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Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Blame America! Blame the West!

“Arnold Wilson (British officer over Mesopotamia) had firm ideas about how the area should be ruled. ‘Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul should be regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes and under effective British control.’ It never seems to have occurred to him that a single unit did not make much sense in other ways. In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf, Baghdad had strong links with Persia; Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs in one country.

The population was about half Shia Muslim and a quarter Sunni but another division ran across the religious one: while half the inhabitants were Arab, the rest were Kurds, Persians or Assyrians. The cities were relatively advanced and cosmopolitan: in the countryside, hereditary tribal and religious leaders still dominated. There was no Iraqi nationalism, only Arab.

Arnold Wilson did not foresee the problems of throwing such a diverse population into a single state.”

Margaret McMillan, Paris 1919, Random House, 2001, pp. 397-8

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