SUSAN PEDERSEN
O N O CTOBER 3, 1932, THE thirteenth annual assembly of the League of Nations voted unanimously to admit the Kingdom of Iraq to membership. Part of the Ottoman territory occupied by the Allied powers during the First World War and then turned over to British administration under League of Nations oversight, Iraq was the first—and would, in fact, remain the only—mandated territory to shed its tutelary status and be granted independence through collective agreement. The significance of the moment was not lost on the assembled delegates, and British foreign secretary Sir John Simon, speaking “as representative of the country whose privilege it had been to guide the State of Iraq through the period of adolescence to the full status of manhood,” insisted that it vindicated the mandates system itself. “When that re-gime was instituted there were not wanting critics and cynics who hinted that the whole Mandatory system had been devised merely as a cloak for colonization and annexation . . . The admission of Iraq to the League was a sufficiently emphatic answer.[1]
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