Democracy In Iraq--BOOM!

Was it five car bombs—or was it seven—that went off in Baghdad the other day? I guess it depends on whether you count in Arabic or English. The locals say one thing; what’s left of the American military presence says the other.
We sponsored an election. It was apparently a reasonably fair election; it was also a dreadfully close election. We take close elections to the Supreme Court or the loser simply quits and lets the other guy have it. In simpler societies, recounts can get bloody.
So far, just in April, 100 Iraqi’s have died in the process. This comes just as we are preparing to cut the 96,000 GIs remaining in Iraq down to under 50,000. That should be completed by September; everybody is scheduled to leave by next year.
Why does this remind me of 1921?
What happened then, you ask. Read on—and see if it sounds familiar. There was a once a province of the brutal Turkish Empire that was maintained by force of arms, not by democratic mandate or agreement of the mutually hostile tribal and religious groups.
The Turkish Empire went away in a cloud of gun smoke back in 1918 and the British decided to take this province over. Mesopotamia, as it was then called, had NEVER been a unified country. Already by the end of World War I, people were beginning to sense just how much oil this piece of earth contained. Britain was quite willing to take on that burden.
Britain, however, was short on cash, and there was not a lot of political sentiment back in England for another foreign war—even for oil. In fact there was none. World War I had left England broke and sick of war—she wanted her boys home.
So young Winston Churchill, who was Colonial Secretary in 1921, held a meeting in Cairo where he came up with what seemed like a brilliant idea—to him. He would 1) combine three hostile tribal areas in Mesopotamia—that of the Kurds, the Shiites and the Sunni’s into one brand new country, called Iraq.
Two, he installed one of the characters out of “Lawrence of Arabia” as king—thus creating a unified national government. (This chap, by the way was from Arabia and had already been tossed out of Syria for trying to make himself king there.) Then, 3) Churchill decided to create an Iraqi national army under this new government so that the British troops could go home.
Cheaper, fewer British casualties, instead of three areas to pacify—one nation state with its own army. Absolutely brilliant plan. Rather like the plan Churchill had as a boy when he sought to gain entrance to a “haunted house” by blowing up a home-made bomb in the outside well. He blew himself high in the air and never found the “secret passage” into the house.
His plan for Iraq didn’t work either. The three Mesopotamian tribes went right on hating each other. The new government was powerless to stop them from killing each other. Without sufficient British troops on the ground to pacify things, everything just go worse.
In 1930, Britain quit and went home. They left Iraq to its new king (whose entire family was finally wiped out in 1958—by a group that included Saddam Hussein). Churchill’s grand design exists today only in the name on the map—where the three groups that still hate each other live to this day.
Now it’s America’s turn to try to create a nation state out of these three groups. (Like the British, we’ve already given up on the oil.) Like the British we are only too willing to pull our own troops out and leave the mess to the Iraqi national army.
One can almost see Mr. Churchill, sitting on a back bench in heaven, shaking his head as he looks down and murmurs, “Good luck”.