Doug Lorimer
In a speech to the March 2002 annual conference of the Welsh nationalist Plaid Cymru party, Elfyn Llwyd, its parliamentary leader, branded Tony Blair "George's Bush's poodle" for the British Labour PM's willingness to commit British troops to Washington's plan to invade and occupy Iraq.
Llwyd's accusation, which has since become the accepted wisdom of most anti-war activists in Britain and abroad, falsely assumes that Blair's support for the US-led invasion and occupation of Iraq was an expression of the British government subservience to US imperialism. In reality, it was an expression of British capitalist rulers' desire to further their own imperialist interests in the oil-rich Middle East, a policy that long predates the current US-led war in Iraq.
In the years leading up to World War I, with the support of the Ottoman Turks, who ruled what is Iraq today, German companies constructed rail lines from south-west Turkey to Basra. London viewed this as a challenge by its German imperialist rival to British control over the newly discovered oil fields in Mesopotamia, as Iraq was then called.
With the opening of the war, British troops invaded Mesopotamia, eventually capturing Baghdad in 1917.
In November 1920, Mesopotamia was given the name "State of Iraq" and placed under British control by the League of Nations, set up in 1919 by Britain and France to give a fig-leaf of international legitimacy to their carve up of the Ottoman Empire.
The civil government of post-war Iraq was headed originally by the British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and his deputy, Colonel Arnold Talbot Wilson.
Local rebellions against British rule had occurred even before the news reached Iraq that the country had been given only mandate status.
According to the US Library of Congress 1988 country study of Iraq, "When the news of the mandate reached Iraq in late May, a group of Iraqi delegates met with Wilson and demanded independence. Wilson dismissed them as a 'handful of ungrateful politicians'. Nationalist political activity was stepped up, and the grand mujtahid of Karbala, Imam Shirazi, and his son, Mirza Muhammad Riza, began to organize the effort in earnest. Arab flags were made and distributed, and pamphlets were handed out urging the tribes to prepare for revolt. Muhammad Riza acted as liaison among insurgents in Najaf and in Karbala, and the tribal confederations."
By July 1920, Iraq was in open revolt against the British, which restored "order" only by bringing in reinforcements from neighbouring British-dominated Persia and by extensive bombing by the Royal Air Force (RAF).
The RAF's bombing of Iraqi rebel villages included the use of poison gas. Responding to a proposal to use chemical weapons as an experiment on "recalcitrant" Arabs, Winston Churchill, then secretary for war, declared in a memo in 1919: "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes."
Ath Thawra al Iraqiyya al Kubra, or the Great Iraqi Revolution (as the 1920 rebellion is called), was a watershed event in modern Iraqi history.
As the Library of Congress study noted, "For the first time, Sunnis and Shias, tribes and cities, were brought together in a common effort. In the opinion of Hanna Batatu, author of a seminal work on Iraq, the building of a nation-state in Iraq depended upon two major factors: the integration of Shias and Sunnis into the new body politic and the successful resolution of the age-old conflicts between the tribes and the riverine cities and among the tribes themselves over the food-producing flat lands of the Tigris and the Euphrates. The 1920 rebellion brought these groups together, if only briefly; this constituted an important first step in the long and arduous process of forging a nation-state out of Iraq's conflict-ridden social structure."
In the wake of the 1920 rebellion and hoping to disguise its colonial rule over Iraq, London replaced its direct rule with a provisional Arab government subordinate to a British high commissioner. In 1921 London installed Faisal ibn Husayn as Iraq's first king and began recruiting and training a puppet Iraqi army. However, British officials were to be appointed to posts in 18 departments to act as advisers and "inspectors".
Through this mechanism, the British retained control over Iraqi political life and the country's vast oil resources until the monarchy was overthrown by a popularly backed Iraqi officer-led revolution in July 1958.
The July 14 Revolution, as it is known, permitted the formation of trade unions and dispossessed the British-controlled Iraqi Petroleum Company of 99.5% of its concessions, restricting it to areas then under production.
In 1968, the pan-Arab nationalist Baathist Party seized power, putting an end to the revolutionary mobilisations of the workers and peasants. It moved to strengthen Iraqi control over the oil industry, nationlising it in 1972. In response, Richard Nixon, then president of the US, which had replaced Britain as the dominant imperialist power, placed Iraq on a list of nations supporting "terrorism".
According to top-secret British documents declassified in January 2004, James Schlesinger, then Nixon's war secretary, invited London in 1973 to join Washington in a plan to seize the oilfields of Iraq and other Persian Gulf OPEC members. A 22-page memorandum, drawn up in December 1973 by Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee, concluded that once this was done "the area would have to be securely held probably for a period of some 10 years".
From Green Left Weekly, March 22, 2006.
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