Review: A Peace to End All Peace

Title: A Peace to End All Peace
Author: David Fromkin
Publisher: New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1989
ISBN: 0-8050-6884-8

Most contemporary discussions on the Middle East ignore how the current system of states there were formed. Modern debates often assume that the particular borders we see now—Iraq, Syria, Jordan, etc.—always existed in the arrangement we see now, with similar political structures. As David Fromkin points out in A Peace to End All Peace, such an assumption is displaced from reality. The system of states as we know it in the Middle East (a term only invented in 1902) (224), was crafted by Europeans around 1922 as a way to grab new expansions to their empire, to carve up the fallen Ottoman Empire and establish influence as they had done with other countries after previous wars.

The process of Middle Eastern statehood is a story involving Britain, France, Russia, Greece, and on the fringes, America. The road is littered with misinformation on all sides; disasterous assumptions and unwarrented mistakes; egos; and blatant grabs for power. The story goes something like this, as I remember it from the book.

The Turks had been trying to find a powerful to ally with them for some time, but had been rebuffed by one after another. After was was started with Germany, the British thought the Germans, who finally accepted Ottoman requests for an alliance, were the ones who initiated the relationship. Russia, an ally at the time, at one point was having problems on a front and asked Britain to attack Turkey. Russia later realized it wasn't having problems anymore, but Britain went ahead and attacked.

After Britain got into the Ottoman empire, it made a series of mistakes that meant instead of finishing the invasion quickly, as was possible then, they instead were defeated in various battles and wound up being entrenched in a drawn out war in the Middle East. Through a variety of political changes in Britain, such as Prime Minister Asquith being replaced by Lloyd George (and Winston Churchill being thrown out of relevant politics altogether), the new government decided it wanted carve up the Middle East as spoils of the war, once it was finished, in a similar manner to the aftermath of previous conflicts.

The British decided to set up Hussein as a sort of "Pope" for Islam, so that Britain could control Arabia through Hussein. Unfortunately for them, such a position for Hussein was not possible due to the political and social arrangements in the Middle East, so the British wound up stationing troops for years in an effort to control the territories over which they now wanted power. To make matters worse for Britain, Russia changed sides.

Adding to all this turmoil was the (incorrect) suspician by Britains and many other Europeans of some worldwide Jewish conspiracy that had the power to control events in several countries. Hoping to use this power to their advantage, Britain made overtures to Jewish Zionism by issuing the Balfour Declaration which advocated a Jewish national home in Palestine, which originally included Jordan. Implementing such a declaration wasn't easy, not only because some Arabs didn't like an influx of Jews but because even some local British governors and military promoted Arab uprisings. Although British promises to the Jews and to the Arabs were ambiguous as to boundaries and timetables, Britain never intended to satisfy the agreements in the first place.

By 1922, the year that everything in the Middle East seems to culminate, the USSR was formed; Britain tinkered with elections in the new state of Iraq to set up and control Feisal (Hussein's son) as ruler; Britain set up Abdullah (Hussein's other son) in Jordan; ibn Saud, who kept causing problems with Abdullah, was given Saudia Arabia; and Britain managed to mollify France by parceling out Syria and Lebanon.

Fromkin's main point is that by 1922, European powers had partitioned the former Ottoman Empire into states and setup puppet regimes, drawing boundaries and imposing rulers while ignoring the wishes of those who actually lived there. It would appear difficult to understand the present-day Middle East without an appreciation of its formation, which is explained in detail in the pages of A Peace to End All Peace. Points I found particularly interesting can be found below.

"In Kitchener's Egypt a hereditary prince and native Cabinet ministers and governors went through the motions of governing. They promulgated under their own name decisions recommended to them by the British advisors attached to their respective offices; that was the form of protectorate government favored by the Kitchener group. In the artful words of Ronald Storrs: 'We deprecated the Imperative, preferring the Subjunctive, even the wistful, Optative mood'" (85).
By 1915 "The British intended to support the candidacy of Hussein for the position of 'Pope' of Islam—a position that (unbeknown to them) did not exist; while (unbeknown to them too) the language they used encouraged him to attempt to become ruler of the entire Arab world—though in fact Storrs believe4d that it was a mistake for Hussein to aim at extending his rule at all" (105).
Mecca and Medina "was a territory that none of the Great Powers coveted. David Lloyd George later wrote that 'no one comtemplated that foreign troops should occupy any part of Arabia. It was too arid a country to make it worth the while of any ravenous Power to occupy as a permanent pasture.' It was not then known that there were immense deposits of oil in the region" (140).
...Kitchener... vehemently insisted on authorizing Cairo to respond immediately and to reach agreement with Hussein... Authorized and directed to do so by London, Sir Henry McMahon then resumed the correspondence with Mecca—the famous McMahon letters, the meaning of which has been debated so much and so long by partisans of Arab and Jewish causes in Palestine" (182). But effectively, "Britain did not bind herself to support Hussein's claims anywhere at all" (183). McMahon, an experienced bureaucrat, had seen the need to be completely noncommittal" (184). Gilbert Clayon later summarized that "'Luckily, we have been very careful indeed to commit ourselves to nothing whatsoever.' ...In London the Foreign Office took the view that the promises would never become due for payment: that Britain had pledged herself to suppot Arab independence only if the Arab half o the Ottoman Empire rose against the Sultan..." (185).
"While most Palestinian Jews chose to avoid involvement in the world war, David Ben-Gurion and Itzhak Ben Zvi, former law students at the University of Constantinople who were leaders of the Labor Zionist movement, offered to organize a Palestinian Jewish army in 1914 to defend Ottoman Palestine. But, instead of accepting their offer, Djemal deported them and other Zionist leaders in 1915" (211).
"During the summer of 1916, Sykes spent a good deal of time making public speeches. In his speeches he gave currency to the new descriptive phrase, 'the Middle East,' which the American naval officer and historian Alfred Thayer Mahan had invented in 1902 to designate the area between Arabia and India..." (224).
"It was typical that even in the economoic section of the Middle Eatern group's report [commissioned by President Wilson in 1917], there was no mention of the possibility that significant deposits of petroleam might be found in that part of the world" (261).
"Most of the world's Jews then lived within the section of the Russian Empire to which they were confined so long as they lived within the Czar's domains: the Pale, or enclosure (from the word for a wooden stake used in bulding fences)" (272).
During its formative years, then, David Lloyd George [later Prime Minister of Great Britain] ha drepresented the Zionish movement [as a layyer on behalf of his London firm, Lloyd George, Roberts & Co.] as it sought to define itself... As he contemplated the conquest of Palestine in 1917 and 1918, nobody had a clearer idea than he of what to do with it once it was his" (274).
The Balfour Declaration, 2 November 1917:
Dear Lord Rothschild, I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty's Government, the following declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to, and approved by, the Cabinet: His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country." I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of the Zionist Federation (297).
"Baghdad, along with Jerusalem, was [in the early 1900s] one of the two great Jewish cities of Asia, and a thousand years before had become the seat of the exilarch—the head of the Jewish religion in the eastern diaspora—and thus the capital of oriental Judaism" (306).
"The nature of the electorate had been radically transformed by wartime legislation that for the first time gave the vote to women (from the age of thirty) and to all men (from the age of twenty-one) (384).
At the Paris Peace Conference of World War I, "Decisions, by all accounts, including those of the participants, were made with little knowledge of, or concern for, the lands and peoples about which and whom the decisions were made (399).
Even though Britain had repeatedly promised Egypt independence, when Saad Zeghul, a leader of a delegation of out-of-office Egyption political figures, met with Sir Reginald Wingate,the British High Commisional in Cairo, and on 13 November 1918 "expressed the desire to go to London to put forward a programme of complete autonomy," the proposal "was rejected as calculated to serve no good object" (418).
"The Sultan and Egypt's other leaders refused to accept mere autonomy or even nominal independence; they demanded full and complete indpendence, which Britain—dependent upon the Suez Canal—would not grant" (420).
The president of the Oeuvre des Ecoles d'Orient, which represented French Catholic missionaries in the Middle East, stated that "it is inadmissible that the 'Country of Christ' should become the prety of Jewry and of Anglo-Saxon heresy. It must remain the inviolable inheritance of France and the Church. It would be a national infamy and an irreparable crime not to remove this sacred land fromt he brutal rapacity of our allies" (442).
Lenin had for years argued against what he called "Great Russian chauvinism", and in 1915 wrote that "We Great Russian workers must demand that our government should get out of Mongolia, Turkestan, and Persia"... (475). But in 1920 the supposed lack of a proletariat in the ruled countries "in effect... meant that the peoples of the East were not yet ready to exercise their right to be free. According to [the Bashkir leader, Zeki Velidi] Togan, Lenin said that even after the socialist revolution had succeeded everywhere in the world, the former colonies of the European Great Powers would have to remain in tutelage of their former masters until such time as they developed an industrial working class of their own" (476).
Even though T. E. Lawrence's accounts were full of hyperbole, his "indirect influence on policy was considerable, for his account of the Arab uprising was believed by Churchill, who lacked personal knowledge of the matter, not having been involved in Middle Eastern affairs during the war after 1916" (498).
"On 28 February 1922, the British government unilaterally issued the so-called Allenby Declaration conceding formal indpendence to Egypt." Around the same time, Churchill convened a conference in Egypt to discuss Mesopotamia and Palestine. "By an accident of geography, in 1921, both Allenby's and Churchill's contrary policies were elaborated in the city of Cairo; and in fact there was a substantive similarity between them, for they both represented unilateral British decisions about how the Arab world should be run—and Arab leaders did not agree to either one of them" (502).
Before the Baghdad eliections, Sir Percy Cox "hurried back to Baghdad to persuade rival candidates" to the British-proposed candidate, Feisal, "to withdraw from the contest—among them, Ibn Saud, who objected to Hashemite candidacy, but was mollified by cash ahnd other British favors" (507). Sayyid Talib, the "dominant local political leader of Basra", tourted Iraq with the slogan, "Iraq for the Iraqis", and British intelligence officers reported that he was getting "a magnificent reception everywhere." Consequently, because of some hearsay of remarks made by Talib at a tea party with Lady Cox, Talib was arrested and deported to the island of Ceylon in the Indian Ocean, supposedly to preserve law and order. "On 11 July [1922] the Council of Ministers unanimously adopted a resolution declaring Feisal to be the constitutional monarch of IRaq. On 16 July the Council authorized a plebiscite to ratify its choice. On 19 August the Ministry of the INterior announced that Feisal had won an overwhelming victory in the yes-or-no plebiscite. On 23 August Feisal's coronation was celebrated; and in official usage Iraq ('well-rooted country') replaced Mesopotamia as the name of this new kingdom" (508).
Around 75 percent of the land allocated to be divided between Jews and Palestinians "had already been given to an Arab dynasty [, Abdullah, son of Hussein,] that was not Palestinian." As this posed a problem, "The newly created province of Transjordan, later to become the independent state of Jordan, gradually drifted into existence as an entity separate from the rest of Palestine; indeed, today it is often forgotten that Jordan was ever part of Palestine" (514).
The Arab complaints about Jewish land purchases were thin; most of the complainers sold land to Jews. "The genuine grievance was that of the impoverished Arab peasantry. As socialists, the Jewish farmers were opposed to the exploitation of others and therefore did all their own work; when Jews bough Arab farms the Arab farm laborers therefore lost their jobs" (522).
In the autumn of 1921, "Turks supplied by France were at war with Greeks backed by Britain and the former Entente Powers found themselves ranged on opposite sides of the Ottoman war that they had entered together as allies in 1914" (537).
"In November 1922, the Kemalist National Assembly deposed the Sultan. The Sultan fled from Constantinople into exile. Thus in 1922 the centuries-old Ottoman Empire came to an end; and Turkey, which for 500 years had dominated the Middle East, departed from Middle Eastern history to seek to make herself European" (552).
On 8 October 1922 Andrew Bonary Law, the retired leader of the Unionist-Conservative Party, wrote a letter to two newspapers. "We cannot alone act as policeman of the world," he said, urging France and others to assist in enforcint the settlement in Germany (554).
[Britain] placed Fuad I on the thrown of Egypt in [1922], and made Egypt a nominally independent protectorate by the terms of the Allenby Declaration of 1922. She established a protectorate in Iraq by her treaty that year with that country: a country that she had created and upon whose thrown she had placed her own nominee, Feisal. By the terms of the Palestine Mandate of 1922 and Churchill's White Paper for Palestine in 1922, Transjordan was set on the road to a political existence separate from that of Palestine—Abdullah, appointed by Britain, was to permanently preside over the new entity by a decision made in 1922—while west of the Jordan, Jews were promised a National Home and non-Jews were promised full rights. Independence or autonomy for the Kurds, which had been on the agenda in 1922, somehow disappeared from the agenda in 1922, so that there was to be no Kurdistan: it was a nondecision of 1922 that was, in effect, a decision. In 1922, too, Britain imposed frontier agreements upon Ibn Saud that established boundaries between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait (560).