Masters of War

Masters of War

        The “sick man of Europe” had been harried by Western powers well before the initiation of World War I, but the funeral invitations were stamped and sealed with the ratification of the Treaty of Sevres in August of 1920. The dead man’s estate was handled by the “Tripartite Agreement” of which Italy, Great Britain, and France were signatories.
      According to R.U.P.E.’s Behind the Invasion of Iraq, Britain and France had already divvyed up the spoils of the Ottoman Empire by allotting Iraq’s three vilayets between themselves with the secretive Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, in which The Kurdish Mosul vilayet was allotted to France, while the Sunni Baghdad vilayet and Shiite Basra vilayet were given to the British dominion. The looting was legitimized by the League of Nations, who delicately termed the new additions to the old-school imperial powers “mandate territories”.
Immediately following the announcement of the League of Nation’s mandate, Britain’s territories in the Middle East revolted but were quelled by a ruthless British campaign of air bombing. The British then installed as a sham government Emir Faisal I, who willingly ceeded to every British whim, granting ludicrously damning contracts in which the country would be compensated for less than a pittance while its vast oil reserves were exploited. Meanwhile, the anti-imperialist movement in the British “mandate territories” grew considerably until Britain conceded Iraqi independence – to a point. In 1932 Britain retreated, yet maintained military bases as well as their handpicked Emir. Iraq was to remain in lockstep with British foreign policy decisions, however in later years nationalist agitation was able to secure a nationalization of Iraq’s oil industry which had formerly been a 20th century version of the East India Company as far as Britain was concerned.
        Backlash against imperialist policies was steadily gaining force in the wider Arab world and needed to be...