February 26, 2007	Monday	Safar 8, 1428

WASHINGTON: At the centre of Baghdad’s neglected North Gate War Cemetery, near the edge of the old city walls, stands an imposing grave. Sheltered from the weather by a grandiose red sandstone cupola, it is the final resting place of a man from whom George W. Bush could have learned a great deal about the perils of intervening in Iraq.

Lt. Gen. Sir Frederick Stanley Maude was head of the British army in Mesopotamia when he marched into Baghdad on a hot, dusty day in March 1917. Soon thereafter, he issued the British government’s “Proclamation to the People of Baghdad,” which eerily foreshadowed sentiments that Bush and his administration would express 86 years later: British forces, Maude declared, had entered the city not as conquerors, but as liberators.

Maude had arrived in Baghdad after a long and arduous military campaign. British forces had been fighting the Ottoman army for two-and-a-half years and had suffered one of the worst defeats of World War I.

Having rallied from that loss and finally reached Baghdad, Maude tried to create common cause between the British army and the city’s residents. He promised that it was not “the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions.” Instead, he called on residents to manage their own civil affairs “in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain.”

Maude did not live to see the failure of his efforts to rally the people of Iraq to the British occupation.

After his death, British policy toward Iraq changed repeatedly as the army attempted to dominate the country and suppress the population. The rebellion quickly spread across the south and centre of the country. The revolt forced Britain to devolve real power to Iraqi politicians.

US presidential candidates now campaigning to seize the White House in 2008 should be forewarned, however, it took Britain ten more years to jettison its financial and military commitments to Iraq. During that period, a number of governments struggled to reduce the size of the forces deployed in Iraq and the amount of money being spent there. They strove for a decade to stabilise the country and meet Britain’s pledges to the international community while trying to placate domestic opinion. The tensions involved in this exercise -- building a state from scratch with a hostile population, under severe budgetary constraints and in the face of rising domestic anger -- ultimately led to the failure of the whole exercise.

Like Maude’s before him, Bush’s policy in Iraq has resulted in a series of unintended outcomes. In the face of ever-increasing violence, the stirring rhetoric about Iraq becoming a beacon of democracy in the Middle East has been quietly dropped. Instead, the operation in Iraq has been placed on the frontline of the global fight against terrorism: it is better to battle terrorists on the streets of Baghdad than in Brooklyn or Houston, the mantra goes.

Where does this leave US policy toward Iraq? Historical studies often divide military interventions into three general phases. The first phase, the initial decision to invade, is shaped by common misperceptions that the conflict will be short and that military force can be used to achieve political objectives.

The second phase is marked by a slow realisation that both these assumptions are wrong. The policy failure leads to increasingly desperate attempts to stay the course, to pour in ever greater numbers of troops, gambling on a resurrection of the initial policy.

The 1920 revolt, followed by the change of government in London in 1922, led to a prolonged but largely unsuccessful attempt to do nation-building on the cheap. The final transformation of policy was marked by another change of government. The election of May 1929 resulted in a Labour administration. The new foreign policy team found it easier to identify the contradictions at the heart of Britain’s relations with Iraq and find ways to overcome them. It recommended Iraq for unconditional membership to the League of Nations in 1932, unceremoniously dumping Britain’s commitment to building a democratic and stable state.

Iraq became a fully independent state that same year. But it was unable to defend itself against its neighbours.

Eighty years later, after failing to stabilise Iraq, the US government has come face to face with the high costs of the new “forward-leaning” foreign policy of the Bush doctrine. Comparisons with other military interventions suggest that Bush will continue to pursue a largely unvarying policy in Iraq, deploying all the troops and resources at his disposal in an attempt to correct the mistakes that have been made. The result, as the president himself has recognised, will be to push the difficult decisions about the future of US involvement in Iraq onto his successor.

History, however, has two final disturbing lessons for the next president. The governing elite nurtured by the British to take their place -- the Iraqi royal family and their associates brought to the country in 1921 -- proved unfit for the purpose and were swept aside by a military coup in 1941. The British army was forced to reinvade and restore them to power. Yet even this second invasion was not enough. The violent instability that engulfed Iraq and resulted in the rise of Saddam Hussein was triggered by the murder of the royal family by Iraqi army officers in July 1958.

Here is what Britain’s history of failure at building a democratic state in Iraq in the 1920s and ’30s tells George W. Bush and his successors: if, like Gen. Maude, they fail to deliver on the promises of a better future for the Iraqi people, then Iraq will continue as a font of violent instability long after those who made the promises have been buried.—Dawn/The Washington Post News Service