Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq

Of the PMC's eleven members in , four were nationals of the main mandatory powers Britain, France, Belgium, and Japan , three were nationals of other European imperial powers the Netherlands, Italy, and Portugal , all but the Japanese member were white Europeans, and all but the Scandinavian member were men. In theory, all members were appointed by the Council for their expertise and not as government representatives; in practice, most were former colonial governors or diplomats with close ties to their state's foreign policy establishment. Yet, of the members from the mandatory powers, only the former French colonial governor, Martial Merlin, acted unabashedly as his government's mouthpiece; both the British member, the famous architect of indirect rule Sir Frederick Lugard, and Belgium's Pierre Orts who had negotiated the East African boundaries with Milner in were more independent.

The legalistic Dutch member, D. Van Rees, also tended to say whatever he liked often at length , and the PMC's mercurial Italian chairman, the Marquis Theodoli, delighted in causing difficulties for the French and British officials who appeared before him. Staunch imperialists these men may have been, but they did not speak with a single voice.

For varying reasons, four members were consistently critical of the mandatory powers. Only one, the Spanish social reformer and political economy professor Leopoldo Palacios, supported self-determination on principle, but he often found a pragmatic ally in the member appointed following Germany's entry into the League, the financial expert Ludwig Kastl and after his replacement, Julius Ruppel.

As director of the Mandates Section from through , Rappard had fought hard, sometimes even against Secretary-General Drummond, to bolster the Commission's authority, and when he left the Secretariat, the PMC insisted that he be appointed an extraordinary member. The Commission's sole woman member, the Norwegian school director Valentine Dannevig, often followed his lead.

This was the group that the Colonial Office would have to convince of Iraq's fitness for independence within three years.

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If it was making progress, how much was due to the British advisers present in every ministry? The PMC had seen little evidence of the Iraqi government's ability to function on its own, but enough to question its probity and character. Bourdillon handled the Commission well, pointing out that whatever Iraq's defects, it was already as independent as some other member states of the League. That hostility did not prompt any reconsideration of British policy, but nor did it lead Britain to flout the PMC.

Deeply invested in the League and aware of the institution's strong public backing, British officials never suggested going forward without its consent, instead crafting a finely calibrated strategy for managing the Commission. Officials thus fought to restrict the PMC's independent access to information, successfully opposing the proposal that the League send a fact-finding mission to judge Iraq's readiness for independence.

Such a prospect, cheerfully contemplated by Amery when the aim had been to slow independence down, was now considered out of the question.

From shock and awe to a quiet exit – US troops pull out of Iraq

What made this strategy necessary was the undiminished level of anxiety, unrest, and dissent that the prospect of Iraqi independence aroused, not only among members of the Mandates Commission but also among Iraq's minorities, other European powers, much of the British political establishment, and even some senior British officials in Baghdad and London. Flood at the Colonial Office likewise admitted. Pragmatic calculations drove them. If Britain wished to retain control of its airfields and oilfields in Iraq but was not willing to spend money and lives reoccupying the country and it was not , there was no other choice.

This strategy was successful, enabling Britain to retain a low-cost hegemonic position in Iraq for another dozen years. Yet the campaign for Iraq's admission to the League also fostered an important and consequential debate, one that spilled beyond the Mandates Commission, about the nature of independence and sovereignty in a post-Wilsonian but not yet post-imperial world. The PMC and other participants in that debate could not force the British to stay in Iraq; they could, however, criticize the nature of the independence on offer and articulate other visions or norms. By doing so, they not only exposed the shifting relations between internationalism and imperialism in this period but also to a degree affected those relations.

Two issues—whether that independence was a kind of imperialism in disguise and whether Iraqi nation-building would threaten non-Arab populations—dominated.

The historical record would give an affirmative answer to both questions, yet this definition of independence prevailed anyway, in a pragmatic bargain that gave both the imperial powers and Arab nationalists some part of what they needed. It is a sign of how anxiously the imperial powers on the Council viewed the prospect of Iraqi independence that they disagreed, insisting that the Mandates Commission be asked for its views about when a territory administered under League mandate might be considered ripe for emancipation.

At a minimum, the PMC members agreed in their final report on the subject in June , it should have a settled administration, the capacity to maintain its territorial integrity, the ability to keep internal order, adequate financial resources, and a judicial apparatus that would afford equal justice to all. This was a list of conditions that many European political theorists of the day would have endorsed.

Interestingly, however, the Commission did not stop there. For the state in question was not being freed in order to act like an unbound captive in a war of all against all. Rather, it would be admitted into a community of states, one bound by norms and practices to which it should conform. The mandates system had been set up as part of a peace settlement, Portugal's Count de Penha Garcia pointed out, and it was reasonable to insist that emancipation not disrupt that peace. The Commission's report went on to propose a list of appropriate specific guarantees. At this moment, however, any illusion that they were discussing an abstract question vanished, with debate focusing on the sticking points that had arisen over Iraq.

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The list was thus an odd mix of protections for existing European privileges such as the obligation to maintain the legal immunities granted foreigners and genuine humanitarian norms such as freedom of conscience. The PMC also suggested—in a sign of things to come—that if the mandated territory had been required to grant equal economic access to all League states as Iraq had been , it should grant those states most-favored-nation status at least for a time. This motley list bore the traces of the Iraq debates, but it bore something else, too—the fingerprints of the foreign ministries of the major European powers.

Certainly the PMC was the bearer of a genuine, if paternalistic, humanitarian sensibility that transcended nationality, but on issues of real importance to European powers, it could also serve as an arena in which to negotiate their interests. Iraqi independence—involving as it did global security and the disposition of large supplies of oil—was just such an issue.

It thus not only divided the PMC but also spilled beyond its bounds, with key discussions taking place in the League Council or among diplomats behind the scenes. Albeit for rather different reasons, Germany and Italy became heavily involved in those discussions. The German position was the most subtle, and is worth recovering.

Germany's approach to colonial questions at the League was shaped by its unusual position as not only the most powerful state on the Council without a colonial empire, but also the former sovereign of many of the territories that the Mandates Commission now oversaw. Since Germany had been stripped of those territories amid charges that it was too brutal to be trusted with colonies charges that very much still rankled , the mandatory powers expected Germany to use its position within the League to lobby relentlessly for their return.

Yet it did not do so. The German Foreign Ministry had given considerable thought to colonial policy before Germany's entry in and had come to the conclusion that any early restitution of those colonies was outside the realm of practical politics. As a result, and paradoxically, upholding League authority became an imperative: Germany could simultaneously assert its humanitarian and internationalist credentials, rebuild its economic interests in its former territories, keep alive hopes of their eventual return, and placate a vociferous domestic colonial lobby, by insisting on the sovereignty of the League and not the individual mandatory power over the mandated territories and by defending the rights of all League states to equal access to their markets.

The German position on Iraq flowed from this analysis. Grobba followed debates over Iraq within the PMC and the Council closely and developed a sophisticated understanding of just what the British were doing. In a series of memos written between and , he analyzed British policy and outlined Germany's response. Britain, he wrote, wished to retain its military and economic advantages in Iraq, but at a low cost, with Arab collaboration, and free from international oversight. As a power without an empire, Germany, too, had every interest in moving the Middle East mandates rapidly to independence; unlike Britain, however, it wished to maximize Iraq's and thus its own room to maneuver.

Thus, while Britain would make independence conditional on special military rights, and other imperial powers would likely demand economic concessions, Germany should not acquiesce: Von Schubert's statement, Grobba noted, had made a great impression in Iraq. Ludwig Kastl, the experienced economic negotiator and lobbyist whom German foreign minister Gustav Stresemann had succeeded in placing on the PMC in , kept in close touch with Grobba and faithfully represented the Foreign Ministry's views.

That is, he welcomed the prospect of Iraqi independence while raising questions about British companies' monopoly over oil concessions and about the degree of military and political control that Britain proposed to exercise over the new state. Britain did recognize Iraqi sovereignty in the Anglo-Iraq Treaty of , but at a considerable price—including the right to move troops over Iraqi soil, the continued presence of the RAF, British ownership of two airbases, the right to train and supply the Iraqi army, the continued employment of some British judges, and a phased diminution of other British staff.

The question, Palacios told one British official, was whether a new and genuinely international institution—the mandates system, under supervision of the League—was being done away with in favor of a bilateral system of protection, outside international control, by the former mandatory power. The problem was also that the German argument was appropriated by a state with different interests and goals—that is, Italy.

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What on earth were they after? In late July, Humphrys met the ambassador and got an answer: Germany and Italy thus objected to Britain's bid to preserve its military and economic hegemony in Iraq after independence, but for different reasons and toward different ends. Both states' arguments were based on a strict calculation of their own national interest, but while the Germans intervened to limit British constraints on Iraq's resources and sovereignty, the Italians did so to force Britain to share the spoils. One might say that the two states were articulating, if only partially and in embryonic form, two different international visions—the Germans of a world of formally equal sovereign states regulated largely through market competition, the Italians of a world in which the great powers among whom Italy liked to count itself would negotiate their spheres of influence and extract privileges from the more vulnerable.

Germany, unsurprisingly, recognized the use to which its arguments were being put and carefully sought to differentiate its position from Italy's. By the PMC's November session, all the cards were on the table. The majority of its members, the Colonial Office knew, remained highly skeptical of Iraq's readiness for independence, and the few that favored it were far from certain that it was on offer anyway. To the relief of the British Foreign and Colonial offices, the Commission would be asked to report merely on whether Iraq had met the conditions it had outlined in June, and not to conduct the negotiations over any special guarantees.

This task would fall to the Council, an unsentimental body that British officials could influence. True, they would probably face problems from the Italians, but thought they need go no further to meet them. Nothing is more revealing of the nature of the independence granted Iraq in than the role played by France. The Colonial Office had expected that the French would cause the most trouble, given that France had expelled Faisal from Syria and remained very sensitive about Hashemite influence there. Indeed, as the Quai d'Orsay reflected on the expense, unpopularity, and international censure generated by French behavior in Syria, Britain's Iraq policy—that of creating a cheap client state outside the realm of international scrutiny—looked increasingly attractive.

Journalists and statesmen in Geneva who had expected to hear France's Middle East expert Robert de Caix condemn Britain's policy thus found him surprisingly mild, and in June he announced to the PMC that France also planned to negotiate a treaty with Syria and then end the mandate. I f a first set of debates sparked by the Iraq proposals concerned the relationship between the new state and the international order into which it would be born, a second set dealt with its relationship to its own population. Wilsonian rhetoric saw that relationship as unproblematic.

For those who had participated in the prewar Arab awakening or joined the wartime Arab revolt, that people was the Arab people, and the imagined state was a pan-Arab polity. Yet the creation of those states only made the problem of the nation more acute. For how could such states, carved out of largely Arab and Muslim provinces but marked by sectarian divisions and with minority populations of other faiths, become a united and self-determining nation?

Decentralization, federalism, even cosmopolitanism—the tools with which empires often manage sectarian or ethnic differences—were discredited, but the national ideologies and institutions that might surmount them were only in formation.

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The invention of Iraq posed these problems in an extreme form. Sunni Arabs and Kurds mostly in the north each constituted about a further fifth, with significant groups of Jews, Christians, Turks, and Yezidis making up the rest. British guns and the emergence of the Turkish Republic shattered those visions, their defeat making the marriage of convenience that was the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq under British mandate possible.

But if Faisal's rule rested on British support and the collaboration of much the same Sunni and urban elite that had been the backbone of the Ottoman state as well, he was aware of the tenuous nature of his legitimacy. The right of inhabitants of mandatory territories to petition the League was one such process and in mandatory Iraq played an unusual and particularly significant role.

Emergent national movements notably in Palestine, Syria, and Western Samoa nonetheless tried to use petitions to protest mandatory status and call for self-determination, but such petitions were usually dismissed by the PMC as in conflict with the very system they were charged to uphold. Only the mandatory power could do so; only Britain could persuade the League of minorities' safety in a unitary Iraqi state. They faced an uphill battle, for when the provisions of the Anglo-Iraq Treaty of became public, the PMC found itself confronted by an avalanche of petitions from Iraq's Kurds and Assyrians.

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Both groups had good reason to feel betrayed. Given the Mosul Commission's recommendations, many Kurds had assumed they would be allowed to govern themselves following Iraq's emancipation; when they discovered that the Anglo-Iraq Treaty contained no such provisions, they immediately asked the League to ensure their autonomy. Ali al-Salem Air Base of the Kuwaiti Air Force was the only base still unoccupied on 3 August, and Kuwaiti aircraft flew resupply missions from Saudi Arabia throughout the day in an effort to mount a defense.

From then on it was only a matter of time until all units of the Kuwaiti Military were forced to retreat or be overrun. Kuwaitis founded a local armed resistance movement following the Iraqi occupation of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti resistance's casualty rate far exceeded that of the coalition military forces and Western hostages. At first, Iraqi forces did not use violent tactics. Iraqi soldiers instructed Kuwaitis to replace their Kuwaiti license plates with Iraqi ones, and also set up an extensive system of security checkpoints to patrol the Kuwaiti population.

People stayed home from work and school en masse. Kuwaitis also began printing informational pamphlets about the invasion from their home computers and printers and distributed the pamphlets to neighbors and friends. After that wave of nonviolent resistance, the Iraqi military turned to repression in order to maintain control over Kuwait.

Pamphlets with anti-war slogans were printed and the resistance provided hiding places and false identification cards for Kuwaitis who were sought by the Iraqi secret police. Stop the Atrocities Now. Money that was smuggled to the resistance was often used to bribe Iraqi soldiers to look the other way. By August , the resistance movement was receiving support from the U. Both the CIA and the U.

Green Berets were involved. On the topic of the resistance, President Bush stated, " I support anybody that can add a hand in restoring legitimacy there to Kuwait and to getting the Iraqis out of Kuwait. The Kuwaiti government went into exile in Taif and supported the resistance movement from there.

This was especially important because the flow of information was severely restricted in Kuwait during the occupation; radio channels played transmissions from Baghdad and many Kuwaiti TV channels were shut down. A resistance newspaper titled Sumoud al-Sha'ab Steadfastness of the People was printed and circulated in secret.

There were no Kuwaiti puppets which Iraq could use to form a Government. In October , Iraqi officials cracked down on the resistance by executing hundreds of people it suspected were involved in the movement as well as conducting raids and searches of individual households. After the crackdown, the resistance began to target Iraqi military bases in order to reduce retaliation against Kuwaiti civilians.

This resulted in an exodus of both Kuwaitis and foreigners, which weakened the resistance movement. Another crackdown occurred in January and February Iraqi forces publicly executed suspected members of the Kuwaiti resistance. Kuwaitis were kidnapped, their corpses later deposited in front of their family homes. The bodies of executed Kuwaiti resistance members showed evidence of different kinds of torture, including beating, electrical shocking, and fingernail removal. Palestinian members of the resistance sometimes disagreed with resistance tactics such as the boycott of government offices and commercial activity.

The Kuwaiti resistance movement was suspicious of this Palestinian ambivalence, and in the weeks after Iraqi forces withdrew, the Kuwaiti government cracked down on Palestinians suspected of sympathizing with the Saddam regime. Iraqi forces also arrested over two thousand Kuwaitis suspected of helping the resistance and imprisoned them in Iraq.

Many of those arrests were made during the Iraqi retreat from Kuwait in February Hundreds escaped from prisons in southern Iraq after the retreat and over one thousand were repatriated by the Iraqi government, [36] but hundreds remain missing. The fate of Kuwaitis arrested during the occupation remained unknown until , when the remains of of them were identified.

Initially, Iraq claimed it had recorded the arrests of only of the missing Kuwaitis. Iraq has made little effort to address the hundreds of missing Kuwaitis, despite trying to mend diplomatic relations with Kuwait in other ways. The resistance was a grassroots movement and leadership was organized horizontally, [42] although Sheik Salem Sabah was cited as the "nominal head of the resistance movement. The movement also protected Americans, Brits, and other foreigners trapped in Kuwait during the occupation. The families of those martyrs received material benefits from the Kuwaiti government such as cars, homes, and funding for trips to Mecca for the hajj.

Since most accounts of the liberation of Kuwait focus on U. The UN Security Council passed 12 resolutions demanding immediate withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, but to no avail. Following the events of the Iraq—Kuwait war, about half of the Kuwaiti population, [50] including , Kuwaitis and several thousand foreign nationals, fled the country. The Indian government evacuated over , overseas Indians by flying almost flights over 59 days. During the 7-month occupation, the forces of Saddam Hussein looted Kuwait's vast wealth and there were also reports of violations of human rights.

The Iraqi invasion and occupation of Kuwait was unanimously condemned by all major world powers. Such is their extreme desire to return to their homes that they naturally believe many things that are not true, and add many others on purpose, so that with what they really believe and what they say they believe, they will fill you with hopes to that degree that if you attempt to act upon them, you will incur a fruitless expense or engage in an undertaking that will involve you in ruin.

But when conditions deteriorated, U. We tend to think of the U. This lesson seems obvious: Adversaries will pursue their own interests. But the architects of the Iraq war seem to have blindly assumed that other interested parties would simply roll over and cooperate with us after a little bit of "shock and awe. Syria and Iran took various measures to strengthen anti-U. Al Qaeda also tried to exploit the post-invasion power-vacuum to go after U. Americans had every reason to be upset by these various responses, because they helped thwart our aims. But we should hardly have been surprised when these various forces did what they could to resist us.

What else would you expect? Counterinsurgency warfare is ugly and inevitably leads to war crimes, atrocities, or other forms of abuse. Another lesson from Iraq and Afghanistan is that local identities remain quite powerful and foreign occupations almost always trigger resistance, especially in cultures with a history of heavy-handed foreign interference. Accordingly, occupying powers are likely to face armed insurgencies, which in turn means organizing a counterinsurgency campaign.

Unfortunately, such campaigns are extremely hard to control, because decisive victories will be elusive, progress is usually slow, and the occupation force will have distinguishing friend from foe within the local population. And that means that sometimes our forces will go over the line, as they did in Haditha or Abu Ghraib.

No matter how much we emphasize "hearts and minds," there will inevitably be abuses that undermine our efforts. There is little question that the invasion of Iraq was abysmally planned, and the post-war occupation was badly bungled. It is therefore unsurprising that U. This goal is understandable and even laudable, but it does not necessarily follow that better pre-war planning would have produced a better result. For starters, there were extensive pre-war plans for occupying and rebuilding Iraq; the problem was that key decisionmakers e.

As Minxin Pei and Sara Kasper of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace concluded from their study of past attempts of "nation-building," "few national understakings are as complex, costly, and time-consuming as reconstructing the governing institutions of foreign societies. For example, having more troops on the ground might have prevented the collapse of order, but the U.

Morever, an even larger U. In short, as Benjamin Friedman, Harvey Sapolsky, and Christopher Preble argue here , better tools or tactics are probably not enough to make ambitious nation-building programs are smart approach.