BLINKERED IGNORANCE
Posted: 07 Jun 2026, 01:33
BLINKERED IGNORANCE
12 May 2006
I’ve been doing a bit of digging into historical events which I knew little about. I was puzzled for years by the fact that many war memorials to the Great War carry the dates 1914-1919. I knew that some took the date of the Versailles Treaty as the end of the war and knew that British troops were active in Mesopotamia after the war but didn’t fully understand why. I was triggered by hearing Hazel Blears stating that it was a mistake to attribute the radicalisation of young Muslims in Britain to the ‘Iraq War’ as 9/11 happened before the current incursion. Like most of her colleagues she is a lawyer by training and it enrages me when statements like this are made from a base of ignorance. I increasingly believe that we need historians in government, not lawyers and accountants.
So I went digging. The broad back-story (because I am not an expert) is that the Ottoman Empire [Turkey] was seen as a threat in the Middle East because they controlled land which could be on the route for an invading force heading for India. Apart from Churchill’s sensible but badly executed attempt to cut this route by invading Gallipoli and starting an Eastern front against Germany, there was a badly managed invasion of Mesopotamia with the same intent from India which failed. In 1916 General Maude was diverted from his campaign in Palestine to invade Mesopotamia but was instructed not to advance on Baghdad. He was successful and in February 1917 he asked permission to take the city. Lloyd George supported him even though the War Office were lukewarm and on March 11th 1917 he reported that the city was secure. Nothing succeeds like success and this was seen as a heavy blow against the German stated aim of an empire from Berlin to Baghdad. (They were a principle investor in the Berlin-Baghdad railway.)
Once in Baghdad Maude’s plan was to push north and link up with our allies the Russians thus cutting the land bridge to India. Because the Russians were so weak, Maude had to go further north than intended and when the Russians fell back the British force had to hold the ground against a possible retaliatory attack by the Turks. The Germans sent General von Falkenhayn to lead the counter-attack but he was hampered by bad rail communications and the pressure the British campaign in Palestine placed on his resources. The end result was that the British controlled most of Mesopotamia and this was retained even when Maude died of cholera in Baghdad on 17th November 1917. The Palestinian campaign eventually resulted in the capture of Damascus and Jerusalem and the Turks withdrew from the war leaving the British in control of Palestine and Mesopotamia.
Despite the successes there were fears that unless Britain secured a corridor through to the Caspian Sea the Russians might have a route through to India, this was the old Khyber Pass mentality driven by fear of the Russian Bear. Despite the fact that the Germans collapsed in 1918 the campaign in the Middle East continued until the War office and the politicians felt safe. The net result being that by 1922 Mesopotamia was under British control.
Once captured, territory has to be controlled and administered and the British Government turned its mind to making the three separate kingdoms of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul (the Kurds) manageable. At this point I would recommend that you go and seek out David Omissi’s article, ‘Baghdad and British Bombers’ published in the Guardian on January the 19th 1991. This was based on the research David had done on his book ‘Air Power 1919-1938’ in which he traced the history of the RAF in what was then Mesopotamia and the punitive bombing of the Kurds to force them to pay taxes. He also mentions the shelling of the tribesmen of the Euphrates when they rose in rebellion against British military rule in the summer of 1920 when the British army used gas shells - ‘with excellent moral effect’ - in the fighting which followed. While the British forces were busy ‘pacifying’ the country, a lady called Gertrude Bell was making her mark. Here’s a quotation is from ‘Miss Bell's Lines in the Sand’ an article by James Buchan in the Guardian of March 12th 2003. Recommended reading.
“In British diplomatic group photographs of the early 20th-century Middle East, amid the plumes and uniforms and the calm paraphernalia of an empire going to hell in a bucket, there is often a solitary female. The woman is slim, with a head of luxuriant hair, and neatly dressed in billowing muslins or in the pencil silhouette and cloche hats of jazz-age Baghdad.
The woman is Gertrude Bell, who is as responsible as anybody for the rickety national state first known as Mesopotamia, and now as Iraq. As a powerful official of the British administration in Baghdad after the first world war, Bell ensured that an Arab state was founded from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, but one which was too weak to be independent of Britain. “I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,” she wrote to her father on December 4 1921.
One of Oxford University's most brilliant students, the greatest woman mountaineer of her age, an archaeologist and linguist, passionate, unhappy and rich, Bell saw in Arab male society, and what US President Woodrow Wilson called “the whole disgusting scramble” for the Middle East after the first world war, opportunities that were unthinkable at home.
John Buchan, in his novel Greenmantle (1916), and TE Lawrence in his guerilla exploits in Arabia the following year, made popular a myth that an Englishman could become an Arab - only more so. To her generation in Britain, Bell went one better. She seemed to move as an equal among the sheikhs without compromising her British femininity. Her letters to her father and stepmother, one of the great correspondences of the past century, pass easily from orders for cotton gowns at Harvey and Nichols [sic] to the new-fangled British air warfare being tried out on recalcitrant Iraqi Arabs and Kurds.
The historical waters have closed over TE Lawrence. Even back in the 70s, I could find nobody with any recollection of him at the scenes of his exploits in western Arabia. But ‘Miss Bell’ is still a name in Baghdad. Even in conversations with the vicious and cornered cadres of Saddam Hussein's regime, her name will come up to evoke, for a moment, an innocent Baghdad of picnics in the palm gardens and bathing parties in the Tigris.
Yet Bell and her superior as British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, laid down policies of state in Iraq that were taken up by Saddam's Arab Ba’ath socialist party. Those policies were to retain, if necessary by violence, the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to promote Sunni Muslims and other minorities over the Shia majority; to repress the Shia clergy in Najaf, Kerbela and Kazimain, or expel them to Iran; to buy off the big landowners and tribal elders; to stage disreputable plebiscites; and to deploy air power as a form of political control. “Iraq can only be ruled by force,” a senior Ba'ath official told me in 1999. “Mesopotamia is not a civilised state” Bell wrote to her father on December 18 1920.’
What Miss Bell recommended and in the event what happened, was that the three kingdoms became the modern state of Iraq with no concessions to ethnic and religious divisions. In effect the British government had laid the foundations for the current inter-denominational and inter-ethnic strife we are seeing now in that country.
That’s enough history, back to Hazel Blears and the other lawyers. They all keep repeating the canard that the incursion hasn’t made terrorism more likely in the UK because it started at 9/11. In their ignorance they have completely ignored the fact that there are people still alive in the three kingdoms who can remember the dreadful atrocities committed by the British in the 1920s. Their children and grand-children learned of these at their mother’s knee. They see the same thing happening all over again, ‘Shock and Awe’ are nothing new to them. Of course these modern events have tipped the Iraqis and their allies towards insurrection and retaliation. Ironically, Saddam Hussein was the man who kept the lid on this by similar methods to those used by the army and the RAF in the 1920s. Once he was removed there was a vacuum and the ‘terrorists’ were given their chance. This was bad enough but was compounded by abolishing the established army and police force after ‘victory’.
I hate the loss of innocent life as much as any man. I oppose the use of force and terrorism as tools for change. My point is that the Hazel Blears of this world must read their history and recognise that what we are seeing today is the culmination of almost 100 years of repression and horrendous acts in the name of foreign policy. To say that this repression, be it current or historical has no bearing on the ‘terrorist threat’ we experience today betrays a total lack of perspective based on knowledge of history or human nature. There will be no policy successes in the region until these truths are recognised and acknowledged.
12 May 2006
12 May 2006
I’ve been doing a bit of digging into historical events which I knew little about. I was puzzled for years by the fact that many war memorials to the Great War carry the dates 1914-1919. I knew that some took the date of the Versailles Treaty as the end of the war and knew that British troops were active in Mesopotamia after the war but didn’t fully understand why. I was triggered by hearing Hazel Blears stating that it was a mistake to attribute the radicalisation of young Muslims in Britain to the ‘Iraq War’ as 9/11 happened before the current incursion. Like most of her colleagues she is a lawyer by training and it enrages me when statements like this are made from a base of ignorance. I increasingly believe that we need historians in government, not lawyers and accountants.
So I went digging. The broad back-story (because I am not an expert) is that the Ottoman Empire [Turkey] was seen as a threat in the Middle East because they controlled land which could be on the route for an invading force heading for India. Apart from Churchill’s sensible but badly executed attempt to cut this route by invading Gallipoli and starting an Eastern front against Germany, there was a badly managed invasion of Mesopotamia with the same intent from India which failed. In 1916 General Maude was diverted from his campaign in Palestine to invade Mesopotamia but was instructed not to advance on Baghdad. He was successful and in February 1917 he asked permission to take the city. Lloyd George supported him even though the War Office were lukewarm and on March 11th 1917 he reported that the city was secure. Nothing succeeds like success and this was seen as a heavy blow against the German stated aim of an empire from Berlin to Baghdad. (They were a principle investor in the Berlin-Baghdad railway.)
Once in Baghdad Maude’s plan was to push north and link up with our allies the Russians thus cutting the land bridge to India. Because the Russians were so weak, Maude had to go further north than intended and when the Russians fell back the British force had to hold the ground against a possible retaliatory attack by the Turks. The Germans sent General von Falkenhayn to lead the counter-attack but he was hampered by bad rail communications and the pressure the British campaign in Palestine placed on his resources. The end result was that the British controlled most of Mesopotamia and this was retained even when Maude died of cholera in Baghdad on 17th November 1917. The Palestinian campaign eventually resulted in the capture of Damascus and Jerusalem and the Turks withdrew from the war leaving the British in control of Palestine and Mesopotamia.
Despite the successes there were fears that unless Britain secured a corridor through to the Caspian Sea the Russians might have a route through to India, this was the old Khyber Pass mentality driven by fear of the Russian Bear. Despite the fact that the Germans collapsed in 1918 the campaign in the Middle East continued until the War office and the politicians felt safe. The net result being that by 1922 Mesopotamia was under British control.
Once captured, territory has to be controlled and administered and the British Government turned its mind to making the three separate kingdoms of Basra, Baghdad and Mosul (the Kurds) manageable. At this point I would recommend that you go and seek out David Omissi’s article, ‘Baghdad and British Bombers’ published in the Guardian on January the 19th 1991. This was based on the research David had done on his book ‘Air Power 1919-1938’ in which he traced the history of the RAF in what was then Mesopotamia and the punitive bombing of the Kurds to force them to pay taxes. He also mentions the shelling of the tribesmen of the Euphrates when they rose in rebellion against British military rule in the summer of 1920 when the British army used gas shells - ‘with excellent moral effect’ - in the fighting which followed. While the British forces were busy ‘pacifying’ the country, a lady called Gertrude Bell was making her mark. Here’s a quotation is from ‘Miss Bell's Lines in the Sand’ an article by James Buchan in the Guardian of March 12th 2003. Recommended reading.
“In British diplomatic group photographs of the early 20th-century Middle East, amid the plumes and uniforms and the calm paraphernalia of an empire going to hell in a bucket, there is often a solitary female. The woman is slim, with a head of luxuriant hair, and neatly dressed in billowing muslins or in the pencil silhouette and cloche hats of jazz-age Baghdad.
The woman is Gertrude Bell, who is as responsible as anybody for the rickety national state first known as Mesopotamia, and now as Iraq. As a powerful official of the British administration in Baghdad after the first world war, Bell ensured that an Arab state was founded from the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra, but one which was too weak to be independent of Britain. “I had a well-spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq,” she wrote to her father on December 4 1921.
One of Oxford University's most brilliant students, the greatest woman mountaineer of her age, an archaeologist and linguist, passionate, unhappy and rich, Bell saw in Arab male society, and what US President Woodrow Wilson called “the whole disgusting scramble” for the Middle East after the first world war, opportunities that were unthinkable at home.
John Buchan, in his novel Greenmantle (1916), and TE Lawrence in his guerilla exploits in Arabia the following year, made popular a myth that an Englishman could become an Arab - only more so. To her generation in Britain, Bell went one better. She seemed to move as an equal among the sheikhs without compromising her British femininity. Her letters to her father and stepmother, one of the great correspondences of the past century, pass easily from orders for cotton gowns at Harvey and Nichols [sic] to the new-fangled British air warfare being tried out on recalcitrant Iraqi Arabs and Kurds.
The historical waters have closed over TE Lawrence. Even back in the 70s, I could find nobody with any recollection of him at the scenes of his exploits in western Arabia. But ‘Miss Bell’ is still a name in Baghdad. Even in conversations with the vicious and cornered cadres of Saddam Hussein's regime, her name will come up to evoke, for a moment, an innocent Baghdad of picnics in the palm gardens and bathing parties in the Tigris.
Yet Bell and her superior as British high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, laid down policies of state in Iraq that were taken up by Saddam's Arab Ba’ath socialist party. Those policies were to retain, if necessary by violence, the Kurdish mountains as a buffer against Turkey and Russia; to promote Sunni Muslims and other minorities over the Shia majority; to repress the Shia clergy in Najaf, Kerbela and Kazimain, or expel them to Iran; to buy off the big landowners and tribal elders; to stage disreputable plebiscites; and to deploy air power as a form of political control. “Iraq can only be ruled by force,” a senior Ba'ath official told me in 1999. “Mesopotamia is not a civilised state” Bell wrote to her father on December 18 1920.’
What Miss Bell recommended and in the event what happened, was that the three kingdoms became the modern state of Iraq with no concessions to ethnic and religious divisions. In effect the British government had laid the foundations for the current inter-denominational and inter-ethnic strife we are seeing now in that country.
That’s enough history, back to Hazel Blears and the other lawyers. They all keep repeating the canard that the incursion hasn’t made terrorism more likely in the UK because it started at 9/11. In their ignorance they have completely ignored the fact that there are people still alive in the three kingdoms who can remember the dreadful atrocities committed by the British in the 1920s. Their children and grand-children learned of these at their mother’s knee. They see the same thing happening all over again, ‘Shock and Awe’ are nothing new to them. Of course these modern events have tipped the Iraqis and their allies towards insurrection and retaliation. Ironically, Saddam Hussein was the man who kept the lid on this by similar methods to those used by the army and the RAF in the 1920s. Once he was removed there was a vacuum and the ‘terrorists’ were given their chance. This was bad enough but was compounded by abolishing the established army and police force after ‘victory’.
I hate the loss of innocent life as much as any man. I oppose the use of force and terrorism as tools for change. My point is that the Hazel Blears of this world must read their history and recognise that what we are seeing today is the culmination of almost 100 years of repression and horrendous acts in the name of foreign policy. To say that this repression, be it current or historical has no bearing on the ‘terrorist threat’ we experience today betrays a total lack of perspective based on knowledge of history or human nature. There will be no policy successes in the region until these truths are recognised and acknowledged.
12 May 2006