The Great ‘Iraqi Revolt: The 1919-1920 Insurrections Against the British in Mesopotamia

Caught up in its own rhetoric of liberation, prominent since the capture of Baghdad during the war, Britain was forced to acknowledge that many legitimate rebel demands had not been met under Wilson’s administration. As Sir Percy Cox was hurriedly brought in to Mesopotamia to take over for the disgraced Wilson, his top priority was the acceleration of creating an “Arab ‘Amir” in the form of a Hashemite monarch, a course of action long championed by the remnants of the Arab bureau, to include Gertrude Bell, long in correspondence with Cox. Major General G.P. Dawnway, a longtime expert of the region, perceptively concluded in April 1921 in the British “Army Quarterly” in an article entitled “Mesopotamia: A Political Retrospect that:

During this period of suspense [the peace settlement with Turkey] the inhabitants of Mesopotamia saw little to reassure them that pledges given by General Maude when he occupied Baghdad were about to be honoured by the British Government. Under their eyes they saw an alien administrative machine daily growing larger, more efficient and more expensive.⁷⁴
He later states that “The action of the French in Syria deepened the suspicion of the Arabs for Europeans, and so had an important bearing on events east of the Euphrates.”⁷⁵ Thus, at least some members of the British establishment had internalized the “liberation” rhetoric of Maude’s speech, sufficiently so that they felt acute tension when the “liberated” rebelled against the “liberators.” Thus Dawnway continued to rail against the internal hypocrisy of British policy, stating that “in that proclamation the Arabs were assured that it was not the wish of the British Government to impose upon them ‘alien institutions.’ If 507 British administrative officials are not an ‘alien institution’ within the meaning of the term, we must perforce abandon the attempt to define anything so elusive!"⁷⁶ Thus attempts to govern the mandate, via coercive measures of administration and military force contrasted sharply with the moral ideology of self-determination inherent to British rhetoric and the League of Nations Mandate. In the end, perhaps no one understood this tension better than one of its architects, Sir A.T. Wilson. He perceptively argued that he was “confronted with the usual dilemma. To do nothing is to encourage brute force which we are unable to control and which is purely anarchic; to suppress it by force may precipitate grave troubles which we are not in a strong moral position to meet.”⁷⁷ By referring to the moral position of the British, he is addressing this tension between control and self-government. He best sums it up by arguing that this tension is so great that it is untenable, and that Britain must either “govern or go,” stating:

you know my views as also do H.M.G. to whom I have expressed the opinion since November 16th, 1918, that the line on which they were working did not lead to anything but disaster and I have latterly told them that they must either govern or go and that to do neither on the mandatory system is not a practicable policy.⁷⁸