I thought about this expression when I read last week the excellent article by Major Joel Rayburn entitled, “The Last Exist from Iraq,” which appeared in the current issue of Foreign Affairs. In his article, Rayburn summarizes and describes the British occupation and withdrawal from Iraq in the first half of the twentieth century. At the end of Word War I, the United Kingdom formally took control of the new country, which has become Iraq, under a mandate from the League of Nations.

From its inception, the British occupation drew heavy criticism at home. A withdrawal campaign focusing on large British expenditures gained force year by year. In response to these criticisms, the United Kingdom began reducing its troop levels in Iraq. This in turn led to increasing violence within the country.

During that period, as now, the violence took two forms. First, Iraq’s hostile neighbors, including Syria, Jordan and Turkey, instigated violence within the country. Second, Puritan Islamists terrorized Shiites. The tribal warfare among Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds grew in intensity. Although the British government promised protection for Iraq’s minorities, it was unable to deliver. According to Major Rayburn, domestic public pressure in England led the British government “first to overstate its progress in Iraq and then to abandon the project too early—with disastrous consequences.” Once Britain withdrew its troops and the British mandate ended in 1932, the democratic Iraqi government which Britain hoped to establish, rapidly collapsed.

In the descent toward civil war, each of the ethnically diverse groups in Iraqi society tried to grab their share of power. At that time, the elite Sunnis who controlled the army seized control with the far weaker Shiites and Kurds having to give ground. In this respect, Saddam Hussein is the logical heir to the power seized by these Sunni military dictators.

In his conclusion, Major Rayburn mounts an effective argument that had Britain stayed longer, violence in Iraq could have been avoided. The Iraqi government would not have been taken over by military dictators and there would have been protection for Iraq’s minority communities. The lesson from this according to Rayburn is that “the United States can ill-afford to do the same.”

The argument is persuasive. However, a second expression began popping into my mind when I finished reading it. That is: “the only thing that history teaches us is that history teaches us nothing at all.”

I began thinking about whether conditions within Iraq are significantly different now than they were seventy or eighty years ago. Clearly, the Sunni military and Sunni elite in the society no longer have the upper hand. That has shifted to the Shiites who are dominant not only in population, but have developed increasingly effective military militias as well as seizing control of the Iraqi army. This not a comforting. Rule by the Shiites would be as disastrous for the other ethnic groups within the country as rule by the Sunnis was the last time around. We would be trading a military dictatorship for tyranny by Islamic fundamentalists. The United States cannot permit this to happen.

The harder question though is could Britain have succeeded it if it had stayed? Can the United States succeed this time around?

It all depends on how we define success. To be sure, leaving a weak government which will instantaneously collapse as a fig leaf for withdrawal is not success. It is failure. On the other hand, we could define success as leaving behind a truly democratic secular government in Iraq that resembles other democratic governments, in Turkey, for example. The difficulty is that the ethnic hatreds among Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds are so strong that may not be attainable.

A phony reconciliation among the three ethnic communities, again, is not a successful result. Instead, the United States must recognize the diversity and animosities that exist among the three. What we might be able to establish is a single country with a loose federation of the three communities. That will take a radical shift in U.S. thinking. It could however be a successful result. More important, it could truly be attainable. By redefining our objective, we can avoid the disaster which Britain suffered in the last century.