gracchusdixit

The philosopher George Santayana famously said:  “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  Those who run our country appear to have forgotten his warning.  Not only have they plunged us once again into the quagmire of the Middle East, but they have embarked upon a so-called “strategy” that is eerily familiar.

At  the conclusion of World War I, the victorious British and French carved up most of the defeated and defunct Ottoman Empire into a hodgepodge of colonies, mandates and protectorates.  This division of the spoils was designed to benefit their own interests—interests that were little different from ours today, i.e., a steady supply of oil and a “stable” political order that would do their bidding.

The British got control of what had been ancient Mesopotamia, a region (never a country) that was populated by different peoples, home to diverse cultural traditions, and for centuries a breeding ground of conflict—between Egyptians and Hittites, Assyrians and Babylonians, Turks and Arabs.  The British imposed a made-up king upon this made-up country, and they called it “Iraq.”

It didn’t take long for the people of this tangled and turbulent region, whose wishes had never been considered let alone consulted, to resent and resist the “stability” that had been imposed upon them.  Trouble followed, and it took the form of what today would be called an “insurgency”.

It so happened that Britain’s Minister of War at the time was none other than Winston Churchill, then as ever a man bellicose to his fingertips and infatuated with the latest technological playthings of war.  Churchill was determined to crush the unrest and to preserve Britain’s imperial interests.  His problem was that the British Empire lacked the military muscle it had once possessed.  After four years of catastrophic slaughter on the Western Front, the British people were worn out, the British economy was all but bankrupt, and the British Empire was stretched beyond its means or its will.  Churchill came up with what he thought to be a solution, one that would minimize costs and reduce the need for “boots on the ground”.  That solution was air power.

For much of the 1920s, death from the air was Britain’s strategy of choice for enforcing its control of Iraq.  The Royal Air Force bombed, machine-gunned, and gassed insurgents wherever and whenever it encountered them.  Needless to say, many of those the RAF encountered—we shall never know the actual number—weren’t “insurgents” at all.  They were merely unlucky civilians who happened to get in the way.  The antiseptic euphemism, “collateral damage,” hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had been, there is little doubt that Churchill would have embraced it as a useful turn of phrase.

There were some protests back home in Britain and more than a few skeptics.  But the witch’s brew that Churchill had cooked up—a concoction of lethal force, low costs, and minimal (British) casualties—quickly became so seductive that the same strategy was applied elsewhere:  in Yemen, in Palestine, in the Sudan, on the porous Northwest Frontier of India where today Pakistan and Afghanistan converge.

The story from the generals and the commanders, and from Churchill himself, was ever the same.  The attacks were invariably “successful”.  Noble RAF pilots were taking steps to “avoid civilian casualties”.  Air power was deemed to be “less brutal” than other techniques, producing a “minimum of destruction and loss of life”.

All that, of course, was how Britain’s leaders chose to see things from their elevated perch several thousand miles away and several hundred feet up in the air.  It was not how things were seen by the people “on the ground.”  And ultimately, it was the people on the ground who prevailed.

Britain’s strategy of terror from the air did little to put down the “insurgents” or to prevent the disintegration of the Empire.   Instead, it inflamed  and embittered the opposition until Britain’s position in the Middle East became untenable.  When the British finally withdrew from Iraq in 1932, the country they had created immediately began to fall apart.  One coup followed another, until Iraq’s made-up monarchy was unmade and overthrown.  A series of terrible military dictatorships followed, culminating with the most terrible of them all, that of our old friend and foe, Saddam Hussein.  We all remember what happened next.

We may remember, but our leaders evidently do not.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of a hundred years ago.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of ten years ago.  They seem to have forgotten the lessons of yesterday.  History never forgets.  Why, it must be asked, do they?  History never forgives.  Nor, it must be said, should we.