1849 map of Ottoman Iraq by Samuel Augustus Mitchell - note Basra (Bassorah) in the south adjacent the Persian Gulf, Baghdad just to the right of the pink “Al Jesira” region, and Mosul far to the north at the very top of the pink region.
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky, sometimes it's very simple to report on historical events because historical actors or proponents of one side or another often proudly announce positions to do with ethnic cleansing, execution, or imperial ambition.
In the case of Iraq one Robert Lyman, a British Army veteran, graduate of Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, introduces us neatly to the British position on Iraq in 1941.
“Iraq was very important to Great Britain in 1941 for a number of reasons. First, together with Iran, it supplied Great Britain with all of its non-American oil. But early in 1941 the continuing support of the United States, a country which was not yet committed to an active involvement in the war, was by no means certain. If all sources of oil were denied to her, Britain would no longer have the wherewithal to fight and she would have to sue for an ignominious and unimaginable peace.”
Iraq was one of the many synthetic “mandate” states formed by the Western powers under the League of Nations after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. The fabled Lawrence of Arabia had assisted an Arab insurgency of nationalist and elite origins which accorded with British interests during the war, to foment unrest in the distant marches of the Ottoman territories.
While the region now known as Iraq had historically been home to the ancient Babylonian empire, its modern history was not a continuation of this regime, and rather centered around three major cities which did not have much at all in common.
The Ottoman regime divided the Mesopotamian territory into three wilayets, or states, centered around the cities of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra. Mosul was and remains much more Turkic and conservative in composition with a rebellious Kurdish minority - it is also the primary source of oil and mineral extraction, making it the most vital cornerstone of the modern country of Iraq. Basra is a port city which has historically been more interested in trade towards Persia and India than the wider Arab world, and Baghdad was a political capital city.
None of these states had much to do with one another, and none of them imagined that they were the same people. British interest in oil after the First World War had largely been directed by the British Navy, chiefly the First Sea Lord Admiral Baron John Fisher and the First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill.
Admiral Baron John Fisher, First Sea Lord
Both men were of the opinion that steam-powered ships were on their way out, and the only way to ensure Britain’s dominion over its subjects was an oil-powered Navy. While interest in Iraq had initially concerned protection of the British trade route to India and imperial attentions were initially focused on Iran's newfound supply of oil, the discovery of oil in Mosul garnered a new wave of attention. Although the economy of Iraq had been dominated by British trade since the war's end, oil quickly replaced other trade goods as the country's primary source of income.
While an increase in oil production would have profound effects on Iraq's future, garnering interest as it did from various foreign powers, the ability of oil to dictate British foreign policy in the Second World War was profound enough, and serves to illustrate the rather openly imperial ambitions of the British empire. Starkly contrasting the American attitude to abolish economic impetus from its historical record, choosing instead to remember its actions as moralistic and noble, the British have hardly shirked from admitting that Iraq was put to heel to serve as a source of exports to the homeland.
In the 30s the British realized that the population of Iraq had become restive thanks to a colonial policy concerned with resource extraction which had empowered new local elites, but which left the larger population in a state of poverty perhaps worse than that experienced under Ottoman rule.
While the Ottomans had imposed their own imperial hegemony in the region, artificially introducing land reform laws with the aim of finally exacting taxes from their Mesopotamian territory, they had had little success and had therefore failed to exert much influence over the region. British rule on the other hand was, thanks to the clear and vital importance of oil to the empire, much more efficient and ruthless.
In an attempt to sidestep growing civil unrest the British imposed the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1930. The British administrators of Iraq were largely drawn from the clique which managed British India, and in establishing the country in 1920 they had made Faisal bin Hussein, a Hashemite noble and compatriot of T.E. Lawrence during the insurgency against the Ottomans, King of Iraq. That is, it should be noted that the "King" of Iraq was not from Iraq but was rather born in the former Hijaz, now Saudi Arabia, being the son of the Grand Sharif of Mecca.
When the 1930 treaty was drawn up, Iraq was to become an "independent" kingdom in an attempt to offer freedom from the British yoke in return for continued economic cooperation. In reality the kingdom was ruled by a host of British advisors. Faisal himself had a deep enmity for the population of Iraq which was surely reflective of public opinion in turn - it was understood by all parties that "independence" was just a word, and that the country - still a synthetic mesh of disparate peoples and cultures - was still in effect controlled by Britain.
King Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi
Faisal himself illustrated the state of the country in 1932, writing just before "independence".
"Iraq is a kingdom ruled by a Sunni Arab government founded on the wreckage of Ottoman rule. This government rules over a Kurdish segment, the majority of which is ignorant, that includes persons with personal ambitions who lead it to abandon it [the government] under the pretext that it does not belong to their ethnicity. [The government also rules over] an ignorant Shiite majority that belongs to the same ethnicity of the government, but the persecutions that had befallen them as a result of Turkish rule, which did not enable them to take part in governance and exercise it, drove a deep wedge between the Arab people divided into these two sects. Unfortunately, all of this made this majority, or the persons who harbor special aspirations, the religious among them, the seekers of posts without qualification, and those who did not benefit materially from the new rule, to pretend that they are still being persecuted because they are Shiites."
Lyman proudly illustrates how it is that the British sought to use this chaotic state of social affairs to its economic advantage.
"... the loss of Iraq would have provided a significant psychological boost to Arab nationalism elsewhere in the Middle East at the time. Iraq had been, since the late 1930s, the home of a new brand of militant Arab nationalism which sought both to thwart plans to create a Jewish homeland in Palestine and to build a new, unified Arab state from the detritus left by the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
Had Great Britain been defeated in Iraq, its hold on both Palestine and Egypt - both physical and political - would have been weakened and thus her ability to defend these strategically sensitive countries from simultaneous external and internal threats would have been much more difficult. Palestine had already suffered the Arab Revolt between 1936 and 1939, and there were plenty of nationalists in Egypt willing and prepared to rise up against the British. Because of this, the region was vulnerable to Axis propaganda and influence. The loss of Iraq, with Rommel attacking Egypt from the west, might have proved enough to eject the British from Egypt altogether, with all the implications this would have meant for the loss to the Allies of the Suez Canal."
British propaganda in turn focused on securing Iraq against Nazi incursion, positioning local Arab resistance as pro-Nazi and deserving of enemy status during the Great Crusade of the Second World War. While it is certainly true that Arab nationalists aligned themselves with Hitler, we should perhaps take a moment to wonder how life in Iraq could have become so dismal as to suggest to Iraqis that allegiance to the Nazi regime was preferable to another year of British rule.
Thanks to the frank pride much of British historiography takes in imperial ambition, Western readers are able to swallow this historical reality without too much difficulty. Although the cruelty of the British occupation is often smoothed over, replaced as it has been in the public imagination with images of Nazi cruelty, it is difficult to find any alternative history - the British created Iraq and used it for oil while ignoring the welfare of its people.
It's another story altogether when it comes to convincing a Western audience that this is par for the course when it comes to international relations, and that America has and continues to operate with much of the same economic imperative. While the American experience is especially multifarious thanks to an ever-changing executive branch and the clique-like machinations of the various bureaus and agencies which animate foreign policy, it is still the case that domination through warfare is often primarily rooted in economics.
As a case in point the Vietnam War is often presented, as it is in Ken Burns' recent documentary, as a situation wherein a bumbling American titan unintentionally decimates the country of Vietnam with "the best of intentions". Much like the British always ensure their enemies are painted over as tyrants or Nazis, the pageantry of American goodwill remains effective even after such propaganda is debunked in the public eye.
The infamous and widely reported RAND report, put together at the request of Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara with the goal of illuminating how it was that America became involved in Vietnam, opens with concerns about the Japanese. A chief concern is the apparent Japanese intention to subjugate newly conquered colonial states with military force, presenting at once a reasonable aversion for violence - supposing that Japanese material requirements would be best met, surely, by peaceable requisition rather than by production at the point of a bayonet. On the other hand there are hints in these internal diplomatic cables as to why such a peaceful occupation was desired. That is, the American position was to be that occupation was acceptable, so long as it was not violent - presumably a violent regime of open extraction would not be amenable to the safe passage of foreign merchants.
Secretary of State Cordell Hull sent a message to Sumner Welles, an American diplomat, directing him to meet with the Japanese ambassador and to convey the following:
"Make clear the fact that the occupation of Indochina by Japan possibly means one further important step to seizing control of the South Sea area, including trade routes of supreme importance to the United States controlling such products as rubber, tin and other commodities. This was of vital concern to the United States. The Secretary said that if we did not bring out this point our people will not understand the significance of this movement into Indochina."
The rest of the message directs Welles to make it clear that the United States would see the military investment of Indochina as the creation of a staging area, implying that the Japanese intended to use Indochina as a base from which to invade even more colonial countries in the region.
This is both an understanding on the part of the Americans that the Japanese indeed intended to pursue a strategy of invasion rather than diplomacy to secure the resources it needed, but also manages to conflate a want for peace with a more austere recognition that peace is a chief ingredient for American export. Not only was Japan signaling that it would now own Indochina, but it was not clear what this meant for American trade in the region. It would mean losing a position of dominance in South East Asia - and so all wider Asian maritime trade - a position it had fought for since before the turn of the century. It may not have bothered the United States so much if these Asian colonial states fell to the Japanese, torn from the clutches of the Dutch, French, and British, so long as the continuance of American business was assured.
By 1942 the Japanese had conquered every source of rubber in Asia except for Ceylon, modern Sri Lanka. Over 90% of the global rubber supply had been lost. Although rubber had originated in South America and had been primarily produced by Brazil, the British transported seeds to British Malaya and Ceylon, the French operated plantations in Indochina and the Dutch in Indonesia.
By the 1930s about half of the world's rubber production was originating in Southeast Asia, along with most coffee and tobacco production. Roughly 70% of Dutch capital was tied up in Indonesia, and half of the plantation crops were rubber trees. The rubber industry grew with the automotive industry, as did oil, and every powerful nation on earth understood that not only their civilian economies depended on these resources, but so did the creation and maintenance of motorized land forces, modern navies, and air forces.
Robert McNamara serves as a focal point for the surprisingly malleable nature of explanations for the Vietnam War. When McNamara was subpoenaed in a libel case directed at CBS, the New York Times reported one especially curious aspect of his testimony.
"On more than 100 occasions, Mr. McNamara protested that he could not recall his opinions or those of others during the war or basic facts about the conflict. At one point he said he was unable to recall the opinions of any other major policy maker. Yet, at other points in the deposition, his memory seemed more firm."
While this inability to understand his own decision making may be genuine to some degree - after all the RAND analysis was commissioned because McNamara sought explanations for his own actions, among those of many other actors and administrations - the one stable factor in any quest to understand the Vietnam War is that of economic advantage.
The RAND analysis notes rather superficial public statements by the likes of Secretary of State Dean Acheson, such as the following given in 1950, in the middle of the French war in Indochina and five years before the Americans would commit troops.
"The recognition by the Kremlin of Ho Chi Minh's communist movement in Indochina comes as a surprise. The Soviet acknowledgment of this movement should remove any illusions as to the 'nationalist' nature of Ho Chi Minh's aims and reveals Ho in his true colors as the mortal enemy of native independence in Indochina."
Today we can look at Ho Chi Minh's connection with Moscow as a geopolitical one - Minh had approached the United States on several occasions and been ignored, perhaps purely for racist reasons and a belief at the time that Vietnam was not worth the President's attention. Minh attached himself to the other global superpower who, while supporting his movement to a degree, was both suspicious of Minh's Vietnamese nationalism and reticent to do much to help Vietnam besides sending some material support via shipping and lending the aid of military advisors. This was the kind of aid that the United States would itself lend to countless states without necessarily offering overt political support for decades - but which was broadcast by Acheson as something close to mind control of the Vietnamese nationalist movement by the Communist Party in Moscow.
Elsewhere in the RAND report it seems the Americans clearly understood that while Ho Chi Minh's Viet Minh movement had succeeded in uniting the majority of the Vietnamese people, the American alternative figurehead, Ngo Dinh Diem, was nothing if not an overt American puppet with little popular support. Describing the situation in 1955 as the Americans took over the occupation of Vietnam from the French the RAND analysis describes a rather cynical state of affairs.
"... the political controversy over Diem was less easily resolved. Diem exacerbated matters with increasingly vehement stricture against the French and Bao Dai. The United States on its part was insensitive to the impact within France of Diem's militant anti-communism -frequently directed at the French Left - and of the rancor aroused by U.S. statements portraying America as the only friend of Vietnamese nationalism.
The U.S. did alert, however, to French statements that Diem was categorically incapable of unifying Vietnamese nationalists. French advice to the U.S. that Diem should, therefore, be replaced was seconded by Ambassador Collins from Vietnam. Throughout the winter and spring, Secretary Dulles and the Department of State in general seemed disposed to consider favorably suggestions that an alternative leader for the Vietnamese be placed in power. However, despite an ostensibly thorough search, no nationalist leader with qualities competitive with Diem's was identified."
This does seem curiously reminiscent of the British strategy - find a local strongman and promote him to head of state, then proceed to rule through him while claiming local independence.
Mirroring the case of British vilification of Arab nationalists as Nazi sympathizers - allying with Hitler not as a common enemy to Britain but out of anti-Semitic and evil intentions - the United States also sought to paint China as another, perhaps oddly simultaneous with Moscow, contender for Vietnamese puppet master.