Desert Quicksand

History Shows That Mideast Conquests Don't Usually Turn Out Well

By Hugh Pope and Peter Waldman
Staff Reporters of The Wall Street Journal

For two centuries, foreign powers have been conquering Mideast lands for their own economic and strategic purposes, promising to uplift Arab societies along the way. Sometimes they have modernized cities, taught new ideas and brought technologies.

But in nearly every invasion, both sides have endured a series of unintended consequences. From Napoleon's drive into Egypt through Britain's rule of Iraq in the 1920s to Israel's march into Lebanon in 1982, Middle East nations have tempted conquerors only to send them reeling.

Little wonder that even many Arabs who hated Saddam Hussein were nervous about the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. "Unless the Americans are far more subtle than they've ever had the capacity to be, and more subtle than the [colonial] British, it's going to end in tears," Faisal Istrabadi, an Iraqi-born lawyer in Michigan, predicted on the eve of war. Adds Mr. Faisal, who has worked with the State Department on plans to rebuild Iraq's judiciary: "The honeymoon will be very brief."

Brute Force

Again and again, Westerners have moved into the Mideast with confidence that they can impose freedom and modernity through military force. Along the way they have miscalculated support for their invasions, both internationally and in the lands they occupy. They have anointed cooperative minorities to help rule resentful majorities. They have been mired in occupations that last long after local support has vanished. They have met with bloody uprisings and put them down with brute force.

"We tend to overlook a basic rule: that people prefer bad rule by their own kind to good rule by somebody else," says Boston University historian David Fromkin, author of "A Peace to End All Peace," a 1989 book on colonialism's failures in the Mideast.

President Bush has said this invasion will be different. In the leadup to war, he broadened his aims from removing Mr. Hussein and any weapons of mass destruction to transforming Iraq into a beacon of freedom in the Middle East. Mr. Bush said U.S. troops would remain to help run Iraq until a new, representative government could take control. He spoke movingly of confronting totalitarianism, and of spreading "God's gift" of liberty "to each and every person."

Napoleon proclaimed a similar new era of equality and respect for "true Muslims" as he marched into Cairo in 1798, killing a thousand members of Egypt's ruling caste. He was accompanied by 100 French scientists, researching an encyclopedia and spreading European "enlightenment" to bemused Egyptian intellectuals. "Peoples of Egypt, you will be told that I have come to destroy your religion," said Napoleon as he entered Cairo. "Do not believe it! Reply that I have come to restore your rights!"

Napoleon's real goals involved France's colonial rivalry with Britain. He sought to outflank the British and frustrate their efforts to find a new commercial route to India. But the French committed a fatal error, repeated by nearly all Western powers since: attempting to divide and rule by appointing minority groups to govern hostile majority populations.

The French teamed up with fellow Christians-members of Egypt's minority Coptic sect-to govern the majority Muslims. Resentment grew as hundreds of unveiled women paraded around town with the French interlopers, flouting Islamic ideals of modesty. Months after the French arrival, Islamic clerics stirred a mob to rebellion, killing 300 Frenchmen. In revenge, French troops stormed the city, killing 3,000 Cairenes and ransacking a major mosque. "The people of Cairo were overwhelmed with disdain, abasement at the despoiling and looting of wealth by the French," wrote Egyptian historian Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti.

The French left within three years. Their influence remained in a modernizing dynasty that rose to power afterward, employing French methods to make economic gains. But France itself lost both money and men from its Egyptian adventure.

Britain came next to Egypt, in 1882. Its takeover secured the Suez Canal route to its Indian Empire, but soon triggered a bloody revolt by nationalist Egyptian officers. For the next 40 years, British administrators ruled Egypt from behind the scenes, fashioning themselves as liberators of Egypt's feudal peasants. But several incidents helped make Egypt a center of anti-Western fervor, among them the brutal punishment of villagers when a fracas with British officers on a hunting trip left an officer dead.

British troops landed in what's now Iraq in 1914, as part of Britain's campaign against the Ottoman Turks, allies of Germany in World War I. "Britain was bursting then with confidence in an easy and early victory," wrote British officer T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, who organized the historic Arab Revolt against the Ottomans. Instead, it took four years for Britain, with vastly superior arms, to conquer all of Iraq.

Upon taking Baghdad, the British offered almost the same salutation as Napoleon had in Cairo. "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," trumpeted Gen. F.S. Maude, commander of the British forces in Iraq.

But like the Ottomans, Britain relied on Sunni Muslims as the governing class in Iraq, an arrangement that aggravated conflicts with Iraq's larger Kurdish and Shia Muslim populations. It didn't help when the British shelled the Shia holy city of Najaf, a main source of anti-colonial resistance. British troops killed 6,000 to 10,000 Iraqis in putting down a joint revolt by Shia and Sunni Muslims in 1920. In 1921, to establish a semblance of local rule, the British brought a leader of the Arab Revolt out of exile in London and anointed him king of Iraq.

Despite Britain's setbacks during its 40-year domination of Iraq, it was arguably more successful than any of the other Western invaders of the region. Some Iraqis still recall the time as a golden age of order, education and development.

'Not a Popular Person'

But the British and their chosen kings could never win over their subjects, and deliberately frustrated the Iraqis' desires for an independent political culture. In a memo for fellow British officers, Lawrence of Arabia warned: "The foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia. However friendly and informal the treatment of yourself may be, remember always that your foundations are very sandy ones."

Bush administration officials acknowledge the minefield they're facing, but have expressed confidence that the U.S., with its record of democratizing postwar Germany and Japan, can succeed in Iraq. In particular, the administration believes it will avoid past pitfalls by following a devastating military strike with billions of dollars in reconstruction and humanitarian aid. U.S. officials are also optimistic that Iraq, with its deep-rooted educational and civil-service systems, its history of secularism, its utter exhaustion after three decades of totalitarianism-and its oil wealth-is exceptionally ready to leapfrog forward.

"Iraq's a sophisticated society," Mr. Bush said before launching the invasion. "Iraq's got money. ... Iraq will serve as a catalyst for change, positive change."