Past & Present

That’s how The Guardian newspaper aptly describes the Russian ex-president Boris Yeltsin who died today. He was 76, which is a surprisingly old age for a man notorious for drinking hard.

I picked up this quotation from “Unconscious Colossus: Limits Of (& Alternatives To) The American Empire” by Niall Ferguson. The quotation also appeared earlier in the Wilson Quarterly issue in the summer of 2005.

Had policymakers troubled to consider what befell the last Anglophone occupation of Iraq they might have been less surprised by the persistent resistance they encountered in certain parts of the country during 2004. For in May of 1920 there was a major anti-British revolt there. This happened six months after a referendum (in practice, a round of consultations with tribal leaders) on the country’s future, and just after the announcement that Iraq would become a League of Nations mandate under British trusteeship rather than continue under colonial rule. Strikingly, neither consultation with Iraqis nor the promise of internationalization sufficed to avert an uprising.

In 1920, as in 2004, the insurrection had religious origins and leaders, but it soon transcended the country’s ancient ethnic and sectarian divisions. The first anti-British demonstrations were in the mosques of Baghdad, but the violence quickly spread to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, where British rule was denounced by Ayatollah Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi, the historical counterpart of today’s Shiite firebrand, Moktada al Sadr…

This brings us to the second lesson the United States might have learned from the British experience: reestablishing order is no easy task. In 1920 the British eventually ended the rebellion through a combination of aerial bombardments and punitive village-burning expeditions. Even Winston Churchill, then the minister responsible for the Royal Air Force, was shocked by the actions of some.

And despite their overwhelming technological superiority, British forces still suffered more than two thousand dead and wounded. Moreover, the British had to keep troops in Iraq long after the country was granted full sovereignty. Although Iraq was declared formally independent in 1932, British troops remained there until 1955.

You’re not happy to hear about massacres, but it is better the truth oozes out late than never.

Survivors say that U.S. soldiers first forced them from villages on July 25, 1950, and then stopped them in front of U.S. lines the next day when they were attacked without warning by aircraft as hundreds sat atop a railroad embankment near No Gun Ri, a village in central South Korea.

I know, I know, it came out a while ago now, but for those after a readable account of the schism in the early history of Islam, Time magazine delivers. The issue with this article also had a terrific graphic display of where the Sunni and Shi’ite muslims live in the world. But that’s not available on-line.