Fought and Lost In 1920: Iraq War

David C. Unger, senior foreign affairs writer for The New York Times' editorial board, wrote a piece in March about the questions that should have been asked about Iraq before the invasion: 10 that policy makers should have asked before invading, 10 that they should have asked as it unfolded, and 5 that they should be asking themselves now.

One crucial point that Mr. Unger brings to our attention is the fact that Iraq was cobbled together by the British in 1917. Composed of three distinct and separate peoples, the only thing that kept it together was top-down dictatorial rule.

So a very reasonable question - asked by the State Department in it's 1200 page report was: what happens when you remove the dictatorship without adequate troops and strategies to preserve order and immediately provide improvements in people's lives?

Present day Iraq is what happens.

Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Wolfowitz - the great ignorers of history and facts - all of them in the Republican cabal had warning. They keep trying to say otherwise, but as Unger writes:

"Some of the parallels between the puncturing of Britain's delusions about Iraq in the 1920's and the rude shocks encountered by America eight decades later are so uncanny it's hard to believe nobody (not even the British) managed to learn anything useful from that earlier experience."

From an article in the March-April issue of Foreign Affairs by Joel Rayburn, an American military historian:

"In 1920, a large-scale Shiite insurgency cost the British more than 2,000 casualties, and domestic pressure to withdraw from Iraq began to build.

In the revolt's aftermath, the war hero T. E. Lawrence led a chorus of critics in the press and Parliament denouncing London's decision to continue the costly occupation.

'The people of England,' Lawrence wrote, 'have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. ... Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be too inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are to-day not far from a disaster....'"

I dare anyone to tell me that doesn't sound like an exact duplicate of the history we are making today. But that's not all. When British military commander, Maj. Gen. Stanley Maude, invaded Baghdad from the south in 1917, he proclaimed that his armies "do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors, or enemies, but as liberators."

President Bush used identical language when he addressed American troops in 2003 with: "you'll be fighting not to conquer anybody but to liberate people."

More from Mr. Unger:

"But as both occupations wore on, large numbers of Iraqis came to see it differently. By 1920 Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds were all in armed revolt against the British.

Britain used air power and other state-of-the-art weaponry to shock and awe the rebels into submission. That didn't work out quite as well as the British hoped. Rising casualties on both sides turned British opinion against the war, and British officials started churning out deliberately over-optimistic reports boasting of progress in political development, stability and training of Iraqi security forces that became increasingly detached from the disappointing realities."

The British who study their nation's history must be experiencing the phenomena of deja vu.

And all those oh-so-bright neo-con con-men who sold us on this war are turning out to be pretty dumb and uninformed after all. What happened to the British eight decades ago has happened to us now.

So what now?

Let's go to Mr. Unger's final five questions that we should be asking ourselves today:

1. Where should the United States draw the line on giving full military support to an Iraqi government that insists on being sectarian, vengeful and non-inclusive?

2. What can Washington to do to mitigate the advantages it is handing Iran by aligning itself with Iraq's most pro-Iranian parties?

3. Should Washington give up on the idea of holding Iraq together as a single nation and accept an equitable partition of territory and resources as the best remaining hope for avoiding civil war?

4. If civil war cannot be avoided, should American troops stay in Iraq and risk getting caught in the crossfire in the hope of limiting the carnage, the regional repercussions and the effects on world oil markets?

5. In the long run, would the United States be better off holding out for something it can call "peace with honor" or would it be better to cut our losses by announcing an exit strategy and brokering the best deal we can?

Before we give our opinions - which the Iraqis, as opposed to us, will have to live with - consider that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki lashed out at the American military on Thursday, denouncing what he characterized as habitual attacks by troops against Iraqi civilians.

Those of us who surf alternative news sources have come across rumbling about the looting of souvenirs by troops during house searches and incidents in which civilians in isolated places were killed "as insurgents" to reach kill military quotas.

In light of confirmation by the military that 24 Iraqi civilians were massacred by marines in the town of Haditha, such rumblings suddenly have more credibility.

If the Prime Minister is now turning against the American military, we may not have a choice in regard to whether we stay or go. All Iraqis may simply begin to wage war on American troops.

After all, according to a WPO poll, nearly half of Iraqis approve of attacks on US-led forces - including nine out of 10 Sunnis, and most Iraqis believe that many aspects of their lives will improve once our US-led forces leave.

It is time to have another referendum in Iraq. Let them vote on whether the U.S. should pull out or stay. Let them vote if they want to break up into three countries or fight each other to the death in one.

As Thomas Friedmann observes:

"...there has been a subtle but important change in the violence in Iraq. The main enemy in many places is no longer the Sunni insurgency. It is anarchy. Mini-wars of all against all. As the BBC reported Wednesday from Basra: Prime Minister Nuri Maliki 'has declared a monthlong state of emergency in Basra, which has been plagued by sectarian clashes, anarchy and factional rivalry.' That's what happens in a security vacuum.

Once this kind of militia madness takes root, it's very hard to uproot. U.S. troops can't do it, because it would require searching homes, neighborhood by neighborhood. Only a cohesive Iraqi national army could do that."

The U.S. has destroyed Iraq. There will be no peace with honor, no withdrawal with honor. We didn't go there to give them democracy, but to establish military bases, to throw the Middle-East into turmoil and destroy the whole region, thinking we would pick up the pieces in the end.

Yet, the pieces are falling from our inept hands. Jeffrey Gettleman reported in March 2006 that:

"In Sadr City, the Shiite section in Baghdad where the [four] terrorist suspects were executed, government forces have vanished. The streets are ruled by aggressive teenagers with shiny soccer jerseys and machine guns.

"They set up roadblocks and poke their heads into cars and detain whomever they want. Mosques blare warnings on loudspeakers for American troops to stay out. Increasingly, the Americans have been doing just that."

Stupid neo-cons. Stupid, arrogant neo-cons. They shouldn't be elevated to the position of dog catcher.