Thus Came Saddam

On the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month of the year
1918, the First World War ended. And the British decided to redesign the Near
East.

Gertrude Bell was socially well connected in London, so much so that she was
appointed Oriental secretary. Her qualifications included a good degree of
sentimental illusion. Around the same time, Lawrence of Arabia was blazing
through the desert, tearing rotten swathes of territory off the decayed
Ottoman Empire. For this he was lionized.

T.E. Lawrence liked Faisal, one of the sons of the hereditary Hashemite ruler
of Mecca, Sherif Hussein. Lawrence prevailed upon the Oriental secretary and
others in the Foreign Office to make Faisal a king, king of a new country in
Mesopotamia. One member of the Foreign Office saw things differently, Sir
Arnold Wilson. He warned against forwarding a Sunni to lead a newly minted
country. He noted the Shia majority would not accept Sunni rule, especially a
foreign Sunni like Faisal. The Sunnis are still a minority in this region of
the Middle East. The Ottomans were also Sunnis, however, and they had ruled
the whole place. As a result, there was an unspoken expectation of Sunnis
being in charge. Wilson’s skepticism was deemed irrelevant.

In 1921 the British manipulated a referendum and Faisal was crowned king of
the brand new country of Iraq. Sheikhs swore allegiance to their new king on
a less than convincing premise: that he was acceptable to the British. To
maintain power, Faisal began immediately to intrigue against the power that
put him on his throne. The British duly capitulated after some show of force
and granted Iraq independence. So in 1931 Iraq was left to its own devices.

Near death, King Faisal’s described his subjects: “unimaginable masses of
human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions
and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to
anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.” Four
years later, in 1937 General Bakr Sidqi mounted a coup. Upon gaining power he
massacred the Assyrian minority. In 1941, another coup and another massacre,
this time visited on the Jews. In 1958, the Iraqi Hashemite dynasty, Faisal’s
descendents, was eliminated. The murderer was soon murdered and the carnage
continues. Sentimental illusions bleed real blood.

James Clark

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(c) 2002 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 2 no. 29
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