History Repeating

Faisal's [the newly crowned King of Iraq] task was enormous; he had not inherited a well-defined nation, but rather a collection of diverse groups - Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs, Jews and Kurds and Yazidis - a territory with a few important cities, most of the countryside under the control of local sheikhs, and with little common political or cultural history, but with a rising Arab nationalism.  The minority Sunni Arabs held political power, while the Shia Arabs were by far the most numerous.  To complicate things further, the Jews were the largest single group among inhabitants of Baghdad, followed by Arabs and Turks.  To this religious and ethnic mosaic, Britain sought to import constitutionalism and a responsible parliament.  Fiasal depended upon Britain to support his new kingdom, but his position would be gravely impaired if he were seen as being too beholden to London.  The British government had to cope with not only with Arab nationalism in Iraq but also with the oil men, who were clamoring for some word on the status of the Iraqi concession.  Britain was all for oil development, hoping that the potential oil revenues would help finance the new Iraqi government and further reduce its own financial burdens.

That is from The Prize, Daniel Yergin's Pulitzer prize winning history of oil. 

The time: early 1920's.

With the exception of the Jews in Baghdad, a different leader, and the U.S. replacing Britain, this is basically what we have today.
Was our Iraq invasion/liberation a case of history repeating?  Not exactly - the two situations are different enough that one couldn't say Dubua and neocon friends were in the exact same position with the exact same motivations as the British eighty odd years ago.

But Yergin's short passage highlights with great clarity the fact that many of the problems we face today have deep roots and were not only around, but very similar, almost a century ago.

As if we really needed it, this further illustrates a true lack of understanding and preparation by the Bush administration before undertaking the massive task of ousting Saddam.  No one doubted the U.S. military would achieve a quick and decisive victory.  But from the looting immediately following the fall of Saddam's regime, to the failed efforts to provide a working infrastructure, to the early insurgency, and into a civil war, it's crystal clear the Bush planning failed to take a complex and difficult history into account.

Now you may be tempted to say that's all in the past - and well covered.  The time to deal with these planning issues was four years ago, before the effort got underway.  Very true.

But it sure seems like Bush is about to make another mistake that has been made before.  This escalation, er, surge, has a very familiar sound.  It didn't really work that well in Vietnam and given the Bush administration's apparent lack of appreciation for history's lessons, I'm guessing that the end result will be roughly the same as Vietnam.  Short term military success with ultimate failure. 

My (loose) prediction: Bush will push more troops into Baghdad which will result in a calming of the violence in the city (ala the massive bombing of Hanoi).  The outlying areas won't change much, but that'll be shoved under the rug as Bush pats himself on the back for doing a heckava job cleaning up Baghdad.  Domestic pressures will ultimately push Bush to start dramatic troop reductions and pulling back our troops to safe zones and acting mostly as advisers.  Shortly thereafter the repressed civil war will explode, leading to a quick withdrawal of the remaining U.S. forces (ala Saigon, '75).  After a nasty civil war Iraq will be ruled by, you guessed it, a military strongman.  Now that's progress.

Ok, I may be off on that prediction.  Actually, I hope I am.  But the fact that Bush's previous efforts don't appear to have factored in very many lessons from history, I have serious doubts about the new plan.  And as such, I'm sadly predicting a similar results to what we've seen in the past.

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