Runaway Raft on the Tigris (via Harper’s).

I’ve been going through Andrew Carroll’s two anthologies of war letters recently, trying to decide which letters to except and add to the archive here. Having just read Ken Silverstein’s feature in the newest Harper’s on the rise of Shi’a Iraqi death squads, this letter stood out. A Marine writes to his priest back home a month after Shock and Awe:

Father Bob,

With religious banners flying, truckload after truckload of cheering Iraqis pass our position. After decades of religious oppression, the Shi’a muslims are now free to worship as they wish. Old men have tears of joy and the younger generation try to thank us the best they can in their broken English. "Thank You America" and "Mr. Bush… good" are about all the Marines can understand, but the sight of the liberated people is an incredible gift to all of us on this most wonderful Easter.

Andrew Carroll, editor, Behind the Lines, (New York: 2006) p. 211.

Lieut. General Sir Stanley Maude issued a proclamation to the inhabitants of Baghdad on March 19, 1917, after the city finally fell to the British-Indian forces and just over a week after their ceremonial entrance into Baghdad (depicted in the photograph in the header).  The proclamation began:

Our military operations have as their object the defeat of the enemy, and the driving of him from these territories. In order to complete this task, I am charged with absolute and supreme control of all regions in which British troops operate; but our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators.
And included the following:

Many noble Arabs have perished in the cause of Arab freedom, at the hands of those alien rulers, the Turks, who oppressed them. It is the determination of the Government of Great Britain and the great Powers allied to Great Britain that these noble Arabs shall not have suffered in vain. It is the hope and desire of the British people and the nations in alliance with them that the Arab race may rise once more to greatness and renown among the peoples of the earth, and that it shall bind itself together to this end in unity and concord
Maude hoped for a smooth colonial administration embodying just enough of the ideals expressed in the proclamation to keep the native population calm. That did not happen. What resulted instead was a Shi’a-Sunni-united rebellion against the British in 1920, known widely as the Arab Revolt, though memorialized in Iraq as the Great Iraqi Revolution.

Imperial British proclamations in newly-captured Baghdad can’t be compared directly to a soldier writing to his priest in 2003, relaying the joy of people free to worship. Some of Paul Bremer’s speeches are the more obvious comparisons to Maude. But in their contrast, the 1917 proclamation and this letter together express to how far things fell in Iraq in the years following both "successful" invasions. That, and the limits of "liberators."