Repeating History in the Swamps of Mesopotamia

Though many have forgotten it -- if they ever noticed it in the first place -- Donald Rumsfeld once ran for president of the United States, modestly declaring in 1988 that the he was the "best among the candidates to assume the reigns of government." It's worth recalling this now because even though the eventual US military victory in Iraq seems assured (the peace may be lost, but that's another story), the strategy formulated by the utterly confident, fawned-over-by-the-public, deferred-to-by-the-press Rumsfeld didn't worked as planned.

Iraqi forces were not "shocked and awed" into submission. Iraqi citizens and soldiers did not turn on Saddam with the rapidity and force the Iraqi exile groups who have the Pentagon's ear swore they would. The initial invading force -- numerically larger than Rumsfeld and his lieutenants deemed necessary -- turned out to be too small, requiring the deployment of tens of thousands of reinforcements . . . whose deployment time to the Gulf has been less than speedy, thanks to micromanaging by Rumsfeld and his crew.

In this sense, "Operation Iraqi Freedom" bears some resemblance to a previous British imperial incursion into Iraq. While that campaign was ultimately successful, it was hallmarked by arrogance fused with an initial impudence that produced results so deceptive and disastrous that the British government later felt obliged to convene a commission of inquiry. And much of the blame, that commission found, could be put on a civilian imperial leader with grandiose ambitions contrary to Britain's national interests, as well as two senior military officials -- one who was convinced that any pressure exerted on the enemy would cause the inferior enemy to crumble, and the other who knew planning was dangerously flawed but proceeded anyway, as he was "an egotist driven by ambition and ravenous for popular acclaim," in the words of one noted military historian.

The exercise in imperial overreach now all but forgotten is the first part of the British colonial Indian Army's Mesopotamia campaign of World War I, an endeavor that went horribly awry due to overconfidence, and a fixation on Baghdad that led to going too far, too fast, with too few, outpacing thinly-stretched supply lines left vulnerable to a marauding enemy. (Déjà vu, anyone?) And rather like the confusing political backdrop to today's military action in Iraq -- are "coalition forces" going in to disarm Saddam? Liberate Iraqis? Control oil? Beget "domino democracy" in the region? -- British imperial intentions with regard to Mesopotamia were hopelessly tangled due to competing internal influences as well.

In 1914, the British War Office in London simply wanted a defensive force to protect British oil interests in Persia from possible attack by the Ottoman Turks -- still neutral, but about to come in on the German side in World War I -- in neighboring Mesopotamia. Yet rather like today's crop of neoconservatives on the Potomac, the imperial Viceroy and his cronies in India were keen to spread the empire -- or, perhaps more precisely, the Viceroy's power -- beyond India and into Mesopotamia, which technically fell into the Viceroy's area of operations.

Unlike the mandarins in London, the Viceroy, Lord Hardinge, felt that war against the Turks should occasion what was euphemistically referred to as "forward defence" -- in essence an effort to rapidly take a strategically-unimportant but symbolically-charged swath of the Ottoman Empire. In October of 1914, Hardinge dispatched units of the Indian Army under the command of General Sir Arthur Barrett to secure the oil fields. Unknown to London, however, were orders given to Barrett by Hardinge to seize Basra in the event of war with the Turks. When the Turks joined the war against the British on November 5, Barrett's forward forces quickly took the al-Fao peninsula and easily dispatched Turkish forces that defended and futilely counter-attacked at Abadan.