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Churchill also confounded by Middle East

Norman A. Lockman
Wilmington News Journal
January 9, 2004

It is intriguing that President Bush is an admirer of Winston Churchill. He keeps a bust of the great man in the Oval Office.

‘‘Churchill is best known for his steadfast leadership during the darkest days of World War II. When Britain was standing alone against Adolf Hitler, his oratory and actions inspired Britons to withstand the worst the Third Reich could deliver.

Churchill's ‘‘blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech, delivered in the House of Commons on May 13, 1940, when he took over as prime minister, is the best known piece of political oratory in modern times. President Bush is enamored of Churchill's willingness to go it alone in the face of overwhelming opposition before the war and overwhelmingly bad odds once it began.

In the Middle East, though, Churchill was an imperialist whose good intentions got the British Empire and himself into considerable hot water.

To begin to get a handle on what the current trouble in Iraq is all about, aside from Saddam Hussein and his elusive weapons of mass destruction, it helps to look further back than the two Bush presidencies. Since Iraq was created by the British after World War I, Iraq has been a fountain for Arab nationalist distaste for the creation of a Jewish homeland.

When Churchill was secretary for the British colonies in 1921, he helped create Iraq, Jordan and

Palestine, which was intended to be a homeland for Jewish people under British mandate. Iraq and Jordan were handed over to handpicked kings, Abdullah and Faisal, the sons of the sharif of Mecca. They were not much welcomed.

Hard to get out

The idea, as Churchill put it in a speech before the House of Commons on June 14, 1921, was ‘‘to set up an Arab government, and to make it take the responsibility, with our aid and our guidance and with an effective measure of our support, until they are strong enough to stand alone ... (and) to reduce our commitments and to extricate ourselves from our burdens while at the same time honorably discharging our obligations and building up strong and effective Arab government which will always be the friend of Britain.”

In 2004, Bush's concept of what is needed to reshape and stabilize the Middle East, particularly as it pertains to Iraq, is essentially the same as Churchill's. Palestine, now partitioned into Israel and the West Bank, is still the flash point.

The problem, then as now, is that Arab nationalism constantly threatens to overtake the dream of a stable, cooperative Middle East tuned to Western sensibilities and willing to live peacefully with a Jewish state in its midst. In Churchill's time, radical Islamic Wahhabi tribes ruled by a desert sheik named Ibn Saud caused trouble. After incessant warfare with his rivals, Saud prevailed and Saudi Arabia was born. That country continues to this day to be the most determined promoter of an extreme

form of Islam that is virulently antiSemitic.

Wahhabism, then and now, is at the heart of the Arab nationalist resistance to foreign influence. It brings grief to those who try to Westernize the Middle East, whether to bolster the empire as was Churchill's goal, or to protect Western interests as is Bush's. It is at the heart of Osama bin Laden's crusade to get rid of the Sauds, who he believes have sold out to the Americans just as the sherif and his sons sold out to the British.

Churchill was an admitted imperialist. Bush says he is not. Therefore, when it comes to shaping Middle East policy, Churchill may turn out to be the wrong mentor.

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