The modern state of Iraq, like all the from its inception, a creation of imperialism. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and Palestine were all carved out of the defeated Ottoman empire at the end of the First World War. The entry into the war by Turkey on the side of Germany threatened British domination of India. This led to a reversal of British policy: instead of continuing to try to maintain the unity of the Ottoman empire British imperialism (with the full support of the French) decided to destroy it.
British troops were landed in the Shattal-Arab to protect Anglo-Persian oil installations at Abadan and occupied the port of Basra. After a bloody campaign, in which the British army suffered severe reverses, British troops entered Baghdad in March 1917. In October 1918, following the armistice with Turkey, Britain took control of the oil-rich province of Mosul.
On the eve of the First World War Arabs were beginning to define themselves in national, as much as religious, terms. Nevertheless they were largely seeking decentralisation, autonomy and equality of Turks and Arabs as Muslims within the Ottoman Empire. What pushed them towards independence was the rise of a specifically Turkish nationalism before the First World War. British imperialism tried to make use of these stirrings of Arab nationalism to defeat Turkey and • • • thereby weaken Germany.
Between July 1915 and January B126 Seen the Shanaton, the
and Sir Henry McMahon, the British High Commissioner in Cairo exchanged a number of notes in which Hussein offers to provide military assistance to Britain in exchange for British support for an independent Arab state and an Arab Caliphate for Islam. McMahon - in his second note - implies that Britain will accept Hussein's proposals despite some reservations about the boundaries of the state in relation to the wilayets (provinces) of Baghdad and Basra and Britain's obligations to the independent Gulf states.)
Hussein was far from being a revolutionary nationalist: indeed he hoped by his alliance with British imperialism to isolate and defeat the rising nationalist movement. However he also allied himself with nationalist army officers whose demands went a lot further than imperialism was willing to give.
Just to be on the safe side Hussein proclaimed himself king of the Arabs in 1916, while continuing to negotiate with the Turks both before and after the launching of the "Arab Revolt' in June 1916. The weakness of the Arab leadership and the lack of an alternative allowed the "Arab Revolt' to be manipulated by British imperialism - via "Lawrence of Arabia' for its own purposes.
Alongside the exchange of correspondence between McMahon and Hussein -and before the launching of the Arab Revolt - other, rather more meaningful, talks were There were plenty of problems and despots in the region long before Saddam Hussein arrived on the scene boycott the commission is testimony to their lack of any real commitment to even the limited notions of self-determination espoused by Wilson, notions that fell far short of those put forward by the Bolsheviks who (at least in theory and, to a large extent in practice) championed the independence of all colonial peoples.
In particular, the decision to award Mandates to France - in the face of overwhelming Arab hostility - suggests a determination by both the British and French to use their dominance of the League of Nations to continue their old imperialist order; thereby confirming, very rapidly, the prediction of the Communist International that the League would be a holy alliance of capitalists bent on crushing the workers' revolution. This assessment was rapidly proved all too accurate.
The modern state of Iraq was created out of the former wilayets (Ottomar