100 years of invading Iraq

100 years of invading Iraq

Valerie Morse

The prime minister has labeled a new deployment of New Zealand soldiers to Iraq an ‘Anzac-badged unit,’ and he has explicitly sought to draped it in the honour and courage associated with troops at Gallipoli 100 years ago.

Since the prime minister has so blatantly invited the association of one war and campaign with another, it is salient to contemplate another part of New Zealand’s history in that war: that of helping Britain to invade Iraq.

The British had gotten stuck into Iraq soon after the start of the War in 1914. Unabashedly, their invasion was about oil and access to India. The British Navy was transitioning its fleet to oil, and they required lots of it. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) was already exploiting the oil in Iran.. In 1913, it obtained a 47% share of the Turkish Oil Company (which had no Turkish participation) to exploit the oil at Mosul in Iraq. In 1914, the British government became half-owners. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company was later to become British Petroleum (BP).

As importantly, the British were intent on maintaining naval supremacy throughout the Middle East, through the Suez Canal in particular, as it provided the most expeditious route to occupied India.

New Zealand’s contribution to the invading army was small: a signal company, some nurses and pilots seconded to the Royal Air Force. But as the official history notes, ‘the Wireless Troop, although only a small unit of which very little was heard during the War, carried out some valuable work.’[1]

Work, that is, assisting the British invasion and occupation of Iraq.

The New Zealanders were fortunate to have arrived in May, 1916 after the Seige of Kut was over. Still viewed as one of the most stunning defeats of the British army, more than 13,000 British soldiers were taken prisoner.

By July of 1916, the British forces in Mesopotamia had a new commander: General Stanley Maude. In December, plans were underway to capture Baghdad.

On March 11, the city was captured. The New Zealanders were among ‘the first batch of troops to enter the city.’[2]

Within a week, General Maude had issued the ‘Proclamation of Baghdad’ written by Mark Sykes, the English imperialist author of the Sykes-Picot Agreement that divided up a post-war Middle East into British and French spheres of influence. The Proclamation told residents of Baghdad that ‘our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.’

Following the seizure of Baghdad, the New Zealand troops remained in Iraq assisting with further battles until they were deployed to Iran where they were, ‘among a force of crack soldiers, equipped with armoured cars, driving across Iran to seize the oilfields at Baku.’[3]

After Iran, the Signal Unit was disbanded and individuals dispatched to units on the Western Front for the duration of the war.

The story of the British occupation of Iraq, however, continued. Despite promises of self-determination following the armistice, England was determined to maintain control of Middle East oil.

Seeing that their desires for independence were going to be ignored, mass demonstrations began to be held in Baghdad. These eventually grew into the Great Iraqi Revolution where nationalist Muslim groups joined forces in an attempt to evict the British. The revolt lasted several months, and there is strong evidence that the British used chemical weapons against Iraqi people then. T.E. Lawrence (aka ‘Lawrence of Arabia) reported that 10,000 people had been killed.

Far from providing the self-determination and independence that the people of Iraq, and indeed the wider Middle East, sought following the end of World War 1, the English ensured their continued domination. APOC acquired concessions for oil across the areas deemed part of the ‘British Mandate,’ exporting the profits to England while communities remained desperately poor, prevented from reaping any benefits from the huge riches on their lands.

If all this sounds a bit familiar, it is because it is. We cannot divorce contemporary issues from historical events. When the prime minister invokes Gallipoli as some sort of cover for his deployment of New Zealand troops today, we need to look long and hard not only at what is going on in Iraq and Syria today. We need to examine and confront New Zealand’s contribution to the British invasion and occupation of Iraq that long ago sowed the seeds of much of the conflict we see today. We cannot hide by saying, ‘it was just a small contribution’ or ‘they were behind the wire.’ For if we fail to understand where we have been, we allow ‘state-sponsored history writing and cultural production [to] complement the state’s use of violence,’[4] and we perpetuate that violence for another generation.

[1] Official History of the New Zealand Engineers During the Great War 1914-1919, p299

[2] Ibid, p300.

[3] Stevan Eldred-Grigg. The Great Wrong War. Random House. p390.

[4] Eric Davis, Memories of State: Politics, History and Collective Identity in Modern Iraq University of California Press.

ends

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