Gas attacks would be more efficient than burning villages, wrote Lawrence of Arabia

Understanding Iraq

Remember Lawrence of Arabia, explains Phillip Knightley.

A history lesson on Iraq

By Phillip Knightley

Before Tony Blair joins the new crusaders trying to impose a "regime change", a Western "settlement" on Iraq, he should at least look at the historical facts that explain the rise of nationalist leaders such as Saddam Hussein. And while he is at it, since he is good at empathy, he might try looking at Britain through Iraqi eyes.

Seen from Baghdad, the British have bombed and invaded their country, lied to them, manipulated their borders, imposed on them leaders they did not want, kidnapped ones they did, fixed their elections, used collective terror tactics on their civilians, promised them freedom and then planned to turn their country into a province of India populated by immigrant Punjabi farmers. Small wonder that the author Said Aburish said to me recently: "If you think Saddam Hussein is a hard man to deal with, just wait for the next generation of Iraqi leaders."

In view of Saddam's ruthlessness in dealing with the Kurds in Iraq, his war with Iran and his invasion of Kuwait, it is hard to conceive that there are younger Iraqi leaders who believe Saddam has not been tough enough, and that, although the United States has the most powerful armed forces in the world, Americans do not have the stomach for the sacrifices an all-out war in the Middle East would entail.

These young Iraqis take the Islamic long view of history, which suggests that the Middle East never favours the foreigner and always takes its revenge on those who, like the British and Americans, insist on seeing the region through their own eyes.

We need to go back to the First World War, when Lawrence of Arabia and Winston Churchill were imposing the first regime changes on the Middle East, to see how we have reached the situation we face today.

In 1919, the recently concluded war had made everyone realise the strategic importance of oil, and in any future major skirmish a secure supply of oil would be an essential weapon. Britain already had one source: British Petroleum, owned in part by the British government, had been pumping oil at Masjid-i-Salamn, in Iran's Zagros Mountains, since 1908. But it was not enough.

So even before the peace conference began in Paris in 1919 some underhand oil trading took place. France, for example, gave Britain the oil-rich area around Mosul in Iraq, in exchange for a share of the oil and "a free hand" in Syria. Unfortunately, Britain had already promised Syria to the Syrians. It was obvious to the smarter Arab leaders that guarantees of freedom and independence made during the war by Britain and France in return for their support against Germany's ally, Turkey, would now mean nothing.

This was confirmed at the peace conference when the oil companies pressed their governments to renounce all wartime promises to the Arabs. The oil companies saw only too well that oil concessions and royalties would be easier to negotiate with a series of rival Arab states, lacking any sense of unity, than with a powerful independent Arab state in the Middle East. Ironically - in that President George W Bush now leads the new crusaders - the only country to protest at the betrayal of the Arabs was the United States.

A commission set up by President Wilson warned that independence for states such as Palestine, Syria and Iraq, should be granted as soon as possible. And the idea of making Palestine into a Jewish commonwealth should be dropped. The report was ignored, even in Washington, and it took a further two years for the Allies to finalise their carve-up of the Middle East. The Arabs were stunned to learn that the whole Arab rectangle lying between the Mediterranean and the Persian frontier, including Palestine, was to be placed under mandates to suit the foreign policies of Britain and France. The Arabs had simply exchanged one imperial ruler, Turkey, for another, the West.

Revolution began almost immediately.

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