Diplomacy sowing seeds of destruction

Review of A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

The post-colonial Middle East was doomed to instability, incessant violence, and failure. In a riveting narrative, this book explains how it happened and why. It is a must-read, in my view a classic.

Fromkin begins with the machinations leading up to the Great War. The Ottoman Empire - in decline for over 300 years, yet a useful "buffer" for the Western powers against the Russian Empire in the "Great Game" - was finally coming apart with centrifugal nationalist forces as well as the rise of the western-minded "young Turks." Britain and France had to decide whether to continue to prop up its vast territorial holdings or to nakedly seek to carve up its territories for the benefit of their own empires. France coveted Syria and Lebanon, Great Britain the rest. In the end, that was what they got, in accordance with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916.

Once the Great War began, the Turks allied themselves with the Germans, for which Churchill was unjustly blamed (he had confiscated two destroyers that Britain's shipyards had just manufactured for the Turks). This led directly to the catastrophically mismanaged invasion of the Dardanelles; it was a bid to end the War by pushing a wedge into the Germanic coalition from the South, again Churchill's idea. (Amazingly, 4 years later, the collapse of Bulgaria was what finally ended World War I as the allies entered the gap. This was precisely what Churchill had envisioned.) As the Turks rallied and proved stronger than anticipated, the allies turned to making alliances with the Arabs and others under loose Turkish suzerainty. Lawrence of Arabia comes to mind.

The greatest accomplishment of the book is to dissect the mentality of British policymakers, which by today's standards was almost ghoulishly primitive. First, they had a 19^th Century colonialist bias, which meant that they were convinced that nature had destined them to rule the "brown" races for their own good, from India to Africa. While there was much strategic calculation, such as guarding the Suez canal for freighter traffic, it was principally to maintain the glory of the British Empire as conceived under Queen Victoria. Second, they lacked even the crudest, most basic knowledge of not just the Turks, but also the Arabs and Zionists. For example, beyond sensationalist and romantic travel literature, the only available source on the Ottomans in the Foreign Office library was a history written in the 18^th Century! Few of the aristocratic elite spoke any of the languages and most were openly racist and antisemitic. Third, there were conspiracy theories that would appear absolutely lunatic today (to paraphrase Fromkin). Thus, many top policy-makers actually believed that “the Jews” controlled not just the young Turks, but also the emerging Bolsheviks and even the German Kaiser's inner circle.

This ignorance and arrogant disregard for other points of view would be laughable were they not directly responsible for the decisions that created the system of shaky nation states we see today in the Middle East. To cultivate the non-existent Jewish cabal, British diplomats came up with the Balfour Declaration, which recognized the validity of a Zionist state. Interestingly, as with many right-wing fundamentalists today, Zionist ambitions gained indispensable credence among British policymakers because a state of Jews in Palestine was a Biblical prerequisite for Armageddon and the assumed ascension of Christians to paradise.

As the War came to an end, Great Britain and France were now so distrustful of each others' imperial ambitions that in 1920 they almost went to war themselves. In addition, due to war debts and loss of life, they were unable to devote attention and resources to nation building. Of course, all this did not stop them from setting up what were supposed to become modern states in places that knew neither secular politics nor any sense of national purpose. After all, these were vast territories that had been governed by independent tribes under a loose Turkish confederation for centuries.

To implement its plan, the Brits had designated several families, including the Hashemites - aristocrats chosen first by the Turks and educated in the Harem of the Sublime Port - as the “highest religious authority”. Somehow, the reasoning went, these “pliable British clients” were supposed to enable the Empire to control all Arab tribes. Of course, once the Brits chose these people, they were stuck with them. Eventually, they were installed as rulers of petty kingdoms, such as Jordan, despite the fact that they completely lacked political legitimacy. Some, though not all of them, are still there.

Unfortunately, the way that the borders were drawn completely ignored the distribution of natural resources, geographic factors such as natural territorial barriers, and the ethnic composition of the new states. It is no wonder that these artificial constructs became unstable, mixing peoples with modern weaponry and infrastructure who for centuries were isolated and divided by religion, ethnicity, and power politics. The new leaders and their subjects had little idea how to wield the tools of the modern state, while growing nationalist forces were undermining the western empires.

This is one story of perhaps the greatest watershed of the 20^th Century: the end of western domination as the impulse grew in colonized peoples to govern themselves. Not only did Turkey reinvent itself, but the Soviet Union was born, while the western powers (with the exception of the US) had squandered their human and financial resources. Amazingly, what was going on in the Middle East at that time was seen as a backwater sideshow: virtually no one recognized the magnitude of political change that was unleashed.

If there is any failing of the book, it is its less diligent effort to penetrate the minds of the Arabs and Turks. The author brilliantly delineates the moribund reasoning from within the 19^th Century western empires, but does not explain what the indigenous peoples, in all their nascent power, were thinking and feeling.