WW II Guidebook to Iraq Contains Lessons That Are Relevant Today

Rick Hampson, in USA Today (July 16, 2004):

...Since invading Iraq, Americans have discovered that the country is a military, political and cultural minefield. But it's a lesson they could have learned from a pocket-sized booklet published six decades ago by the U.S. government.

A Short Guide to Iraq was written to educate World War II servicemen about a place most of them had never heard of. It describes an Iraq familiar to soldiers there today: the heat, the oil, the religious and political factions, the talent for guerrilla war, the taboos against everything from making a pass at a woman to eating with your left hand.

The guide anticipates virtually every problem encountered by U.S. forces in the past 15 months, from the Abu Ghraib prison scandal to the increase in casualties since the fall of Baghdad.

In 1942, Hitler, not Osama bin Laden, was America's No. 1 enemy. The Nazis were driving south through the Caucasus Mountains, desperate for oil; if they reached Iraq, they'd have all they needed. The booklet says that to foil the Germans (who had sympathizers in Iraq), Americans must win over the Iraqi people:

"American success or failure in Iraq may well depend on whether the Iraqis . . . like American soldiers or not. . . . One of your jobs is to prevent Hitler's agents from getting in their dirty work. The best way you can do this is by getting along with the Iraqis and making them your friends. . . . Every American soldier is an . . . ambassador of good will."

Two things about the guide strike the contemporary reader: How naive Americans were at the time about the power of goodwill to influence foreign affairs, and how much Americans knew even then about the pitfalls of operating in Iraq. The topics include:

Taboos: "Moslems do not let other people see them naked. . . . Dogs are unclean to Moslems. . . . (Except to shake hands) do not touch or handle an Iraqi. Do not wrestle with him in fun, and don't slap him on the back. . . . Above all, never strike an Iraqi."

At Abu Ghraib, these cultural rules were deliberately broken by U.S. jailers determined to extract information from Iraqi prisoners by stripping them, threatening them with guard dogs and beating them. Images of that abuse have spread across the Middle East in the past 2 1/2 months, with disastrous results for U.S. prestige.

"Americans look as if they're violating all the major cultural taboos," says Juan Cole, professor of modern Middle Eastern history at the University of Michigan. "We've squandered the goodwill we enjoyed at first. Hundreds of small, positive interactions with Iraqis have been overshadowed by things like Abu Ghraib."

Ironically, U.S. troops in Iraq today are probably the most informed ever about a local culture. They're issued a 300-page Transitional Handbook that dwarfs the 44-page Short Guide, and some soldiers participate in role-playing exercises at U.S. military bases to familiarize them with Iraq's people before they go overseas.

American officials repeatedly have said the vast majority of U.S. troops treat Iraqis with sensitivity and restraint. But the burden of occupying and policing an unsettled foreign nation keeps producing cultural clashes, Cole says.

Women: "Moslem women do not mingle freely with men. . . . Any advance on your part will mean trouble and plenty of it. Even when speaking to Iraqi men, no mention should be made of their female relatives."

In October, there were protest demonstrations in Baghdad after soldiers detained a female Oil Ministry employee who refused to allow her handbag, which contained a copy of the Koran, to be searched by a bomb-sniffing dog....