The British in Mesopotamia
This is a bit of a scoop for Savage Minds. A student of a friend (who have not asked to be named here) doing archival work recently came across an extremely rare memoir by General Aylmer Haldane of his time as commander-in-chief of British forces in Iraq responsible for putting down the Iraqi insurrection against the British in 1920. He’s made “the entire book available”:http://www.dean.usma.edu/departments/history/web03/resources/resource%20pages/Mesopotamia/insurrection_mesopotamia.html in a series of public-domain PDFs. It is quite detailed ethnographically, and includes appendices with information on troop strengths, casualty figures, and so forth. This is not my area of specialty but I’m told is of genuine and important documentary value, and of course it’s relevant to our own situation today.
It should be noted that several of the chapters are grouped together in single PDF files, so you don’t want to be clicking on every link on the page when downloading the book.
This is an excellent resource. Thanks.
The military has several sets of archives that have books such as this, with many in either HTML or PDF editions for download. As you can see, this is from the website of USMA (West Point)…
The Combined Arms Research Library is also an excellent resource:
http://www-cgsc.army.mil/CARL/
This is a very old post and I am not sure if anyone is still interested, but I suggest reading A. Vinogradov ‘The 1920 Revolt in Iraq Reconsidered: the role of tribes in national politics’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, 3 (1972) pp.123-139. For a compelling critical account of the British Mandate in Iraq and how cultural essentialism can lead to disasters, see T. Dodge ‘Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation-building and a History Denied’. I seriously doubt that Americans today have a better idea about that country than the British had back then.