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