CHURCHILL AND THE CAIRO CONFERENCE OF MARCH 1921

Cairo Conference of March 1921

The Cairo Conference was convened by Winston Churchill, then Britain’s colonial secretary.

With the mandates of Palestine and Iraq awarded to Britain at the San Remo Conference (1920), Churchill wished to consult with Middle East experts, and at his request, Gertrude Bell, Sir Percy Cox, T. E. Lawrence, Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, Sir Arnold T. Wilson, Iraqi minister of war Ja’far alAskari, Iraqi minister of finance Sasun Effendi (Sasson Heskayl), and others gathered in Cairo, Egypt, in March 1921. The two most significant decisions of the conference were to offer the throne of Iraq to Amir Faisal ibn Hussein (who became Faisal I) and the emirate of Transjordan (now Jordan) to his brother Abdullah I ibn Hussein. Furthermore, the British garrison in Iraq would be substantially reduced and replaced by air force squadrons, with a major base at Habbaniyya. The conference provided the political blueprint for British administration in both Iraq and Transjordan, and in offering these two regions to the Hashemite sons of Sharif Husayn ibn Ali of the Hijaz, Churchill believed that the spirit, if not the letter, of Britain’s wartime promises to the Arabs would be fulfilled.

Bibliography

Fromkin, David. A Peace to End All Peace. New York: H. Holt, 1989.

Klieman, Aaron S. Foundations of British Policy in the Arab World: The Cairo Conference of 1921. London: Johns Hopkins, 1970.

At the Cairo Conference of March 1921, the British set the parameters for Iraqi political life that were to continue until the 1958 revolution; they chose a Hashemite, Faisal ibn Husayn, son of Sherif Hussein ibn Ali former Sharif of Mecca as Iraq’s first King; they established an Iraqi army (but kept Assyrian Levies under direct British command); and they proposed a new treaty. To confirm Faisal as Iraq’s first monarch, a one-question plebiscite was carefully arranged that had a return of 96 percent in his favor. The British saw in Faisal a leader who possessed sufficient nationalist and Islamic credentials to have broad appeal, but who also was vulnerable enough to remain dependent on their support. Faisal traced his descent from the family of the Prophet Muhammad. His ancestors held political authority in the holy cities of Mecca and Medina since the tenth century. The British believed these credentials would satisfy traditional Arab standards of political legitimacy; moreover, the British thought Faisal would be accepted by the growing Iraqi nationalist movement because of his role in the 1916 Arab Revolt against the Turks, his achievements as a leader of the Arab emancipation movement, and his general leadership qualities. Faisal was instated as the Monarch of Iraq after the Naquib of Baghdad was disqualified as being too old (80 yrs) and Sayid Talib (a prominent Iraqi from the province of Basra) was deported on trumped up charges by the British. The voting was far from a reflection of the true feelings of the Iraqi people. Nevertheless, Faisal was considered the most effective choice for the throne by the British government.

The final major decision taken at the Cairo Conference related to the new Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922. Faisal was under pressure from the nationalists and the anti-British mujtahids of Najaf and Karbala to limit both British influence in Iraq and the duration of the treaty. Recognizing that the monarchy depended on British support— and wishing to avoid a repetition of his experience in Syria — Faisal maintained a moderate approach in dealing with Britain. The treaty which had been originally set as a twenty year engagement but later reduced to 4 years, was ratified in June 1924, stated that the king would heed British advice on all matters affecting British interests and on fiscal policy as long as Iraq had a balance of payments deficit with Britain, and that British officials would be appointed to specified posts in eighteen departments to act as advisers and inspectors. A subsequent financial agreement, which significantly increased the financial burden on Iraq, required Iraq to pay half the cost of supporting British resident officials, among other expenses. British obligations under the new treaty included providing various kinds of aid, notably military assistance, and proposing Iraq for membership in the League of Nations at the earliest moment. In effect, the treaty ensured that Iraq would remain politically and economically dependent on Britain. While unable to prevent the treaty, Faisal clearly felt that the British had gone back on their promises to him.

On 1 October 1922 the Royal Air Force in Iraq was reorganized as RAF Iraq Command which was given control of all British forces in the kingdom.[1]

The British decision at the Cairo Conference to establish an indigenous Iraqi army was significant. In Iraq, as in most of the developing world, the military establishment has been the best organized institution in an otherwise weak political system. Thus, while Iraq’s body politic crumbled under immense political and economic pressure throughout the monarchic period, the military gained increasing power and influence; moreover, because the officers in the new army were by necessity Sunnis who had served under the Ottomans, while the lower ranks were predominantly filled by Shia tribal elements, Sunni dominance in the military was preserved.

Oil concession

Before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the British-controlled Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) had held concessionary rights to the Mosul wilaya (province). Under the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement — an agreement in 1916 between Britain and France that delineated future control of the Middle East — the area would have fallen under French influence. In 1919, however, the French relinquished their claims to Mosul under the terms of the Long-Berenger Agreement. The 1919 agreement granted the French a 25 percent share in the TPC as compensation.

Beginning in 1923, British and Iraqi negotiators held acrimonious discussions over the new oil concession. The major obstacle was Iraq’s insistence on a 20 percent equity participation in the company; this figure had been included in the original TPC concession to the Turks and had been agreed upon at San Remo for the Iraqis. In the end, despite strong nationalist sentiments against the concession agreement, the Iraqi negotiators acquiesced to it. The League of Nations was soon to vote on the disposition of Mosul, and the Iraqis feared that, without British support, Iraq would lose the area to Turkey. In March 1925, an agreement was concluded that contained none of the Iraqi demands. The TPC, now renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company (IPC), was granted a full and complete concession for a period of seventy-five years.

Later years of the mandate

With the signing of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty and the settling of the Mosul question, Iraqi politics took on a new dynamic. The emerging class of Sunni and Shia landowning tribal sheikhs vied for positions of power with wealthy and prestigious urban-based Sunni families and with Ottoman-trained army officers and bureaucrats. Because Iraq’s newly established political institutions were the creation of a foreign power, and because the concept of democratic government had no precedent in Iraqi history, the politicians in Baghdad lacked legitimacy and never developed deeply rooted constituencies. Thus, despite a constitution and an elected assembly, Iraqi politics was more a shifting alliance of important personalities and cliques than a democracy in the Western sense. The absence of broadly based political institutions inhibited the early nationalist movement’s ability to make deep inroads into Iraq’s diverse social structure.

The new Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was signed in June 1930. It provided for a “close alliance,” for “full and frank consultations between the two countries in all matters of foreign policy,” and for mutual assistance in case of war. Iraq granted the British the use of air bases near Basra and at Al Habbaniyah and the right to move troops across the country. The treaty, of twenty-five years’ duration, was to come into force upon Iraq’s admission to the League of Nations. This occurred on October 3, 1932.

British High Commissioners to the Kingdom of Iraq

• 1920 – 1923 Sir Percy Zachariah Cox
• 1923 – 1928 Sir Henry Robert Conway Dobbs
• 1928 – 1929 Sir Gilbert Falkingham Clayton
• 1929 – 1932 Sir Francis Henry Humphrys

Further reading

• Barker, A. J. The First Iraq War, 1914-1918: Britain’s Mesopotamian Campaign (New York: Enigma Books, 2009). ISBN 978-1-929631-86-5
• Eskander, Saad. “Southern Kurdistan under Britain’s Mesopotamian Mandate: From Separation to Incorporation, 1920–23,” Middle Eastern Studies 37, no. 2 (2001)
• Fieldhouse, David K. Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958 (2006)* Fisk, Robert. The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East, (2nd ed. 2006),
• Jacobsen, Mark. “‘Only by the Sword’: British Counter‐insurgency in Iraq,” Small Wars and Insurgencies 2, no. 2 (1991): 323–63.
• Simons, Geoff. Iraq: From Sumer to Saddam (2nd ed. 1994)
• Sluglett, Peter. Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country, 1914–1932 (2nd ed. 2007)
• Vinogradov, Amal. “The 1920 Revolt in Iraq Reconsidered: The Role of Tribes in National Politics,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 3, no. 2 (1972): 123–39

References

1. R. M. Douglas, “Did Britain Use Chemical Weapons in Mandatory Iraq?” Journal of Modern History Dec. 2009, Vol. 81, No. 4: 859-887. online concludes “no”–that no chemical weapons or gas was actually used.

CHURCHILL'S "SHOCK AND AWE" IN IRAQ IN THE 1920'S

Saad Eskander director of Baghdad‘s national library:

“The Kurds still blame the British very much for what happened to us. As you know, the first people to use chemical weapons against the Kurds were the RAF. They burned villages, used gas against the Kurds.”

But not only the Kurds, of course: Winston Churchill, as Secretary of State for War and Air, called for the systematic gassing and bombing of many peoples Britain sought to subjugate as it carved up a new colony on the dunes of Mesopotamia, the mountains of Kurdistan and elsewhere amid the collapse of the Ottoman Empire.

“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes,” said Churchill, “[to] spread a lively terror.”

More:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jun/09/iraq.iraqandthearts

The Guardian, Monday 9 June 2008

See Also: “Human Smoke” Nicholson Baker book.

“I am strongly in favour of using poison gas against uncivilised tribes,” said Churchill, “[to] spread a lively terror.”

PROFESSOR BERNARD LEWIS AND THE NEOCON PHRASE " CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS"

Bernard Lewis

Bernard Lewis and the Selling of the “Clash of

Civilizations” as a Key Prop in the Neocon Zionist

Perpetual War Strategy:

Lewis’s basic premise, put forward in a series of articles, talks, and bestselling books, is that the West–what used to be known as Christendom–is now in the last stages of a centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic civilization.

Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations,” using it in a 1990 essay titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and Samuel Huntington admits he picked it up from him.

Biography

Born to middle-class Jewish parents in Stoke Newington, London, Lewis became attracted to languages and history from an early age. While preparing for his bar mitzvah ceremony at the age of eleven or twelve, the young Bernard, fascinated by a new language, and especially a new script, discovered an interest in Hebrew. He subsequently moved on to studying Aramaic and then Arabic, and later still, some Latin, Greek, Persian, and Turkish. As with Semitic languages, Lewis’s interest in history was stirred thanks to the bar mitzvah ceremony, during which he received as a gift a book on Jewish history.

He graduated in 1936 from the then School of Oriental Studies (SOAS, now School of Oriental and African Studies) at the University of London with a B.A. in History with special reference to the Near and Middle East, and obtaining his Ph.D. three years later, also from SOAS, specializing in the History of Islam. Lewis also studied law, going part of the way toward becoming a barrister, but returned to study Middle Eastern history. He undertook post-graduate studies at the University of Paris, where he studied with the orientalist Louis Massignon and earned the “Diplôme des Études Sémitiques” in 1937. He returned to SOAS in 1938 as an assistant lecturer in Islamic History.

During the Second World War, Lewis served in the British Army in the Royal Armoured Corps and Intelligence Corps in 1940–41, before being seconded to the Foreign Office. After the war, he returned to SOAS, and in 1949 – as he was one of the very rare specialists – he was appointed to the new chair in Near and Middle Eastern History at the age of 33.

In 1974, Lewis accepted a joint position at Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study, also located in Princeton, New Jersey. The terms of his appointment were such that Lewis taught only one semester per year, and being free from administrative responsibilities, he could devote more time to research than previously. Consequently, Lewis’s arrival at Princeton marked the beginning of the most prolific period in his research career during which he published numerous books and articles based on the previously accumulated materials.^[7] In addition, it was in the U.S. that Lewis became a public intellectual. Upon his retirement from Princeton in 1986, Lewis served at Cornell University until 1990.

Lewis has been a naturalized citizen of the United States since 1982. He married Ruth Hélène Oppenhejm in 1947 with whom he had a daughter and a son before the marriage was dissolved in 1974.

Lewis is a founding member of ASMEA (The Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa). Formed October 24, 2007, the organization is an academic society dedicated to promoting the highest standards of research and teaching in Middle Eastern and African studies, and related fields. Lewis is Chairman of its academic council.

Bernard Lewis (born May 31, 1916 in London, England) is a British-American historian, Orientalist, and political commentator. He is the Cleveland E. Dodge Professor Emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. He specializes in the history of Islam and the interaction between Islam and the West, and is especially famous in academic circles for his works on the history of the Ottoman Empire.

Lewis is a widely-read expert on the Middle East, and James L. Abrahamson describes him as the West’s leading interpreter of that region. ^[1] His advice has been frequently sought by policymakers, including the current Bush administration. In the Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing Martin Kramer, whose Ph.D. thesis was directed by Lewis, considered that, over a 60-year career, he has emerged as “the most influential postwar historian of Islam and the Middle East.”

Lewis advocates closer Western ties with Israel and Turkey, which he saw as especially important in light of the extension of the Soviet influence in the Middle East. Modern Turkey holds a special place in Lewis’s view of the region due to the country’s efforts to become a part of the West.

Lewis views Christendom and Islam as civilizations that have been in perpetual collision ever since the advent of Islam in the 7th century. In his essay The Roots of Muslim Rage (1990), he argued that the struggle between the West and Islam was gathering strength. It was in that essay that he coined the phrase “clash of civilizations“, which received prominence in the eponymous book by Samuel Huntington. The phrase “clash of civilizations“, was first used by Lewis at a meeting in Washington in 1957 where it is recorded in the transcript.

Books

• The Origins of Ismailism (1940)

• A Handbook of Diplomatic and Political Arabic (1947)

• The Arabs in History (1950)

• The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961)

• Istanbul and the Civilizations of the Ottoman Empire (1963)

• The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (1967)

• The Cambridge History of Islam (2 vols. 1970, revised 4 vols. 1978, editor with Peter Malcolm Holt and Ann K.S. Lambton)

• Islam: From the Prophet Muhammad to the capture of Constantinople (1974, editor)

• History — Remembered, Recovered, Invented (1975)

• Race and Color in Islam (1979)

• Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (1982, editor with Benjamin Braude)

• The Muslim Discovery of Europe (1982)

• The Jews of Islam (1984)

• Semites and Anti-Semites (1986)

• Islam from the Prophet Muhammad to the Capture of Constantinople (1987)

• The Political Language of Islam (1988)

• Race and Slavery in the Middle East: an Historical Enquiry (1990)

• Islam and the West (1993)

• Islam in History (1993)

• The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (1994)

• Cultures in Conflict (1994)

• The Middle East: A Brief History of the Last 2,000 Years (1995)

• The Future of the Middle East (1997)

• The Multiple Identities of the Middle East (1998)

• A Middle East Mosaic: Fragments of Life, Letters and History (2000)

• Music of a Distant Drum: Classical Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and Hebrew Poems (2001)

• The Muslim Discovery of Europe (2001)

• What Went Wrong?: The Clash Between Islam and Modernity in the Middle East (2002)

• The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (2003)

• From Babel to Dragomans: Interpreting the Middle East (2004)

September 1990 Atlantic Monthly

Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West, and

why their bitterness will not easily be mollified

by Bernard Lewis

The Roots of Muslim Rage

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/199009/muslim-rage

Lewis’s basic premise, put forward in a series of articles, talks, and bestselling books, is that the West–what used to be known as Christendom–is now in the last stages of a centuries-old struggle for dominance and prestige with Islamic civilization.

Lewis coined the term “clash of civilizations,” using it in a 1990 essay titled “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” and Samuel Huntington admits he picked it up from him.

The Iraq War would be chapter one in their “war of the world” based on the “clash of civilizations.”

This would become a perpetual neocon global civil war with America-Israel against the world….

The neocon Zionist wirepullers around McCain–Podhoretz, Kagan, Gerecht, Kristol, et al– have this global civil war as their goal.

They are continually misidentified as “Wilsonians.”  They are actually Right-radical revolutionaries in the interwar European fascist tradition.

IRAQ: BASRAH WATER

Iraq Reconstruction –

Qurmat Ali pumping units

CEGRD-PAO (CEGRD.PAO@usace.army.mil)

Sattler, Alan G “Grant” GRD

(Alan.G.Sattler2@usace.army.mil)

Sat 5/17/08

May 17, 2008

Release No. 080517-1

U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS

GULF REGION DIVISION

Basrah Residents to enjoy more clean

water

By A. Al Bharani

Gulf Region South district

BASRAH, Iraq – The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in southern Iraq is investing $9.5 million to develop one of the most strategic water projects here in Al-Garma north of the Basrah province.

The project aims to increase the Qurmat Ali pumping units capacity from 4,000 to 16,000 cubic meters per hour to provide uninterrupted flow of water for the people of Basrah and develop the infrastructure to improve the quality of life for all the people, said Ferdinand Guese, the project engineer in the USACE Basrah Area Office.

Guese said the project includes installation of a two part steel intake structure with all mechanical, electrical and civil related works, a low lift pump station to include five 2,000 cubic meter per hour pumps and a high lift pump station with six pumps ranging in size from 1,500 to 2,000 cubic meters per hour.

“A new chlorine building will be installed to include the chlorination system and chlorine, in addition to the construction of two water compact units at 400 cubic meters per hour each,” Guese said.

The project is one of many USACE is overseeing to rebuild and develop Basrah province. The projects were requested by Basrah Governorate and the Basrah Director General (DG), according to Army Maj. Stephen Dale, executive officer and operations officer of the Basrah Area Office of the USACE Gulf Region South district.

“Despite construction challenges in Iraq, Army Engineers contribute to a higher level of quality construction than usually seen in the region,” said the major.

Guese said GRS awarded this contract to Al Dayer United Company for General Construction in January 2008 and the project is about 20 percent finished and is to be completed by the end of this year.

Executive manager of Al Dayer United Company for General Construction said, “All the construction work we are doing here is under the supervision of the GRS. This project is one of the highly needed projects by the people of Basrah due to the high salinity in the water and the lack of water treatment systems in the province.

“In fact, I got more than one job opportunity in some other countries just like United Arab States and Lebanon, but I prefer staying here and get the honor of rebuilding my country and seeing those local people getting more jobs and more chances in life,” the executive manager said. “We are employing on an average 70 Iraqi local workers a day and I’m very happy to see these locals getting job opportunities so they can support their families and better their way of life,” he added.

Guese explained that USACE will build a diesel generator building, install two 2 megavolt generators, a 2500 gallon diesel fuel tank, transformers and all connections to provide a full time operating system to the Qurmat Ali pumping units.

Al, the USACE Iraqi deputy resident engineer overseeing the work at Qurmat Ali pumping units said, “Shatt Al-Arab is the source of raw water to supply this project and the construction work for this facility includes 11 new large intake pumps in addition to the renovation of the four existing ones.”

“The new facility will include a 3,000 cubic meter ground storage tank and it will have the capacity to produce 16,000 cubic meters an hour of treated water which will significantly supplement the existing water supply and will provide clean water supply for the 2.5 million residents in Basrah province,” said Al.

Al explained that the Basrah Area Office will provide about 80 hours of training for 15 electrical engineers and technicians for the operation and maintenance of the new water system and all the associated equipment and components.

An Iraqi citizen who lives in Al Qarma said, “We are anxiously awaiting the completion of this project. Currently due to the hot weather in summer and the lack of a sufficient water system in the Basrah province we suffer low or no water pressure. This project definitely will improve the water system in the area.”

Guese said that the upgrade of the water system will bring many benefits to the people of Basrah. By increasing the efficiency of water management, he said Basrah residents will enjoy more clean water.

-30-

Note: A. Al Bahrani is a Public Affairs Specialist with the Gulf Region South district, Gulf Region Division, U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Iraq. For more information, contact public affairs by phone at 540-665-1233, by e-mail to CEGRD.PAO@tac01.usace.army.mil,

or visit www.grd.usace.army.mil

Iraq Reconstruction – Qurmat Ali pumping units

CEGRD-PAO (CEGRD.PAO@usace.army.mil)

Sattler, Alan G “Grant” GRD

(Alan.G.Sattler2@usace.army.mil)

May 17, 2008

Release No. 080517-1

U.S. ARMY CORPS OF ENGINEERS

GULF REGION DIVISION

Basrah Residents to enjoy more clean water

Note: For high resolution photos see www.grd.usace.army.mil/news/releases/index.asp

Sat 5/17/08

IRAQ OIL EXPLORATION

Hydrocarbon exploration and field

development in IRAQ

A comprehensive technical and policy

reference manual for entering IRAQ

and operating in its oil and gas sector

CGES study on Iraqi Oil

Louise Peacock (louise.peacock@cges.co.uk)

Wed 5/14/08

Hydrocarbon exploration and field development in IRAQ

A comprehensive technical and policy reference manual for entering IRAQ and operating in its oil and gas sector.

www.cges.co.uk

Dear Colleague,

The CGES study ‘Hydrocarbon exploration and field development in IRAQ‘ provides invaluable information and analysis concerning Iraq’s upstream oil industry, oil related policies, petroleum laws and contracts, as well as how to do business in the country. The study is published at a time when Iraq’s future is beginning to look brighter and business development is becoming realistic.

‘Hydrocarbon exploration and field development in IRAQ‘ was researched and written by Dr Thamir Uqaili with a team of Iraqi experts. Dr Thamir Uqaili is a petroleum engineer with over 40 years experience in exploration, engineering and technical management in the INOC and at the Iraqi Ministry of Oil. With hands-on operational information on Iraq’s oilfields and close examination of oil exploration in the country, plus extensive well-by-well and field-by-field data, the volumes offer a wealth of detail on how operations are conducted in Iraq. The study includes 43 location and development maps and 600 pages of analysis, figures and data.

The main volumes cover:

Doing Business in Iraq

Exploration

Well Drilling and Completions

The Upstream Oil and Gas Sectors

Field Development

Policies

Petroleum Laws and Contracts

Iraq’s exports and OPEC issues

If you are interested in a specific area covered by this comprehensive study, you are able to purchase the individual volumes. Email marketing@cges.co.uk for details and prices.

Hydrocarbon exploration and field development in IRAQ is essential reading for companies who aspire to a future market presence in Iraq, who are about to enter Iraq or who plan to expand their existing activities in the country.

The full study is available on CD or in printed format. If you are interested in this unique study, please contact CGES Marketing:

• Email: marketing@cges.co.uk

• Call: +44 (0)20 7309 3610/5657

Kind Regards

Jenni Wilson and Louise Peacock

CGES Marketing

For other CGES studies, please call us or look at our website: www.cges.co.uk

CGES study on Iraqi Oil

Louise Peacock (louise.peacock@cges.co.uk)

Hydrocarbon exploration and field development in IRAQ

A comprehensive technical and policy reference manual for entering IRAQ and operating in its oil and gas sector

Wed 5/14/08

RENDEZVOUS OF CIVILIZATIONS VERSUS CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS

Robert Kagan and Norman Podhoretz and other unrepentant and “slinky” neocon/Zionists have now taken John McCain to bed ideologically as they once took Bush to bed.

They fundamentally want to “upend” the current world system of alliances and drive events to an Isra-American world system and alliance which will subjugate the world for the benefit of themselves and Israel.

They use Churchillian phrases but have Hitlerian designs and are not “Wilsonians” but represent a radical-Right agenda of world war, “world on fire” or Robert Kaplan’s hidden wish for the “coming anarchy.”

These same radical-Right revolutionaries are now allied with Joseph Lieberman in an intense and unrelenting effort to get America into a war with Iran, hoping that will finally ignite a global anti-Muslim clash of civilizations on a planetary scale.

It is obvious that Kagan and company are endlessly hostile to Obama and to intellectual globalists like Fareed Zakaria, whose “The Post-American World” is in fact being brought about by the Zionist neocons like Kagan, Podhoretz, Feith, Ledeen, Kristol, Wurmser etc.

The fundamental paralysis and distortion of the Bush/Cheney White House is that they wanted to get to Zakaria-ism via neoconservatism because their polices were always gripped by Zionofear.

Thus the Bush/Cheney years have been years characterized by “Orwello-Zionism” such as the phrase “Sharon is a man of peace’ while the truth is that Sharon has been leading Israel’s Palestinian massacres for half a century including Sabra and Shattila in Lebanon in the 1980s.

Zionofear and Orwello-Zionism

See also:

“POST-AMERICAN WORLD” CAUSED BY THE ISRAELIZATION OF WASHINGTON? « Cambridge Forecast Group Blog

"POST-AMERICAN WORLD" CAUSED BY THE ISRAELIZATION OF WASHINGTON?

On May 8, 2008, National Public Radio’s “On Point” show featured

“Israel at 60” followed by “The Post-American World”

What nobody sees or wants to see is that these two topics are two sides of a coin: it’s the Israelization of Washington and hence world policy, pushed by the neocons/Zionist “conveyor belt,” which has brought America to this condition.

These neocon/Zionists took Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney “to bed” ideologically and brought us the Iraq War. They hope to plunge the whole world into a civil war radiatng out of Iraq. Senator Joe Lieberman and Podgoretz and the neoxon group wirepulling John McCain are ardently pushing for Iraq II with Iran.

In other words the prospect of America’s eclipse is intimately tied up with Israel and its neocon agents.

The media “bafflegab” tries to hide this interlinking with endless apologetics for Israel’s colonial settler state ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians and the endless ‘false flag” operations in Lebanon with endless murders.

Thursday, May 08, 2008 10-11AM ET

NPR

http://www.onpointradio.org/

Israel at 60: Life Beyond the Headlines

As Israel turns 60, we talk with two thought-provoking writers — Bernard Avishai, author of “The Hebrew Republic,” and Etgar Keret, one of Israel’s top young writers and filmmakers — about the country’s unique identity and its way ahead.

Fareed Zakaria: The Post-American World

We talk with global big-thinker Fareed Zakaria about how and whether America can lead in this century.

Israel at 60:Life Beyond the Headlines

Thursday, May 08, 2008 10-11AM ET

By host Tom Ashbrook

By the Hebrew calendar, today marks the 60th anniversary of the creation of Israel in 1948. And Israel has been celebrating, with picnics and parties and warplanes on display.

Of course, Arabs call the events of 1948 the “naqba” — or catastrophe.

But it’s Israel’s birthday. We’ll observe today with one of the hottest writers of a new generation of Israeli writers, Etgar Keret.

And with an American-Jewish resident of the U.S. and Jerusalem, Bernard Avishai, who says it’s time for the Jewish state to become what he calls the “Hebrew Republic.”

This hour, On Point: Israel turns sixty.

.Bernard Avishai, consulting editor at the Harvard Business Review, former professor at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center in Israel, and author of the new book “The Hebrew Republic: How Secular Democracy and Global Enterprise Will Bring Israel Peace at Last”

· Etgar Keret, author of the story collection “The Girl on the Fridge” and director of the award-winning film “Jellyfish.”

Fareed Zakaria: The Post-American World

Aired: Thursday, May 08, 2008 11-12PM ET

Global big thinker Fareed Zakaria is out with his latest big book, and the title almost says it all: It’s “The Post-American World.”

Take a look at the world and it’s not hard to see: the world’s tallest buildings, biggest airplane, biggest investment fund, biggest movie industry, biggest refinery, biggest casino — heck, the world’s biggest ferris wheel –none of them are in the USA anymore.

So, is it all over over for Uncle Sam? Not if we play our cards right, says Zakaria.

This hour, On Point: Fareed Zakaria and the post-American world.

Fareed Zakaria, columnist and editor of

Newsweek International.

His new book is “The Post-American World.”

On May 8, 2008, National Public Radio’s “On Point” show featured

“Israel at 60” followed by “The Post-American World”

KISSINGER AND THE IRAQ WAR: JEREMI SURI BOOK

Henry Kissinger and the American

Century

by Jeremi Suri (Author)

More recently, Kissinger’s covert advice to Bush to mimic Nixon’s Vietnam course by standing fast in Iraq — in opposition to realist perspectives — suggests that a hunger for influence may again have trumped the logical conclusions of his own nominal worldview.

Publishers Weekly

University of Wisconsin historian Suri (Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente) endeavors to explore the philosophical roots of Henry Kissinger’s actions as national security adviser and secretary of state under President Nixon, finding those roots in a Jewish boy’s experiences of a weak Weimar regime’s fall to genocidal Nazism. At the end of the day, in Suri’s account, Kissinger’s philosophy boiled down to the need to back democracy with muscle. America, alone of the free countries, said Kissinger, was strong enough to assure global security against the forces of tyranny. Only America had both the power and the decency to inspire other peoples who struggled for identity, for progress and dignity. But Kissinger’s expressed idealism leads Suri to downplay the consequences of Kissinger’s actions, including his role in subverting the democratically elected government of Chile’s Salvador Allende. Kissinger did not support the brutality of the regimes he supported in Chile, South Africa, and other parts of the Third World, Suri writes. But, the author acknowledges, he did nurture personal relations with their leaders as strongmen who could mobilize force effectively against threats to themselves and the United States. At the close of that statement, Suri stumbles into the unpleasant truth of Kissinger’s realpolitik. Illus. (July)

From The Washington Post’s Book World/washingtonpost.com

Review

Perhaps because of the pungently Nixonian odor of the Bush White House — the patriotism politics, the “l’état, c’est moi” declarations, the war — this season has delivered a bounty of books about the men of Watergate. The current climate has vitalized anxieties about the imperial presidency, drawing fresh scrutiny to the Nixon years from such eminent writers as Robert Dallek, Elizabeth Drew, Margaret MacMillan, James Reston Jr., and Jules Witcover — not to mention a Nixon biography from the scandal-plagued tycoon Conrad Black and the Broadway drama “Nixon/Frost.”

Joining this lengthening queue is Jeremi Suri, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, with a useful, idiosyncratic study, Henry Kissinger and the American Century. Suri isn’t trying to compete — for audience or authoritativeness — with Dallek’s Nixon and Kissinger or MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao, which combine scholarly rigor with popular appeal. Rather, he’s gambling that less can be more. Suri’s Kissinger is an academic rumination on the cerebral Harvard professor-turned-showboating national security adviser that, while intentionally narrow in scope, is bold in its reach.

With his gravelly Germanic mumble, horn-rimmed glasses, cold-blooded espousal of realpolitik, and a head that Oriana Fallaci likened to that of a sheep, Kissinger has become a most improbable American icon. Like his equally complex and controversial benefactor, Richard Nixon, he has generated reams of chitchat, psychobabble and lore, from his 383-page undergraduate thesis to his rumored liaisons with starlets. (One favorite tale: when thanked by an admirer for “saving the world,” Kissinger replied: “You’re welcome.”) If only for his Strangelovean presence in American culture, he warrants explication.

Suri comes at Kissinger in two ways. In the book’s first part, he explores Kissinger’s formative experiences in their binational context — the Bavarian Jew living under the Nazis, the immigrant in New York’s Washington Heights, the army administrator returning to postwar Germany. In each trying situation, Kissinger learned to leverage his status as an outsider into influence — a practice that soon became a Kissingerian trademark. In the book’s second part, Suri puts forth a close reading of Kissinger’s scholarship, finding in it elaborations of the distrust of popular passions first instilled in interwar Germany. In the two final chapters he highlights these traits within Nixon’s international policies.

Some readers, it should be warned, may bristle at the author’s undisguised admiration for his subject, particularly the words “brilliant,” “genius” and “revolutionary,” which pepper the prose. And Suri surprisingly omits discussion of Kissinger’s well-known role in the original sin of Watergate — the illegal wiretapping of journalists and White House aides — and his alleged perjury in hushing it up.

By and large, however, Suri adopts the stance not of a partisan but of a sedate academic. History, after all, while not eschewing normative judgments altogether, calls for understanding more than moralizing — not just for adjudicating the debates over Nixon’s continuation of the Vietnam War and détente, but also for explaining the meaning of those debates. If the book doesn’t damn Kissinger for the 1972 Christmas bombing of North Vietnam or the 1973 coup against Chile’s Salvador Allende, it does try to show why he favored those actions.

The roots of Kissinger’s ideas matter because for all his failures of policy and morality, he still elicits purring admiration from a certain insider set. The insiders love Henry because in foreign affairs, despite the proven importance of personal diplomacy, Americans crave overarching visions and “grand strategies” from which policy decisions are said to flow naturally. Kissinger managed to associate the age-old doctrine of realpolitik with his own person.

Of course, policymakers don’t implement pure ideas. Individuals must interpret doctrine in light of new situations and through the filters of their own habits of mind. In Kissinger’s case, his realism was animated by a cynicism so virulent that it ultimately devoured itself: Whereas more principled realists such as the political scientist Hans Morgenthau opposed the Vietnam War from early on, Kissinger (following Nixon’s direction) suppressed hard-headed analyses warning that the conflict was unwinnable, preferring to chase the chimeras of credibility and reputation.

More recently, Kissinger’s covert advice to Bush to mimic Nixon’s Vietnam course by standing fast in Iraq — in opposition to realist perspectives — suggests that a hunger for influence may again have trumped the logical conclusions of his own nominal worldview.

The underlying problem is that Kissinger never admitted a fatal contradiction in his peculiar brand of realism. As Suri notes, Kissinger was so disdainful of democratic accountability that he came to think that effective statecraft “depended on an almost mythical grand master” — a philosopher-king, a professor in a Superman uniform — whose brilliance and personality could hold it all together. Regarding his own era, Kissinger left no doubt about whom he considered that grand master to be.

In describing the legacy he wished to leave, Kissinger once said that he wanted to erect a lasting international framework that would reflect not his own preferences but the basic interests of the United States. Yet, ironically, his grand scheme required that it all rest on his personal touch.

As the years pass, the case for Kissinger’s greatness becomes increasingly hard to sustain. His academic reputation has long since been deflated. Most scholars now agree that Nixon conceived and directed his own policy (except when incapacitated by Watergate), with Kissinger functioning as his agent. Even the perennial accusations of war crimes against Henry sound like overwrought sloganeering — too lofty a charge to level at a mere deputy.

Kissinger is, in the end, a smart man — not a genius, not even unusually brilliant — whose lot it was to serve a president whose mania for acclaim, dreams of grandeur and taste for secrecy and deceit matched his own. In one sense, hitching his star to Nixon’s was unfortunate for Kissinger, because the shame of Nixon will always be his shame, too. But in another sense it was lucky, because in the Cold War’s last years Nixon unleashed him to pursue their shared ambitions on the world stage, not without some benefit. When Nixon fell, Kissinger remained standing, poised with a sly smile to gather the credit.

Product Details:

• Hardcover: 368 pages

• Publisher: Belknap Press (July 1, 2007)

• Language: English

• ISBN-10: 0674025792

• ISBN-13: 978-0674025790

Comment:

Kissinger stated on the “Charlie Rose” PBS TV program many months ago, “I agree with Sharon’s view.”

In other words, Henry Kissinger, the victim of ethnic cleansing in Germany, supports the ethnic cleansing of Palestine.

Due to worldwide Zionofear, no one is able to see these facts clearly and openly.

The Palestinians are today’s “Jews”.

Zionofear is blocking world policy what with the Israelization of Washington policy.

ISLAMIC VIRTUE PARTY: IRAQ

Islamic Virtue Party

Islamic Virtue Party (Al-Fadhila Party) is an Iraqi political party. It follows ayatollah Muhammad Ya`qubi a student of Mohammad Sadeq al-Sadr and thus represent a branch of the Sadrist Movement, however the party is not affiliated with Muqtada al-Sadr and is in fact a rival to his branch of the Sadrists.[1] Its support comes mostly from the Shi’a poor in the south of the country.

Its current secretary general is Abdelrahim Al-Husseini who in May 2006 replaced, Nadim al-Jabiri. [2] Another prominent member of the party is Mohammed al-Waili who is currently serving as the governor of Basra province.

It took part in Iraqi legislative election in January 2005 and December 2005 as part of the United Iraqi Alliance list. Following the December 2005 legislative election the party holds 15 seats in the Iraqi parliament.

In May 2006 however the party pulled out of negotiations for a new Iraqi government, complaining of American interference. The party had hoped that the Oil and Trade Ministers would be named from the party.[3]

In March 2007, the party withdrew from the ruling Shi’ite Coalition and has vowed to continue as an independent block. Nadim al-Jabiri announced that the move was caused by increasing sectarionism in Iraqi politics. This turn of events could pave the way for the Islamic Virtue Party to join Iyad Allawi’s secular block of Sunni and Shi’ite parties.[4]

In April 2007, SIIC successfully brought a no-confidence motion against Mohammed al-Waili in the Basrah Governorate Council. This dismissal was ratified by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki in July, and meant the loss of their most important political position. [5]

References

1. [1][2]

2. [3]

3. [4] [5]

4. Small party breaks away from Iraq Shi’ite bloc

5. Basra Governor Dismissed Fadhila Brands al-Maliki Gov. “the New Baath”, Asharq Al-Awsat via Informed Comment, 2007-07-29

COLONEL GERARD LEACHMAN: IRAQ 1920

Colonel Gerard Leachman

At the Triumph Leader Museum, which houses a collection of gifts given to Saddam Hussein over the years, curators had removed things from the display cases and squirrelled them away for safekeeping, although it was doubtful how safe anything would be anywhere in Baghdad once the bombs began to fall.

I went to the museum to take another look at the gun that had been used in 1920 to assassinate Colonel Gerard Leachman, a British officer who spent the First World War in the deserts of what was then Mesopotamia, leading Bedouins in skirmishes against the Ottoman Turks. By 1920, after the League of Nations gave the British a “mandate” to govern what was now referred to as Iraq, Leachman was trying to subdue restive Arab tribesmen. He advocated “wholesale slaughter” as the only really effective method, and in present-day Iraq his assassin, Sheikh Dhari, is remembered as a hero and a patriot. The Sheikh’s descendants gave his gun to Saddam as a birthday present a few years ago.

The March 6th issue of the Iraq Daily, a badly translated English-language newspaper produced by the Ministry of Information, carried the usual stories giving the government’s spin on events, including an editorial with the headline “the U.S. army generals dream of the British vanished empire.” The editorialist referred to Britain’s calamitous twentieth-century military adventures in Iraq and suggested that the Americans would share a similar fate: “We have prepared for you a nice and comfortable grave next to your inferior Stanley Maude”—the British general who captured Baghdad from the Ottomans in 1917 and died there while attempting to impose some kind of order on Mesopotamia’s Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds, Jews, and various tribes and clans. The curator who was called to assist me at the Triumph Leader Museum seemed to share the editorialist’s point of view. She asked me where I was from, and when I told her she taunted me with a little rhyme:

“Welcome, U.S.A., go away.” But another curator was more sympathetic. He said he would fetch the gun, and he went down some stairs and returned in a few minutes, along with several uniformed guards, carrying a long-barrelled bolt-action rifle. It was, the curator explained, a Brno rifle made under license in Persia, specially for long-distance precision marksmen. He pointed out some Farsi script on the barrel, and the numbered sight for calibrating distance. “This,” he said, smiling, “is the rifle that killed Colonel Leachman.” I admired it for a few minutes, and the gun was taken away again.

Colonel Leachman was a contemporary of T. E. Lawrence, and, like Lawrence, he became famous for his exploits in the desert, living among the Arabs and accomplishing great feats of endurance and daring. Lawrence was more celebrated than Leachman, largely because of Lowell Thomas’s razzmatazz presentation of his story, and because Lawrence lived to write his memoirs, but Leachman was a heroic figure, and news of his murder both inspired the Arab tribes to revolt and horrified the British public, which was already having second thoughts about the occupation of the Middle East. Leachman had come to Mesopotamia in 1907, after serving in the Boer War and then in India. He spent a short time in the cosmopolitan society of Westerners in the cities of Basra and Baghdad, but he made his reputation moving among the tribes of the Euphrates. He wore traditional Arab garments and rode horses and camels on long trips across desolate, unmapped landscapes, reporting back on the intrigues among tribal chieftains during the last days of the Ottoman Empire.

Leachman was a severe man, and by the time of the armistice, in 1918, he had survived many savage battles and many attempts on his life. After the war, he was ruthless in putting down Arab uprisings. The British used aerial bombardments as a cost-efficient method of controlling the resentful tribes, and Leachman was especially feared for his ideas about quelling disorder. In August, 1920, he drove west from Baghdad toward the town of Al Fallujah, about forty miles away, to meet with Sheikh Dhari, perhaps to negotiate the waiver of a loan to the Sheikh, who had thus far not participated in the Arab rebellion. Exactly what happened that day is unclear, but the British tended to believe that Leachman was shot in the back at a police post, and that he had been set up.

Sheikh Dhari’s descendants, the family who donated the rifle to Saddam, still live in the village of Khandhari, on the old road to Al Fallujah, which runs alongside the superhighway linking Baghdad and Amman. I was taken there by a new government minder, who replaced the truant Khalid. The village is about halfway to Al Fallujah, which is now the site of a complex of industrial facilities under intermittent scrutiny by U.N. weapons inspectors. Chemical weapons were produced at Al Fallujah during the nineteen-eighties and nineties and may or may not have been made inoperative or harmless. We stopped in front of the Khandhari mosque, a yellow brick building with an ornately tiled turquoise-yellow-and-green minaret.

The mosque is almost directly across the road from the Abu Ghraib prison, and we could see a huge portrait of Saddam wearing black gangster garb next to the prison’s main gate. Officially, the prison has been empty since last October, but I had heard that it is up and running again. A dusty bazaar was nearby, with sidewalk venders and truckstop teahouses. It was not hard to imagine the place as an old caravanserai, or way station, in the days of camels and horse carts.

Sheikh Dhari’s family was at noon prayers in the mosque, and we waited for them for about an hour. Three old men in traditional robes and checked head scarves came out—the Sheikh’s grandsons—and the minder explained that I had come to hear their family’s story of the killing of Leachman. They invited me to their home, a couple of low buildings surrounded by date palms just off the main road, and led me into the diwaniya, a long rectangular meeting room lined with tea tables and cheaply tapestried sofas and chairs. The three elders—Sheikh Muther Khameez Al-Dhari, seventy-one; Sheikh Abdul Wahab Khameez Al-Dhari, seventy-two; and Sheikh Taher Khameez Al-Dhari, seventy-five—pulled up chairs next to me. Sheikh Muther, a hefty, mostly toothless man, spoke first. He belted out his version of the famous story in a truculent tone, and his brothers immediately indicated that they disagreed with him. The eldest, Sheikh Taher, a distinguished-looking man with a fine gold-embroidered robe and decorated walking stick, looked at his brother stonily and said nothing. Sheikh Abdul Wahab turned away from Taher and rolled his eyes. Muther stomped out angrily, but he returned a few moments later. Abdul Wahab then took the floor but was soon interrupted by Muther. This was all going on in Arabic, with my minder, Muslim, finding it quite beyond his abilities to translate, but I heard the name Leachman mentioned a lot. Muslim wrote down what they said, and occasionally asked them questions, but he seemed bewildered. “They are old men, and each has his story,” he said. The bickering continued. Finally, wordlessly and with a great display of dignity, Taher removed himself, walking away to sit with some other relatives in the room. A dozen or so sons and nephews and grandsons of the old sheikhs had gathered to listen, and, as their elders quarrelled, they smiled and shook their heads.

One of the younger relatives, who spoke English, sat down next to me. He said that his name was Abdul Razaq, and he asked me whether I was a Christian or a Jew. When I told him that I was of Christian origin, he smiled with relief. “I am glad,” he said. “I don’t like Jews.” Abdul Razaq pointed to an old black-and-white photograph on the wall near a portrait of Saddam Hussein. The photograph was of Sheikh Dhari, he said. The face had been crudely touched up to represent an angelic-looking man, rather like the old-fashioned renderings of Joseph in illustrated bible stories for children. His hands were folded pacifically on his knees. Like his grandsons, he was bearded and wore a robe and a head scarf.

During a lunch of rice, red beans, grilled chicken, and salad, served on a tablecloth laid out on the floor, Muslim gave me the gist of what the old men had said. They claimed that Leachman was thwarting efforts by several sheikhs in the Middle Euphrates, including Sheikh Dhari, to gain independence from British rule. Leachman had accused the sheikh of supporting a gang of bandits and had made a rendezvous with him at a police station near the sheikh’s home. Sheikh Dhari went to the meeting, but he brought several relatives with him. The two men quarrelled, and while they were standing at the doorway, the Sheikh signalled his relatives to shoot. Leachman was wounded in the leg, and Sheikh Dhari stabbed him with his sword and killed him. Sheikh Dhari fled to Turkey, and the Arab tribes revolted. A price was put on the sheikh’s head. He was captured a few years later by a British spy and brought back to Baghdad, where he died in a hospital after being injected with poison.

This version of events is remarkably similar to the way the story was told in “Clash of Loyalties,” a film made by British and Iraqi producers in 1983. Leachman, played by Oliver Reed, is a drunken, cold-hearted cynic who says things like “Killing and intimidation are my job, and I do it well.” Sheikh Dhari is a tragic hero. He gallops off into exile after his daring feat, but years later, when he is old and sick, he is lured back to Iraq, betrayed, and murdered. In the final scene, the sheikh’s casket is followed by thousands of angry mourners who pass by the British Legation, where diplomats look on smugly. The image right before the credits shows spouting oil wells and flames.

Back in the diwaniya, over tea, Sheikh Muther became agitated. “Leachman was trying to make war between the people in Iraq in order to get what he wanted,” he yelled. “Tell America not to attack! I am a warrior just like Sheikh Dhari, and I will defend my country bravely.” He chuckled and grinned and grabbed me in an affectionate-seeming embrace. Once our clinch was broken, I asked Muther what lessons the Americans should draw from the British experience, and Abdul Razaq spoke up. “We learned many lessons about how to defend ourselves from any kind of occupation. The Americans and British cannot occupy Iraq. Nobody can occupy Iraq.”

Abdul Razaq invited me to go with him to where Leachman was killed, in an old yellow brick building with arched windows and a single doorway, set back from the road amid eucalyptus trees and a warren of mud hovels. It had been the Turkish police station, he said, and during Leachman’s time it was requisitioned by the British. A family was living there now, and I saw a young man and a few small children inside. A central passageway led past dark, vaulted chambers to a courtyard paved with stones. Beyond several arches lay a kind of open stable block, where a large white goose wandered around. Before we left the house, Abdul Razaq stopped me, just inside the great front door. “This is the spot where Leachman was killed—right here,” he said. Abdul Razaq pointed to an old tree that stood about a hundred feet away and said that was where the relatives with guns waited. I told him I was very impressed that Leachman could have been shot from such a distance, standing inside a darkened doorway, with Sheikh Dhari right next to him. Abdul Razaq smiled.

“Remember,” he said, “Iraqis are very good warriors.”

In late November, 1914, shortly after Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire, a British expeditionary force seized Basra, and a few months later the British began moving north, toward Baghdad. They got within twenty-five miles of the city but then had to retreat to Kut, a village on the Tigris River. There, on December 3, 1915, they hunkered down, under siege from the Turks and their Arab allies. A few days later, Colonel Leachman, who had been covering the flanks of the retreating troops and was outside Kut, broke through Turkish lines to rescue some of his servants who were trapped in the village, including a young Indian boy who had become his constant companion. Leachman led a breakout with a few thousand cavalry troops. The rest of the army was not so lucky. Ten thousand British and Indian soldiers died between the start of the march on Baghdad and the surrender in Kut in April, 1916. Twenty-three thousand more troops died trying to rescue the trapped soldiers. The survivors of the siege were sent on a death march and were press-ganged into work as laborers on a railroad line. It had been the longest and most terrible siege in the history of the British Empire.

Kut is now an ugly, down-at-the-heels town of a few hundred thousand people. To get to it from Baghdad, you drive through a flat landscape of churned-up, trash-strewn brown earth and an industrial belt of scrubby factories that eventually merges into green fields of alfalfa and small farms and stands of date palms. When I drove there in mid-March, I saw hundreds of newly bulldozed snipers’ nests and sandbagged foxholes. They were fragile, rather pointless-looking defenses—a single shot from a tank would blow any one of them to smithereens. Not much else in the way of military preparation seemed to be going on. Just outside the large concrete arches and the military inspection post that serve as the gateway to Kut, we passed an army barracks where uniformed men who seemed to be recruits were being rallied at the roadside, but there was a desultory look to their activity.

Donkey carts carrying jerricans and fresh alfalfa bobbed along on the streets of Kut. It was a springlike morning, and as I waited outside the governor’s compound, where I had gone to ask permission to visit the British cemetery, I could hear children playing in a nearby schoolyard. The school let out, and a group of young boys came down the road, hopping in and out of recently dug foxholes. After an hour or so, some senior-looking officials emerged with my minder, Muslim, and we drove in a big loop around the town, past a stadium where soldiers were making more dugouts in the median strip of a boulevard, and into a scrubby area of the city, with tiny, badly built brick houses and raw sewage running down the streets. The British cemetery is a sunken square of land surrounded by buildings on three sides. A fence ran along the street in front of it, but the front gate was open, and I could see that the whole place was strewn with garbage, and about half of it was hidden behind a tall thicket of weeds. An inscription next to the front gate read, “Kut War Cemetery, 1914-1918.” As I stared in dismay, the man who had guided us from the governor’s office explained, through Muslim, that the poor state of the graveyard was the result of the U.N. sanctions and the lack of diplomatic relations with Great Britain. “The men who used to look after it, and who received salaries from the British, have gone,” he said. “That is the reason it looks like this.”

We clambered down to the cemetery grounds, over a huge pile of stinking rubbish. Women peering out of a window giggled and chattered. Some young boys sat on a wall, dangling their feet and staring at us. The stench of excrement was strong; in one spot the skin of a freshly slaughtered goat buzzed with flies. There was a dead tree with bicycle inner tubes caught in its branches. An unmarked obelisk at the center was splattered with black and yellow paint, and broken-off headstones lay everywhere. Those still standing and legible showed that most of the men who were buried here, English privates with surnames like Martin, Nicholls, Newton, and Rogers, had been killed at the height of the siege of Kut, between January and April of 1916.

When I was done poking around, I chatted with the official from the governor’s office and mentioned that ten thousand soldiers had died in Kut. He smiled. “And if the Americans invade you will see many of them killed at the borders with Iraq,” he said. “We are here, living in our homes, and we will defend ourselves and our country with courage, the same as people anywhere would do in our position.” I asked the officer his name. He told me, with some reluctance, that it was Hassan Al-Wazaty. When I asked him his rank, he laughed and demurred: “No rank. I am just one of the people of Iraq. We are all like soldiers now.”

Later, in a situation without minders or translators, I told a man who is highly placed in Baghdad that I had seen trenches and foxholes on the road to Kut, and he laughed. That was just to keep people busy doing things, he said. It was obvious that the regime did not intend to defend anything but Baghdad itself. The Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard had been pulled to Baghdad from the south and the north and had been dispersed throughout the city, in civilian areas. This seemed like a foolhardy policy to him, but there it was. “If everything else is gone,” he said, “then why fight for Baghdad? What is the point in that?”

Colonel Leachman was buried in an unmarked grave in Al Fallujah, among the bodies of other soldiers who had fallen in the Arab rebellion. Leachman’s body was disinterred in 1921 and reburied in Baghdad, in the North Gate War Cemetery, in the Bab al Mouatham neighborhood.

The graveyard is a dusty fifteen-acre oblong with rows of regimental tombstones, and open spaces where the ashes of Muslim and Hindu soldiers lie. It is dotted with the odd plinth and funereal obelisk and bisected by a row of forlorn-looking date palms. The Turkish embassy is across the street. Several laborers were working on a new guardhouse when Khalid, the minder who was soon to abscond to his home in Karbala, and I visited. One of the laborers unlocked the gate and pointed to General Maude’s imposing domed stone mausoleum at the center of the grounds. “That’s where most of the visitors go,” he said. We walked toward it, passing an obelisk inscribed with the message, in English and Sanskrit, “God is One—His is the Victory: In Memory of the brave Hindus and Sikhs who sacrificed their lives in the Great War for their King and their Country.” Etched into a large limestone plinth nearby were the words “Their Name Liveth for Evermore.”

Some of the headstones had broken off, and lay toppled and neglected. Those still standing were etched with Christian crosses and regimental insignias: an elephant and palm for the Ceylon Sanitary Corps, a castle standard for the Essex Regiments, and a stag’s head for the Seaforth Highlanders. The headstone for 201775 Private S. Brown of the Dorsetshire Regiment, who died on September 28, 1917, at the age of twenty-five, bore the words “Peace, Perfect Peace.” Many of the graves were anonymous and were inscribed with the same message: “Four Soldiers of the Great War—Known Unto God.” The casket in General Maude’s mausoleum bore the epitaph “He Fought a Good Fight and Kept the Faith.” A plaque identifying him was covered with graffito markings in Arabic, the names of Iraqi boys: Jassim, Muhammad, Shakir . . .

As we were walking out of the cemetery, we passed an obelisk with the inscription “Here are the honoured Turkish soldiers who fell for their country in the Great War, 1914-1918.” When I pointed this out to Khalid, he seemed confused, and I explained that the obelisk had been erected by the British to honor their enemies. He smirked. “So, the British have honor!” he said, and he walked away, then turned back. “Maybe they will do the same for us, after they have killed us. Thank you very much.”

(Jon Lee Anderson, Letter from Baghdad, also “Fall of Baghdad, 2004 book)

Colonel Gerard Evelyn Leachman:

Brevet Lieut.-Colonel Gerard Evelyn Leachman CIE DSO (1880 – August 12, 1920), was a British soldier and intelligence officer who travelled extensively in Arabia.

Leachman was commissioned into the Royal Sussex Regiment and served in India and in the Boer War. He spent most of his career as a political officer in Iraq, where he was instrumental in pacifying warring tribes to bring stability to the new country. Leachman also made various expeditions further south into Arabia, where he contacted Ibn Sa’ud on behalf of the British government. He travelled as a naturalist of the Royal Geographical Society, but was in fact a British agent.

With his dark, Semitic looks and skill at riding a camel, Leachman was easily able to pass as Bedouin and often travelled incognito.

Leachman’s first major expedition south into the Arabian Peninsula was in 1909, during which he was involved in a ferocious battle between the Anaiza and Shammar tribes near Ha’il. He was awarded Macgregor Memorial medal for reconnaissance in 1910. In 1912 Leachman made a second expedition with the intention of crossing the Rub Al Khali, but was refused permission by Ibn Sa’ud when he reached Riyadh and instead went to Hasa. He was the first Briton to be received by Ibn Sa’ud in his home city.

In December, 1915, during the Siege of Kut, the British commanding officer, Major General Charles Townshend, ordered Leachman to save the British cavalry by breaking out and riding south. This he did and the cavalry were the only British unit to escape before the fall of the city to the Ottomans.

Leachman was close to Gertrude Bell‘s friend Fahd Bey and fought with the Muntafiq tribal federation. After the war, he was made first military governor of Kurdistan. He was murdered by Sheikh Dhari, a tribal leader, near Fallujah on August 12, 1920.

He was played by Oliver Reed in al-Mas’ Ala Al-Kubra (1983), a film financed by Saddam Hussein.

References

• A Paladin of Arabia. The Biography of Brevet Lieut.-Colonel G. E. Leachman, N.N.E.Bray, Unicorn Press (1936). ISBN 0-7103-0976-7

• Travellers in Arabia, Eid Al Yahya, Stacey International (2006). ISBN 0 9552 1931 0 (9780955219313)

• OC Desert; the life of Lieutenant-Colonel Gerard Leachman, H.V.F. Winstone, Quartet (1982). ISBN 0704323303

The Siege of Kut was a major battle of World War I. It was part of the Mesopotamian Campaign (in what is now Iraq). The British Empire‘s Mesopotamian Expeditionary Force (MEF) was defeated by Ottoman forces.

Kut-al-Amara is a town on the Tigris, where it meets the ancient Shatt al-Hai canal. It is 350 km upstream from Basra and around 170 km from Baghdad. In 1915 its population was around 6,500.

The 6th (Poona) Division of the Indian Army, under Major-General Charles Townshend, had fallen back to the town of Kut after retreating from Ctesiphon. The British Empire forces arrived at Kut around December 3, 1915. They had suffered significant losses and were down to around 11,000 soldiers (plus cavalry). General Townshend chose to stay and hold the position at Kut instead of continuing the march downriver towards Basra. Kut offered a good defensive position, it was contained within a long loop of the river. The problem was how to get supplies. Kut was a long way from Basra. In retrospect, Townshend’s decision to stay at Kut was a disastrous one.

The siege

The pursuing Ottoman forces arrived on December 7, 1915. Once it became clear the Turks had enough forces to lay siege to Kut, Townshend ordered his cavalry to escape south, which it did, led by Colonel Gerard Leachman. The Ottoman forces numbered around 11,000 men and were commanded by the respected but old German General and military historian Baron von der Goltz. Goltz knew the Turkish army well as he had spent 12 years working on modernizing the Ottoman army from 1883 to 1895. After three attacks in December, Goltz directed the building of siege fortifications facing Kut. He also, like Caesar at Alisia, prepared for an attack from Basra, using the Tigris River, by building defensive positions further down the river.

After a month of siege, Townshend wanted to break-out and withdraw southwards but his Commander, Sir John Nixon saw value in tying down the Ottoman forces in a siege. However, when Townshend — inaccurately — reported only one month of food remained, a rescue force was hastily raised. It is not clear why Townshend reported he only had enough food for one month when he actually had food for more than four months (although at a reduced level).

Relief expeditions

The first relief expedition comprised some 19,000 men under General Aylmer and it headed up the river from Ali Gharbi in January 1916. It was badly mauled in three clashes in January (Sheikh Sa’ad, Wadi and Hanna). At this point Khalil Pasha (the Ottoman commander of the whole region) came to the battle, bringing with him a further 20,000 to 30,000 reinforcements.

Following the defeat of Aylmer’s expedition, General Nixon was replaced as supreme commander by Percy Lake. More forces were sent to bolster Aylmer’s troops. He tried again, attacking the Dujaila redoubt on March 8. This attack failed at a cost of 4,000 men. General Aylmer was dismissed and replaced with George Gorringe on March 12.

The relief attempt by Gorringe is usually termed the First Battle of Kut. The British Empire forces numbered about 30,000 soldiers, roughly equal to the Ottomans. The battle began on April 5 and the British soon captured Fallahiyeh but with heavy losses, Bait Asia was taken on April 17. The final effort was against Sannaiyat on April 22. The Allies were unable to take Sannaiyat and suffered some 1,200 casualties in the process.

The relief efforts had all failed at a cost of around 23,000 Allied killed or wounded. Ottoman casualties are believed to be around 10,000. The Turks also lost the aid of Baron von der Goltz. He died on April 19 supposedly of typhoid but the rumor at the time was that he was poisoned by some of his Turkish officers. It is a fact that there was no German commander in Mesopotamia for the rest of the war.

Surrender of the British army

British leaders attempted to buy their troops out. Aubrey Herbert and T. E. Lawrence were part of a team of officers sent to negotiate a secret deal with the Turks. The British offered £2 million and promised they would not fight the Turks again, in exchange for Townshend’s troops. Enver Pasha ordered that this offer be rejected. [1]

The British also asked for help from the Russians. General Baratov, with his largely Cossack force of 20,000 was in Persia at the time. Following the request he advanced towards Baghdad in April 1916 but turned back when news reached him of the surrender.[2]

General Townshend arranged a ceasefire on the 26th and, after failed negotiations, he simply surrendered on April 29, 1916 after a siege of 147 days. Around 13,000 Allied soldiers survived to be made prisoners. 70% of the British and 50% of the Indian troops died of disease or at the hands of the Turkish guards during captivity. Townshend himself was taken the island of Malki on the Sea of Marmara, to sit out the war in luxury.

In British Army battle honours, the siege of Kut is named as “Defence of Kut Al Amara”.

Aftermath

James Morris, a British historian, described the loss of Kut as “the most abject capitulation in Britain’s military history.” After this humilitating loss, General Lake and General Gorringe were removed from command. The new commander was General Maude, who trained and organised his army and then launched a successful campaign which captured Baghdad on March 11, 1917. With Baghdad captured, the British administration undertook vital reconstruction of the war-torn country. Kut was slowly rebuilt as a memorial to those who had died in its defence, while those citizens who had lost family in the siege received funds for the reconstruction of their homes[3]. In a few short months the city of Kut was reborn with a growing population of two hundred [3].

References

1. David Fromkin, A Peace to End all Peace, p. 201

2. Cyril Falls, The Great War, p. 249

3. Howell, Georgina. Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell. London: Macmillan, 2006. p. 311

Sources and further reading

• Barber, Major Charles H. Besieged in Kut – and After Blackwood, 1917

• Braddon, Russell The Siege Cape, 1969 / Viking Adult, 1970 ISBN 0-670-64386-6

• Dixon, Dr. Norman F. On the Psychology of Military Incompetence Jonathan Cape Ltd 1976 / Pimlico 1994 pp95–109

• Harvey, Lt & Q-Mr. F. A. The Sufferings of the Kut Garrison During Their March Into Turkey as Prisoners of War 1916–1917 Ludgershall, Wilts: The Adjutants’s Press, 1922

• Keegan, John (1998). The First World War. Random House Press.

• Long, P. W. Other Ranks of Kut Williams & Norgate, 1938

• Mouseley, Capt. E. O. The Secrets of a Kuttite: An Authentic Story of Kut, Adventures in Captivity & Stamboul Intrigue Bodley Head, 1921

• Sandes, Major E. W. C. In Kut & Captivity with the Sixth Indian Division Murray, 1919

• Strachan, Hew (2003). The First World War, pp 125. Viking (published by the Penguin Group).

• Wilcox, Ron (2006) Battles on the Tigris. Pen and Sword Military.

• Mons, Anzac & Kut by Aubrey Herbert

Colonel Gerard Evelyn Leachman

Comment:

Hitchcock’s 1936 thriller, “The Secret Agent” has the Battle of Kut 1915/1916 and the surrender at Kut of Charles Townsend as its backdrop.