How We Got Here-Part 1

Tired of hearing blathering liberals tell me 'it's all about oil' or 'American Imperialism', it occurred to me that once again we need a history review.

Present day Iraq has historically been something of a frontier zone. Because it served as an axis of trade routes and contact points between Asia and the Mediterranean, the Persian Gulf and the Caucasus, Kurds, Turks, Arabs, Persians, Semites, Indo-Europeans, Muslims, Christians, Jews and members of various syncretic groups have lived (and continue to live) there.

In the late nineteenth century the Ottomans embarked on a centralizing mission designed to impose imperial government on outlying provinces, including Iraq. The Ottomans found themselves confronting the British, who ruled India and looked toward the Persian Gulf for further trade; they were determined to control it either directly or by proxy.

The British entered Basra in October 1914 to secure control of the Persian Gulf and protect Persian oil fields and communication lines to India. The British lacked sufficient troops. Secret agreements were made with the French and with Sharif Hussein, who controlled the Muslim holy cities in what is now Saudi Arabia. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 divided the Middle East into French and British spheres of influence.

With the creation of the new Iraqi state, old conflicts came again to the fore. These included border disputes, tribal unrest along the frontier, and disputes over water from Persian streams which fed Iraqi rivers. In an attempt to force gains on these issues, Persia refused to recognize the new Iraqi state until 1929. At the Paris Peace Conference a Persian delegation pressed the British for border concessions, which were refused.

With Iraqi independence in 1932 the issue took on new urgency. By 1934 Iraq was driven to complain to the League of Nations about Persia's "flagrant acts of aggression," thought attempts to resolve the dispute in the League went nowhere. In 1937 both sides agreed to make concessions, and a Frontier Treaty was signed.
As the Persians viewed Iraq as a British fabrication, they did not attempt to engage the country as an equal, and only in the period after British influence waned were real attempts at negotiations made. So long as the border itself remained mostly quiet, the British were happy to occupy themselves with the more pressing issues of early statehood and violence on the Syrian border.

Britain, as the occupying power, allowed self-rule in inland Syria at the end of the war. By the summer of 1919 financial pressures in Britain forced the imperial power to withdraw from Syria, leaving he French and Faisal (son of the Sharif Hussien-no relation to Saddam Hussein, a Baathist) to settle matters. The militant Arabs of Damascus wanted the French out of Syria. The French wanted to rein in the militant Arabs. The Syrian border was determined between 1918 and 1920. The British agreement on withdrawal from Syria led to a revolt against British rule in Iraq.

While the British were instrumental in fighting for Mosul's inclusion in Iraq, other border determinations were not entirely in their hands. A decline in domestic public support for imperial adventures meant that funding and manpower in Iraq were severely limited. The British had expanded the empire and shrunken their pocketbooks at the same time. Thus, they were unable to fight every border contest, and in the case of Iran, its refusal to engage with the British government generally meant that the border issues there were not for the British to fully resolve. The case of Syria revealed the severe limitations on British power, and even uncoordinated Arab moments led to the transfer of Iraqi lands to Syria.