 13 2003 the Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) was set up. Dodge notes the membership “was chosen by Bremer after extended negotiations between the CPA [the US Coalition Provisional Authority], Vieira de Mello and the seven dominant, formerly exiled parties.” The IGC would “establish a constitutional process,” Bremer said at the time.
However, the Americans had a serious problem on their hands. In late June 2003 the most senior Shia religious leader in Iraq, Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, issued a fatwa (a religious edict) condemning the US plans as “fundamentally unacceptable.”
“The occupation officials do not enjoy the authority to appoint the members of a council that would write the constitution,” he said. Instead, he called for a general election “so that every eligible Iraqi can choose someone to represent him at the constitutional convention that will write the constitution” which would then be put to a public referendum.
“With no way around the fatwa, and with escalating American casualties creating pressure on President Bush,” the Washington Post reported in November 2003 that Bremer “dumped his original plan in favour of an arrangement that would bestow sovereignty on a provisional government before a constitution is drafted.”
This new plan, known as the November 15 Agreement, was based on a complex process of caucuses. A 2005 briefing from peace group Justice Not Vengeance (JNV) explained just how anti-democratic the proposal was: “US-appointed politicians would select a committee in each province which would select a group of politically acceptable local worthies, which in turn would select a representative… to go forward to the national assembly” which would “then be allowed to elect a provisional government.”
In response, Sistani made another public intervention, repeating his demand that direct elections — not a system of regional caucuses — should select a transitional government. After the US refused to concede, the Shia clerical establishment escalated their pro-democracy campaign, organising street demonstrations in January 2004.
100,000 people protested in Baghdad and 30,000 in Basra, with news reports recording crowds chanting: “Yes, yes to elections, no, no to occupation” and banners with slogans such as “we refuse any constitution that is not elected by the Iraqi people.”
Under pressure, the US relented, agreeing in March 2004 to hold national elections in January 2005 to a Transitional National Assembly which was mandated to draft a new constitution.
The campaigning group Voices In The Wilderness UK summarised events in a 2004 briefing: “Since the invasion, the US has consistently stalled on one-person-one-vote elections” seeking instead to “put democracy on hold until it can be safely managed,” as Salim Lone, director of communications for the UN in Iraq until autumn 2003, wrote in April 2004.
Why? “An elected government that reflected Iraqi popular [opinion] would kick US troops out of the country and is unlikely to be sufficiently amenable to the interests of Western oil companies or take an ‘acceptable’ position on the Israel-Palestine conflict,” Voices In The Wilderness UK explained.
For example, a secret 2005 nationwide poll of Iraqis conducted by the UK Ministry of Defence found 82 per cent “strongly opposed” to the presence of the US-led coalition forces, with 45 per cent of respondents saying they believed attacks against British and American troops were justified.
It is worth pausing briefly to consider two aspects of the struggle for democracy in Iraq. First, the Sistani-led movement in Iraq was, as US dissident intellectual Noam Chomsky argued in 2005, “One of the major triumphs of non-violent resistance that I know of.”
And second, it was a senior Iraqi Shia cleric who championed democratic elections in the face of strong opposition from the US — the “heartland of democracy,” according to the Financial Times’s Martin Wolf.
It is also worth remembering, as activist group JNV noted in 2005, that president George W Bush’s ultimatum days before the invasion was simply that “Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours.” This was about “encouraging a last-minute coup more than the Iraqi leader’s departure from Baghdad,” the Financial Times reported at the time. In short, the US-British plan was not free elections via “regime change” but “regime stabilisation, leadership change,” JNV argued.
This resonates with the analysis of Middle East expert Jane Kinninmont. Addressing the argument the West invaded Iraq to spread democracy, in a 2013 Chatham House report she argued: “This is asserted despite the long history of Anglo-American great-power involvement in the Middle East, which has, for the most part, not involved an effort to democratise the region.”
In reality “the general trend has been to either support authoritarian rulers who were already in place or to participate in the active consolidation of authoritarian rule… as long as these rulers have been seen as supporting Western interests more than popularly elected governments would.”
This thesis is not short of shameful examples — from the West’s enduring support for the Gulf monarchies in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, the UAE, Oman, Qatar and Kuwait, to the strong backing given to Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt before both dictators were overthrown in 2011.
Back to Iraq: though far from perfect, national elections have taken place since 2003. But while the US has been quick to take the credit, the evidence shows any democratic gains won in Iraq in the immediate years after the invasion were made despite, not because of, the US and their British lackey.
Indeed, an October 2003 Gallup poll of Baghdad residents makes instructive reading. Fully 1 per cent of respondents agreed with the BBC and Runciman that a desire to establish democracy was the main intention of the US invasion. In contrast, 43 per cent of respondents said the invasion’s principal objective was Iraq’s oil reserves.
It is a truism to say that American dependence on oil has long influenced US foreign policy especially from the post–WWII era of geopolitical competition, through post Cold War era deregulation, to today with fist-bumping and bemoaning the Saudis to pump more and more oil until the cost of living for the working classes of the west eases (economically speaking it is counterintuitive for the seller, likely to result in unintended consequences if the oil-rich Gulf were to kowtow, and be disastrous for the Paris Accords). But there’s an argument to be made that “energy security” for the buyers will likely lead to “political instability” for the sellers.
As Mundy (2020) writes in “The Oil for Security Myth and Middle East Insecurity” (for MERIP, the Middle East Research and Information Project) since the 1970s, the Middle East has been the location of a third of all recorded wars between states, nearly 40 per cent of all internationalised civil wars and seven out of ten wars of occupation. With the launching of America’s global war on terrorism, a third of all new armed conflicts have emerged in the Middle East since 2000; that number has grown to half since 2010. The Middle East’s share of all terrorism related events worldwide, as defined by the Global Terrorism Database, has likewise increased from 10 percent in the 1970s to over half since 2010.
As Mead (2019) wrote in a review of “Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the United States and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East” (Barr, 2018), the British Labour government that took power in the summer of 1945 soon concluded that keeping as much of the Middle East’s oil as possible under British rule—and thus within the sterling zone—offered the best, perhaps the only, hope of maintaining the United Kingdom’s place in the first rank of world powers. This conviction became the lodestar of post war British policy. At first, the prospects looked good. Pro-British monarchs ruled in Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and the Gulf kingdoms. There were, however, two problems with the plan: Arab nationalists wanted no part of British rule, and the United States was willing and able to displace the United Kingdom as the dominant regional power.
From The Times, a long time ago.
“Shadow Wars,” reviewed
Steve Donoghue
2016. The Christian Science Monitor
Anyone who’s seen the videos — and everyone has seen the videos — will have the same set of questions. The videos show schoolgirls being herded out of their classrooms by armed men who shout their organization name loudly and clearly for the video cameras. They show markets and nightclubs with flashing police sirens outside, forlorn groups of bystanders standing around hoping for news of loved ones inside. They show priceless ancient ruins being dynamited. They show journalists kneeling in the desert, squinting in the sunlight moments before they’re beheaded.
They show a naked, strident barbarism that seems like it belongs in a different age. The names are as familiar as the videos: al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, ISIS. And the questions that arise inevitably are always the same: Who are these people? Where did they come from? What do they want?
Christopher Davidson is a reader in Middle Eastern Politics at Durham University, author of the landmark study “After the Sheikhs,” and his big new book, “Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East” comes closer than any recent popular study to offering definitive answers to those and other questions.
The patterns were set during the great imperial heyday of Continental gamesmanship, when British satraps all throughout the Middle East often propped up the most fiercely conservative Islamic fundamentalists because they made more effective regional buffers against the forces of Russian encroachment.
And the further along Davidson’s book progresses, the more those patterns come to look unbreakable. The Western powers intervene, meddle, support, subsidize, and double cross, constantly using the rhetoric of good stewardship while caring only about securing oil and land bases to parry the ambitions of the other regional chess masters, primarily the Russians. In all cases, long-term strategies are forgotten in the cloak-and-dagger mania of short-term tactics, and the result is a word that crops up all throughout Davidson’s book: blowback – unintended consequences that are intensely predictable in hindsight.
So an American Secretary of State can on a Monday deliver a stirring address about the sanctity of human rights in “the developing world” and on a Tuesday declare that the local dictator is a close personal friend of the family and must remain in power to ensure the stability of the region. So the United States can funnel covert funding and training to jihadist guerrilla forces in Afghanistan in the 1980s in order to use them as catspaws against the Soviets, without sparing much concern for the fact that the jihadis in question hated America as fervently as they hated the Russians – without, in other words, even trying to envision blowback that might involve one of those jihadi guerrilla fighters, Osama bin Laden, going on to strike at his American benefactors. Even when the warning signs are tragically explicit, they often go unheeded, as Davidson chronicles in theaters of operation stretching from West Africa to Central Asia.
The pattern holds firm everywhere from Syria to Qatar to Yemen to Libya to Somalia to Nigeria: Great Britain or France or the United States will pick some “partner” in a volatile region like Iraq, bet all the markers on that partner being a willing agent of democratic reform even though that partner is very visibly a power-bloated monster, and then, years down the line, express pious horror when that partner turns out to be a power-bloated monster.
In the mass of historical and geopolitical information Davidson assembles in these pages, some notes sound again and again. One of these of course is the so-called “Arab Spring” of 2011, in which enormous and almost entirely peaceful popular protests swept through the Arab world. Since the movement posed a direct threat to the status quo, it predictably received tepid response from those holding power in the region – most certainly including the United States.
Another of these recurring notes is something of longer-standing centrality to American foreign policy: Saudi Arabia, staunch ally, trade partner, and arms market to the United States, turns up repeatedly playing a game of its own, harboring, sponsoring, and financing Islamic terrorists in their operations against the United States. Running through virtually every tale of Middle Eastern violence and treachery Davidson relates is at least some strand of Saudi complicity; American policymakers might be familiar with this most dangerous of double standards, but it’s a good bet the general American public – which in poll after poll seems unaware of the fact that 15 of the 19 al-Qaeda terrorists who attacked America on September 11 were Saudi nationals – would be alarmed by it. For its unsparing probity, Davidson’s book ought to be required reading with both groups.
And what about the answers to those fundamental questions – Who are these people? Where did they come from? What do they want? “Shadow Wars” makes the answers painfully, damningly clear. What the book doesn’t do is offer any way out of the old patterns it describes, since arbitrary withdrawal causes just as much blowback as arbitrary involvement. But if some future solution is discovered, it’ll be thanks to the path-clearing of books like this one.
Shadow Wars: Reviews
Hilal Khashan
2017. American University of Beirut
Davidson of Durham University seeks to answer the question: Why has the Arab quest for democracy been bogged down in a murky quagmire while “parts of Europe, Latin America, and even Africa once managed to cut the shackles of authoritarianism.” The answers he provides, however, implicating the United States and Britain in all Arab political problems, do not satisfy.
Individually, many of the examples Davidson provides make sense, for example, that the U.S. military establishment became concerned about reductions in spending after the drawdown of U.S. troops from Western Europe. It is difficult, however, to accept that the need “to protect U.S. defence spending” was the primary reason for President George H.W. Bush’s decision to go to war against Iraq in 1991. This reductionist analysis suggests sensationalism.
The author dwells at length on the mischievous role of the West in the region’s “deep state” counterrevolutions, which aborted the “Arab Spring.” There is no denying that the foreign policy of Washington and its Western allies is muddled at best, but to assign to them such overpowering influence relieves Arab dictators from their own responsibility and failure. Similarly, he asserts that Washington had a role in the creation of the Islamic State (ISIS) and criticizes the Obama administration’s lack of resolve to destroy it. But he insults the reader’s intelligence when he claims that the many accounts of ISIS barbarity “were poorly sourced, and some were definitely made up.”
The book would have benefited from more editing and factual review (Egyptian president Anwar Sadat expelled all Soviet advisors in 1972, not 1971) and, considering its voluminous size, should have an index. But most seriously, the book is too thin on analysis. Davidson grounds his book in a neoclassical counterrevolution theory whose building blocks are not particularly appropriate for studying the evolution of Arab societies during the past two centuries. The theoretical inadequacies of Shadow Wars weaken its arguments and impede convincing conclusions.
John Waterbury
2017. New York University, Abu Dhabi
According to Davidson, for more than a century, the intelligence and military establishments of the United Kingdom and the United States have been leading a hidden struggle against implicitly progressive forces in the Middle East, driven by a desire for geopolitical advantage and the control of oil. Notwithstanding the declaration of a “war on terror;’ Davidson believes that the preferred instruments of the Americans and the British have been Islamist movements: the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and, most recently, the Islamic State (also known as ISIS). The Americans and the British have often found themselves fighting their own proxies, but they knew that would happen, Davidson claims. They therefore fight halfheartedly, he contends, so that such groups continue to survive. Nearly all of Davidson’s sources are in the public domain: he uncovers no original evidence for his argument and instead assembles familiar pieces into an unfamiliar shape. The results are unconvincing. For example, if Western powers fostered ISIS in order to drive a Sunni wedge between Iran and Syria, why did they bother to topple Saddam Hussein, who already played that role? More troubling, Davidson’s analysis denies agency to Islamists, Middle Easterners, and pretty much everyone else: in his view, we are all merely pawns in the shadow wars.
Douglas Little
2017. Clark University, Massachusetts
The meteoric rise in 2014 of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) has spawned a dizzying array of articles and books seeking to place this latest Middle East horror show into historical perspective. Among the most ambitious, provocative, and tendentious is Shadow Wars by Christopher Davidson, a lecturer in Middle East politics at the University of Durham. Davidson at-tributes the emergence of ISIS and other extremist groups to “the long-running policies of successive imperial and ‘advanced capitalist’ administrations” in Britain and America and “their ongoing manipulations of an elaborate network of powerful national and transnational actors across both the Arab and Islamic worlds” (pp. viii–ix). Shadow Wars synthesizes the writings of William Blum, Robert Dreyfuss, Mark Curtis, and like-minded critics of British and American policies to create what might be called a unified field theory of Western imperialism in the Middle East, suggesting along the way that many recent grisly terrorist actions in Iraq and Syria may actually have been “false flag” operations designed to legitimate military intervention by the United Kingdom and the United States. After I finished reading this information-packed, but often eye-glazing 700-page monograph, I said to myself: If Naomi Klein and Robert Ludlum had decided to coauthor an account of recent events in the Middle East, they would have produced something like Shadow Wars.
Although Davidson has made good use of the WikiLeaks “Cablegate” database of leaked US diplomatic documents along with some on-the-ground interviews, he relies mainly on secondary sources rather than archival materials to tell his story. Frequently, he veers off into the acronym-laden political underbrush, where Islamic splinter groups de-bate how many infidels can dance on the head of a pin. Once one clears away Davidson’s forest of thick description, his master narrative looks something like this. After 1945, British and American officials, frequently working in concert, cultivated ties with Islamic groups, first to counteract Arab and Iranian nationalists who threatened Western control of Middle East oil during the 1950s and 1960s and later to defeat Soviet forces in Afghanistan during the 1980s. So far this is a familiar story already well-told by scholars like Joel Gordon, Mark Gasiorowski, and Steve Coll, but Davidson presses beyond the end of the Cold War to argue that the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s intervention in the Balkans during the 1990s was not intend-ed merely to defend a motley crew of Bosnian and Kosovar Muslims but also to serve as a dress rehearsal for military intervention in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Libya early in the 21st century. After the attacks on September 11, 2001, US president George W. Bush and UK prime minister Tony Blair, with help from pro-Western Muslim autocrats in Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf shaykhdoms, launched a global crusade against terrorism designed to undermine Islamic reformers, reinforce the neoliberal Washington Consensus, and rev up the military-industrial complex on both sides of the Atlantic via massive amounts of defence spending and arms sales.
While Davidson’s interpretation of the War on Terror reads like a chapter from Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, his explanation of the causes and consequences of the Arab Spring is bewildering. Spontaneous grassroots revolts against pro-Western kleptocracies in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen and anti-Western autocracies in Libya and Syria were discredited and eventually crushed by an unholy alliance of military officers in Cairo and oil shaykhs in Riyadh and Doha with the blessing of the administrations of Barack Obama and British prime minister David Cameron, who paid little more than lip service to democracy and human rights. Indeed, in the case or Libya, Davidson implies that Washington and London conspired to bring down Mu‘ammar al-Qadhafi through “a fake Arab Spring” in order reopen the richest oil fields in North Africa to multinational corporations based in the US and UK.
Davidson’s analysis of the emergence of ISIS is downright bizarre. In a chapter entitled “The Islamic State: A Strategic Asset,” he asks, “qui bono?” (who benefits?). The answer, of course, is American and British corporate interests and their allies in Saudi Arabia, all of whom agree that “the rise of the Islamic State has been spectacularly good for business” (p. 406). Furthermore, according to Davidson:
“Although the new caliphate’s savagery may seem unconscionably nihilistic, it nonetheless serves an equally important purpose for those on the outside, as even after the Arab Spring the surviving Western-backed autocracies have been able to confirm their status as the Middle East’s “moderates,” just as they were during the War on Terror and, before that, against the threat of international communism.”
— 405–406
Later in this chapter, Davidson claims that the Obama Administration intentionally ignored warnings about ISIS until mid-2014 in the hopes to drive a Sunni wedge into the “Shi‘i crescent” that stretches from Damascus to Tehran. One of his chief sources for this is Michael Flynn — Barack Obama’s onetime director of the Defence Intelligence Agency and, more recently, Donald Trump’s short-lived National Security Advisor — who told Al Jazeera in 2015 that “there was a decision in the US government knowingly to support such extremist groups” (quoted on p. 421). As for Obama’s drone strikes and covert operations against ISIS, Davidson regards them merely as proof that the United States was “trying to find the right balance between being seen to take action but yet still allowing the Islamic State to prosper” (p. 422).
This is not the only time in Shadow Wars where Davidson suggests that there is a dark conspiracy at work in the Muslim world. He claims that Western intelligence agencies exaggerated reports that Serbian paramilitary units killed 8,000 Bosnian Muslims in the “Srebrenica massacre” (the quotation marks are Davidson’s) in order “to provide a casus belli” for NATO intervention in 1995 (p. 135). Davidson notes without editorial comment that “Libyan bloggers” identified the man lynched in a ditch outside Sirte in October 2011 as prob-ably “one of Gaddafi’s many very realistic body doubles” (p. 297). Davidson implies that the sarin gas attacks on Syrian rebels at Ghuta two years later were carried out not by the regime of Bashar al-Asad but by the rebels themselves (p. 330). Most controversial of all, Davidson suggests that there is evidence of “camera trickery” and other video “inconsistencies” (pp. 425, 500) in two of the most gruesome acts committed by ISIS, the beheading of James Foley and the burning alive of Royal Jordanian Air Force pilot Mu’adh al-Kasasiba, adding for good measure that some “experts” believe that pictures of the graphic murder of a Japanese hostage were enhanced by a set of “Photoshopped images” (p. 503).
What then are we to make of Christopher Davidson’s unified field theory seeking to explain a century of war, revolution, and terrorism in the Middle East? He presents solid evidence that the Western powers did employ Islam as an antidote to radical Arab nationalism during the Cold War. He reminds us that although US and UK policy-makers have always insisted that their interventions in the Muslim world were never about oil, crises like the Suez War in 1956 and Operation Desert Storm in 1991 were almost entirely about oil. And he reveals the hypocrisy of American and British leaders, who have talked the talk of democracy from the age of Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq in Iran (1951–53) through the era of Mohamed Morsi in Egypt (2012–13) while refusing to walk the walk. Today, ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi in Cairo is indeed the second coming of Mohammad Reza Shah in Tehran 65 years ago.
Yet Davidson’s explanation of more recent developments, frequently couched in adverbs like “worryingly” and “intriguingly” and “sinisterly,” seems off the mark. Despite Davidson’s insistence that ISIS is little more than a band of “useful idiots” and social media addicts serving the interests of malevolent Persian Gulf royals and multinational corporations, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and his extremist followers are in reality accidental opportunists who have taken advantage of America’s greatest geopolitical blunder in one hundred years to unleash a reign of terror. Far from being a valuable “strategic asset” for the Western powers and their clients in the Middle East, ISIS is a grave strategic threat whose reliance on 21st century social media and 7th century barbarism promises to keep Donald Trump, Prime Minister Theresa May, and their successors awake at night for many years to come.
The plot thickens
Déjà vu – Tehran then half a century later (manufacturing the story e t c)Books by BarrNasser & MosaddeqOperating in the shadows.
Iraq (et al.)
Two books, together, tell a compelling tale,
Two Telling Tales
In the first, Rutledge (2005) traces the origins of America’s addiction throughout the twentieth century and explains how America’s relations with the Middle East were developed through its quest for energy security. America’s motorisation and its consequent demand for oil at predictable market prices was and continues to be an important influence on US policy towards Iraq – especially given the uncertainties relating to what has so far been the securest source of Middle East oil – Saudi Arabia. Ian Rutledge argues that the war in Iraq was neither a war for ‘freedom’ or ‘democracy’ nor was it a plot to ‘steal Iraq’s oil’, but rather an attempt to establish a pliant and dependable oil protectorate in the Middle East which would underwrite the soaring demand from America’s hyper-motorised consumers. In this work, Rutledge undertakes an in-depth analysis of the motorisation of US society and explicitly links this to America’s foreign policy adventures, past and present.
In the second (Rutledge, 2014) In 1920 an Arab revolt came perilously close to inflicting a shattering defeat upon the British Empire’s forces occupying Iraq after the Great War. A huge peasant army besieged British garrisons and bombarded them with captured artillery. British columns and armoured trains were ambushed and destroyed, and gunboats were captured or sunk. Britain’s quest for oil was one of the principal reasons for its continuing occupation of Iraq. However, with around 131,000 Arabs in arms at the height of the conflict, the British were very nearly driven out. Only a massive infusion of Indian troops prevented a humiliating rout.
“Enemy on the Euphrates” is the definitive account of the most serious armed uprising against British rule in the twentieth century. Bringing central players such as Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell vividly to life, Ian Rutledge’s masterful account is a powerful reminder of how Britain’s imperial objectives sowed the seeds of Iraq’s tragic history.
Iran–Iraq War, 1980–1988
As Liu (2018) has said, there is no simple explanation for America’s conflicting actions, and the superpower played an integral though contradictory part throughout the Iran–Iraq War. Its actions ultimately benefitted neither Iran nor Iraq, but rather “the U.S. itself and its material interests in the Middle East.” Ultimately, American involvement, Liu continues, “exacerbated the already bloody conflict … and further contributed to lasting political insecurity in the region.”
1. The military buildup from August 1990 to January 1991; 2. The aerial bombing campaign against Iraq from the 17th January, 1991 onwards.
The Iraq War / Second Gulf War, 2003–
Pilgrims at the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf. Emily Garthwaite for The New York Timessome 1,000,000 Brits vehemently protested against Bush and Blair’s unwarranted invasion intentionsDuplicity UnleashedThe placard that say it all/oil
References
Barr, J. (2012). A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914–1948. W. W. Norton.
Barr, J. (2018). Lords of the Desert: Britain’s Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East. Simon & Schuster.
Coll, S. (2004). Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001. Penguin Publishing Group
Coll, S. (2024). The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the CIA, and the Origins of America’s Invasion of Iraq. Penguin Publishing Group.
Curtis, M. (2003). Web of Deceit: Britain’s Real Role in the World. Vintage.
Curtis, M. (2004). Britain’s Real Foreign Policy and the Failure of British Academia. International Relations, 18(3), 275–287. https://doi.org/10.1177/0047117804045193
Davidson, C. (2016). Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East. Oneworld Publications.
Little, D. (2017). Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East. The Middle East Journal, 71(2), 328–330. https://www.jstor.org/stable/90016332
Mead, W. R. (2019). Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the United States and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East. Foreign Affairs, 98(1) 201–201. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/26798040
Rutledge, I. (2005). Addicted to Oil: America’s Relentless Drive for Energy Security. I.B. Tauris.
Rutledge, I. (2014). Enemy on the Euphrates: The British Occupation of Iraq and the Great Arab Revolt, 1914-1921. Saqi Books.
