A Middle East “Might Have Been”

History is an argument without end.

--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

HDS Greenway has a Boston Globe column offering an historical analogy for Iraq that may say more than Greenway meant to say. Greenway writes, “As Washington struggles with what to do with a lost war, consider the British experience in Palestine and their 30-year mandate after World War I.” Greenway perceptively adds:

 Britain, "with its technological and military superiority . . . its entrepreneurial and missionary zeal, its largely democratic institutions, was to take the once-great peoples of the East into tutelage and direct their slow but sure progress under stable and just government," A.J. Sherman recalls in his book, "Mandate Days." "This clashed almost immediately with the reality of Palestine."

 the British genuinely hoped for national reconciliation and peace in Palestine between Jews and Arabs. But as Tom Segev writes in "One Palestine Complete," "the government expected the army to impose peace between the Jews and the Arabs, as a result of which it had to fight both of them."

 When Arabs and Jews weren't fighting each other they attacked the British, who were blown up in terrorist attacks, their soldiers kidnapped and killed. When they weren't surging, they holed up in Green Zone-like enclaves called "Bevingads," after Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin. "Security continued to erode despite the presence of over 100,000 troops," Sherman writes. "The sense of constant menace (was) heightened by the ubiquitous roadside mines, against which no British vehicle could be adequately armored."

 Britain feared the chaos that would follow a retreat. But after 30 years of trying to engineer compromise, the British left with their tails between their legs when support on the home front collapsed. Once they were gone, the feared upsurge of bloodshed between Arabs and Jews was realized, and the nightmare of outside intervention from neighboring states came to pass.

Comment: To Greenway, the British were fools to get between two sides that valued victory above peace. Greenway is saying the U.S. in Iraq is similarly stupid to “force compromise on combatants who have no interest in compromise.”

I buy Greenway’s analogy but take exception to his conclusion. The Arab-Israeli conflict has been a disaster for world peace over the 59 years since Britain “bugged out.” The conflict bedevils the world today, and arguably mothered the Islamic extremism that currently darkens civilization’s otherwise-bright future. Had Britain not crumbled in the face of homefront impatience with its Palestine peacekeeping, and had it instead presided over a partition acceptable to both sides (yielding a smaller Israel), the oil-rich Middle East might have become peaceful and prosperous.

History’s argument goes on.