What the British learned in 1920 by not leaving Iraq

It's one of the loneliest places in Baghdad - the British military cemetery, where hundreds of forlorn gravestones attest to the price of imperialism in Iraq.

In 1920, a Shiite revolt erupted against British occupiers, who had arrived in Mesopotamia at the start of World War I. Britain pushed out Ottoman forces, but didn't move fast enough to create a promised new nation state. The uprising surprised the British, left more than 2,200 occupation troops and an estimated 8,450 Iraqis dead or wounded - and cost, by one account, three times as much as British financing of the entire Arab revolt against the Ottomans.

Today the US faces the same dilemma that dogged the British: How to grant self-rule to Iraqis as promised, while keeping overall control. Despite rhetoric from Washington that it will transform Iraq into a democratic beacon in the Mideast, few Iraqis believe the US is sincere.

"The Americans believe in democracy, but they do not believe in its results," says Gailan Ramiz, an Iraqi political scientist with degrees from Princeton, Harvard, and Oxford. "The ballot box should rule - period. It is so in America, and it should be so in Iraq. It can't be avoided by any more tactics." Changing such attitudes will require the US to learn lessons from the British colonial experience - lessons applied only fitfully so far. Among them:

The US-appointed Governing Council signed an interim constitution on Monday, and Washington insists that it will hand sovereignty back to Iraqis on June 30. Elections for an interim assembly are due next January. But American troops will not be going home this summer if bloody resistance attacks continue, and few Iraqis expect the US to cede real control.

"When the British came to Baghdad in 1917, they declared that 'We are here as liberators, not occupiers.' That is the same statement the Americans have made," says Ghassan Atiyyah, an expert on the 1920 revolt and head of the Iraq Foundation for Development and Democracy. "Iraqis thought the British were sincere about it, and they proved to have other designs. [Today] Iraqis are asking: 'How could America get rid of Saddam in three weeks, and have no elections in 11 months?' "

The historical comparison does not always hold. The anti-British revolt mostly involved Shiites, but was more tribal and rural than religious, and fanned by overtaxation. Bowing to military cost-cutting at home, and public pressure not to deepen its role in Iraq, the British government back then had less at stake in Iraq than America does today, as it uses Iraq as a test case of unilateral US action in a post-Sept. 11 world. Still, many points do apply.

The British relied on air power to quell dissent - at great cost to the civilian population and to its credibility. Americans, too, are often accused of heavy-handed tactics while hunting Saddam Hussein loyalists and anticoalition guerrillas.

British cabinet papers from 1921 raised doubt about keeping "peaceful control of Mesopotamia" if it "ultimately depends on our intention of bombing women and children."

In his memoirs, the British commander in charge of quelling the revolt, Lt. Gen. Sir Aylmer Haldane, wrote in 1922 of the "vanity of what we undertook," in confiscating 63,000 rifles from Iraqi tribes. The Iraqis "not only rearmed themselves but acquired weapons of more modern type," Gen. Haldane lamented, leading him to conclude of Mesopotamia that "it is folly to think, not in one year but even in many years, to draw the teeth of its inhabitants."

Historian Paul Rish, in an introduction to Haldane's memoirs, indicates that one method that contributed to the 1920 revolt and future unrest was a British plan that "relied heavily on putting pliable but unpopular Arabs in sham authority."

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