Britain invaded Iraq with Indian troops in WWI before the U.S. did.

Evidence

In an ironic twist of imperial substitution in the early twentieth century, the British preceded the U.S. in invading Iraq. During the First World War, the British sent Indian troops on a military campaign in what was then called Mesopotamia (largely modern-day Iraq) and attempted to oust its Turkish rulers. The goal was to maintain Indian trade routes and secure important oilfields and a pipeline that had been established in Persia (contemporary Iran), and, subsequently, to establish another colony for the empire. Even as Indian troops secured the British Empire’s military aims, the harsh conditions drove some deserters to join the Ghadar Party in San Francisco, a revolutionary diasporic group that sought independence for India. At first, Indian laborers were unwilling to honor work contracts because they feared the violence in Iraq, but they were ultimately delivered via a system of confinement in military-camp depots on their way to labor sites. — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 69

Categorization

• XREF: Resonates with the Iraq War parallels drawn in H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy’s post-9/11 America and the general theme of imperial substitution.
• SEED: An essay angle: the Ghadar Party deserters from a British war in Iraq as a forgotten precedent tying diaspora radicalism to anti-colonial resistance — a bridge from 1917 Mesopotamia to 2003.
• CANDY: The irony that Britain preceded America in invading Iraq — a compact conversational jab with real historical weight.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 69