Long Live the King?

Shouting "Long live the king," about 1,500 Iraqi tribal sheiks and monarchists welcomed Sharif Ali bin Hussein, a cousin of Iraq's last king who returned here Tuesday after spending 45 years in exile.

The London investment banker, who left Iraq in 1958 — the year he was born — flew in by chartered jet and then drove to his family mausoleum that still cradles the remains of two of Iraq's previous kings, Faisal I and Ghazi.

The Smithsonian Magazine published an article in its May issue by former New York Times foreign correspondent Jonathan Kandell. It's called Iraq's Unruly Century and the pdf file can be found by following that link.

To begin it reads like a blueprint for the American occupation. Does this strike a chord of familiarity?

"Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies but as liberators," proclaimed Gen. Stanley Maude, commander of the British forces, as his troops marched into Baghdad in 1917.

37 years of monarchy followed that pronouncement, a time riddled with Iraqi resentment towards their occupiers, a bitter anger that accomplished something the British failed to achieve, a unifying of the Sunnis, Shiites and rival sheikdoms. The Kurds even joined in rebellion. Will it be a lesson for Iraq's new occupiers, do they think the same lies now ring truer delivered by Americans, or do they simply not care the facade is obvious, after all, what can any of these Iraqis do about it?

There are other similarities that smack of tweaked reenactment. Not only is oil and its distribution the primary concern of the liberators but the control of it in the form of a League of Nations 'mandate' for Britain and the UN 'resolution' for the U.S., or in other words, occupiers granted permission by a global governing body despite the mockery it makes of either country's reason for invading in the first place.

Arnold Wilson reminds me of Rumsfeld, forcing a military solution upon the situation with great disdain for any diplomatic intervention, but especially when I read that Wilson looked upon his detractors as "ungrateful politicians". I wonder if Rummy thinks his application of Wilson's formula for success will have a different outcome? And again does he base this on the absence of an Iraqi defense and if so certainly he knew this going in rendering the reasons for attack nothing short of a deliberate lie.

Gertrude Bell's expressions of approval for Iraqi self-rule but unwillingness to support the notion that a free people should choose their own leader and her favoring of Faisal as king reminds me of countless apologists who are okay with the pre-emptive strike so long as we install someone friendly to the U.S. in its aftermath. This insistence that a liberator remains so when they go on to install the new government against the will of the people is ridiculous. At least these 'liberators' should drop the pretense. Bell was livid when met with what she called the 'double-dealing' of Faisal during negotiations of the 1924 Anglo-Iraq treaty because her hand-picked king criticised it publically while agreeing to it privately. How else would the king of a free people present a treaty to his subjects that allowed this;

...provide for the maintenance of British military bases, give British officials a veto over legislation and perpetuate British influence over financial and international matters for 20 years.

But here's a quote of hers that brings Wolfowitz and the neoconservatives to mind;

During afternoon teas at the palace, she reeled out her vision of a progressive Iraq that could become a beacon for the Middle East. "When we have made Mesopotamia a model state, there is not an Arab of Syria and Palestine who wouldn’t want to be part of it," she told the king, adding that she hoped to see Faisal "ruling from the Persian frontier to the Mediterranean."

The character the Bush administration should be taking a page from and undoubtedly the most intelligent of the lot is Freya Stark. I can imagine her laughing at the detractor who viewed her staying in prostitutes' quarters as "lowering the prestige of British womanhood." It's no wonder her presence in the British Embassy during the coup d'etat of 1941 saved the occupants from a far worse fate. She didn't go to Baghdad to displace its people or force them to live a different way. She arrived with an appreciation differences in culture can offer, an eagerness to assimilate that knowledge, and in my opinion an indisputable conviction, that "the most interesting things in the world were likely to happen in the neighborhood of oil."

Unfortunately I believe that's the extent her influence has on the current 'liberators'. What a shame.

The article is interesting but I think falls down in its analysis once Hussein enters the picture. Hopefully one day The Smithsonian will reveal 'the rest of the story'.