Welcome, everyone. It's wonderful that so many people have joined us from near and far.
My name is Dr. Move and we Lloyd and I'm an independent historian and media consultant.
I worked with Paul Collins, curator at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, to develop the exhibition, Owning the Past from Mesopotamia to Iraq.
This free exhibition uses the Ashmolean archaeological collection from what was Mesopotamia.
To explore the relationship between heritage and identity,
it focuses on the creation of Iraq and the role that the British and particularly figures from Oxford itself,
played during the period at the end of the First World War. The exhibition will be on display until the middle of August, and we expect the Ashmolean,
which is currently closed to reopen as the lockdown in the U.K. ease's.
In the meantime, an introductory film is being made about the development of the exhibition and in particular the role played by our two
page community ambassadors who are vital in linking us to people from the Middle East diaspora now living in Oxford.
The voices of these local people are central to the exhibition and the exhibition text is presented in Arabic as well as English through art.
I'm delighted to introduce today's panel will explore the troubled history of Anglo Iraqi relations.
Starting with Professor Eugene Rogan, who was a key adviser for the exhibition.
Professor Rogan is director of the Middle East Centre at St. Anthony's College, Oxford,
and author of The Fall of the Ottomans, The Great Wall in the Middle East, 1914 to 1920.
Our next speaker is Charles Tripp, professor of politics, with reference to the Middle East and North Africa.
So as part of the University of London. He's author of the very well known history of Iraq.
And finally, joining us from the United States is Professor Dina Courey.
She's professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University and author of Iraq in Wartime Soldiering,
Martyrdom and Remembrance. After the three presentations, there will be time for questions and discussion.
But first, Professor Ragan is going to take us back to the start of the century of conflict.
Thank you. We thank you so much for such a warm introduction.
And welcome, everyone. It's a pleasure to have you with us.
And to celebrate the partnership between the Middle East centre and the Ashmolean Museum in
bringing about this review of a century that has defined Iraqi as much as British history.
On the 5th of November 1914, Britain declared war on the Ottoman Empire.
The very next day, British units of the Indian Expeditionary Force entered the shop.
A lot of that waterway that separates Iran from Iraq and fired on the Ottoman forts guarding the entrance at the Foul Peninsula.
As far as I know, that was the first hostile action taken by the British military against the Ottoman Empire in the First World War.
Course it wouldn't to the last. And it wasn't that the British were already gunning to occupy Iraq.
In fact, their interests at that stage in the war were limited to Abbadon Island,
the terminal of the Iranian oil operation, and the source of refining and of storage of Avaaz oil.
So really, the objective was just to secure an essential oil field at the start of a war which was going to be increasingly fed by oil.
British forces come under attack and trying to hold Abbadon by the Ottomans and realise to secure their position.
They need to advance into a hinterland that takes them soon to Basra.
They occupy the city of Basra as early as the twenty third of November against relatively light autumn in opposition.
And at that point, Sir Percy Cox, a man who'd be very instrumental in Anglo Iraqi relations,
issued a proclamation to the residents of Baghdad in which he promised no remnant of Turkish administration now remains in this region.
In place there of the British flag has been established under which you will enjoy the benefits of liberty and justice,
both in regard to your religious and your secular affairs.
It sounded like imperial conquest.
But I assure you at this point, Britain actually had no territorial interests in Iraq, let alone the Ottoman Empire.
British policy up until this point had always been to preserve the Ottoman Empire as a weak buffer state separating strong powers like Russia,
Germany, as well as keeping French ambitions for territorial expansion of their empire at bay.
So in the course of the First World War, this would be one thing that would change.
It's not until March, April of 1915, that we really get to see how limited Britain's interests were.
We're on the eve of the Dardanelles campaign. The three Entente allies, Russia,
France and Britain meet to agree that territorial carve up of the Ottoman Empire in the event of a
quick and successful campaign to force the Straits and seise the Ottoman capital of Constantinople.
For that reason, it's called the Constantinople agreement.
The Russians were the first out of the blocks and they claimed Constantinople the Straits as their war prises for beating the Ottomans.
The French were no less certain of what they wanted, and they claims to Syria and solicitor.
Still a lot ill-Defined territories, but clearly ambitious.
And at that point, Britain said to its allies that they would just reserved the right to claim territory of equal strategic
importance as and when they worked out what would be in the best interests of their British Empire.
Being Britain, they did the next typical thing, which is to convene a commission.
They found a Mandarin Sir Maurice de Bunson charged with the task of finding out what
territories in the Ottoman Empire would actually be to the advantage of the British Empire.
And in the course of the deliberations that a Bunson committee identified the
Persian Gulf region as the area of greatest importance to the British Empire,
given its proximity to India. With British forces already in Basra.
The De Bunson committee argued that it made sense for Basra to be added to what was now a British lake in the Persian Gulf.
The Arab territories from Oman through the crucial states, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait, all tied by treaty relation to Britain.
Securing Buster now gave them the head of the Persian Gulf in a way which was strategically valuable to them.
And then the committee went on to reason that you couldn't really hold Basra province against a hostile force in Baghdad, say, Russia or France.
So you wanted plus for reinforced with Baghdad and then to really secure Mesopotamia, you wanted Mosul.
And as they write in the demands and committee report and oil again makes it commercially desirable for us to carry our control on to Mosul.
So we have the first articulation and of course, the 1915 of British territorial interests in Audibert domains and the focus Mesopotamia.
This is reinforced, of course, by the Mesopotamia campaign conducted by the British in Iraq in the course of the First World War.
And the British enjoyed very rapid success at the beginning of the conflict,
moving up the Tigris to occupy Amara by the 3rd of June 1915 and up the Euphrates to occupy not Syria.
By July of the same year, these swift British victories were brought to a halt.
In November of 1915, when in some ways to compensate for the failings of the Dardanelles,
the British made a bid on Baghdad that was brought to a quick halt in November of 1915 at the Battle of Selman Pack.
General Townsend and his army were driven into retreat. They fell back on a bend of the river and cut Amara, where for one hundred and forty days,
Townshend and his army withstood determined siege from the Ottoman authorities and were ultimately starved to total surrender.
On the 24th of April of nineteen sixteen.
At that point, Townshend gave his unconditional surrender and over 13000 generals,
officers and men of the Anglo Indian Army fell into the hands of the Ottoman forces,
the largest victory the Ottoman Empire enjoyed in the whole of the First World War.
It didn't end for the Ottoman Empire as well as it had in Kuwait, and British forces in Mesopotamia regrouped,
resumed conquest, took Baghdad by the 11th of March 1917 and ultimately to secure Mosul.
The British broke international law by fighting 10 days beyond the signing of their armistice,
with the Ottoman Empire entering the city of Mosul on the 10th of November 1918.
So by the end of World War One, all three provinces of Iraq were under British rule in 1918,
unlike 1914, Britain openly sought to add that territory to its imperial possessions.
It had negotiated that outcome with the Sharifs of Mecca and the Hussein McMann
correspondence and with their allies France in the CITES Pekoe agreement.
But the Iraqis themselves had not been consulted, and they never gave their consent.
Britain and France wilfully misled the Arab peoples about their intentions when in November of 1918,
they issued a joint declaration promising, and I quote, the complete and definite emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by
the Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations,
deriving their authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigent populations.
When in April 1920, the Iraqis learnt that instead of their own government, they would come under British mandate.
They rose in revolt from the end of June to the end of October 1920.
For four months, the Iraqi revolution of 1920 challenged British rule.
Britain responded with great force. They raised their troop numbers from 60000 to over 100000 soldiers in Iraq.
They deployed scorched earth tactics that left by British count eight thousand four hundred fifty Iraqis dead.
Iraqi counts go much higher. But we will have a more accurate figure bringing to an end the First World War
experience at a very inauspicious start to the British mandate for that history.
I will now pass the floor to my colleague, Charles Tripp. Charles, over to you, Eugene.
Thank you very much indeed. And welcome to all of you who tuned in.
I'm going to talk about Iraq under the British mandate and then under the informal British rule until the revolution of 1958.
And I suppose what one wants to bring out is the fact that something that Eugene has already talked about,
which is effectively that the British had a instrumental view of Iraq.
In other words, Iraq was to be a means to an end, and the end was the service of the British Empire.
So for the British in Iraq, there were three priorities.
One was by territory to secure its imperial communications with India and the empire to the east.
The second was the social fabric and state order of Iraq itself to ensure stability in Iraq by whatever means,
giving no opportunity for others to intervene. And thirdly, there were the resources to ensure privileged access to oil.
These three priorities you can see throughout the period of 1921 to 1958.
First of all, the fact of the League of Nations granting the mandate of Iraq to Great Britain in 1920,
in 1921, Britain founding the Iraqi state and the Iraqi monarchy,
1927, a largely British company discovering oil in major quantities near Kirkuk and eventually forming the Iraq Petroleum Company,
a British dominated company, in 1929. In 1932, a grant of limited independence to Iraq from Great Britain.
But again, the limitations became apparent in 1941,
when an independent Iraq took a different direction than Britain wanted and Britain reinvaded Iraq and militarily reoccupied the country in 1941.
And even after the Second World War, Britain trying to tie Iraq for several decades to its own particular interests.
In nineteen forty eight, the British tried to get the Iraqis to sign, which they did sign.
The governments sign the Portsmouth's treaty, which would have tied Iraq to Britain for another 30 years.
There was such a rebellion in Iraq itself, the Westberg, as it's called, that the Iraqi government backed out.
But again, in 1955, Great Britain tying Iraq to its Cold War strategy in the Baghdad pact that was formed in 1955.
So throughout this, there is this clear notion that Iraq should serve a purpose and the purpose should be British.
Often this was dressed up with loftier ideals, not always hypocritical, but always in need of Iraqi allies.
And it had important consequences for Iraq and for the Iraqis and for the kind
of state that emerged not simply as territorial boundaries were defined,
but also the boundaries between the Iraqi state and the Iraqi people in all its diversity.
And I would argue this produced a very distinctive kind of state under the mandate,
leaving a legacy that the Iraqis felt long after the British had departed.
So there are three aspects of that state that I just want to highlight which will help to make my argument.
The first is the notion of oligarchy, a state ruled unrepresented socially through oligarchic rule.
Second, a political economy of that state based upon land ownership first and then on oil.
And thirdly, the politicisation of the Iraqi armed forces.
So in the first case, the British, of course, needed to try and make the state work,
which meant, of course, looking for those Iraqis who shared British views of order and power.
And in the early years, this privily two kinds of Iraqi.
The first with the ex Ottoman officials drawn mainly from Abrego, Turkey, largely Sunni sections of society.
And the second were the tribal sheiks.
That is the local notables through whom the British Empire had exercised power across its territories, across the world.
And in fact, it got enshrined in Iraq in a particularly notorious measure, the tribal disputes regulation,
which effectively gave the tribal sheiks completely separate jurisdiction until it was ended in the revolution of 1958.
So the state became under British rule or British guidance as a vehicle for power, privilege and wealth of those who were in.
That is the state servants', the army officers, the Hashemite court.
The new men of this new order, as well as the co-opted tribal sheiks both and uncertainty.
But just as it was a vehicle for power, for some, it was also used as a mechanism for excluding others.
Those who did not seem to be trustworthy to the British or to its allies.
First of all, they were the Kurds who were regarded as troublesome and unruly and difficult to place within a modern state.
And in 1931, 32, on the eve of independence, the British and Noorie side,
the Iraqi prime minister cooked up an outrageous report to the League of Nations claiming that Kurdish rights would be guaranteed after independence,
which, of course, they weren't. The second group that the British tended to and some of its allies tended to look upon with great
suspicion were the Shia community leaders and their clerics who were regarded as far too close to Iran,
obscurantist, fanatical and so on. But equally as it came clear during the course of the mandate and after, the British were also very wary,
as were their allies of democratic and radical social reformers in Iraq itself.
So there's a very characteristic comment by a British official in the 1920s who says in exasperation this Iraq has become a nation of lawyers.
In other words, what the British really dislike.
That the Iraqis should stand up for their rights has, quite understandably, the Iraqis tended to do so.
In short, if they weren't recognised by the British and their successors as useful for your own state projects,
then you were marginalised, written out of the dominant narrative of Iraqi state formation.
And of course, all this was cemented by the emerging political economy of landownership and that eventually of oil that the
British used and their allies used to enshrine and to substantiate that hold over Iraqi society and state.
In Britain, there were different ideas about the ideal patterns of land ownership. Some favoured romanticised sheikhs as great semi-final landlords.
Others favoured small, middling landholding peasantry.
Both systems, in fact, were in place in Iraq and different parts of the country under British rule.
But the balance of power clearly lay with the large landowners. They were seen as protectors of the status quo, a force for stability.
And of course,
it was a way a land became a way of binding these social leaders to the state and giving the state enormous patronage over the countryside.
It produced very notoriously in 1933, the law of the rights and duties of the cultivators.
Rather, euphemism is actually more about the duties of the cultivators.
In other words, it's abrade, the peasants from Emara, who lived in virtually serfdom and feudal conditions from even leaving their land,
which of course they took no notice of and fled to create the slums in southeastern Baghdad when oil came into the equation, particularly after 1945.
It was used in much the same way. Mainly it profited the Iraq Petroleum Company, largely British owned company.
But of course, it also benefited the ruling oligarchy of Iraq itself.
And the privileges were passed on to its allies in the name of development, namely through the Iraq Development Board,
which tended to favour those who were in a good position politically with the elite.
But the third and disturbing feature of the state that was emerging was the politicised armed forces of Iraq.
The British decided that the Iraqi armed forces were going to be used to build the state and in fact,
the Iraqi armed forces were the first foundation of the state.
They were set up in January 1921, before the monarchy, before the parliament, before virtually all the apparatus of the state itself.
They were used and intended to be used to extend the reach of central government,
to suppress rural revolts, to enforce revenue collection, and to disarm the tribes.
When the British initiated the Iraqi army, it commanded something like twenty thousand rifles.
The Iraqi army itself, there were some like 200000 rifles in the countryside at large.
So you can see the balance of power was, in the British view, deeply disturbing.
And of course, the Iraqi army helped to alter that balance of power, helped by the British,
by the Royal Air Force between central government and provincial Iraq.
Initially, the officers employed in setting up the Iraqi army were those who had been part of the Arab revolt or they were out of work,
officers of the old Ottoman army, some of whom had been active, in fact,
in the 1920 revolution, but who had since been co-opted into serving the new state.
Inevitably, therefore, it favoured those sections of society from which the Ottoman Empire had drawn its officers,
largely provincial Sunnis, that is Arab, Turkish and Kurdish.
The British saw the Iraqi army largely as a small in turning internal police force to ensure internal order and to build the state.
Not to go on foreign adventures. And in fact, for the first decade or more, two decades of its existence, it was a purely internal forces.
And one can see its gradual politicisation emerging out of this internal role as a policing force.
It became eventually a political actor in its own right.
And you see that in nineteen thirty one to thirty three, with the suppression of the Kurdish Barazani revolt in 1933,
with the massacre of the Syrians in 1935, with the suppression of the Yazidi revolt and with the tribal revolts of the middle Euphrates.
And in 1936, the first of six military coup d'etat took place whereby Iraqi army officers determined who should govern from Baghdad until 1941.
And that's what provoked the British military intervention of that year.
And finally, of course, in 1958, when the military officers overthrew the monarchy and initiated the Iraqi revolution of 1958.
So I suppose to sum it up, one could argue and I would argue strongly that these are three features of the state, the oligarchy,
the political economy of land and oil, and then the politicised armed forces, which formed a baneful legacy of the British in Iraq.
And in many ways, what the British had built up in Iraq was what I call a dual state.
That is, it had set up institutions of the public state, the monarchy, the parliament, the judiciary, the ministries of finance and so forth.
But behind them, it had also set up networks of association, patronage and violence,
what I call a shadow state, which was used by the British and by its allies to retain control.
The legacy of this, I would argue, remained long after the British control or influence had ended in Iraq.
And now I'm happy to hand over to Dina Houri, who takes the story further.
Thank you, Charles. Thank you, Eugene. It's a pleasure to join you at this event that's hosted by the Middle East centre at sea.
Anthonys, I'm tusked today with making some brief comments on the U.S. involvement in the 1991 Gulf War.
The U.N. sanctioned embargo and the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq.
It's a tall order to cover this this period, particularly because it is still part of our lived experience.
And for the Iraqi Iraqis amongst our audience.
You, your families and your friends have been affected by the wars and have had endless
discussions and have been active in the politics revolving around these wars.
And you've had a very rich experience. The process.
What I'd like to do today is set the set, the special place that these wars against Iraq and I consider the embargo as a war really by other means,
have occupied an international order that emerged after the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War.
And the first point I'd like to make is that the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990
provided the opportunity for the United States to refashion its role in the world.
And what the Bush administration described it to, to define the contours of the new world order as the dominant military and economic power,
the United States, with its junior allies amongst them.
Britain, of course, would lead this order.
It embraced a policy that sought to bring democratic reform and an economic liberalisation of state run economies.
When it intervene militarily,
it sought to deploy its military power in a manner that avoided the political costs of the loss of life that had happened in the Vietnam War.
It used new military technologies and established strategic military bases in areas that had hitherto been close to Western powers.
And Iraq, unfortunately, became the test case for the implementation of these polity policies over for over the following twenty five years or so.
So the first is that what is really the second Gulf War,
the 1991 Gulf War was the first war that tested the international system in the post-Cold War era.
And the reaction of the international community to the 1990 invasion of Kuwait was swift.
Seeing the invasion as a threat to its interests in the region and to the global flow of oil, the United States led the international response.
So starting in August, on August 2nd, the day of the invasion and extending until the official start of the war on January 17th, 1991,
the U.N. Security Council issued twelve resolutions that set the stage for military action
against Iraq and shape the post-war settlement that was imposed on the defeated regime.
You are perhaps familiar with the story of the war. He had what bears highlighting are issue aspects of the war.
First, the large coalition of states that the United States built, including 28 included 28 members.
Amongst them, three Arab states, Egypt, Morocco and Syria.
And the major European, Western and Western European powers.
It was clear that the U.S. administration had a vision of a new world order in which it was the
dominant military power that could intervene to rectify a threat to the international order.
But that dominance was to be sanctioned by multilateral agreements and by the international community represented by the United Nations.
And so the 1991 Gulf War was the first such concrete illustration of how this new system would work.
Over next the next decade. And the system, of course, evaporated with after after September 11 and after the Iraq war, then the 2003 war.
Now, the second aspect of the war that those of your of us who watched it happen on television would
I'd like to highlight is the sheer destructiveness of it over a remarkably short period of time.
The war started on January 17th and effectively ended on February 24th.
So despite the deployment of some 400000 troops, the U.S. military command to minimise American troop casualties used our airpower,
as the British had done in 1920, to destroy the infrastructure of Iraqi cities.
Visiting fire,
more destruction in a few days than eight years of war with Iran had had caused Iraqis talk about these days in really apocalyptic terms.
The war was also the first war in which American and international viewers were able to view the bombing
and destruction from their home television sets simultaneously as the bombing was taking place.
The unbury aspects of the destruction that parent blood lessness of it all remains a singular feature of the
new deployment of military technologies that would characterise US military dominance and intervention.
It represented a politically acceptable antidote to the kind of war that the Americans had experienced in Vietnam.
It repaired the American public and its policy establishment for future interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq.
The view from Iraq was, of course, quite different.
The destruction caused by the war, the massive rebellion of its population against the Fed's catastrophic policies of politics,
of the baths, the repression that followed the uprising in the south and north.
The effective loss of sovereignty over economic, its economy and its territory.
All of these were the consequences of the 1991 war.
So the invasion of 2003 destroyed the Iraqi state.
But the process had begun actually in the 1990s. The second point I want to make has to do with the United Nations and the new post,
particularly that all of the United Nations in the new post Cold War era, the 1991 Gulf War,
transformed the nature and role of the United Nations as an international body whose mandate was to mediate conflict through diplomacy,
mitigate the effects of humanitarian crises, and ensure that biologic a logical survival of the global population.
Instead, it's sanctioned intent to enforce and manage the most comprehensive embargo ever imposed on one man, one of its members.
Joe Gordon has has called the embargo an invisible war against Iraq.
The Security Council, that effective decision making executive body of the United Nations,
came to be dominated in the 1990s by the foreign policy interests of the United States in a particularly ironic twist.
The various humanitarian agencies within the United Nations found themselves working to mitigate
the catastrophic impact of the decisions about the embargo taken by its Security Council.
And so there are agencies working to mitigate the decisions of the executive body of the United Nation.
And the United Nations policy on Iraq, in particular on the Iraqi embargo,
entered a pattern attributable damage to the mission and legitimacy of the United
Nations and eroded its role as a legitimate mediator of international conflict,
at least outside the Middle East, because it's stolen in Palestine.
Israel is quite another matter. So the impact of the embargo on Iraqi society is well documented in a word.
It was devastating. Malnutrition, inflation. Shortage of medical supplies.
Unemployment decline and bleated literacy rate.
And in the long, a long list of human costs that continue to reverberate in Iraqi society to the present.
I conclude with a final point point on the 2003 U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq, the U.S. invasion,
occupation and establishment of a post Baathist Iraq marked the effective application of the U.S. vision for a new world order.
It's dreamscape, if you wish. It was also it also marked the disastrous end of that vision,
the U.S. invasion and occupation brought a specific kind of democracy to Iraq based on the apportionment of office along confessional lines.
The privatisation of the resources and of the resources of the state and the establishment of a free market.
You are familiars with the results of these policies, sectarian politics, the militarisation of every aspect of life in Iraq,
civil war and ethnic separation, corruption at every level of government.
The rise of ISIS and the erosion of a national lella narrative that would unify all Iraqis.
Clearly, the neoliberal vision of a democratic and free market system that had that was imposed by the occupation had been an utter failure.
And the U.S. has washed its hands effectively from the whole project.
And, you know, unlike the [INAUDIBLE] cot report that was issued by the British government to start 2016, that has been really No.
The assessment or on the impact of the war and on the invert or any sort of verdict on why what went wrong.
The Iraqis are left to pick up the pieces.
I want to conclude by pointing actually to promising developments that have been taking place in Iraq in the past three or four years.
I think there's a new generation of Iraqis, the children, not of Baathist [INAUDIBLE],
but of the two thousands who are now asking insistently at great cost to themselves for a new politics that moves beyond sectarianism.
They are demanding a responsible state capable of distributing public goods equitably and a nation that is inclusive and democratic.
It's not clear how successful they will be in the short term, but they have at least begun the work of reconstructing, I think, an alternative future.
And I think I'll conclude with that. Dina, thank you so much.
And Charles, again, thank you so much.
I feel that the audience has really had the benefit of your scholarship and the years that you have spent and studying a country that,
you know, the century of domination has been the subject of tonight's conversation.
I would like to invite our audience to join us with their questions.
If you go to the Q and A bar at the bottom of your screen, you can enter a question.
If you give your name, then I'll assume you want your name read out loud if you'd rather ask the question privately.
You can just market as anonymous and then we'll respect your anonymity.
It's OK. I have first question here from Mohammed Tofiq Ali, who would like to know if.
Well, you're asking about Iraq, Syria and Yemen.
For the interest of tonight's audience, I might focus the question just on Iraq and say, ah, is Iraq fragile, failing or a failed state?
So could I put the question after a century of war and domination?
Dana, Charles. Would you agree with the claim that Iraq is on its path to becoming either a fragile or a failed state?
So do you want us to go in which order a ship?
Why don't we start with Charles? I'm happy to go off to challenge.
Well, thank you, Dana.
Well, briefly, all states are fragile and clearly many of the things that Dana was talking about increased the fragility of the Iraqi state.
But, of course, all states are also resilient in the sense that what is emerging and what emerged from what seemed to be chaos, civil war is a.
A pattern of order and a pattern of privilege and sometimes a ruthlessly directed set of power relations,
which is reconstructing the Iraqi state, reconstructing it in a way that some clearly and the younger generation find deeply troubling.
But for others, there's been a very wealth bestowing possibility.
So I think one has to be wary about the notion of failed states.
I do not agree with that idea. I think that states transform themselves and are transformed.
And what you've seen in Iraq certainly over the last few years has been the transformation of the Iraqi state.
But it remains fragile. But more importantly, many of much of its population, their condition remains fragile as well.
I think I would echo Charles caution against talking about failed states or failing states,
because the assumption is that there's an ideal state and and somehow states fail that ideal.
My understanding of what's happening in Iraq,
what has been happening over the 90s and in the post 19 nine post invasion is the
there is a fragmentation of a unified and centralised state that it has become a DE.
What stands for the state has become a contested terrain between different forces within Iraqi society.
But it functions differently than it used to function in under, let's say, the in the 1970s, over or in the 1980s.
Certainly the institutions of the Iraqi state are transforming themselves, but it's still a state.
It's. And so what emerges out of this is going to be interesting.
I mean, there are going to be winners and losers as as always and such thing in such conflicts.
But what I'm finding quite interesting in particularly in these uprisings and these protests
that are taking place in Iraq is and they're taking place in primarily Shiite areas.
Is that is.
The conception of state that is being called for conflate state with nation with something that the Iraqis have been dealing with for some some time.
And. But there is no clear definition of what the state that there are that these protests are asking for.
These protesters are asking for I think it remains to be worked out between the different parties at the present.
Thank you both very much. Let's move on, we have a question from an anonymous participant who wants to know if there's any evidence on
the potential impact of highly publicised Western bombing atrocities during the 1991 war,
fuelling the rise in support for Islamic extremism in Iraq or further afield.
I think on this one, I'm going to start with you, Dina, and then Charles.
Feel free to add in a questionnaire response if you would like to weigh in.
Eugene, could you repeat the question, because I'm I it yeah, it's you know, I just want to make sure I get the question.
Yeah. The question really is asking about evidence that there is any link between the bombing atrocities during the 1991 war.
So the way in which the war was conducted.
Ninety one in terms of the violence used Motlop pass or what not fuelling the rise in support for Islamic extremist terror groups.
I mean, you could say more generally the way the war was conducted.
Ninety one perhaps provoking. Terrorists responses.
I think it's certainly the bombings in and the conduct of the war in 1991 led to radicalisation of of of various Islamist groups.
And for the you the the you know, the conflation of anti imperialism with with Islamic radicalism,
i.e., Islamic radicalism develops as a discourse of empty imperialism.
And I can't actually perhaps Charles can can speak to this with more authority,
because I find that within Iraq itself, these these bombings actually led to internal policies of Islamization.
And by the regime itself.
But also the the emergence of radical radical radicalism within Shilluk politics
that were not actually tied tragically with the with the bombings themselves,
but tied to the suppression of the intifada 1991.
I'm going to pause it there, Charles, and actually go on to another question, if I may, because I've got one that's right up your alley.
This is from Nicholas Bird. Charles, do you have ideas on how institutions such as schools,
museums and public spaces can better represent a more realistic history of Iraqi people and their experiences due to imperialism,
rather than continue to present and engage people with one that reinforces the imperialistic ideology?
She's interested in how we engage the public with yours and Dina's knowledge and Iraqi experience.
I tread carefully here because I haven't actually seen the exhibition at the Ashmolean,
so I don't know how they present it, but I think in general terms,
it's putting the experience of other places,
cultures and peoples in a context and context is not simply about artefacts, but is about the context of power itself.
How did the artefacts get there? Who discovered them? Who rediscovered them?
Who interpreted them? Who expropriated them?
So I think it's the it's always important to present that within a properly political context and historical political context.
So I think some institutions are better at doing that than others.
And certainly one might argue that in the last 10 or 15 years, the awareness of the need to do that has been far more sharp.
And I think well taken in many institutions in this country and elsewhere.
So I think that it's certainly an important part of the story.
You don't just present things as if they were miraculously arrived without human agency by explaining human agency.
You explain how they got there and who did it, but also where they came from and what they meant to the communities in the country itself.
Do you know I've got the next question for you. This is coming from Dr. Salah Tweeny.
And was Sun City a university? He wants to know, can Britain do anything about Iraq without the consent of the United States of America?
That's a good question to ask. My, my, my, my response would be exactly.
It depends what that anything is. I if if if the question is a question of military action, I think neither British the British government,
as I'm assuming the British government is not interested in anything of that sort.
But in terms of other forms of relationship, whether we're talking about trade relations or aid or any other or culture.
This, this, this, it can do I think it is doing so that's I think my my answer to you, too.
But it's certainly a military action. I don't think the British government is interested in it at the moment or could have done anything without them,
without Dalkey of the U.S. government. And here, I'd like to follow up with a question from Ahmed from Thorne.
And this I'd like to put to Charles first and then Dina weigh in after.
But really, what emerges from our discussions today is about the will to dominate Iraq, British and then American.
So what is the thought? Asks, Could the lecturer's give us a brief comparison between British and American policy in Iraq?
And who wants to build a real state? Who really is that it for state building or is it all about domination?
Charles, take a first stab at that one and then I'll come back to you, Dina.
Well, certainly in the period that I was talking about under the mandate and beyond.
But one could argue more recently, the two projects are connected.
That the British certainly believe that the state was the best way of securing their interests,
a state that was friendly, allied and producing the kinds of things that they wanted it to do.
So I think the two projects are not separate.
There is a sense in which the domination was B through a recognised form of institution, which was the state form in building the state.
As I argued, they built all kinds of aspects into it, which were to have some pretty dire consequences for the Iraqis themselves.
But by then, the British had left. And that clearly there's a similar parallel with what happened after 2003.
Dena. I would actually say that the you know, since the you know,
the create the the expansion of empires in the late 19th and early 20th century and certainly with the League of Nations,
the question of occupation was always built around the concept of state building as well.
So as Charles has said, they're feeling inseparable in the American case.
What was very distinctive about the American attempt to build a state in Iraq was that there then Yunus of an enterprise for them,
i.e. they had they did not come to the enterprise with their the long imperial experience of Britain in building states of a certain kind that that.
And so they came to it. It is at least in in 2003 first.
First of all, from a totally ideological perception perspective, based on the idea of American exceptionalism, i.e., this is an American vision.
It is a good vision. It is for the best of the best of Iraq and the interests of Iraqis and so on.
So in that respect, the ideological basis undergirding the state building enterprise in Iraq were less.
It came out of less experience, but a really ideological belief in the exceptional abilities of the state and the vision of the United States.
Thank you, Peter. Thank you very much. I'm going to combine two questions here because they are touching on similar points.
So the higher cliff wants to bring us up to current affairs and wants to know if there's any political,
diplomatic way to give assistance to the young people protesting against corruption and armed groups as they're
being targeted by different armed groups on a daily basis in front of the British and American embassy.
So I guess by extension, is there anything Britain or America could be doing to assist demonstrators in their legitimate demands?
And Elaine Giles on top of that, wants to know what would it take to rebuild trust between Iraq and the U.K.?
And perhaps there's a link between those two. So, Charles, if you get us started there.
Well, a rather disappointing reply to the first part, which is not a lot, in other words,
that kind of state that has allowed the emergence of the have to chabi the popular mobilisation forces to become effectively
instruments of those in power is the kind of state that the British and the Americans helped to establish in 2003.
And for the British or the Americans now to say, no, no, we don't want that kind of state total.
We want another swing state altogether. There's no way they have no purchase.
There are too many now entrenched interests to prevent that from happening.
And so, unfortunately, the young people very bravely protesting and who are being attacked often by the very instruments of that state are helpless,
as in terms of what the British can do. The British can wring their hands, but I don't think they can provide much material assistance.
And ironically, they might even have a word or two with the prime minister of Iraq.
But he himself gets very fed up with the power of some of these organisations.
But, of course, is unable to even if I'm willing to suppress them.
So he might agree with the British or the Americans that, yes, yes, it's terrible that the force is being used,
but frankly, they have very little power to do anything about them.
So you could argue that as with the state set up under the mandate, the unforeseen consequences of that live with the Iraqis for a long time to come.
So, sadly, the state set up in 2003 with exactly the point that Dana was making before,
with very little sense of the texture and the dynamics of Iraqi society itself, has created its own dynamics and its own interests and its own logic.
And that is now playing out quite violently in many parts of Iraq.
Dina, any reflections? The only thing I would add to this is that the United States government could exert pressure.
But the ultimate interests of the government is our jets geo strategic and and not human rights interests.
You know, and I think it's it can do very little beyond beyond, you know,
tell the Iraqi government that they should cut down on this kind of suppression
of the protests given given its larger interests in Iraq and the region.
Charles, here's a question for you. Adrian Petch notes that he was at school with King Faysal.
And asks if he'd been tougher like his cousin Hussein of Jordan, would things have been different?
Did the monarchy have any influence at all? Over to Charles?
Yes, Face Faisal has often been portrayed as rather a tragic figure,
which in many ways he was, because by the time he became king, he became king officially.
But by time he reached his majority. The path of Iraqi politics was already set and there was no way in which he could control it.
So sadly, although he was respected and in many ways, as I understand it, very much liked figure,
he had far more ruthless members of his family and of the Iraqi political elite who had already pursued their own course.
And that course was what played itself out in 1950s with the suppression of protests, with the hanging of communists,
with the destruction of the Iraqi trade unions, with the politicisation of the armed forces.
However, none of this could the young King Faisal have any control at all.
So he was, in a sense, a tragic figure, a figure who may have had personal qualities,
but was put in a position where he was effectively doomed by those who had built the state around him.
Do you know I got two questions that I'm going to combine for you. The first is from Frank De,
who wants to know how the Americans managed to invade Iraq in 2003 without understanding there are suddenly and she in the country.
And from Jane's story,
who wants to know how far was the US led invasion in 2003 influenced by Bush Junior's response to his father's failed attempt in 1990 91?
So let's come back to the basics of what drove and what was the ignorance of the 2003 invasion.
I think the second question is my quick is very quick has a quick answer.
Yes. Yes. And and if you've watched Saturday Night Live or any of the shows during the invasion that were on I mean there I mean, more seriously.
Certainly that it was a clear sense amongst the group of advisers that worked with the younger Bush that the 1991 settlement remained incomplete.
And that and the and that is the imperative to complete the project of 1990, once at the fathers project of 1991,
because most of their advisors basically around the younger Bush were very,
very important in it in setting Iraq policy during war, first with the 1990 war one war for the second question.
In fact, the Shia the Sunni Shia divide has had been widely known to be American Americans when they
went in and figures within the Iraqi opposition had highlighted actually these differences
encouraged the U.S. administration to work with Shia opposition groups centred in Iran and
encourage as well a belief on the part of the Americans that chiasm is inherently more,
more, more open to democratic, to the democratic politics than cynicism.
So the debate, I mean, and the knowledge of the Shia Sunni divide within within Iraq was was I mean, it was common amongst the establishment.
Less less common is the complexity of these divisions within Iraqi society and the layering
of these identities with several other identities and with the complexity between each.
I mean, it was a version of it discourse or the view of Iraqi society embraced by
opposition groups outside Iraq that had been active in anti Baathist politics.
And and oh. So it it's actually was not based on a real knowledge of the complexity of allegiances in in Iraq.
Bushin lend to me. Thank you, Dina.
We are coming to the end of our hour and the questions continue to pile in.
We've had a fantastic turnout tonight. And so I'm not surprised that I'm getting more questions that we'll have time to answer.
I would like to give the honour of the last question to what our students, Tom Coyne, who puts the question to Charles Tripp.
He says, You mentioned that Britain submitted a bogus report to the League of Nations guaranteeing the rights of the Kurds.
Should Iraq become independent? What were the motivations in doing so?
Was this an order to admit Iraq to the league as quickly as possible? Or were there other factors at play?
So putting on your. Professorial historians Hatch.
Charles. You say I have half a minute to which reply is denied.
The point is that everyone knew that the proposal that Iraq should become independent was going
to be put towards the League of Nations in 1932 to be done on a regular basis to be considered.
And the British were quite happy to contemplate that idea of what they thought of as an independent Iraq.
Also evident to the Kurdish parties and groups was that Iraq was going to be a state dominated by Baghdad and
by basically elites who had no love for the Kurdish people or indeed for the rights of the Kurdish people.
And so they had been petitioning the League of Nations since 1930 to not grant independence to Iraq unless there were
sufficient guarantees of the rights of the Kurdish people to a degree of autonomy within the new independent state of Iraq.
And because the British were aware of this and realised that it might mess up their proposal in Geneva.
And so they concocted with no side a fictitious effectively report on the condition of human rights and rights of the Kurdish people in Iraq,
as well as with lots of pledges of how the new Iraqi government and state would,
of course, guarantee rights of autonomy and self-government in the Kurdish region.
Whether this was sufficient to persuade, but it certainly had an effect in Geneva and the League of Nations then granted independence to Iraq in 1932.
Thereafter, nothing more was heard of the pledges made by no outside.
Charles, it couldn't have been done better or more briefly. Thank you very much.
I will now need to bring our session to a close. I've had a number of questions asking whether this session will be posted.
And I assure you we'll get back to everyone who registered if it is.
And I would like to extend warm thanks on behalf of both the Ashmolean Museum and the Middle East centre to our guests tonight.
Dana Hurry joined us from George Washington University in Washington, D.C.
Charles Tripp, who joined us from London in sharing the depth of the knowledge and experience in the study of modern Iraq.
I think you guys have been an amazing audience and the questions have been truly fantastic.
So thank you for weighing in and making the session work as well as you did.
And I wish you all the very good evening from Oxford to bid you good night.