The Three-State Solution? (Page 2)

The British used their power to recognize sheiks as a way of rewarding the cooperative, and of punishing those unwilling or unable to keep their clans in line. Where administrators perceived a clan as unruly, they decertified them as tribes and seized their lands, giving them to others. The British were faced then, as the Americans are now, with ruling a huge territory on the cheap because of the disillusionment of the postwar public. To compensate for lack of troops, they relied on air power, conducting bombing raids from the sky against tribes that rebelled or refused to pay taxes. The airplane also allowed a close surveillance of the population in a manner that the supposedly despotic predecessors of the British, the Ottomans, could never have dreamed of achieving. This aspect of British rule in Iraq has long been understood by, among others, the eminent historian of Iraq Peter Sluglett. In his 1976 study, Britain in Iraq, Sluglett quotes Member of Parliament Leopold Amery as saying, "If the writ of King Faisal runs effectively through his kingdom, it is entirely due to the British airplanes."

Yet, as Dodge points out, the airplane quickly demonstrated its limits, in large part because it depended on raw power and fear rather than on legitimate authority. The British used night bombing and incendiary explosives to destroy villages around Samawah in 1923 as a means of forcing the population to surrender its rifles and submit. While the destruction of six villages and the killing of 100 men, women and children terrified the peasants, they simply dispersed from the area and took their rifles with them. The Royal Air Force high command considered following the fleeing Iraqis, but concluded that further bombing would only be a slaughter. According to Dodge, the high command feared that the British public would discover exactly how they were ruling Iraq. His points about the political limits of air power are well taken, but it should be remembered that after 1923 the number of bombing raids actually increased. At that point, Squadron Leader Arthur Harris (who is not mentioned in Dodge's index) invented the heavy bombing techniques he later practiced in Hamburg and Dresden.

Though a fine addition to the literature on the technologies of colonial control, Dodge's book has limitations. He cites no Arabic sources and thus often cannot challenge the accounts of Iraqis found in the British archives. In fairness, the Iraqis themselves are not Dodge's subject, which is rather the guiding ideologies of British administrators in Iraq. But a better understanding of Iraqi society itself might well have enabled him to understand and critique the colonial apparatus more incisively.

Likewise, Dodge offers few social statistics, so that one takes away from his book no sense of scale. He speaks of airplanes but never says how many were deployed in Iraq. He speaks of land tenure but tells us nothing about the size of the rural population or the changing distribution of landed wealth. The processes he discusses resulted by the late 1950s in a society where 70 percent of cultivable land was in the form of 3,400 large haciendas, 55 percent of which were in the hands of about 2,500 (mainly Sunni) individuals. Much of the rural population was landless by 1957. This highly unjust and unstable social structure owed a great deal to British policy, and helped plunge the country into crisis in 1958.

Although Dodge's book is largely confined to the British experience of ruling Iraq, it is not out of place to point out one important implication of his account for the Anglo-American invasion and occupation. It is that there are longstanding limits to the use of high-tech weaponry and air power in effectively ruling a conquered population, even in the task of counterinsurgency. As Dodge demonstrates, the British neglected to establish direct links between the state and the Iraqis, resorting instead to an incoherent mixture of high-tech bullying, blandishments and threats directed toward the rural elite. Contemptuous of the urban middle classes and distrustful of educated Iraqis, they favored precisely those social forces least interested in the nation and most interested in cultivating local tribal identities and in preserving unjust concentrations of property.

In a similar fashion, the US-dominated Coalition Provisional Authority has attempted to rule Iraq by using communal and religious leaders and corrupt expatriate politicians--the modern analogues of the tribal chieftains of an earlier era. The interim Governing Council appointed by US civil administrator Paul Bremer last July was top-heavy with leaders of fundamentalist or radical Muslim organizations that had fought the Baath Party. Several of these religious figures belonged to revolutionary Shiite parties. Even one of the five Kurdish members is an Islamist, though fundamentalism has little support among the Kurds. Just as British policies reinvigorated tribalism, so the US emphasis on ruling Iraq through male religious and ethnic figures could well exacerbate religious and ethnic tensions down the road. The dangers inherent in rising communal tensions were recently illustrated by the terror bombings of Shiite holy cities, which took the lives of well over a hundred worshipers.

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