What Our Students Are NOT Learning about Iraq

I was recently invited to lecture to Orange County history and social
studies teachers about the current Iraq crisis. To better prepare my lecture
I asked to see the materials given to teachers to design lessons about Iraq
and the Middle East. As someone who has spent the last fifteen years
studying the history of the region, I was shocked and frustrated by what I
read, or more accurately, by what I didn't read, as several of the most
important episodes and dynamics of the country's short history have been
completely erased from the history they present. That the US and Great
Britain, the two main proponents of war against Iraq, played crucial roles
in these events makes their absence all the more troubling.

First and foremost, none of the materials (almost all from educational
websites sponsored by mainstream news organizations) include the slightest
discussion of the impact of British colonialism in Iraq on the country's
history. Such an omission is inexcusable; we can no more write colonialism
out of Iraq's history than write slavery out of America's.

Indeed, if we want to know why they hate us, or how the Ba'ath regime could
commit such atrocities on Kurds, Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraqis, we must
first understand what it is like to be colonized, for several reasons.
First, because the experience of colonialism in Iraq also happened in Syria,
Algeria, Egypt, Morocco, Jordan, Palestine, and Lebanon. Put simply, we
can't understand what it means to build a modern nation, or how capitalism
and free markets developed throughout the world, without examining the
crucial role played by European imperialism and colonialism in this matrix
of forces, especially in the Middle East.

Second, America today is the world's only remaining imperial power, a fact
that even senior Bush Administration officials publicly acknowledge. If we
consider that many of the arguments offered by President Bush to support a
US invasion of Iraq -fostering freedom, democracy and development-are
identical to those used by Britain almost ninety years ago when it created
Iraq, it becomes clear why students, and indeed, all citizens, need to learn
about the history of British rule.

Described briefly, rather than build on a century's long process of Ottoman
modernization (however uneven and painful) in Iraq, when Great Britain
conquered the country in 1917 it strengthened the position of the country's
most conservative and venal forces-civilizing rhetoric aside-in the name of
political expediency and economic "efficiency." Sadly, this policy led to
increasing concentration of wealth and poverty in the ensuing decades.

As important, it could only be implemented by extreme violence and
autocratic rule, including the repeated use of poison gas and large-scale
aerial bombings of civilian targets that have made Saddam Hussein infamous,
and which according to a recent biography of Hussein, "administered a shock
to the country's social system from which it has never recovered. It was the
British conquest of Iraq which set the stage for what is happening today."

What does this have to do with the United States and current policy? In a
code-word: TPAJAX. This was the code name of the operation, run by the CIA
and British intelligence, that in 1953 overthrew the elected Mossadeqh
Government in Iran. A recently declassified review of the operation written
by senior CIA personnel candidly discusses the reasons behind the coup: the
Iranian Government's supposed support for communism and desire to gain
control of the oil industry.

What is so important about this document is that the CIA helped stage two
coups in Iraq, in 1963 and 1968, for almost identical reasons as the 1953
Iran operation; both times it helped the Ba'ath party secure power in its
wake. In the first coup, the CIA literally broadcast the names of suspected
communists from a clandestine radio station in Kuwait, thousands of whom
were summarily murdered by the new regime. The second coup brought to the
center of power a young but equally ruthless Saddam Hussein.

The history of US support of the Ba'ath party is crucial to help us
understand why we did such good business with Saddam while he routinely
gassed Kurds and invaded Iran, and why it was only when he overplayed his
hand vis-à-vis older and more valuable clients we went to warnot to oust
him, but rather to restore the "status quo ante" in which the surrounding
regimes would be in fact more dependent on us for their survival.

Indeed, the TPAJAX history should be required reading for all high school
students and teachers precisely because it teaches us how the most
enlightened democracies repeatedly violate their professed ideals. So should
a new book by Israeli economists Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler, The
Global Political Economy of Israel. This book offers conclusive evidence
that during the last half-century the defining parameter in shaping US
foreign policy and even our economy as a whole has the been the
disproportionate power and wealth of the defense and oil industry vis-a-vis
the rest of the US economy. That is, the famous but easily misunderstood
"arms-petrodollar cycle" that for decades has seen billions of dollars go
into the coffers of despotic Middle Eastern (and other) regimes, only to
return to the US in the form of arms purchases, is at the heart of the
current imbroglio with Iraq.

Amazingly, there is nary a word about arms and oil in the information
materials given to teachers. Yet as Nitzan and Bichler demonstrate, every
single "energy conflict" since 1967 has occurred after a precipitous fall in
the profits of the "arms-oil coalition," and that contrary to the widespread
belief that our interest is in "access to cheap oil," our Government and
industry prefer moderate to high oil prices precisely because they produce
the revenues that get recycled back home in the form of arms purchases. Not
surprisingly, these profits had dipped to their lowest level in decades
before September 11, 2001, but have risen precipitously since that terrible
day.

In this regard, we need to remember that American democracy is only as
strong as the breadth and quality of information at the disposal of its
citizens, particularly when the country prepares for war. California's
history standards reflect this important fact, requiring teachers to
inculcate "critical thinking and analysis skills" as well as details of
America's rise to world predominance and our foreign policy system to their
students, all with the goal of educating "good citizens." Yet even if they
had a more honest and complete history to teach, teachers complained that
the standards are so focused on Europe that they have barely a week to teach
the rest of the world, let alone the complex history of Iraq.

As President Bush prepares to engage in a nation-building program whose
complexity would have frightened even the most daring British Colonial
Office hand, it is vital that educators and students have the tools to
understand how and why previous attempts went awry, especially when
America's rhetoric, the importance of oil and Iraq's strategic location, and
the lead role of the CIA in the war on terror, poise us to reenact previous
imperial adventures in Iraq. How can Americans of all ages make informed
political judgments when these crucial issues are left out of the
classroomnot to mention newsroom? Our teachers, students and citizens
deserve better.