This article was originally published in the Arab American News, July 24-30, 2004, as "Reliving History in the Middle East"

LESSONS FROM HISTORY

It has been said that those who do not study history are condemned to relive it; in other words, if you don’t profit from the mistakes of those who went before you, you are doomed to make the same mistakes. No where could this be more clearly illustrated than in the on-going U.S. involvement in the Middle East. The first comparison to the present situation in Iraq that comes to mind is suggested by the history of the French invasion of Egypt in 1798. Napoleon Bonaparte, at the command of 45, 000, sailed from France to “free the Egyptians from their Mamluk oppressors”. The official proclamations stressed that the French came as friends of Islam, only interested in altruistic motives. In fact, the assimilation of Egypt as a colony of France had been in the minds of French diplomats and officials for decades. The benefits of occupying the country were great and it was hoped that the British would also be thwarted in the eastern Mediterranean. This was not a plan hatched by Bonaparte. If he is to be given credit for any originality, it was in the inclusion of a body of scholars, engineers and artists with the invasion force. This resulted in the first full-fledged study of the country by a European power and what has been termed the beginnings of scholarly Egyptology. The Napoleonic campaign in Egypt was not one of the high points of Bonaparte’s career. The invasion force was assembled under great secrecy and the troops had no idea of their destination. They were ill prepared to confront the cultural and religious customs of what was considered by every eighteenth century Frenchman a virtually unknown and at best an exotic destination. The soldiers were also ill prepared for desert warfare and they were not provided with the most basic equipment including practical boots for the sands of Egypt or canteens for the water necessary in the heat of the desert. The French artillery had to improvise ways to transport cannon over the sands. They were not fighting the kind of battles European warfare had prepared them for and they were constantly challenged by the conditions of the county and the customs of the people. After Bonaparte lost his fleet and his life line to France to the British under Admiral Nelson at the disastrous battle of Aboukir Bay the situation was even more dire, but that is not the main lesson to learn about warfare in the Middle East from Bonaparte’s mistakes.

Cairo was taken with little resistance after the so-called battle of the Pyramids (which actually took place at Embaba, a considerable distance from them but the name was too dramatic to resist). The occupation dug in at the capital and a force was deployed to pursue the Mamluks south up the Nile. The end result was that the French army under general Desaix was strung out for hundreds of miles from their headquarters in Cairo, attempting to defeat an enemy that disappeared into the desert only to return to snipe and harass the overtaxed Europeans. Although the French army fought their way as far south as Aswan (and left an inscription on the walls of Philae Temple to testify to it) they never secured the country in a tactical sense. First hand accounts speak about passing back and forth through the same area in Upper Egypt four and five times in pursuit of the allusive enemy who practiced a different kind of warfare that the French were accustomed to.

A revolt in Cairo against the occupation lasted for weeks had to be put down with considerable bloodshed on both sides. After this insurrection, Al-Jabarti (Abd al-Rahman, Al-Jabarti al-Misri) tells us at the French no longer felt safe in the city, moved into protected enclaves and carried weapons, whereas in the beginning of the occupation they had been much more confident in their personal safety and reliant on the friendship of the people they had come to “liberate”.. Al-Jabarti is the best contemporary source on the French campaign as seen from the Egyptian side. His comments on what he considered the uncouth manners of the French make amusing reading and his description of the French campaign is in vivid contrast to similar accounts from the European side.

The invasion of Palestine by Bonaparte, an even more disastrous move for the French, resulted in a significant defeat that Bonaparte simply seems to have shrugged off. When the opportunity presented itself he secretly left Egypt with a small group of close associates to return to France where his political opportunities were beginning to materialize. The results of his abandoning his army were mixed. He went on to become First Consul and later Emperor of France. General Kléber, his appointed successor as commander of the army in Egypt, was assassinated by a young man named Soliman who would doubtlessly be termed and “insurgent” in today’s idiom. Of the 45,000 Bonaparte took to Egypt less than half survived to return to France. The French army was forced to capitulate to the English in order to make even this possible. One of the by-products of the capitulation was the surrender of the inscription called the Rosetta Stone, ultimately the key to the decipherment of ancient Egyptian language, to the British which is why it rests in the British Museum today. Another by product that had much greater material consequence was the rise to power of Mohammad Ali, who went to Egypt as a commander of a contingent in the Turkish army and stayed to become the self made ruler of the country and the founder of a dynasty.

History has other lessons for any western country contemplating a campaign in the Middle East. World War One is best known through the accounts of interminable trench warfare in Europe. Even the real or romanticized exploits of T. E. Lawrence with Arab forces in the Middle East have become the subjects of countless books and films. But there is one campaign of the “Great War” that is little remembered. In 1915 a combined British-Indian force invaded Iraq and managed to fight it way almost to the outskirts of Baghdad. When they were repulsed and forced to retreat back down the Tigris-Euphrates Valley they took a stand at the city of Kut-al Amrah. The foreign invaders were surrounded and besieged for 147 days and eventually forced to an ignominious surrender of thirteen thousand men. What was left of the army was marched off into captivity where more than half of them died as prisoners of war. Since it was one of the most humiliating defeats suffered by the British it is usually only mentioned in passing in their histories of the Great War with their usual emphasis on the Western Front. Certainly the American invaders of Iraq had never heard of Kut until they passed it in haste on their way to Baghdad. One last example from history has, perhaps, even more relevance to the recent “handover” of sovereignty in Iraq. The British invaded Egypt in the 1880s, for reasons that can be best described as imperialist inspired. They resolved to put down the popular revolution led by the military officer Ahmad Arabi for reasons that were described as restoring order but the real aim was to protect the British financial interests in the Suez Canal and put the bankrupt country on a sound administrative basis so that it could pay its massive debts. The aftermath of this invasion has come to be known in history as the “Veiled Protectorate”, a puppet government in Egypt that was in fact ruled by British overseers and “advisors”. Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, was at the head of an administration that controlled virtually every aspect of Egyptian life. The foreign influence was so pervasive that it was not shaken off until well after Egypt was declared an independent country in 1922.

Surely there are lessons to be learned from these historic examples of badly planned aggression on the part of European powers and the self-serving explanations and justifications that have been used to explain them. One has the impression that a knowledge of history is no longer considered an important asset to modern military and political planning. The race to capture Baghdad, Sadam Hussein and the nonexistent Weapons of Mass Destruction is reminiscent of Bonaparte’s rapid taking of Cairo, equally ill prepared and not thought out as to the consequences. If that were not enough to caution the invasion of a Middle Eastern country, the British disaster at Kut should have sounded a few warning bells. One can only hope that the “hand over” to a sovereign government is not the beginning of another “veiled protectorate”.