May 17 (Bloomberg) -- As revelations about the treatment of prisoners in Iraq fuel worldwide opposition to the U.S.-led occupation, authors and historians including Dilip Hiro and Niall Ferguson say President George W. Bush has failed to learn from the Arab nation's past.

The publication of pictures of naked detainees being abused and humiliated in Baghdad's Abu Ghraib prison ``marked the shedding of the last part of the fig leaf worn by President Bush to justify his invasion of Iraq,'' said Hiro, 64, the London- based author of 25 books, including five on the Middle East. Among them is ``Iraq: In the Eye of the Storm.''

Bush affirmed his support for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld last week as more photos were published showing abuse of Iraqi prisoners. ``You are doing a superb job,'' Bush told Rumsfeld at a news conference last Monday at the Pentagon. On Thursday, Rumsfeld made a surprise trip to Iraq to visit U.S. troops.

As gun battles raged in Fallujah, a majority Sunni Muslim city, and Najaf, a Shiite holy city, the military death toll has escalated. More than 145 coalition soldiers were killed in April, while 35 died in the first 12 days of May. Altogether, 882 allied personnel have been killed since the war began more than a year ago, according to coalition figures.

`Repeating History'

Ferguson, 40, a professor of history at New York University and author of the forthcoming book ``Colossus: The Price of American Empire,'' said the U.S. hasn't understood that it is an imperial power, inheriting a role once played by the British. In 1920, British forces quelled a similar revolt in Iraq -- and remained in the country for another 35 years.

``We have the spectacle of a great English-speaking power occupying Iraq and more or less repeating history, precisely because it neglected to pay attention to it before,'' said Ferguson, who is also a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution in Palo Alto, California. Ferguson, in his book ``The Pity of War'' argued that Britain's misreading of German intentions in 1914 escalated what could have been a local conflict into World War I.

Rumsfeld, 71, said he was surprised by the hostile reaction to U.S. troops a year after the toppling of Saddam Hussein's regime.

``I guess if you asked me a year ago, I would have expected the word `occupation' and the negative aspects of that would not have been assigned to us to the extent it has been,'' he said in an April 29 television interview with MSNBC.

`Faulty Analogy'

Daniel Pipes, who heads the Middle East Forum in Philadelphia, said he and others made a critical mistake in comparing the mission in Iraq with the U.S. occupation of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II. The U.S. presence in those cases helped put both Axis countries on the path to democracy and economic revival.

``It was a faulty analogy,'' said Pipes, 54, author of ``Militant Islam Reaches America.'' ``Whereas Japan and Germany were defeated, the Iraqis were liberated and they thought that it was a chance to follow their will, not ours.''

Moreover, he said, the American people are not ready to commit the same resources to Iraq's recovery as they did to the defeated nations of World War II. Bush, 57, has asked Congress for a $25 billion reserve to cover the escalating costs of military operations. The Pentagon has spent more than $70 billion in Iraq since January 2003.

``I believe we are going to fail if what we are striving for is a free Iraq,'' said Pipes, who earned a doctorate in history from Harvard University in 1978. ``A more modest goal is an Iraq that is not a threat to us.''

Another Revolt

Ferguson said the parallels with the 1920 uprising are compelling. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I, the British, like the U.S.-led coalition last year, were able to gain control of Iraq easily and quickly, only to find themselves mired in a violent occupation.

Then, as now, the occupying forces described themselves as liberators, only to be confronted by a revolt, which contrary to expectations drew Shiites and Sunnis together, Ferguson said.

After putting down the 1920 revolt, the British installed Faisal I as king, while keeping economic and political control in their own hands. By 1925, the League of Nations awarded Faisal the northern province of Mosul, adding ethnic Kurds to the kingdom's mix of Arab Sunnis and Shiites. The British mandate ended in 1932, with the signing of a treaty that allowed British troops to stay behind. The last British soldiers left Iraq in 1955.

``The Bush administration did not bother to read basic history,'' said Hiro. ``Under the British mandate, the Shia and Sunni rose together. This occupation has brought them together again.''

Neither Trent Duffy, a White House spokesman, nor Scott Stanzel, a spokesman for the campaign to re-elect Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, would provide names of historians who believe that the president's Iraq policy will succeed.

Still Time for U.S.

Walter Russell Mead, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, a New York-based policy-analysis group, said that while the situation is deteriorating, it's premature to forecast defeat for the U.S.

``The U.S. is losing influence over the political future of Iraq, but I think it's a little bit early still to say that they've failed,'' Mead, 52, author of ``Power, Terror, Peace and War,'' published last month, told National Public Radio in an interview broadcast on April 25.

Much of the criticism of the U.S. policy in Iraq focuses on Rumsfeld.

William Kristol, editor of the Weekly Standard, a Washington- based political magazine, and author of ``The War Over Iraq: America's Mission and Saddam's Tyranny,'' said Bush should scrutinize the defense secretary's performance.

``Bush should either consider replacing Rumsfeld, or at least take a real look at what has been done,'' said Kristol, 51, an early supporter of the war who has criticized the Pentagon for not committing more troops to Iraq after the March 2003 invasion.

Open Letter

Hiro said the U.S.-led occupation stirred an Iraqi nationalism that had been exploited under the 24-year rule of Hussein, himself a Sunni who had repressed Iraq's Shiite majority.

``Iraqi nationalism has come to the fore under the trusteeship of Anglo-American occupiers who have nothing in common with the country -- not language, culture or religion,'' said Hiro. He proposes that the Arab League, with other Muslim nations, take over responsibility for security in Iraq.

In an open letter released April 26, 52 former U.K. ambassadors and international officials criticized Prime Minister Tony Blair for his support of the U.S. administration's policies in Iraq and in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

One of the signatories, Marrack Goulding, 67, a former diplomat who served in several Middle Eastern countries and is now warden of St. Antony's College at Oxford University, said the failure in Washington and London to consult with experts was ``one of the puzzles of this whole sad episode.''

`Awful Mess'

Goulding said coalition officials failed to grasp the difficulties involved in upsetting a political arrangement that dated back to Ottoman times, by which the Sunni minority held power in a country with a Shiite majority. The Shiites now make up 60 percent of Iraq's 25 million population.

``When you overthrow that kind of regime in a somewhat artificial country where passions rise awfully high, then you will have an awful mess unless you have a clear plan,'' he said.

Augustus Richard Norton, a professor at Boston University and author of ``Civil Society in the Middle East,'' said the U.S. knew too little about Iraqi internal politics, which had been squelched under the Hussein regime, to be able to judge how things would turn out.

``There were too many variables in the situation that we didn't understand,'' said Norton, 57, a former career U.S. Army officer and professor at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Long-Term Presence

In 1920, the British put down the joint Sunni-Shiite uprising with an air-bombing campaign that cost about 6,500 lives on both sides. Ferguson of New York University said the U.S.-led coalition must also act decisively, relying on high-tech weaponry to avoid the brutality of the British response.

``The U.S. must understand that it has made a long-term commitment to Iraq,'' Ferguson said. ``Anybody who thinks it can be handed over to the United Nations, who is under the pretense that the UN is some utopian substitute for the big bad U.S. empire, is naive. There won't be an international option for Iraq until security is established by the United States and the coalition of the willing.''

Norton said the current violence will require a long-term U.S. military presence, and that presence will remain a target for low-intensity warfare. ``We have managed to put ourselves in a checkmate: We can't leave and we can't stay,'' he said.

Pipes proposes backing an Iraqi strongman who would take control and move the country toward democracy. ``It will take decades,'' he said.

`Margin of Safety'

Two years ago, some historians, including Bernard Lewis, professor emeritus of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University, made optimistic predictions about Iraq.

``I see the possibility of a genuinely enlightened and progressive and -- yes, I will say the word -- democratic regime arising in post-Saddam Iraq,'' Lewis said in an interview with the Jerusalem Post on April 7, 2002. Lewis, 87, declined to be interviewed for this article because he did not have time.

Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations agreed that Iraq had the potential to move toward greater political freedom.

``There are a lot of structural reasons why Iraq at the end of the day should look, if not as beautifully democratic as, say, Switzerland or something, a lot more like the United States wants it to look,'' he said in the NPR interview, which the network conducted jointly with NYU's Ferguson. ``Unfortunately, they have been burning through their margin of safety at a fairly rapid rate.''

`Tainted' by U.S.

Some early supporters of the Bush administration's Iraq policy have become more vocal in their criticism of decisions made over the past year. Among them is Kristol, who signed an open letter in early 2002 calling for Hussein's ouster.

In the 1990s, Kristol led the Project for the Republican Future, which the Weekly Standard's Web site says shaped the strategy that helped the Republican party gain control of Congress in 1994. He was chief of staff to Vice President Dan Quayle during the Bush administration and to Secretary of Education William Bennett under President Ronald Reagan.

``A lot of us thought at some level that they know what they are doing,'' Kristol said, referring to the administration. ``But many parts of the government appear feckless, not at the macro level, but at the operational level.''

Norton said the political situation in Iraq won't become easier after the scheduled transfer of sovereignty by the U.S. to the Iraqis on June 30.

``It is clear that anyone who takes over will be tainted by a connection to the U.S., and the only way they will survive is to distance themselves from the U.S., which will prompt the U.S. to try to undermine them,'' Norton said.

``There is not a single case in the Middle East where the political elite put in place by the colonial power survived for long,'' he said. ``In this case, it might take a decade or two, given backing from the U.S., but the long-term prospects do not augur well.''

To contact the reporter on this story: Celestine Bohlen in Paris at cbohlen@bloomberg.net.

Last Updated: May 17, 2004 00:02 EDT