Blessed are those Egyptians who agree with us.” Napoleon went on to set up an “administrative council” in Egypt, very like the one which the Bush Administration says it intends to operate under US occupation. And in due course the “shayks” and “qadis” and imams rose up against French occupation in Cairo in 1798.If Napoleon entered upon his rule in Egypt as a French revolutionary, General Allenby, when he entered Jerusalem in December, 1917, had provided David Lloyd George with the city he wanted as a Christmas present. Its liberation, the British Prime Minister later noted with almost Crusader zeal, meant that Christendom had been able “to regain possession of its sacred shrines”. He talked about “the calling of the Turkish bluff” as “the beginning of the crack-up of that military impostorship which the incompetence of our war direction had permitted to intimidate us for years”, shades, here, of the American regret that it never took the 1991 Gulf War to Baghdad; Lloyd George was “finishing the job” of overcoming Ottoman power just as George Bush Junior now intends to “finish the job” started by his father in 1991.And always, without exception, there were those tyrants and dictators to overthrow in the Middle East. In the Second World War, we “liberated” Iraq a second time from its pro-Nazi administration.

The British “liberated” Lebanon from Vichy rule with a promise of independence from France, a promise which Charles de Gaulle tried to renege on until the British almost went to war with the Free French in Syria.Lebanon has suffered an awful lot of “liberations”. The Israelis – for Arabs, an American, “Western” implantation in the Middle East – claimed twice to be anxious to “liberate” Lebanon from PLO “terrorism” by invading in 1978 and 1982, and leaving in humiliation only two years ago. America’s own military intervention in Beirut in 1982 was blown apart by a truck-bomb at the US Marine headquarters the following year. And what did President Ronald Reagan tell the world? “Lebanon is central to our credibility on a global scale We cannot pick and choose where we will support freedom… If Lebanon ends up under the tyranny of forces hostile to the West, not only will our strategic position in the eastern Mediterranean be threatened, but also the stability of the entire Middle East, including the vast resources of the Arabian peninsula.”Once more, we, the West, were going to protect the Middle East from tyranny. Anthony Eden took the same view of Egypt, anxious to topple the “dictator” Gamal Abdul Nasser, just as Napoleon had been desperate to rescue the Egyptians from the tyranny of the Beys, just as General Maude wanted to rescue Iraq from the tyranny of the Turks, just as George Bush Junior now wants to rescue the Iraqis from the tyranny of President Saddam.And always, these Western invasions were accompanied by declarations that the Americans or the French or just the West in general had nothing against the Arabs, only against the beast-figure who was chosen as the target of our military action. “Our quarrel is not with Egypt, still less with the Arab world,” Anthony Eden announced in August of 1956.

“It is with Colonel Nasser.”So what happened to all these fine words? The Crusades were a catastrophe in the history of Christian-Muslim relations Napoleon left Egypt in humiliation. Britain dropped gas on the recalcitrant Kurds of Iraq before discovering that Iraq was ungovernable. Arabs, then Jews drove the British army from Palestine and Lloyd George’s beloved Jerusalem The French fought years of insurrection in Syria. In Lebanon, the Americans scuttled away in humiliation in 1984, along with the French.And in Iraq in the coming months? What will be the price of our folly this time, of our failure to learn the lessons of history? Only after the United States has completed its occupation we shall find out. It is when the Iraqis demand an end to that occupation, when popular resistance to the American presence by the Shias and the Kurds and even the Sunnis begins to destroy the military “success” which President Bush will no doubt proclaim when the first US troops enter Baghdad.

It is then our real “story” as journalists will begin.It is then that all the empty words of colonial history, the need to topple tyrants and dictators, to assuage the suffering of the people of the Middle East, to claim that we and we only are the best friends of the Arabs, that we and we only must help them, will unravel.Here I will make a guess: that in the months and years that follow America’s invasion of Iraq, the United States, in its arrogant assumption that it can create “democracy” in the ashes of a Middle East dictatorship as well as take its oil, will suffer the same as the British in Palestine. Of this tragedy, Winston Churchill wrote, and his words are likely to apply to the US in Iraq: “At first, the steps were wide and shallow, covered with a carpet, but in the end the very stones crumbled under their feet.”. Assessing the cost of any war involves huge uncertainties because the normal rules of economics do not apply. The greatest uncertainties are the length of the military action and the scale, pace and nature of post-war reconstruction. In the case of another Middle East war, its impact on the oil market would be a further complication. What can be said is where the costs might come, where we can be reasonably sure of the effects and where we are flying blind.