The general had reached Kut, only about 100 miles from Baghdad on the Tigris River. Marching his army from Kuwait, with an easy command of the skies and the latest technology at his disposal, the general had found his advance into Iraq to be far quicker and less costly than many skeptics back at home had predicted. Enemy units, poorly equipped and led, seem to melt away when confronted. Surely this successful invasion shouldn’t stop at a remote mud heap like Kut. Surely Baghdad would be his for the taking, thought the general.
And so, with a half-hearted request for reinforcements denied by the theater commander, the general moved his army towards Baghdad. Some days later, he retreated his now-battered army – 40 percent smaller, subtracting those killed or wounded on the outskirts of Baghdad – back to Kut. After five more months, a pale remnant of the army would surrender at Kut, to their besiegers and to the desert that had defeated them.
The year was 1916. The general was Charles Townshend, an Englishman. His army was a combined force of British and Indian troops. Only 10,000 surrendered to the besieging Ottoman Turks at Kut, with another 30,000 men having been killed or wounded in Townshend’s 1915-16 Baghdad campaign. A year later, another British force would finally capture Baghdad and all of Mesopotamia, but at a cost of nearly 100,000 dead (including Townshend’s losses).
The military history of the territory we now call Iraq, and will soon call the second battlefield of the Sept. 11 War, is a long and storied one. The Sumerians who created the world’s first great civilization in southeastern Iraq were a warrior people. Their city-states contended with bronze weapons, with crude, onager-driven chariots, and with rudimentary siege engines. Later, Semitic peoples – including the Akkadians and Babylonians – invaded and conquered the region, followed by the efficient war machine of the Assyrians, who mastered the military technologies the ancient world. Their combined-arms approach and skill at road-building, engineering, and siegecraft were inherited by the Persians, whose empire stretched from the Mediterranean to India and the Central Asian steppe.
Alexander the Great fought famous battles in Iraq. So did the conquering Muslims of the 7th century and the Turks in the 10th and 11th centuries. In 1258, Baghdad was the site of another famous siege, as the Mongol hordes under Hulagu destroyed the walls of the city with catapulted palm trees and terrorized the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate. This last disaster destroyed not only Baghdad but much of Mesopotamia, which never really recovered its agricultural or cultural productivity. Hulagu put to death between 200,000 and 800,000 residents of the city (depending on whom you believe; Hulagu admitted to the lower number).
More recently, the southern port of Basra and its surrounding territory featured one of the largest land battles of the 20th century – between Iraq and Iran during their bloody and pointless war in the 1980s. And, of course, America has already invaded the country once with military forces commanded by a President Bush. This time, it looks like we will be going all the way to Baghdad, finally to finish the job started more than a decade ago.
I have no doubt that the George W. Bush administration knows its history. They know that Iraq has seen much war and death over the centuries. And, at least since the Mongol conquest, Iraq has also seen barbarity and tyranny and stagnation. Now, America seems poised to carry war again to the land between the rivers – but this time, it’s a war that promises to bring not simply destruction and death but the possibility of freedom and rebirth to the cradle of human civilization.
Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation and publisher of Carolina Journal.