War Post

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."

   

    The current New Yorker features a cover of entrenched soldiers, one reading by flashlight, and inside 12 pages of soldiers’ letters anchor their "Life During Wartime" issue. A selection from "Dispatches from Iraq: Soldiers’ Stories" can be heard on The New Yorker’s website; if audio tracks of war letters are of interest, more can be heard at the Gilder Lehrman Institute—letters from the American Revolution to the current war.

   From this New Yorker: in 2003, Captain Donna Kahout wrote to members of her Colorado church about fighting on religious land:

   One clear day, I looked down at the rich greens of the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates and pondered over the fact that these were the Tigris and Euphrates that I’d learned about in chruch and school my whole life. Genesis describes the Garden of Eden standing at the headwater of four rivers, two of which are the Tigris and Euphrates. That places the Garden just north of Basa, within sight of where I flew almost daily.

   Abraham, Daniel, Ezra, Nehemiah, the whole displaced Israelite nation, and perhaps even Adam and Eve all trod the ground I was looking down on daily. And I was living in the same desert where the Israelities wandered. We complain about being there for three months—it’s so barren, flat, windy, hot, sandy, and dry—it’s no wonder the Israelites complained during the forty years that they followed God around the Sinai Peninsula between their exodus from Egypt and their entrance into the Promised Land, near Jerusalem.

Indian medical orderlies attending to wounded soldiers on stretchers outside a dressing station, Mesopotamia, 1914-1918.

    While current soldiers remark at a combat zone with Biblical connection, some of the Indian soldiers in Iraq in the 1910s, trodding the same ground, refused to fight against the local population for their own religious reasons. A 1916 letter from a Punjabi Muslim named Fateh Ullah to his friend, Fateh Ahmed, who was stationed in France, relates a friend’s refusal to fight in Mesopotamia:

    We have learnt from Nasir Khan’s letter that his brother Raja Khan has been sentenced by court martial to fourteen years’ imprisonment. This has caused us much grief. The details which he gives are that when the 15th Lancers reach Basra they were ordered to fight against the Turks. They, however, declined to take up arms against their brother Muslims and asked to be sent to some other theatre of war. A court martial was convened and 400 men were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.

- David Omissi, Indian Voices of the Great War (London, 1999), p. 199.