Historian Ian Rutledge wants us to learn the lessons of Iraq - almost a century later

A new history of the British involvement in Iraq during the Great War and its immediate aftermath paints a grimly familiar picture – of imperial hubris and overreach, of violent resistance and repression, and of insatiable thirst for oil.

A painting of a ‘desert duel’ between airmen and horsemen, in the district of Shat-el-hai, Mesopotamia. S&M / ANSA / UIG via Getty Images

What of Iraq and those two familiar aphorisms of history? That those who ignore its lessons are doomed to repeat them. That it is a cycle of tragedy followed by farce.

Iraq’s story seems like an unrelenting century of violence and bloodshed, frequently sectarian in its intensity. No lessons learnt, nothing short of tragedy.

The current conflict, which threatens to shred the country’s already-fragile bonds for good, seems to confirm Iraq’s status as a permanent battleground. That it was once the birthplace of civilisation seems nothing more than a cruel irony. In a land of beheadings and suicide bombs, Iraq seems like a place where civilisation might go to die.

Ian Rutledge's Enemy on the Euphrates [Amazon.com] is a timely reminder of how we got here. It begins with what might be called the moment of conception of modern Iraq, the British incursion up the Arabian Gulf to Basra in the opening months of the First World War in 1914, and ends with the coronation of Faisal I in 1921.

Rutledge's focus is the Great Arab Revolt that lasted, one way or another, until 1921. This is a conflict usually seen through the lens of Lawrence of Arabia, of Bedouin camel cavalry attacking the Hejaz Railway, the capture of Jerusalem, the secret promises of the Balfour Agreement and the betrayal of any prospect of single, united, Arab nation.

In Enemy on the Euphrates, the foe is not the Ottoman Empire but the British one. Rutledge, an economist and historian, points out that much of the army in "Turkish Arabia" was composed of local Arab soldiers. For them, the fight was not liberation from Istanbul, but expulsion of the British in support of the Ottomans.

Why was Britain there in the first place? The answer is the decision, taken in 1912, to convert the empire’s vast fleet from coal to oil. Ships running on oil could move faster, further and with fewer crew. When war broke out in August 1914, the burning question – literally – was where this oil would come from.

The answer was Persia, where British companies held concession rights, and its Ottoman-controlled neighbour to the west. These were vital strategic resources to be protected at all costs.

So it was that in October 1914, as the First Battle of Ypres sealed four years of trench warfare in Europe, an expeditionary force led by HMS Ocean, an elderly battleship attached to the China Station, steamed up the Arabian Gulf to land on the right bank of the Shatt al Arab waterway.

Leading the invasion force was Brigadier General W S Delmain of the Indian Army and artillery batteries from the 6th (Poona Division). Indian forces, under British officers, and a smaller number of British regular troops would do most of the fighting in the three years to come, and also take most of the casualties.

By the end of the year, the expeditionary force had secured British oil interests at Abadan, captured the port of Basra and were marching steadily up the banks of the Tigris with relatively little loss.

Then, in November 1915, at Ctesiphon, the ancient imperial capital of the Parthian and Sassanian kings, the march on Baghdad was halted in a bloody and indecisive battle with Ottoman forces that killed and wounded almost half the British and Indian forces.

Retreating to the town of Kut, the 16,000-strong expeditionary force endured a six-month siege before surrendering. Of the 11,800 men taken captive at Kut, over a third died in the brutal conditions of captivity.

Coming so soon after the disaster at Gallipoli, these two reverses against the Turks sent a shock wave through the British public, who until then were little aware of the Arabian campaign.

Reinforced by fresh troops and new leadership under General Sir Stanley Maude, the British advanced once more, recapturing Kut in February 1917, then taking Baghdad the following month. By the time of the German and Turkish surrender in November 1918, they had reached as far as Mosul.

The end of the war had left Britain in control of a huge swath of the Ottoman Empire. But what was it, and, more importantly, what did they propose to do with it? The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 had carved up the region between Britain and France, an arrangement confirmed at the San Remo Conference of April 1920.

France would take what is now Lebanon, Syria and parts of northern Iraq. Jerusalem would be under international control but effectively run by the British, who would also rule over what is now Jordan and would take Baghdad and the lands bordering the Tigris and Euphrates as a protectorate known as Mesopotamia.

But as Rutledge asks: “What, exactly, was Mesopotamia?” It had no official or diplomatic use in the Ottoman Empire and “even in British parlance it was an extremely vague expression”.

Nor was there much more clarity about what to do with this new possession. The original mission had been simply to protect the navy’s oil. Britain in late 1918 had neither the will nor the resources to add Mesopotamia as a new colony, but nevertheless had to rule the region until new solutions emerged.

Trouble began to manifest itself as early as December 1917. The local sheikhs had tolerated the Ottomans, who at least were fellow Muslims, but their replacement by British and Indian troops inevitably led to trouble.

The British had their first introduction to the complicated structure of Iraqi society at Najaf, the holy city of Shia Islam. A British aircraft flying over the city received heavy ground fire and the governor was forced to flee. The uprising was eventually suppressed the following year, but with an iron fist.

British officers and politicians were generally of the view that the Arabs were incapable of self-rule. “Any idea of an Arab state is simply bloodstained fooling at present,” as one local commander put it.

Yet the Arabs under their new protectorate showed less and less inclination to accept new masters. By May 1920, there were mass demonstrations in Baghdad. Despite a programme of new building and infrastructure that included flood protection, there was, as Rutledge puts it, a feeling that “the British were remodelling Baghdad as a British city for British interests”.

In resisting the British, the local population came together in a way that today seems unthinkable. Shia and Sunni took sides together against the occupiers, united against an enemy they hated more than each other.

By the summer of 1920, the middle regions of the Euphrates were in armed revolt. British military resources were already stretched thin, with the country’s post-war economy in little position to add more, even from India. The cost of occupying Iraq, the war secretary Winston Churchill was warned, was an unsustainable £18 million a year.

There is a horrible familiarity to all this, of course, which is what make Enemy on the Euphrates such an important book. What the British discovered in 1920, they and, more significantly, the Americans were doomed to repeat in 2003.

Casualties among the British and Indian troops began to mount. What forces available were scattered thinly and by mid-July the occupiers had effectively lost control of the mid-Euphrates.

On August 23, The Times of London reported: "Mesopotamia: A Serious War Before Us." As young British officers began to die in increasing numbers, back home questions were asked about the point of it all. Was it just about oil?

The solution, then as now, was air power. Churchill ordered several squadrons of the latest fighters and bombers to the region, to indiscriminately wreak death and destruction from the air on insurgents and civilians alike. In some quarters there was talk of using chemical weapons. No less a figure than Colonel T E Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote sarcastically in The Observer of the aerial bombings: "It is odd that we do not use poison gas on these occasions. Bombing the houses is a patchy way of getting the women and children."

No serious consideration was given to using gas, but in the worst of ironies, the use of chemical weapons against the Kurds by Saddam Hussein was justified by some on the grounds that the British had done it first.

By October 1921, the combination of fresh troops and air strikes had ended the uprising, although at the cost of around 500 British and Indian soldiers and perhaps 10,000 Iraqi lives.

The end of rebellion was enough for the British to consider exactly what they were doing in Iraq, the solution being to create a monarchy for the recently deposed ruler of Syria, Faisal, son of Hussein ibn Ali, sharif of Mecca and ally of the British in the other Arab Revolt of 1917.

To support Faisal, Britain also allowed the return of several hundred army officers once loyal to the Ottoman Empire. All were Sunni, in a country where more than half of the population was Shia.

Faisal’s accession allowed Iraq to become a client state, friendly to Britain and her economic interests. In time. the Iraqi monarchy would be overthrown by force, a pattern that continues to repeat itself in a country whose history seems to be written in blood.

James Langton is an editor at The ­National.