Politics

The Case to Stay in Iraq – From India’s Partition

By Dweep Chanana ⋅ August 9, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print This Post ⋅ Post a comment

Sixty years after the British created India and Partition, the Irish and British are reflecting on what they left behind. No doubt, there is much self-congratulation amongst the English for a successful India – though their positive legacy is highly dubious. But The Independent (from Ireland) sees wider implications of the history that followed partition:

The documentation as it has come out, however, paints a rather less flattering view of the dissolution of Empire. True Britain did give it up voluntarily, but in India at least the sordid truth is Britain — and in particular Lord Mountbatten — cut and ran… 

And there were, and are, lessons, not least for Iraq. If the Americans and British had read the history of partition, they would never have disbanded the Iraqi police nor the army in the way they did, nor would they have attempted to impose a skewed democracy based on sectarian division. And as Britain now faces the prospect of disengagement, the questions haunting 1947 re-occur.

Maybe sectarian violence and partition of Iraq are inevitable, as they seemed to the British in India. The eruption of sectarian killing back then has never been properly explained, nor are the children of that time in India, Pakistan and Bangladesh are interested in trawling over the events.

In retrospect, Britain should have set a reasonable deadline for British withdrawal and then worked out an agreed plan for security and civil authority to take us to it. Britain cut and ran 60 years ago. It would be a terrible indictment to do so again.