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Book Review CHURCHILL’S FOLLY Scripture is wise! Indeed, the sins of the fathers are visited upon the third and fourth generations. We are seeing the repercussions of those sins acting out on the nightly news as the United States is the latest Western power to attempt to exercise its will in Iraq. Scholar Christopher Catherwood (Cambridge and the University of Richmond) gives us a comprehensive review of the history of the mideast, and especially the nation state of Iraq. The folly of Winston Churchill was the notion that there could be a united nation called Iraq that would bring together Kurds, Sunni and Shiite Arabs. Catherwood begins his survey of the history of Iraq with the end of World War I as the Ottomon Empire, the old “sick man of Europe”, collapses. Imperial Britain invents a number of British-client states including Iraq, Jordan, and Saudia Arabia, as well as forming the eternally problematic mandate of Palestine. Iraq’s importance to London was as a stop on the air route to India. Britain’s priority was to reduce demands upon the exhausted Imperial Army, as well as the English taxpayer. The creation of these states, with appointed indigenous governments, was an attempt to control without colonizing the mideast. It was “imperialism on the cheap.” From its start, Iraq was an unpopular step-child of Britain. The post-war governments in London worried about Iraq a great deal less than the economic malaise at home, insurgency in India, Ireland’s Civil War, Russian interference in the Caucuses and Iran, the Greek-Turk War and domestic scandals. Winston Churchill was a senior member of the British government and, along with T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) and a group of 40 European diplomats and politicians, created the modern state of Iraq. The nation was born in an agreement reached in a plush Cairo hotel in 1921. The new nation forced together Kurds, Sunni Arabs and Shiite Arabs. Churchill thought that the Hashemite tribe was malleable to British interests, and placed their chieftan on the throne after holding some sham elections. Cousins of this first King Faisal reign to this day in Saudia Arabia and Jordan. Churchill would be disappointed in his Iraqi adventure, as the Sunni Arab king refused to be a puppet of the English. About 5,000 British troops would die over the colonial period as an insurgency dragged on for more than a decade. Catherwood defines Churchill’s chief error as totally misunderstanding religious differences between the people of Iraq. In what is a lesson for our time and circumstance as 150,000 British and Americans today serve in Iraq, he writes, “Britain’s biggest mistake in the 1920’s, and one that the Coalition is repeating now, was assuming that nationalism is stronger than religion.” There were huge differences between Kurds and Sunnis and Shiites. The error of Churchill in 1921, which we are still paying for in 2006, says the author, is the notion that Iraq could be one secular nation. Thomas A. Skrenes |
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