We hear a lot about the “new” imperialism these days. Indeed, it’s become somewhat of an intellectual fad. Pundits, political commentators, and even professors have been busy debating the “new” Anglo-American empire. The one that spontaneously burst into existence sometime after 9/11, probably around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Volumes of academic verbiage along with pages of distilled analytical wisdom are poured into efforts to try and understand whether this “new” empire is good or bad for the world. Occasionally, we get a little bit of criticism of the failures of Bush and his neoconservative ideologues. Consistently left out of the debate is, of course, the existence of an overwhelmingly enormous Elephant occupying the Living Room of intellectual freedom.
What is this Elephant, and from whence does it come?
This Elephant symbolises that rather difficult subject matter known as the Brute Facts of History, the absence of which is what permits mainstream commentators to pontificate endlessly in a manner that serves not to illuminate, but to obscure.
Ignoring the Brute Facts of History, unfortunately, is integral to Western political culture. It permits a war for oil and power based on genocide to be paraded as exporting democracy and protecting security; it allows the systematization and globalization of mass death to be legitimized as necessary violence in the service of life itself. Western political culture survives on such methods of misinformation. For suppressing History is precisely how Western imperial power legitimizes its violence.
It is this systematic incapability to practice serious, sustained self-critique and self-reflection that prevents our societies from envisioning what we have been doing in Iraq as it truly is. For what we have perpetrated, and continue to perpetrate, is no less than a protracted 90-year Holocaust. The term “Holocaust” is not used loosely here, but in its full import. Its aptness emerges self-evidently from a brief inspection of the Brute Facts of History. It reveals that our political culture is utterly morally bankrupt, if not pathologically narcissistic; our political party system is hopelessly corrupt and irrelevant, thoroughly complicit in the sponsorship of a century or more of imperial genocide, yet still enamoured of its own “civilized” stature; our mass media, equally bankrupt, narcissistic, corrupt and indeed in many ways irrelevant as far as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights are genuinely concerned.
For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood.
A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. Throughout this 90 year period, American, British and other Western states have facilitated, sponsored, commissioned and participated in acts of genocidal violence against the Iraqi people. Yet this brutal, shocking history, so overwhelming, so integral to the fundamental interests of Western power in one of the world’s most strategic regions (the Middle East) is simply not part of the historical consciousness of our societies. It is not part of our self-identity. Because our governments don’t do such things. We are, of course, “civilized.”
With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that were genocidal. If this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations. We will proceed by dividing the Iraqi Holocaust into four major historical phases, which we discuss in chronological order.
Phase 1 – The “Arab Façade”
Shortly after the First World War, a number of European powers including England turned their eyes toward the Middle East, with a view to weaken the regional hegemony of Ottoman Turkey, the Muslim caliphate for four centuries. The region encompassed by the Ottoman caliphate included the areas of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and much of Saudi Arabia. Amidst a plethora of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and even religious differences, Islam provided the basis of political unity sustaining the caliphate. [Aburish, Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Indigo, London, 1998] The Ottomans were hardly saints, and had their own fair share of violence and repression. Among other things, they were complicit in the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide.
Yet that doesn’t absolve the British for what they planned and did in the Middle East, which has now amounted to the continuation of relations of violence and even genocide. British officers in the Arab Bureau in Cairo improvised plans to sponsor local uprisings. According to Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, British aims were explicitly to divide, and thus weaken, the Arabs, not unify them. Despite public overtures of support for Arab unity and independence, the British secretly signed the 1916 Sykes-Pikot Agreement with France, which made official the task of controlling Middle East oil by exploiting internal divisions. Under the Agreement, Iraq was to be carved-up between France and Britain. Thus, Britain invaded southern Iraq as soon as war with the Ottomans had been declared, taking Baghdad in 1917, and Mosul in November 1918. Iraq was not the only innovation. British, French, American and other European manoeuvres saw the creation of twelve new fictional Middle East nation-states from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The contents of the Sykes-Pikot agreement were revealed in 1921 when the Bolsheviks retrieved a copy. Oil was, of course, a major factor in its formulation, as was officially recognised in the 1920 San Remo Treaty, and in the illegal 1928 Red Line Agreement, involving the British and French sharing of the oil wealth of former Turkish territories originally under Ottoman rule. Here, percentages of future oil production were allocated to British, French and American oil companies. [Aburish, ibid.]
In the aftermath of the war, what remained of the Ottoman empire was divided among the colonial powers in the mandate system established under the League of Nations, by which formerly Ottoman territories were to be governed by the European powers to guide them toward self-government. Britain managed to obtain the mandate for Iraq, even threatening war to keep the oil-rich Mosul province in the country. The announcement of British mandate rule in Iraq in 1920 led to widespread indigenous revolts, which were ruthlessly suppressed by British forces. That year, then Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill, proposed that Mesopotamia “could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.” His proposal was formally adopted the next year at the Cairo conference, and Iraqi villages were bombed from the air. [Edward Greer, ‘The Hidden History of the Iraq War,’ Monthly Review, May 1991]
Subsequently, emir Faysal I – who belonged to the Hashemite family of Mecca – was appointed by the British High Commissioner as the King of Iraq. Faysal immediately signed a treaty of alliance with Britain that virtually re-instated the British mandate. To counter the widespread nationalist protests to this continuation of colonial rule by proxy, the British High Commissioner forcefully deported nationalist leaders, while establishing an Iraqi constitution granting King Faysal dictatorial powers over the Iraqi parliament. Iraqi popular unrest, however, was intolerable enough to make this state of affairs increasingly unsustainable, forcing Britain to grant Iraq formal independence in 1932 as part of the process of decolonisation. The gesture, however, was only token. Britain had already signed a new treaty with Iraq establishing a “close alliance” between the two countries and a “common defence position.” With King Faysal still in charge and British bases remaining in Basra and west of the Euphrates, British rule was rehabilitated in an indirect form. When elements of the Iraqi army and political parties toppled King Faysal in 1941, Britain invaded and occupied Iraq again to re-install him.
This policy in Iraq — which included both the colonial phase of direct rule and the transition to effective indirect rule under decolonisation — was candidly described by Lord George Curzon, then British Foreign Secretary, who noted that what the UK and other Western powers desired in the Middle East was an:
“Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff…. There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.” [William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1982, p. 28, 34]
Lord Curzon had defined in explicit terms the regional framework of political order as a network of surrogate client-regimes. Hence, in attempting to ensure that these client-regimes remain fundamentally compliant with the overall parameters of “British guidance”, regional policy was designed to sustain their internal stability at all costs. As the global hegemony of the British empire faded, virtually eclipsed after the Second World War by the United States, the same policy was pursued. As one US State Department official stated in 1958: “Western efforts should be directed at… the gradual development and modernisation of the Persian Gulf shaikhdoms without imperiling internal stability or the fundamental authority of the ruling groups.” And similarly, the US National Security Council noted in 1958: “Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries.” [Curtis, Mark, The Great Deception, (London: Pluto) p. 147, 127] Yet a further secret British document from the same year concurs, detailing other relevant strategic considerations:
“The major British and other Western interests in the Persian Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued availability of that oil on favourable terms and for surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism in the area and subsequently to defend the area against the brand of Arab nationalism.” [File FO 371/132 779. ‘Future Policy in the Persian Gulf’, 15 January 1958, FO 371/132 778. Cited in Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)]
Phase 2 – Our “Policeman”
The period after the Second World War saw renewed imperial overtures from both Britain and the United States to regain hegemony over Iraq. After taking power in 1958, Iraqi president Abdul Qarim Qassem was tolerated by the Eisenhower administration as a counter to the pan-Arab nationalist aspirations of Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. [Roger Morris, ‘A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,’ New York Times, 14 March 2003] But by 1961, he challenged US-led Western interests again by nationalising part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company. He also declared that Iraq had a legitimate historical claim to the oil-rich Western client regime Kuwait. [Aburish, op. cit.]
He thus became “regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.” Consequently, plans were laid to overthrow him enlisting the assistance of Iraqi elements hostile to Kassim’s administration, with the CIA at the helm.” In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshalled opponents of the Iraqi regime,” notes the NY Times. “Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents.” Former Ba’athist leader Hani Fkaiki has confirmed that Saddam Hussein – then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after attempting to assassinate Kassim in 1958 – was colluding with the CIA at this time. [Aburish, op. cit.]
Aburish collects together official documents and testimony showing that the CIA had even supplied the lists of people to be eliminated once power was secured. Approximately 5,000 people were killed in the 1963 coup, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors, resulting in the decimation of much of the country’s educated class. Iraqi exiles such as Saddam assisted in the compilation of the lists in CIA stations throughout the Middle East. The longest list, however, was produced by an American intelligence agent, William McHale. None were spared from the subsequent butchery, including pregnant women and elderly men. Some were tortured in front of their children. Saddam himself “had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors [and] was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.” [Aburish, op. cit.]
US intelligence was integrally involved in planning the details of the operation. According to the CIA’s royal collaborator: “Many meetings were held between the Ba’ath party and American intelligence – the most critical ones in Kuwait.” Although Saddam’s Ba’ath party was then only a minor nationalist movement, the party was chosen by the CIA due to the group’s close relations with the Iraqi army. Aburish reports that the Ba’ath party leaders had agreed to “undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies” in return for CIA support. He cites one Ba’ath party leader, Hani Fkaiki, confessing that the principal orchestrator of the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad. [Aburish]
In 1968, another coup granted Ba’athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr control of Iraq, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. The violent coup was also supported by the CIA. Roger Morris, formerly of the US National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, recalls that he had “often heard CIA officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.” [Morris] Thus, two gruesome CIA military coups brought the genocidal Ba’ath party, and with it Saddam Hussein, to power, in order to protect US strategic and economic interests.
Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these Anglo-American interventions and occupations. Using United Nations data and the concept of “excess mortality” – “the difference between actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics” — Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself obtained power [Gideon Polya, “Iraq Death Toll Amounts to a Holocaust”, Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43); Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne: LaTrobe, 2007)]
Western sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, now well-documented, continued through to the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. During that period, funds and technologies supplied by the US, Britain, France, to name only three major powers, served to support Saddam during his war with Iran (1980-88) — killing 1.7 million people on both sides; and his internal repression such as the genocidal Anfal campaign (1987-89) against the Kurds — killing 100,000 people including the gassing of 5,000 at the village of Halabja in 1988. Although the US Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the Anfal atrocities, the Reagan administration pressured the House of Representatives to block the bill. In 1989, a year after the attacks, the US government doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to Saddam to more than US$1 billion. A declassified National Security directive issued by then President Bush Snr. in October that year prioritised the provision of funds and technology to Saddam’s regime, describing it as the “West’s policeman in the region.” The international community, in other words, under US leadership, was complicit in Saddam’s acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing [Anthony Burke, “Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering”, Global Change, Peace & Security (June 2005, Vol 17, No 2) p. 206; Curtis, p. 129]
Phase 3 – “Paying the Price”
Finally, of course, we have the scale of deaths resulting from direct Western interventions in the post-1991 period until today. According to a demographic study by Beth Daponte, formerly of the US Commerce Department’s Census Bureau of Foreign Countries, Iraqi deaths due to the 1991 Gulf War totalled 205,500. Out of these, 148,000 civilians were killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the war, including due to adverse health effects resulting from the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure during the Allied bombing campaign. [Beth Osborne Daponte, “A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War” Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (1993)]
1991 is also the year in which the Allies imposed via the United Nations comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq, purportedly to prevent Saddam’s access to weapons of mass destruction, but which tended to entrench the power of his regime while fatally depriving the Iraqi people of essential items to survive. Thus, from 1991 to 2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children. In fact, officials had occasionally acknowledged that the Iraqi population was the primary target of the sanctions regime, a means of waging protracted war on Saddam. “Iraqis will pay the price while [Saddam] is in power”, warned Robert Gates, then presidential national security adviser and current Defense Secretary [Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)]
Arguments that the UN sanctions regime constituted a form of genocide are supported by multiple United Nations officials who were directly involved in the administration of the regime, such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Hans von Sponeck, former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Generally, the argument has pointed not only at the immense scale, in terms of numbers of people who have died due to the sanctions, but has also highlighted direct evidence of Western intent at senior levels, by proving that officials responsible for sanctions policies were fully cognizant of their impact in the deaths of Iraqi civilians [George E. Bisharat, “Sanctions as Genocide,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2001, Vol. 11, No. 2) pp. 379-425; Thomas Nagy, “The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others”, Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Minnesota, 12 July 2001)
Phase 4 – Exporting Democracy
Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War. Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the epidemiological study by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures, which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry’s figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser described the survey’s methods as “close to best practice” and its results “robust”, advising ministers not to criticise the study in public. [Paul Reynolds, “Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates”, BBC News (20 October 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6045112.stm; Owen Bennett-Jones, “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’” BBC News (26 March 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm].
Indeed, Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005. Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the invasion. [Tina Susman, “Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million”, Los Angeles Times (14 September 2007)] The ORB findings tally with those of the John Hopkins team, whose data-set, according to independent experts such as Australian biochemist Dr. Gideon Polya, calculated for a year later confirms at least one million post-2003 Iraqi deaths due to the war.
These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to 3 million people.
Hand on his heart, Tony Blair told the world before his resignation that he “believed” what he did in Iraq was “right”. I’m sure he did. No doubt, so did Hitler with regard to his exterminatory campaigns in Europe.
We may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial power are doing in Iraq is right. But the truth is that some of the worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly believed that what they were doing was right. What is worse is that the Iraqi Holocaust is only the tip of the iceberg, a mere fragment of the imperial violence that has been, and is being, committed throughout the world, in our name.
If we have any semblance of humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile, at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our most urgent task must be to find ways to challenge and oppose this global system, which has expanded not only during the era of traditional modern “colonization” but even moreso in the era of postmodern “globalization”, systematically generating genocidal violence against hundreds of millions of people across the South; and systematically finding ways to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary… for us to live, breathe and prosper.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society, 2003) and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (www.globalcrisis.org.uk) in London. He teaches globalisation, empire and international relations at Brunel and Sussex Universities in the UK.
We hear a lot about the “new” imperialism these days. Indeed, it’s become somewhat of an intellectual fad. Pundits, political commentators, and even professors have been busy debating the “new” Anglo-American empire. The one that spontaneously burst into existence sometime after 9/11, probably around the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Volumes of academic verbiage along with pages of distilled analytical wisdom are poured into efforts to try and understand whether this “new” empire is good or bad for the world. Occasionally, we get a little bit of criticism of the failures of Bush and his neoconservative ideologues. Consistently left out of the debate is, of course, the existence of an overwhelmingly enormous Elephant occupying the Living Room of intellectual freedom.
What is this Elephant, and from whence does it come?
This Elephant symbolises that rather difficult subject matter known as the Brute Facts of History, the absence of which is what permits mainstream commentators to pontificate endlessly in a manner that serves not to illuminate, but to obscure.
Ignoring the Brute Facts of History, unfortunately, is integral to Western political culture. It permits a war for oil and power based on genocide to be paraded as exporting democracy and protecting security; it allows the systematization and globalization of mass death to be legitimized as necessary violence in the service of life itself. Western political culture survives on such methods of misinformation. For suppressing History is precisely how Western imperial power legitimizes its violence.
It is this systematic incapability to practice serious, sustained self-critique and self-reflection that prevents our societies from envisioning what we have been doing in Iraq as it truly is. For what we have perpetrated, and continue to perpetrate, is no less than a protracted 90-year Holocaust. The term “Holocaust” is not used loosely here, but in its full import. Its aptness emerges self-evidently from a brief inspection of the Brute Facts of History. It reveals that our political culture is utterly morally bankrupt, if not pathologically narcissistic; our political party system is hopelessly corrupt and irrelevant, thoroughly complicit in the sponsorship of a century or more of imperial genocide, yet still enamoured of its own “civilized” stature; our mass media, equally bankrupt, narcissistic, corrupt and indeed in many ways irrelevant as far as democracy, the rule of law, and human rights are genuinely concerned.
For the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq was by no means the beginning of the Anglo-American imperial turn. On the contrary, the 2003 Iraq War constituted merely a new phase in a series of prolonged regional interventions from which the 2003 trajectory of Anglo-American power cannot be abstracted if it is to be fully understood.
A broader historical perspective permits us to conceive the 2003 Iraq War as only the end-point of a continuum of genocidal catastrophe wrought by British interventionism, beginning early in the twentieth century. The British state has conducted military interventions in Iraq on and off for 90 years or so, continuing to do so under the leadership of the United States since 1991. Throughout this 90 year period, American, British and other Western states have facilitated, sponsored, commissioned and participated in acts of genocidal violence against the Iraqi people. Yet this brutal, shocking history, so overwhelming, so integral to the fundamental interests of Western power in one of the world’s most strategic regions (the Middle East) is simply not part of the historical consciousness of our societies. It is not part of our self-identity. Because our governments don’t do such things. We are, of course, “civilized.”
With this in mind, we will begin by reviewing Western engagement with Iraq as a continuous historical process consisting of considerable instances of systematic imperial violence, which frequently included episodes that were genocidal. If this argument is accurate in highlighting 1) the continuity of imperial relations between the early twentieth and twenty-first centuries 2) the potentially genocidal impact of Anglo-American military and social policies in Iraq; then we have established the case for a fundamental re-think of our understanding of contemporary international relations. We will proceed by dividing the Iraqi Holocaust into four major historical phases, which we discuss in chronological order.
Phase 1 – The “Arab Façade”
Shortly after the First World War, a number of European powers including England turned their eyes toward the Middle East, with a view to weaken the regional hegemony of Ottoman Turkey, the Muslim caliphate for four centuries. The region encompassed by the Ottoman caliphate included the areas of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, Jordan and much of Saudi Arabia. Amidst a plethora of ethnic, linguistic, cultural and even religious differences, Islam provided the basis of political unity sustaining the caliphate. [Aburish, Said K., A Brutal Friendship: The West and the Arab Elite, Indigo, London, 1998] The Ottomans were hardly saints, and had their own fair share of violence and repression. Among other things, they were complicit in the 1915-17 Armenian Genocide.
Yet that doesn’t absolve the British for what they planned and did in the Middle East, which has now amounted to the continuation of relations of violence and even genocide. British officers in the Arab Bureau in Cairo improvised plans to sponsor local uprisings. According to Sir Arthur Hirtzel of the India Office, British aims were explicitly to divide, and thus weaken, the Arabs, not unify them. Despite public overtures of support for Arab unity and independence, the British secretly signed the 1916 Sykes-Pikot Agreement with France, which made official the task of controlling Middle East oil by exploiting internal divisions. Under the Agreement, Iraq was to be carved-up between France and Britain. Thus, Britain invaded southern Iraq as soon as war with the Ottomans had been declared, taking Baghdad in 1917, and Mosul in November 1918. Iraq was not the only innovation. British, French, American and other European manoeuvres saw the creation of twelve new fictional Middle East nation-states from the ashes of the Ottoman empire. The contents of the Sykes-Pikot agreement were revealed in 1921 when the Bolsheviks retrieved a copy. Oil was, of course, a major factor in its formulation, as was officially recognised in the 1920 San Remo Treaty, and in the illegal 1928 Red Line Agreement, involving the British and French sharing of the oil wealth of former Turkish territories originally under Ottoman rule. Here, percentages of future oil production were allocated to British, French and American oil companies. [Aburish, ibid.]
In the aftermath of the war, what remained of the Ottoman empire was divided among the colonial powers in the mandate system established under the League of Nations, by which formerly Ottoman territories were to be governed by the European powers to guide them toward self-government. Britain managed to obtain the mandate for Iraq, even threatening war to keep the oil-rich Mosul province in the country. The announcement of British mandate rule in Iraq in 1920 led to widespread indigenous revolts, which were ruthlessly suppressed by British forces. That year, then Secretary of State for War and Air, Winston Churchill, proposed that Mesopotamia “could be cheaply policed by aircraft armed with gas bombs, supported by as few as 4,000 British and 10,000 Indian troops.” His proposal was formally adopted the next year at the Cairo conference, and Iraqi villages were bombed from the air. [Edward Greer, ‘The Hidden History of the Iraq War,’ Monthly Review, May 1991]
Subsequently, emir Faysal I – who belonged to the Hashemite family of Mecca – was appointed by the British High Commissioner as the King of Iraq. Faysal immediately signed a treaty of alliance with Britain that virtually re-instated the British mandate. To counter the widespread nationalist protests to this continuation of colonial rule by proxy, the British High Commissioner forcefully deported nationalist leaders, while establishing an Iraqi constitution granting King Faysal dictatorial powers over the Iraqi parliament. Iraqi popular unrest, however, was intolerable enough to make this state of affairs increasingly unsustainable, forcing Britain to grant Iraq formal independence in 1932 as part of the process of decolonisation. The gesture, however, was only token. Britain had already signed a new treaty with Iraq establishing a “close alliance” between the two countries and a “common defence position.” With King Faysal still in charge and British bases remaining in Basra and west of the Euphrates, British rule was rehabilitated in an indirect form. When elements of the Iraqi army and political parties toppled King Faysal in 1941, Britain invaded and occupied Iraq again to re-install him.
This policy in Iraq — which included both the colonial phase of direct rule and the transition to effective indirect rule under decolonisation — was candidly described by Lord George Curzon, then British Foreign Secretary, who noted that what the UK and other Western powers desired in the Middle East was an:
“Arab facade ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff…. There should be no actual incorporation of the conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but the absorption may be veiled by such constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer state and so on.” [William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930, Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 1982, p. 28, 34]
Lord Curzon had defined in explicit terms the regional framework of political order as a network of surrogate client-regimes. Hence, in attempting to ensure that these client-regimes remain fundamentally compliant with the overall parameters of “British guidance”, regional policy was designed to sustain their internal stability at all costs. As the global hegemony of the British empire faded, virtually eclipsed after the Second World War by the United States, the same policy was pursued. As one US State Department official stated in 1958: “Western efforts should be directed at… the gradual development and modernisation of the Persian Gulf shaikhdoms without imperiling internal stability or the fundamental authority of the ruling groups.” And similarly, the US National Security Council noted in 1958: “Our economic and cultural interests in the area have led not unnaturally to close US relations with elements in the Arab world whose primary interest lies in the maintenance of relations with the West and the status quo in their countries.” [Curtis, Mark, The Great Deception, (London: Pluto) p. 147, 127] Yet a further secret British document from the same year concurs, detailing other relevant strategic considerations:
“The major British and other Western interests in the Persian Gulf [are] (a) to ensure free access for Britain and other Western countries to oil produced in States bordering the Gulf; (b) to ensure the continued availability of that oil on favourable terms and for surplus revenues of Kuwait; (c) to bar the spread of Communism and pseudo-Communism in the area and subsequently to defend the area against the brand of Arab nationalism.” [File FO 371/132 779. ‘Future Policy in the Persian Gulf’, 15 January 1958, FO 371/132 778. Cited in Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)]
Phase 2 – Our “Policeman”
The period after the Second World War saw renewed imperial overtures from both Britain and the United States to regain hegemony over Iraq. After taking power in 1958, Iraqi president Abdul Qarim Qassem was tolerated by the Eisenhower administration as a counter to the pan-Arab nationalist aspirations of Gamal Abdul Nasser of Egypt. [Roger Morris, ‘A Tyrant 40 Years in the Making,’ New York Times, 14 March 2003] But by 1961, he challenged US-led Western interests again by nationalising part of the concession of the British-controlled Iraq Petroleum company. He also declared that Iraq had a legitimate historical claim to the oil-rich Western client regime Kuwait. [Aburish, op. cit.]
He thus became “regarded by Washington as a dangerous leader who must be removed.” Consequently, plans were laid to overthrow him enlisting the assistance of Iraqi elements hostile to Kassim’s administration, with the CIA at the helm.” In Cairo, Damascus, Tehran and Baghdad, American agents marshalled opponents of the Iraqi regime,” notes the NY Times. “Washington set up a base of operations in Kuwait, intercepting Iraqi communications and radioing orders to rebels. The United States armed Kurdish insurgents.” Former Ba’athist leader Hani Fkaiki has confirmed that Saddam Hussein – then a 25-year-old who had fled to Cairo after attempting to assassinate Kassim in 1958 – was colluding with the CIA at this time. [Aburish, op. cit.]
Aburish collects together official documents and testimony showing that the CIA had even supplied the lists of people to be eliminated once power was secured. Approximately 5,000 people were killed in the 1963 coup, including doctors, teachers, lawyers, and professors, resulting in the decimation of much of the country’s educated class. Iraqi exiles such as Saddam assisted in the compilation of the lists in CIA stations throughout the Middle East. The longest list, however, was produced by an American intelligence agent, William McHale. None were spared from the subsequent butchery, including pregnant women and elderly men. Some were tortured in front of their children. Saddam himself “had rushed back to Iraq from exile in Cairo to join the victors [and] was personally involved in the torture of leftists in the separate detention centres for fellaheen [peasants] and the Muthaqafeen or educated classes.” [Aburish, op. cit.]
US intelligence was integrally involved in planning the details of the operation. According to the CIA’s royal collaborator: “Many meetings were held between the Ba’ath party and American intelligence – the most critical ones in Kuwait.” Although Saddam’s Ba’ath party was then only a minor nationalist movement, the party was chosen by the CIA due to the group’s close relations with the Iraqi army. Aburish reports that the Ba’ath party leaders had agreed to “undertake a cleansing programme to get rid of the communists and their leftist allies” in return for CIA support. He cites one Ba’ath party leader, Hani Fkaiki, confessing that the principal orchestrator of the coup was William Lakeland, the US assistant military attache in Baghdad. [Aburish]
In 1968, another coup granted Ba’athist general Ahmed Hassan al-Bakr control of Iraq, bringing to the threshold of power his kinsman, Saddam Hussein. The violent coup was also supported by the CIA. Roger Morris, formerly of the US National Security Council under Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon in the late 1960s, recalls that he had “often heard CIA officers — including Archibald Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore Roosevelt and a ranking CIA official for the Near East and Africa at the time — speak openly about their close relations with the Iraqi Baathists.” [Morris] Thus, two gruesome CIA military coups brought the genocidal Ba’ath party, and with it Saddam Hussein, to power, in order to protect US strategic and economic interests.
Gideon Polya, a retired senior biochemist at Le Trobe University working on a scientific analysis of global mortality, has put together a staggering overview of some of most reliable estimates of the number of Iraqi civilians who have died as a consequence of the direct and indirect impact of these Anglo-American interventions and occupations. Using United Nations data and the concept of “excess mortality” – “the difference between actual deaths in a country and the deaths expected for a peaceful, decently run country with the same demographics” — Polya calculates that since 1950, 5.2 million Iraqis died during the period in which the CIA and MI6 were fostering coups, installing and re-installing dictators, until Saddam himself obtained power [Gideon Polya, “Iraq Death Toll Amounts to a Holocaust”, Australasian Science (June 2004, p. 43); Polya, Body Count: Global avoidable mortality since 1950 (Melbourne: LaTrobe, 2007)]
Western sponsorship of Saddam Hussein, now well-documented, continued through to the eve of the 1991 Gulf War. During that period, funds and technologies supplied by the US, Britain, France, to name only three major powers, served to support Saddam during his war with Iran (1980-88) — killing 1.7 million people on both sides; and his internal repression such as the genocidal Anfal campaign (1987-89) against the Kurds — killing 100,000 people including the gassing of 5,000 at the village of Halabja in 1988. Although the US Senate passed a bill to impose sanctions on Iraq for the Anfal atrocities, the Reagan administration pressured the House of Representatives to block the bill. In 1989, a year after the attacks, the US government doubled its annual Commodity Credit Corporation aid to Saddam to more than US$1 billion. A declassified National Security directive issued by then President Bush Snr. in October that year prioritised the provision of funds and technology to Saddam’s regime, describing it as the “West’s policeman in the region.” The international community, in other words, under US leadership, was complicit in Saddam’s acts of genocide and ethnic cleansing [Anthony Burke, “Iraq: Strategy’s Burnt Offering”, Global Change, Peace & Security (June 2005, Vol 17, No 2) p. 206; Curtis, p. 129]
Phase 3 – “Paying the Price”
Finally, of course, we have the scale of deaths resulting from direct Western interventions in the post-1991 period until today. According to a demographic study by Beth Daponte, formerly of the US Commerce Department’s Census Bureau of Foreign Countries, Iraqi deaths due to the 1991 Gulf War totalled 205,500. Out of these, 148,000 civilians were killed as a direct or indirect consequence of the war, including due to adverse health effects resulting from the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure during the Allied bombing campaign. [Beth Osborne Daponte, “A Case Study in Estimating Casualties from War and its Aftermath: The 1991 Persian Gulf War” Physicians for Social Responsibility Quarterly (1993)]
1991 is also the year in which the Allies imposed via the United Nations comprehensive economic sanctions on Iraq, purportedly to prevent Saddam’s access to weapons of mass destruction, but which tended to entrench the power of his regime while fatally depriving the Iraqi people of essential items to survive. Thus, from 1991 to 2002 under the Anglo-American imposed UN sanctions regime, UN data confirms a death toll of 1.7 million Iraqi civilians, half of whom were children. In fact, officials had occasionally acknowledged that the Iraqi population was the primary target of the sanctions regime, a means of waging protracted war on Saddam. “Iraqis will pay the price while [Saddam] is in power”, warned Robert Gates, then presidential national security adviser and current Defense Secretary [Nafeez Ahmed, Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society/Clairview, 2003)]
Arguments that the UN sanctions regime constituted a form of genocide are supported by multiple United Nations officials who were directly involved in the administration of the regime, such as Dennis Halliday, former UN Assistant Secretary-General; and Hans von Sponeck, former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq. Generally, the argument has pointed not only at the immense scale, in terms of numbers of people who have died due to the sanctions, but has also highlighted direct evidence of Western intent at senior levels, by proving that officials responsible for sanctions policies were fully cognizant of their impact in the deaths of Iraqi civilians [George E. Bisharat, “Sanctions as Genocide,” Transnational Law & Contemporary Problems (2001, Vol. 11, No. 2) pp. 379-425; Thomas Nagy, “The Role of ‘Iraq Water Treatment Vulnerabilities’ in Halting One Genocide and Preventing Others”, Association of Genocide Scholars (University of Minnesota, 12 July 2001)
Phase 4 – Exporting Democracy
Then we have the death toll of Iraqi civilians in the 2003 Gulf War. Of the several credible academic studies of civilian deaths in Iraq in the post-2003 invasion period, the most rigorous was the epidemiological study by John Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health, which estimated 655,000 excess Iraqi civilian deaths due to the war. Although the study employed standard statistical methods widely used in the scientific community, critics argued that the numbers of bodies being discovered did not match Lancet figures, which were more than 5 times greater than the Iraqi health ministry’s figures. Yet even the Ministry of Defence’s chief scientific adviser described the survey’s methods as “close to best practice” and its results “robust”, advising ministers not to criticise the study in public. [Paul Reynolds, “Huge gaps between Iraq death estimates”, BBC News (20 October 2006) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6045112.stm; Owen Bennett-Jones, “Iraqi deaths survey ‘was robust’” BBC News (26 March 2007) http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/6495753.stm].
Indeed, Lancet’s figures could be empirically verified if journalists visited several locations at random in Iraq and discovered local reports of 4 or 5 times more deaths. This is exactly what was subsequently done by the British polling agency, Opinion Business Research (ORB), which has tracked public opinion in Iraq since 2005. Working with an Iraqi fieldwork agency, ORB conducted face-to-face interviews with a nationally representative sample of 1,720 adults aged 18 plus. Interviewees were asked how many members of their household had died as a result of the Iraq conflict since 2003. The ORB poll found that 1.2 million Iraqi civilians had been murdered since the invasion. [Tina Susman, “Poll: Civilian Death Toll in Iraq May Top 1 Million”, Los Angeles Times (14 September 2007)] The ORB findings tally with those of the John Hopkins team, whose data-set, according to independent experts such as Australian biochemist Dr. Gideon Polya, calculated for a year later confirms at least one million post-2003 Iraqi deaths due to the war.
These are staggering figures. They suggest that since 1991, the total civilian death toll in Iraq as a consequence of Anglo-American invasions, socio-economic deprivation and occupation amount to 3 million people.
Hand on his heart, Tony Blair told the world before his resignation that he “believed” what he did in Iraq was “right”. I’m sure he did. No doubt, so did Hitler with regard to his exterminatory campaigns in Europe.
We may well believe that what the Anglo-American centres of imperial power are doing in Iraq is right. But the truth is that some of the worst crimes in history were committed by people who truly believed that what they were doing was right. What is worse is that the Iraqi Holocaust is only the tip of the iceberg, a mere fragment of the imperial violence that has been, and is being, committed throughout the world, in our name.
If we have any semblance of humanity left in us as we stand and stare pathetically, immobile, at the scale of the horror our governments have wrought, then our most urgent task must be to find ways to challenge and oppose this global system, which has expanded not only during the era of traditional modern “colonization” but even moreso in the era of postmodern “globalization”, systematically generating genocidal violence against hundreds of millions of people across the South; and systematically finding ways to legitimize this violence as normal, functional, necessary… for us to live, breathe and prosper.
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed is the author of Behind the War on Terror: Western Secret Strategy and the Struggle for Iraq (New Society, 2003) and executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development (www.globalcrisis.org.uk) in London. He teaches globalisation, empire and international relations at Brunel and Sussex Universities in the UK.