It’s a pleasure to be here, but let me first start off by apologizing for interrupting your dinner, I hope it’s worth it.  It’s a double pleasure to be here with you at the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.  I realize I’m coming to this podium behind a lot of chaps who are very much more informed speakers than myself.  Second, before I came to the podium I was exposed to the Council’s education work which I think can be seen as increasingly complex and in troubled times is a must for everyone.  I congratulate the Council on doing that with young people in fostering understanding in education. 

I flew in to Washington a couple of weeks ago just as a helicopter was tragically downed and then, while I was here, the Black Hawk helicopter was downed [in Iraq] and yesterday the tragic news from Nasiriya was a huge loss of lives of Italian soldiers.  I thought what possible positive or what possible note could I strike that we could deal from.  I think that the one point I’d want to stress, the one point of the book, is that we’ve been here before. 

Britain invaded Iraq in the beginning of the First World War in 1914, basically for strategic reasons; it didn’t want the Turks or the Germans to seize the head of the Persian Gulf, and it moved out and seized Baghdad in 1917.  Then things began to change and it was an American that made things change.  It was President Woodrow Wilson with his idealistic, but certainly very sensible, argument that imperialism was dead and that the European powers couldn’t compete, couldn’t destabilize international relations while scraping over countries less powerful than themselves.  So the British had to transform their holding of Iraq to a much more open and controlled civilizing mission.  Clearly that’s what General Moore said just before he died from cholera in Baghdad, that the British were there to help the Iraqis, to bring liberal democracy, to build states under which all Iraqis could prosper.

Again things went very badly wrong.  After three years the Iraqis started asking, "Where is this democracy?  Where is the state you promised us? And where is the prosperity?"  In June 1920 an extremely violent revolt broke out across the south and center of the country and spread up to the north.  The British faced 131,000 tribal people with modern rifles, fighting to kick them out of the country.  It took them until February 1921 to secure Iraq, to get back in control of the country.  As the dust settled, the British found that 400 of their own troops had died, 2,000 casualties and 40 million pounds had been spent.  Now, this had extreme ramifications for the government back in London.  At the end of the First World War a British population weary of conflict, weary of high taxes, were calling for the troops to come home quickly.  The next election was fought on the very issue of why British troops were in Iraq, why was it mucking about with this God-forsaken country on the fringes of empire and, indeed, the war-time coalition of Lloyd George and Winston Churchill were thrown out by the British population as being too jingoistic, overreaching the power of Britain.  The next elected prime minister was elected on the very prophetic slogan -- "we cannot be the policeman of the world." 

So, it is this moment, in February 1921, I would argue, that the British intentions of building a modern powerful state were dropped, driven by the competing pressures of the promises the British had made to the League of Nations set up by Woodrow Wilson.  The promises were made through General Moore to the Iraqi people Amid the ever-increasing pressure of a cynical and angry electorate -- the electorate won back in Britain.  Short cuts were taken and the state that was set up was shoddy, it was weak and it didn’t fulfill the promises given when Baghdad was seized in 1917.  The result is where we find ourselves today.  After the British left in 1932, not doing the job they promised, Iraq became a fulcrum of regional instability, but the Iraqi people suffered under one dictatorship after another and the wider Middle East suffered under unstable countries run by governments that would rather embark on overseas adventurism than help the needs of their population.

So, what I want to do today is look at three themes that would lead us to understand what went wrong in the 1920s and ’30s, but more importantly how we can avoid those problems today in 2003, how we can fulfill the promises President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair made to the Iraqi people on the eve of the invasion.

First, I think that what we’re involved in today and what we were involved during the1920s is state building.  So let us take a moment to think what it means to build a state, what we’d actually have to do to build a successful state.  Now, what I think it is, is the creation of efficient, but transparent and legal links, between the state and the capital - whether it be Baghdad or Washington - and ask ordinary people in America or ordinary people in Iraq.  Now, these institutions must be mutually reciprocal.  The state clearly asks things of us.  It asks for our taxes, probably unpopularly, but it also places restraints on us.  We have to abide by the laws of the state and we have to want to abide by the majority of those laws.  Now, in return we then offer up legitimacy to the state, we offer up belief in the state that we own the state, we send politicians either to Los Angeles County Council or to the regional government or to the national government and they know if they don’t do what we want them, we pull them back down.  So this is a mutual conversation of belief and legitimacy.  And, finally, it has to be done on the local level. 

Each one of us has to feel that the state is doing what we need whether it be order, electricity or education and welfare for our kids, we need to believe that the state is speaking to us and acting in our interests.  So, this can only be done with a detailed knowledge and understanding of the society the state is trying to interact with. 

Now, my book is about how this went terribly wrong in the 1920s and ’30s; how the British fundamentally misunderstood the society that they were interacting with and how misunderstanding generally can undermine policy making.  What I want to do with you tonight, possibly quite controversially, is compare to the mistakes and misperceptions that are going on at the moment, that the British and the Americans are making in the palace in Baghdad, and around the coalition provisional authority, who are deeply striving to build a state in Iraq today.

First, I’d look at how the British understood the Ottoman Empire, the regime they changed, and then coming through to 2003 how the Americans and the British understood Saddam Hussein.  Now, the British had an extremely negative view of the Ottoman Empire; they saw it as corrupt, violent and inefficient and then they saw it as corrupting Iraqi society.  This is highly problematic, because anyone in the Middle East in the 1920s would have gained their education, their training as a civil servant under the Ottoman Empire so this rather negative view that the British had contaminated and warped their interaction with those people destined to inherit the civil administration of the Iraqi state, those working in the cities in Baghdad, in Basra and Mosul, were seen as corrupt and prone to try to oppress the Iraqi population.  So the British then went out into Iraqi society to try to find people that they could deal with, try to find people that could counterbalance what they saw was a corrupt civil service and they walked into society and looked for tribes and sheiks, sheiks representing the tribes and both tribes and sheiks representing a more honest or more representative Iraqi society.  This had very strong ramifications for the evolution of the state, because they deliberately built a weak state and tried to build a strong society, a strong tribal society, to act as a counterbalance and we’ll see how this unfolded.

Now, the question I’m always asked is why was there so little planning before the invasion of Iraq in 2003?  And I think this is another misperception about how Iraq works, about the government of Saddam Hussein.  The Americans and the British and a lot of people believed that Saddam Hussein’s state was extremely strong, that it controlled the population with an iron grip but also that it would float through society and knew a lot about society.  So, the belief would be that either there would be a coup as the war started and that simply the Americans would go straight to Baghdad and seize the state or if they had to fight their way to Baghdad once they got there they’d be greeted by jubilant civil servants who would say, "Look, here’s a strong state.  Let’s use it to control society and then we’ll reform society, we’ll reform the state from the top downwards."  So what we’re involved in and after the cease-fire would simply be an issue of reform.  We’re not changing the state.  Clearly, I think this is where Paul Wolfowitz, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Cheney’s views about the short-term commitment would come from.

Now, sadly, I think tragically, this has proven to be a very strong misconception.  In 2001 I was in Iraq researching the effects of sanctions and it was very, very clear that sanctions had ripped apart the Iraqi state.  I was down in Kabala, the holy Shiite city in the south, and the most vulnerable place in the Iraqi state, so I thought, "Well, I’ll go and interview the governor of this province to see how he runs it." I had to step over a pool of raw sewage from a broken toilet outside his front door to get into his office.  Clearly, the power of the state wasn’t residing in this building and indeed wasn’t residing in the institutions of government.  What Saddam Hussein had done very fiendishly is drain all the money and the resources out of the state, let the state fall to pieces and give it to his cronies, give it to his extended network of family and loyalists and [maintain] within the society a very informal, almost shadow, state.  So, when the United States and British troops arrived in Baghdad, they found a state on its last legs having tried to combat three wars in the last 20 years.  If you then add to that the three weeks of looting that followed liberation in April and May, the state was ripped to pieces.  If you walk down any street in Baghdad you see government offices that were gutted by the looters and then burned and then a second set of looters were coming and stripping the copper electric wires off the walls.  Today you cannot speak of a state in Iraq.  So what Richard Cheney and President Bush thought they were going to do, which was quite understandably reform the state from the top down, has now come about as a process of building the state from the grassroots upward.  It will take a generation, lots of money and lots of commitment and I think this realization was quite slow in dawning on our friends in Washington and indeed on our friends in London.

Let’s switch now to visions of society--how we understand Iraqi society, how the British understood Iraqi society in 1914 and how the Americans and the British of the coalition provisional authority understand it now in 2003.  I think that the crucial question is--if you’re building a state, if you’re trying to interact with Iraqi society the question is--who are the Iraqis?  Who are the people that we want to give power to?  Who are the people we think deserve that power in Iraq today?  The British in 1914 were largely ignorant about Iraq.  Again, this is no surprise.  Iraq was on the fringes of the Ottoman Empire then and the British would have found it very difficult to get into Iraq before the war, before the invasion in 1914.  So, they dreamt of a way Iraq should look like.  Iraq -- hey, it’s Arab, it’s Islamic, it’s rural, it should be tribal, it’s good common sense, isn’t it?  And so when Woodrow Wilson said, "Do you have to make this a democracy, you have to give real power to Iraqis?" the British answered that question, "Who are the Iraqis?" in the way they thought it should be, not in the way it actually was because they’d done no extended research into Iraqi society and because the British state was so broke after World War I they couldn’t afford to.  So they were making policy off the cuff and they were making policy with a society they really didn’t understand.  Again, this vision of Iraq that the British had an urban society they believed to be irrational and corrupted by the Ottoman Empire, but also an urban society where a surprisingly large-scale nationalist movement was saying to the British, "Thank you very much.  Now get out.  We want our own state and we want it now," and they juxtaposed this urban society against a rural society where they believed the sheiks of tribes represented an Iraqi reality--that they could go to the tribes, go to the sheiks and say, "Hey, what do you want?  We’ll give you money if you give us popular support."  Now, what they didn’t realize was that Iraq had been slowly, through the 1800s, integrated into the world economy and that the structure of Iraqi society had been vastly transformed by that.  Land became expensive as Iraq started exporting corn and grain and rice to the world economy.  Land ownership changed and the sheiks went from being first among equals, went from being representatives of their society, to being petty landowners who used force of arms to turn their tribesmen into serfs, forced to work the land for very poor money.

So, let’s go to 2003 now.  Again, understandably, the U.S. and the U.K. in planning for the war had no sustained investigation of Iraq.  I was only one of two academics who managed to get in and do research in Iraq under sanctions.  Again, no surprises and no blame there--Iraq was a dictatorial society and it’s very difficult to get in.  But more than that, because they had no information they also suffered from the fact that the coalition provisional authority had a severe shortage of Arabic speakers.  There are 1600 paid civilians working on rebuilding Iraq and when I was there in May and June there were only 16 Arabic speakers amongst them.  But because of this lack of knowledge, the U.S. forces were depending on a group of Iraqis whom we know well--Ahmed Chalabi and the Iraqi National Congress.  Ahmed Chalabi is known as a very influential figure around Washington and he sold, I think, people like Paul Wolfowitz a dream of Iraq.  He said Iraq has, as Paul Wolfowitz said, "probably the most pro-American society in the Middle East.  Iraq would welcome American troops with chocolates and flowers," and Ahmed Chalabi claimed networks of thousands of freedom-fighting Iraqis would come to America’s aid.  And these exiles would act as a conduit of information, they would go into Iraqi society and bring data out and say, "Hey, this is what you need to do." They would go into Iraqi society and say, "Hey, the Americans are doing a lot.  This is what they’re doing.  This is what they want you to do."  Now, sadly that proved not to be the case. 

When I was there in May and June, I interviewed as many different Iraqis as I could find.  {Iraqi society} treated the exiles with either indifference or much more often, with open hostility.  And this is understandable.  Iraqi society has suffered 12 years of sanctions, crippling sanctions, and then Iraqis would say, "Who are these guys who come in with the Americans?  They’ve not been here.  They’ve not suffered with us.  Who are they to tell us what to do?  Who are they to tell the Americans who we are?"  And that’s a great problem. 

The second problem is that Iraq has been fundamentally misunderstood.  Anyone of us who have been to Iraq in the last five or six years finds a society united by a strong nationalism, united by a strong pride, like Americans in their country.  Now, again, the coalition provisional authority, like the British, has misunderstood this.  There is a popular, almost TV-pundit like view, that Iraq is heterogeneous and divided between three warring factions -- the Sunnis, the Shiites and the Kurds.  Now this certainly might have been the case in 1920, but it’s not now.  A lot has changed.  For example, from 1970 to 1974, the Baath Party had an awful lot of oil money to spend on their population and they did that by building schools, by building health services and infrastructure.  Now, a little know fact is that the Iraqi army is three quarters Shiite and it’s the very same army that fought tenaciously in an eight-year war from 1980 to 1988 against Iran which we know is a fellow-Shiite country.  Now, these guys weren’t fighting for Saddam Hussein, who’s universally loathed in the country, but what they were fighting for is Iraqi nationalism.  So when Paul Bremer comes along and sets up the interim governing authority he said it’s the most representative body Iraq has ever had.  That’s not difficult.  Iraq has never had a representative body before.  But he claims this representative body is representative because it has 12 Shiites, five Sunnis, five Kurds and he’s thrown in a Turkoman and an Assyrian Christian for good measure as well.

But what Iraqis are appalled about is "this isn’t our country, these people shouldn’t have been appointed on the basis of their religion, where they go to worship.  They should have been appointed on their technocratic excellence."  And this, I think, is a great minefield.  In misunderstanding the nature of Iraqi society the danger is that the coalition provisional authority is creating problems itself.  It’s fracturing Iraq and creating dangers that will come to haunt it.

To conclude, to sum up and to bring back the things of the first half of my talk.  What does it mean to build a state, and more important for us today, what does it mean to build a state in Iraq?  Prime Minister Blair and President Bush promised the Iraqis in the run up to the war the stability, prosperity and democracy and that’s going to take up to a generation, that’s going to take from us the British and you the Americans, a massive commitment, a commitment to Iraq of money, expertise and soldiers. It’s going to be very difficult but I think we have to deliver on those promises.  Now, the British in 1920 failed to deliver because they misunderstood the society.  They tried to run money information and state institutions through these tribal sheiks, these tribal sheiks who represented no one but themselves, and when that failed, when the Iraqi population continually started uprising they resorted to something else.  Again, another little known fact "shock and awe," the use of airpower, was invented by Winston Churchill in Iraq in 1920.  They created these new technology airplanes and when a section of the Iraqi population revolted they bombed them into belligerent passivity.  They would drop leaflets: "If you don’t pay your taxes, if you don’t abide by government laws, we’re going to bomb you" and when they didn’t they bombed them.  So what you had was a population that was misunderstood and a population that was angry at the state that the British created.  The state institutions didn’t get into society, they stopped at these figures of influence that didn’t have any influence, and eventually because they didn’t have any influence these institutions weren’t seen as legitimate.  Now, the ramification of this was that when Iraq received its independence in 1932, each successive government had to use more and more violence to stay in control of society.  So Saddam Hussein in this light can be seen not as the evil genius who’s meant to be responsible for all Iraq’s problems but a culmination of historical trends that were with Iraq from 1920, albeit vicious and nasty ones. 

Now again, let’s come to 2003.  We have a big problem.  I would argue that because of electoral politics in Washington, Paul Bremer is trying to cut corners.  He’s trying to find figures of social influence again to run state [institutions], to get influence from Iraqi society and he comes up with another legacy of Saddam Hussein.  Saddam Hussein with increasing violence and money set out and broke any collective organization within Iraqi society.  It is impossible to talk of civil society in Iraq because Saddam Hussein virtually buried it or sent it into exile.  So there are very few figures of social influence at the moment.  It’s going to take a lot of time for those to grow up.  Now, in their place we have a roaring phenomena -- militias.  Iraq is a highly armed society and vicious people have set up militias trying to guarantee order for themselves in return for political patronage.  "I’ll guarantee you order if you support me and if you don’t I’ll shoot you," and what’s most worrying is that the governing council is calling for the institution of those militias as a new Iraqi army.  If that happens that’s sowing seeds for instability.

So, what has to happen now is for those building the state to get down into Iraqi society, to build a state that has meaning and legitimacy for ordinary Iraqis.  The only way, sadly, that that can be done is from the grassroots upwards.  You have to start from the beginning with local government -- where Iraqis can say, "Hey, I know that guy.  He’s responsible for my schools, my police force, and my electricity.  I know that guy because he lives in my town and I have elected him."  Once that has been built up then you roll that back to Baghdad.  What’s being done now is the setting up of a government in Baghdad that has no influence elsewhere in Iraq and is a potent symbol of resentment. 

Now this is a very difficult and time-consuming task, but it has to be done because if we repeat the mistakes of the British, Iraq will become a font of regional instability that will haunt us as Britons or you as Americans but also the whole world, and I think it was unfair to ask any one country to shoulder the burden of this generational project.  Even America doesn’t have the money, the expertise, or, as we found out, the soldiers to do this.  I think the only way this can be done is by an effort from the international community and the only way that can be successfully guaranteed is by going back to the United Nations.  The United Nations needs to be brought in, our friends in Paris and Berlin need to be convinced that if Iraq does fail, if the lawlessness continues to spread, then we’re all in for trouble.  This needs to be a united international effort to avoid the mistakes of the British in the1920s and ’30s and deliver on President Bush and Prime Minister Blair’s promises and give the Iraqis the democracy, the stability and the prosperity they so deserve.

Thank you very much.