Iraq, and other unexpected legacies of war
by Jack Neely
In an antique store in Bearden a few years ago, a friend found a Knoxville promotional booklet, published in the 1890s. It was this city's fastest-growing era, when anything seemed possible. The booklet boasted that Knoxville was close to the same latitude as one of the great cities of the world, Nineveh, the ancient capital of Assyria, the city of palaces and temples and libraries on the Tigris River. The implication was that, perhaps, if latitude has anything to do with the greatness of a city, the greatness of Nineveh awaited us.
It's surprising enough that Knoxville was ever proud enough to compare its destiny to that of a legendary capital. It's another thing to realize that we aspired to be like a city that's now within the boundaries of Iraq. It's ruins are opposite Mosul, on the Tigris upstream from Baghdad.
Americans of the 1890s were fascinated with the culture of the Persian Gulf. Mesopotamia, as Victorian schoolchildren knew better than modern kids do, was the birthplace of civilization and had a special appeal. American parents read their children stories about Baghdad, the 1,001 Nights. The heroes were always Arab Muslims. They pored over artists' renditions of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, framed them and hung them in their parlors.
Many of our fraternal organizations, especially those founded in the Victorian era, are based on Islamic tradition. Much of the modern architecture of the Victorian era borrowed from Arabic styles. Christian ladies in Knoxville planted their gardens with exotics from the fabled Muslim east: crape myrtles, camellias, gingkos, and mimosas.
Mimosas were considered an ornamental tree, perhaps the sort of tree that a upper-class Knoxville lady might sit beneath, perhaps on an ottoman, and read the stories of Scheherezade, or perhaps play a little of the charmingly unpredictable Islamic game of chess. But the mimosa broke out of her garden and spread to the neighbor's lawn, and soon took over the neighborhood in ways that even the most learned botanists did not anticipate. Like a lot of well-intended things, they get out of hand.
That lady probably never heard the word Iraq. It was the exotic eastern part of the Ottoman Empire, the land of Baghdad, Babylon, Nineveh. It was a region of religiously conservative societies, behind us technologically but far ahead in certain handicrafts. Though not always a peaceful region, it was never an enemy to America.
The 20th century brought developments that changed Iraq in unpredictable ways, and the United States played a part in its alteration. One was the discovery of oil, of which the United States was already the world's biggest consumer. The other was war.
But not war in Iraq. The wars that changed the region were fought 2,000 miles away. The Ottoman Turks found themselves on the losing side of the First World War, their territories divided by the victorious allies. The new nation of Iraq was an incoherent piece of a defeated empire, hastily and arbitrarily divided and administered by the British, who hoped not only to build a new nation, but also to profit grandly from its oil. The accidental nation of Iraq, this unwieldy chunk of the old Ottoman Empire, was born of a war beyond the control of the Iraqis.
Then came World War II, which, like the nation of Iraq, was another unintended consequence of World War I. Iraq was only a backwater of the next European war but found it necessary to choose sides, and picked the wrong one. As a result, it was re-occupied by the resented British for the duration. Boys in Tikrit saw that the men in power were not the traditional Arabs in turbans and desert robes, but the guys who wore coats and ties and had big guns.
The immediate outcome of the allied victory was that it freed conquered nations, halted the Nazi genocide, and exacted vengeance on the leaders, in most cases, by slaying them. It was as satisfying a conclusion as anybody at MGM could have hoped for.
For most of the world the war didn't end that quickly. The instabilities inherent in every war gave an advantage to opportunists.
The Russians, bent on revenge for its millions of war dead, moved into Eastern Europe. The Communists seized China, the largest nation in the world. And led by the victors, especially Great Britain, the United Nations established a homeland for the Jews, the most miserable victims of the war. Like most of the consequences of war, these decisions came hastily, without much regard for long-term consequences. It created a rift in the Middle East between the Muslims and the Western-supported Jews. Many observed that it aligned with the other postwar rift between the democratic nations and the Communist nations.
That war seemed to precipitate instability in Mesopotamia, partly due to its consequences elsewhere. A series of assassinations and coups in the 1950s and '60s proved that in Iraq, a nation invented and hardened by foreigners' wars and cold wars, the fittest to survive were always the most ruthless.
No one at Versailles in 1919 was expecting any of that. Wars have consequences far beyond the scope of the horrific damage wrought by bullets and missiles, even by smart bombs. The wisest of smart bombs will never guess the lives they'll change for generations to come, for better and for worse.
March 27, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 13
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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