Review Britain’s 2 Wars With Iraq 1941 1991

El-Solh, Raghid, Britain’s 2 Wars With Iraq 1941 1991, Garnet Publishing Limited, 1996

 

Raghid El-Solh’s Britain’s 2 Wars With Iraq 1941 1991 is a tale of two halves. It covers the Anglo-Iraq War which was part of the larger World War 2 conflict as well as the Gulf War. The author argues that England has historically attempted to maintain the status quo in the Middle East which came into conflict with various Iraqi leaders. The coverage of first war is quite good while the section on the Gulf War reads like Saddam era propaganda.

 

Solh’s thesis is that Britain has been a status quo power in the Middle East. He begins with how status quos are created and enforced before covering how the modern Middle East was formed in the wake of World War I. That was when London and Paris carved up the region leading to several new countries such as Iraq. Maintaining that new state system and the UK’s influence in the area became its main priorities. The history is solid and the author doesn’t go too far off into academia when discussing the theory of status quos.

 

The main challenge to England’s policy was Arab nationalism. The UK empowered a group of Arab nationalists led by King Faisal when it created Iraq. While they talked about Arab unity their main focus was upon gaining independence for their country. London was not opposed to that as long as it could maintain its hegemony.

 

By the time of World War II a new generation of more militant Iraqi leaders had emerged especially in the military that were anti-British. They believed that the UK stood in the way of the full development of Iraq, supported Zionism in Palestine and backed France’s control of Syria and Lebanon even after France fell to the Nazis in 1940. As a result the Iraqi government tried to be neutral during the World War while reaching out to Italy and Germany. Prime Minister Winston Churchill was not willing to accept that. His response was to start the Anglo-Iraq War and invade Iraq in 1941. This fits well into the author’s thesis that the UK wanted to maintain the status quo in Iraq. That meant a pliant government in Baghdad which was especially important during the conflict with the Axis. That was achieved by putting the old guard politicians back in power after the war.

 

The next part of the book was a real disappointment. El-Solh claimed that the U.S. and UK wanted to contain Iraq’s regional ambitions after the Iran-Iraq War while increasing economic relations. The former included a propaganda campaign against Saddam Hussein which led to condemnations of Iraq for executing a British journalist, the arrest of people attempting to send nuclear triggers to Baghdad and the confiscation of parts for a supergun. El Solh writes that these were part of a Western plot against Saddam Hussein to warn him against expanding his power in the Middle East. When Saddam threatened to burn half of Israel with WMD the two western capitals were supposedly done with the dictator. All of this is completely wrong and seems to support Saddam’s conspiracy theories that the West was out to get him. The Bush administration for instance was solely focused upon improving relations with Saddam right up to the day he sent his troops into Kuwait. It blocked Congress from sanctioning Baghdad for its human rights abuses. It continued to give credit to Iraq even though it knew that some of that money was being used for its weapons programs. After Saddam’s threat to Israel Washington told Baghdad it wanted good ties. Overall it makes the second half of the book a waste of time because so much of it is based upon false pretenses.

 

Britain’ 2 Wars With Iraq starts off very well but then falls apart halfway through. Its discussion of how England helped create the modern Middle East and then attempted to maintain that system is quite good. The problems start with the Gulf War which comes off as repeating Iraqi propaganda about Western conspiracies against Saddam. El Solh published his book in 1996 when there was plenty of information about how the U.S. attempted to expand its ties with Saddam despite his threats to Israel and Kuwait and yet that is completely missing from his work. The fact that he repeats one piece of misinformation after another makes the book worthless to read in the end.

 

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