CLEMENT ATTLEE’S question to Lieutenant-General Savory was succinct. “Was it too quick?” Both men knew the answer. Already, hundreds of thousands had been murdered; the spasm of violence which had engulfed the Indian subcontinent would reverberate down the centuries; the bitterness of partition was entrenched. Indian independence had been granted without proper preparation.

Paul Bremer (for “United States Special Envoy” read “Viceroy” to Iraq) should know the story. In our rush to quit, Savory wrote, we British “tried to make it appear to the Indians, the world and to ourselves that (we) were committing a Noble Deed”. The Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, had “forced the pace too much”.

That was obvious even at the time, but it suited the occupying power to effect a swift exit, and a date was plucked from the air. At a press conference on June 3, 1947, a journalist asked the Viceroy how long His Excellency would remain “His Excellency”? “That is a most embarrassing question,” said Mountbatten. “I think the transfer could be about the 15th of August.” And so it was.

The sheer logistical madness of this 72-day handover was hard to overstate. “What are we doing?” Mountbatten told Pandit Nehru, the incoming Indian Prime Minister: “Administratively it is the difference between putting up a permanent building, a Nissen hut or a tent. As far as Pakistan is concerned, we are putting up a tent.”

From that 50-year-old folly, let us turn to the folly almost six months ahead. For the “independence” of Iraq, Washington has plucked a different date from the air: June 30, 2004. The timing has nothing to do with any sane estimate of the time Iraq needs to prepare. It is dictated by George W. Bush’s re-election campaign. Nobody denies this. It is criminal.

And I offer the Indian precedent for the Iraqi handover not because there are likely to be close parallels. I cite it as an example of the folly, when nation-building, of announcing arbitrary dates set according to pressures at home.

Dates have a terrible potency. When politicians as formidable as this US President announce timetables as clear as that now decided upon, and do so with an absolute confidence which will not be thwarted, the thing takes on a sort of mad finality. We scratch our heads. Perhaps they know something we do not? Nike and the Neocons agree: “Just do it.” That by June 30 Iraq will be a self-governing nation acquires the sort of incontrovertibility that was claimed for the magnificence of the emperor’s new clothes. The gaping crowd assents.

To what purpose, then, the whisper “but”? Even the boldest are confined to murmuring that it really does seem hard to envisage what sort of an “independent” Iraq the Americans have in mind.

What they undoubtedly do not have in mind is either of the precedents I offer, the second of which is the former Belgian Congo. As it happens, June 30, 2004, will be the 44th anniversary of the Belgian handover. A year earlier, in 1959, had come the announcement that Belgium was to withdraw from the colony “without delay but without considerable haste”. Belgium then withdrew with considerable haste. All hell was let loose.

The occupying power’s rhetoric was joyous. There was no question, said King Baudouin, of imposing a solution on the Congo — “there will be adjustments conforming to its own character and traditions (which) will allow the expansion of the various regions to go ahead according to their geographical situation, their culture and their racial and economic development”.

Whereupon the Congo was plunged into half a century of civil war, secession and slaughter. The chaos shows no sign of abating. It is desperately important to remember the misplaced hopes that preceded it and remind ourselves that when politicians talk about nation-building they always sound optimistic, always sound sure, always sound in control, and almost never are.

The brazen fanfare drowns out doubt, but The Times’s correspondent expressed it in Central Africa. If, he commented, the Belgians “felt anxiety over the immaturity of the African politicians into whose hands they were giving the Congo, they did not show it”. He gave warning of the “lamentable” situation in the Civil Service: there were “simply not enough well-trained indigenous civil servants to be able to keep things afloat ”, he wrote. None of this tempered official confidence. “No decision affecting the future will be taken without preliminary consultation with existing political organs,” said a Belgian spokesman. “Belgium wishes the independence and the institutions of the Congo to correspond to the aspirations of the immense majority of inhabitants.”

COMPARE THIS with Colin Powell, reported in the Washington Post this week: “We’re open to refinement, and we’re waiting to hear what people have suggested or will suggest. What Ambassador Bremer and all of us have been doing in our conversations is listening and hearing and (saying): ‘Are there better ideas that would make the plan more refined, better and more acceptable to a broader group of individuals and leaders within Iraq?’ ”

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