DUCKPOND

Of course, I know it is against the rules, but in this case I do not have an understanding of the relevant history so I will give an extended quote from David Kaiser at History Unfolding. This takes us back to the First World War and the sacrifice of our forebears:

The Ottoman Empire ruled most of the Arab world for many centuries, moving, as empires so often do, from periods of glory to centuries of decadence. By the 1900s a new political movement, the Young Turks, was trying to modernize it along European lines. But in 1914 the Young Turks made a fateful, terrible mistake: they entered the First World War on the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary. The European powers, then at the height of imperial expansion, had long dreamed of partitioning their vast domains, and the Allies now had a legal excuse to make specific plans to do so. The British both made agreements parceling out Ottoman territory among the French, Italians, Russians and themselves, but also enlisted subject Arab populations (which as we will see were much, much smaller than they are now) to fight their oppressors. And to cap it all off, the British in 1917 issued the Balfour Declaration endorsing the formation of a “Jewish national home” in Palestine, largely in order to outbid the Germans in a battle for the support of Russian and American Jews. Under Lloyd George, who led the country to victory, the Middle East became the focus of British war aims, the bounty he could secure in return for the gigantic sacrifices (including the lives of 700,000 soldiers) that the British Empire had made. Unfortunately for him, however, the area had very little of the strategic or economic significance that it has now acquired, and the British people were far more interested in demobilizing their huge armies than in keeping them in these new and distant lands.

One by one, the British discovered their hopes falsified by reality. Their principal Arab allies were Hussein Sharif of Mecca and his sons, Faisal and Abdullah. The initially attempted to install Faisal as the leader of Syria—a vaguely defined territory that also included Lebanon—but eventually had to yield that region to the French and transplant Faisal to newly created Iraq, where he became King, instead. After the British split Palestine at the Jordan River and created Transjordan (an almost unpopulated territory) to its east, Abdullah became that country’s King. The Zionist project immediately encountered the violent resentment of the local Arabs, with whom most British officers on the scene tended to sympathize. In Turkey proper Lloyd George sponsored Greek inroads into the Greek-inhabited enclave around Smyrna, while also trying to create an independent Armenia for the Armenians who had survived the wartime genocide. Everything went wrong in Turkey when Mustafa Kemal, later Kemal Ataturk, managed to create a new nationalist movement that secured control of Anatolia and eventually routed the Greeks and drove the western powers away from Constantinople in 1922. That also led to the fall of the Lloyd George government. Meanwhile, in Arabia, Hussein of Mecca was destined to succumb to an alliance between Wahabi Islam and the House of Saud.

Fromkin [David Fromkin, A Peace To End All Peace] does not explain exactly how the Ottomans had managed to govern these far flung regions relatively effectively, but he makes clear that the collapse of Ottoman authority, like the collapse of Ba’athist authority in Iraq in 2003, led immediately to anarchy in much of the region. Conflicts between Greeks and Turks, Muslims and Christians, and among various tribes sprang up in Anatolia, Iraq, Syria and Transjordan, while the British scrambled to find anyone who could govern effectively on their behalf. Egypt, too—which the British had occupied in 1882 and annexed in 1914—was stirring, and the British had to grant a sham independence a few years after the war. (Not for thirty years more did Egyptian Army officers led by Nasser turn the sham independence into the real thing.) Iraq exploded into a bloody revolt in 1920, and there, too, even the British client Faisal was unwilling to grant the British too much control over their affairs. Many British officials tried to blame their problems on Bolshevik, German, or even Jewish outside agitators—Fromkin mentions that British intelligence was still viewing the expanding Bolshevik regime as a German-Jewish conspiracy—but local resistance was almost always the real problem. Led by Winston Churchill, then Secretary of State for War and Air, the British also introduced a military innovation, the control of far-flung rural populations through air power. Two-seated biplanes in which the co-pilot wielded a machine gun could wreak havoc in a native village, and became the magic weapon with which the British hoped to keep both Iraq and their Afghan frontier under control. But meanwhile, the political upheavals in the region led, then as now, to massive movements of people. Hundreds of thousands of Greeks and Turks, for instance, were exchanged to settle the conflict between those two nations—and now, millions of Iraqis have fled to Syria and Jordan while millions of others have been driven into new homes within Iraq.

British and French imperialism set the stage, with American promotion after the Second World War for the United Nation’s recognition of the state of Israel, which from its aggressive settler origins in the late nineteenth century has continued to change the dynamics of the region. Now the invasion and long occupation of Iraq by the Americans has introduced an new agent of instability. Americans were “characteristically idealistic” as they increasingly “search for a new set of reliable clients”. It seems to be that Americans are pragmatic, in turn idealistic and practical as the situation demands, which I suppose makes them more typical than special, and there is a myth they have of themselves about that.

Americans unlike the British did not have a significant debate about their involvement in the Middle East. Democratic candidates are too afraid of being labeled by media as soft on national security and the Iraq debate has been about means not ends. These observations might be saying something about the American political system, as distinct from the British parliamentary system. So what is the deeper historical lesson? Possibly that imperialism and violence did not work then, and don’t work now, so let’s try something else. What might that be?