Global Policy Forum

By Luciana Bohne *

American philosopher, John Dewey, defined "politics" as "the shadow cast by business over society." No more sinister shadow darkens the world's political stage today than the shadow cast by oil and energy puppet-masters as they reap profits "beyond the dreams of avarice"—to quote US foreign-policy planners for the Middle East some 60 years ago.

In 2003, after the invasion of Iraq predictably failed to find WMD, US deputy defense secretary Paul Wolfowitz was asked in Singapore why the US had attacked Iraq instead of North Korea with its known cache of WMD. He explained: "Let's look at it simply. The most important difference between North Korea and Iraq is that economically we just had no choice in Iraq. The country swims on a sea of oil."

But petroleum profits are not the only force driving the invasions and indirect takeovers by Western powers of the Middle East. The other force is the Middle Eastern region's "stupendous source of strategic power"—according to the same US policy makers of 60 years ago. This is the power that one economy can have over another if it controls the region where the enormous energy resources of the Middle East are expected to supply two-thirds of the world's petroleum demands for years to come. In the 1980s, for example, when the US persuaded their client-state, Saudi Arabia, to drop the price of oil per barrel to $10, the USSR economy fell apart.

And what of the people colonized in the region? They are, and always have been, incidental—"collateral damage," in one way or another. Historically, if they remained passive, they were left alone. If they resisted, they were brutally "pacified"—Palestine is a case in point.

For all their high-sounding rhetoric, colonizers traditionally cannot afford to squander democracy on their subjects. Indeed today, none of Washington's client-states known as "allies" in the region are "democracies." And this is a logical consequence of imperial control: no empire has ever been able to dominate alien territories by granting their populations democracy. In fact, what empires breed by taking over territories is resistance. People resist the theft of their resources, the impoverishment of their national industries, the exploitation of their labor for greater profit abroad, the loss of their national honor and dignity in the denigration of their culture, customs, and values by the evolving racism that always accompanies the dynamics of domination of one group of humans by another.

And when people resist, they are not left alone. They are not told, "Sorry. We came as liberators. We thought you would like some democracy, but if you want us to leave we will leave." No, what people in the outposts of empire throughout the annals of history get when they resist is not democracy but bullets. And lethal gas. And aerial bombing strikes. And mass arrests. And prison and torture. And executions. And wholesale destruction of their most cherished cultural riches: as I write, the ancient Shia city around the Imam Ali's shrine in Najaf is being turned into an open parking lot for the convenience of patrolling US Humvees. This logic of arrogance and domination is genetically implanted in imperial systems. It is, in fact, the DNA of imperialism.

Today, this historical imperial DNA is at work, as in a mirror darkly. In Iraq: anyone still believing that the United States is interested in bringing democracy to Iraq at the point of a gun had better look at the British precedent, the four decades (1917-1958) of British rule of Iraq which installed "an oligarchy of racketeers"—a carefully nurtured and protected Arab dynasty of opportunists who could be relied upon to become the trusted custodians of British Iraq.

In 1917, the British, with the help of colonial soldiers from India, took Jerusalem and Baghdad. This terminated 400 years of Ottoman/Turkish rule. Ottoman rule over the centuries had allowed the region to enjoy virtual autonomy—so long as taxes were paid to Istanbul. When Sir Harold Maude rode on his horse into Baghdad at the head of his conquering British/colonial army, he issued his paternalistic "Proclamation of Baghdad" in which he announced to the surprised and hitherto unconsulted Arab and Kurdish people their liberation from the Ottomans of the long leash. "We come as liberators, not as occupiers," the proclamation read in an echo that would ring hollow in its American version to the citizens of Baghdad in March of 2003.

With the ingratitude typical of occupied people, Iraqis rebelled with a resistance 100,000 strong. Winston Churchill placed the control of Iraq in the hands of the Royal Air Force, asking if it would be possible for the RAF to use some kind of asphyxiating bombs. Indeed, Churchill's enthusiasm for poisoned gas was total: "I do not understand this sqeamishness about the use of gas. I am strongly in favor of using gas against uncivilised tribes."

Poisoned gas, was used on Arabs and Kurds. There are still Iraqis alive who remember the terror-RAF bombings of their villages in the '20s, "sometimes they raided three times a day." RAF Wing Commander, Sir Arthur Harris, Bomber Harris of Dresden in WW II, then said, "The Arab and Kurd now know what real bombing means in casualties and damage. Within forty-five minutes, a full-size village can be practically wiped out and a third of its inhabitants killed or injured."

When the rebellion was quelled, the British looked around to find an "Arab facade" on their rule of Iraq. They selected the son of a British ally in WW I—Prince Faisal of the Hashemite dynasty, a Sunni from Arabia, and made him King of Iraq in 1927. King Faisal was succeeded in 1933 by his son, Ghazi, an anti-British nationalist, whom the British found uncooperative. He died conveniently in a car accident, strongly suspected to have been arranged by His British Majesty's government in London.

A regency then ensued: Ghazi's brother-in-law, the despised Prince Abdull-ilah, became the regent for Ghazi's young son. This feudal arrangement was supervised for the British by a bloody-minded, ambitious opportunist, the equivalent of today's imperial stooge and CIA-asset in Iraq, Iyad Allawi. His name was Nuri al-Said. As Prime Minister of Iraq, he fetched and carried for the Empire, bathing his hands in the blood of Iraqis he killed for his keep. He was executed in 1958, his body hung from a lampost in Baghdad—in what Iraqis know as their Revolution against the twin evils of British imperialism and the Hashemite monarchy.

In 1958, a core of "Free Officers" in the Iraqi army led a coup under the leadership of Brigadier Abdul-Karim Qasim, the son of a Sunni carpenter and a Shia-Kurdish mother, an accident of birth that came to symbolize in his person the united front of Iraqi national aspirations for self-rule. On 14 July 1958, the "Free Officers" declared Iraq a Republic. The spontaneous response of the people was overwhelming. In Baghdad, Basrah, Nasiryah, Kirkuk, and Mosul mass mobilizations of people in the streets were described as "overflowing rivers," "tides that engulfed," "purifying floods." The popularity of the revolution was beyond doubt. In Baghdad, over 100,000 people tore down the statue of King Faisal I and of General Sir Harold Maude, standing in front of the British Chancellery, which was set on fire. Hashemite Iraq as a dictatorship propped up by the coercive power of the British Empire came to an end.

Like the excesses of imperialism everywhere, the US invasion of Iraq will be recorded by history as a huge crime, and the end of US rule in Iraq, like British rule, will have been implicit in its criminal beginning. It won't happen without the Iraqi people's resistance and without the pressure of the people of the United States for a new and sane leadership. The dark hour of despair weighs heavily on decent people in both Iraq and the United States. It is echoed in the words of Iraqi poet Sinan Antoon, recording the US occupation in 2003:

I place my ear on the belly of this moment I hear wailing I put it on another moment —the same!"

But fear and despair do not breed the kind of fearlessness that is required to face down injustice. With Gandhi, we must remember, "[When I tend to despair,] I think that throughout history, there have been tyrants and murderers, and for a while they seemed invincible, but in the end they have always fallen. Always!"

About the Author: Luciana Bohne teaches film and literature at Edinboro University of Pennsylvania.