The British have never been prone to ignoring their military defeats, preferring to turn them into national epics (Dunkirk, 1940) or at least exciting movies (Isandlwhana, 1879). But even military historians have forgotten the defeat of Manchester column. Yet it remains an event that is real and immediate to our enemies in Iraq today.
The defeat of Manchester column was the nadir of the Arab revolt of 1920. Britain, governing Iraq since it had defeated the previous Ottoman Turkish rulers at the end of World War I in 1918, found that imposing imperial rule brought Sunni, Shia and Kurds together in arms against them. The Manchester column was an Anglo-Indian combined armed force, built around an infantry unit — the Second Battalion of the Manchester Regiment — largely of raw recruits. Sent unsupported against Sunni rebels near Hillah (Babylon), it was overrun on July 23, 1920, losing several hundred dead and prisoners.
The British ultimately won the war — it was 1920 and the empire still could strike back — and were able to maintain their interests in Iraq (even after its independence in 1932) until the 1950s. But the defeats they experienced in the opening battles in 1920 remained a potent lesson for both sides. For the British, it meant practicing indirect rule, backed up by air power and local levies, rather than committing ground units. For Iraqi nationalists, it provided an example of the success of armed resistance that obscured their own failures to link together Iraq’s diverse and divided people.
In the 1980s, Saddam Hussein switched from popularizing his ideology of secular Arab socialism to invoking the splendors of ancient Babylon to provide legitimacy and a symbol of Iraqi unity. But, in his last years in power, he invoked the events of 1920 for the same reasons. At his last national day parade in Baghdad, he brandished a Lee Enfield rifle captured from the Manchester column, his call to guerrilla resistance, a symbol that Western, non-Muslim occupiers were not invincible.
The different currents that support the insurgency in Iraq today — Sunni resentment, internal Shia divisions, Islamic radicalism, violent nationalism and remnants of Ba’athist ideology — have followed the 1920 model to armed resistance. (Even though it would seem that, for any faction, the optimal strategy would be to organize, wait for the United States to reduce its commitment and then challenge anyIraqigovernmentthat emerged.) Confronting superior U.S. firepower in pitched battle is not our enemy’s optimal strategy. But because the lessons of 1920 associate legitimacy with armed resistance (rather than political organization and intimidation), today’s fighting may undercut their ability to implement the less dramatic but more dangerous threat of cells being organized and Iraqi officials being murdered.
Today’s Iraqi enemies see their own ability to strike painful blows — the ambush in Fallujah, armed defiance at Shia mosques — as a reflection of their efforts to create a new Manchester column. Yet this concentration on terrorist successes also shows their longer-term weaknesses. They may be good at drive-by killings or improvising explosive devices, but so far they are not offering serious competition in the more important area of political warfare, of putting together a coalition that can force aside the new Iraqi government as soon as the U.S. combat troops leave. Indeed, much of the recent Shia resistance is seen not as a direct challenge to the U.S. occupation but to the Shia leadership’s decision not to offer a radical challenge to the U.S.-directed process of forming an Iraqi government.
Saddam’s totalitarian vision either swept away or drove into opposition much of the traditional tribal and religious leadership that made battlefield success in 1920 possible. Under Saddam, any Iraqi with political organizing skills was likely in exile or dead, if not one of his henchmen. Thus, the opposition in Iraq has no obvious political leadership not tainted with Ba’athist links, nor cadres trained in the hard disciplines of revolutionary warfare.
What they do have instead is the memory of the Manchester column. The motivation of a victory against an enemy that appeared to be imposing imperial rule may not apply to fighting U.S. forces that have, from the start, emphasized their goal of withdrawal and hand-over to Iraqis. The history of nationalist resistance may inspire some Iraqis to fight, but so far it has not provided our enemies with a coherent vision of a future Iraq, or how to achieve it. That, despite the renewed fighting, still remains solely in the hands of the United States and our Iraqi allies.
David C. Isby is a Washington-based author and defense and foreign policy consultant.
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