General Richard Myers, US military bossman, has come and gone. He said he did not discuss Indian troops for Iraq. Oh yeah. Like pigs have wings. Presumably he visited because he wanted to see our monsoon rains pouring down as relief from the arid wastes of the Iraqi desert. The fact is the Americans have neither given up their desire to get our jawans to do their dirty work for them, nor has the Vajpayee government given up its arch Jaswant Singh-driven desire to impale once-independent India in a subsidiary alliance with the United States. The fig leaf now being suggested is a “UN mandate” under which our boys can be despatched to Mesopotamia. As they were sent to suppress the Iraqi revolution of 1920 in protest against the Mandate given by the League of Nations to legitimise the British occupation of Iraq.History is now repeating itself as tragedy in the Land of the Twin Rivers. At the “peace conference” in Versailles in 1919, the defeated erstwhile Turkish Caliphate was obliged to disgorge its Arab territories. But instead of giving the Arabs independence, which was the compact on which the Arabs had throw in their lot with the Allies in the First World War, the imperial powers agreed among themselves (no question of asking the Arabs) that the Bedouin of the desert were too uncivilised to rule themselves and would, therefore, have to be tutored into political maturity. To France and Britain was entrusted this noble mission civilisatrice. Avidly, the two carved up the Middle East on the basis of the Sykes-Picot accord, France taking Lebanon and Syria, the Brits getting Palestine, Jordan and, of course, Iraq. It is Iraq which concerns us today.The Iraqis reacted to the threat of a League Mandate with a peaceful congress of the al-Ahad al-Iraqi (the Iraqi People’s Congress) in Damascus in March 1920 where they attempted peacefully to put forward a reasoned case for Iraqi independence. The League of Nations dismissed these nationalist aspirations and at the San Remo conference next month the Mandate for Iraq was awarded to Great Britain. The non-violent initiative of the al-Ahad al-Iraq was thus overtaken by a guerrilla force moving from Syria into Iraq (in the direction of the Mosul sector which the Bushmen want us to police) under the leadership of Jamil al-Midfai, a militant who would doubtless in today’s Anglo-Americanese be called a “terrorist”. The incoming forces of liberation were supported by an indigenous group of freedom fighters (aka “terrorists”) organised as the Haras al-Istiqlal, or Independence Guard, led by two Shia eminences, Muhammad al-Sadr and Mirza Muhammad Rida, both sons of the leading ayatollahs of their community.With Sunni and Shia coming together, militancy was reinforced by mass demonstrations in Baghdad, Basra and other Iraqi cities. To counter this nationalist uprising, the Brits then, like the Americans now, set up a governing council of collaborators. Then, as now, the collaborators could not agree among themselves on who should preside over the council. So, elections were announced (but not held, then as now) for a constituent assembly to be organised by a commission chaired by a returning exile, an Ottoman grandee, Syed Talib al-Naqib (the role now assumed by a returning exile and feudal grandee, Ahmed Chalabi).Fuelled by mass hatred of this abject collaborationist surrender to imperial power, armed revolt broke out in Iraq in June 1920. Within a month, the mid-Euphrates (al-Farhat) region, dominated by the Shia strongholds of Najf and Karbala, was wrenched from colonial hands. Success on the Shia front encouraged the Sunnis of the Tigris (al-Dijla) to join the spreading revolt. Over the next several months, the revolution was ruthlessly crushed. The officers were British, the jawans were Indian. Six thousand Iraqis were killed. Five hundred jawans and Tommies lost their lives killing them. “For the Iraqis,” says Charles Tripp, the leading British historian of modern Iraq at the London School of Oriental and African Studies, “it became part of the founding myth of Iraq.” The revolt failed, as our First War of Independence failed, but it compelled the Brits to sweeten the League of Nations Mandate with a bilateral UK-Iraq treaty. The treaty replicated the subsidiary alliances the Brits had entered into with Jaswant Singh’s feudal ancestors, kith and kin in 19th century Rajputana. King Faisal I “became sovereign of a state that was not itself sovereign” (Tripp).The arrangement was so bitterly resented that as soon as British military power weakened with the onset of World War II, Rashid al-Gailani (whose position in contemporary Iraqi folklore is roughly comparable to the Rani of Jhansi’s) led a revolt in 1941 against the British-supported royal regime, which ranks in Iraqi nationalism where our Quit India movement of the following year figures in our struggle for independence. Participating in that revolt was Khairallah Talfa al-Massalat, the uncle who adopted Saddam Hussein.Every political move which Paul Bremer and his gang are making in today’s Iraq derives almost copy-book style from the machinations of the British colonialists, Percy Cox, Arnold Wilson and Henry Dobbs, through the turbulent twenties. And every military move of the Americans is a 21st century version of what the Brits did 80 years ago. Then, we, as a hapless colony of the Brits, were compelled to send our finest young men to death and disgrace in Iraq in aid of the League of Nations Mandate. Now we are being sounded out on sending our young men to death and disgrace under the fig-leaf of a United Nations mandate. The difference between the two is that the League’s Mandate was with a capital M; the proposed UN mandate will be with a small m. But unless and until the UN itself replaces the US as the authority in Iraq to restore independence and sovereignty to that country, sending Indian troops to Iraq under a UN mandate will be no different to sending them with a League Mandate. They will die and be disgraced in someone else’s cause. The time to say, “No,” is now.
