A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

Other studies of the First World War and its aftermath in the region have tended to deal with a single country or area. Even those dealing with European policy in the Arab or Turkish East as a whole have focused solely, for example, on the role of Britain, or of Britain and France. But I place the creation of the modern Middle East in a wider framework: I see what happened as the culmination of the nineteenth-century Great Game, and therefore show Russia, too, playing a leading role in the story. It was in whole or in part because of Russia that Kitchener initiated a British alliance with the Arab Moslem world (pages 97–8); that Britain and France, though they would have preferred to preserve the Turkish Empire in the region, decided instead to occupy and partition the Middle East (pages 137–42); that the Foreign Office publicly proclaimed British support for the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine (pages 184–93); and that, after the war, a number of British officials felt that Britain was obliged to hold the line in the Middle East against crusading Bolshevism (pages 465–8). Yet, so far as I know, this is the first book to tell the story as that of the Middle East in the widest sense: the Great Game sense, in which Russia plays a central role.

  As you will see when you read the book, Middle Eastern personalities, circumstances, and political cultures do not figure a great deal in the narrative that follows, except when I suggest the outlines and dimensions of what European politicians were ignoring when they made their decisions. This is a book about the decision-making process, and in the 1914–22 period, Europeans and Americans were the only ones seated around the table when the decisions were made.

  It was an era in which Middle Eastern countries and frontiers were fabricated in Europe. Iraq and what we now call Jordan, for example, were British inventions, lines drawn on an empty map by British politicians after the First World War; while the boundaries of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq were established by a British civil servant in 1922, and the frontiers between Moslems and Christians were drawn by France in Syria-Lebanon and by Russia on the borders of Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan.

  The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today. The basis of political life in the Middle East—religion—was called into question by the Russians, who proposed communism, and by the British, who proposed nationalism or dynastic loyalty, in its place. Khomeini’s Iran in the Shi’ite world and the Moslem Brotherhood in Egypt, Syria, and elsewhere in the Sunni world keep that issue alive. The French government, which in the Middle East did allow religion to be the basis of politics—even of its own—championed one sect against the others; and that, too, is an issue kept alive, notably in the communal strife that has ravaged Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s.

  The year 1922 seems to me to have been the point of no return in setting the various clans of the Middle East on their collision courses, so that the especial interest and excitement of the years with which this book is concerned, 1914 through 1922, is that they were the creative, formative years, in which everything seemed (and may indeed have been) possible. It was a time when Europeans, not implausibly, believed Arab and Jewish nationalism to be natural allies; when the French, not the Arabs, were the dangerous enemies of the Zionist movement; and when oil was not an important factor in the politics of the Middle East.

  By 1922, however, the choices had narrowed and the courses had been set; the Middle East had started along a road that was to lead to the endless wars (between Israel and her neighbors, among others, and between rival militias in Lebanon) and to the always-escalating acts of terrorism (hijacking, assassination, and random massacre) that have been a characteristic feature of international life in the 1970s and 1980s. These are a part of the legacy of the history recounted in the pages that follow.

  Two stories are told in the book and then merge into one. The first begins with Lord Kitchener’s decision at the outset of the First World War to partition the Middle East after the war between Britain, France, and Russia, and with his appointment of Sir Mark Sykes to work out the details. The book then follows Sykes during the wartime years, as he worked out Britain’s blueprint for the Middle East’s future. It goes on to show that, in large part, the program Sykes had formulated was realized after the war, and was embodied in documents formally adopted (for the most part) in 1922.

  This was the story that I originally set out to write. It was meant to show that if you put together a number of the documents and decisions of 1922—the Allenby Declaration establishing nominal independence for Egypt, the Palestine Mandate and the Churchill White Paper for Palestine (from which Israel and Jordan spring), the British treaty establishing the status of Iraq, the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, Britain’s placing new monarchs on the thrones of Egypt and Iraq and sponsoring a new princely ruler for (what was to become) Jordan, the Russian proclamation of a Soviet Union in which Russia would re-establish her rule in Moslem Central Asia—you would see that when taken together they amounted to an overall settlement of the Middle Eastern Question. Moreover, this settlement of 1922 (as I call it, because most of its elements cluster in and around that year) flowed from the wartime negotiations which Sir Mark Sykes had conducted with France and Russia to agree upon a partition of the postwar Middle East between them. The French received a bit less than had been agreed, and the Russians were only allowed to keep what they had already taken before the war, but the principle of allowing them to share with Britain in the partition and rule of Moslem Asia was respected. Within the British sphere, all went according to the Sykes plan: Britain ruled for the most part indirectly, as protector of nominally independent Arab monarchies, and proclaimed herself the sponsor of both Arab and Jewish nationalism.

  In addition to establishing that there had been a settlement of 1922 in the Middle East, I show that our quarrel with that settlement (to the extent that with hindsight we would have designed the new Middle East differently) is not what we sometimes believe it to be. It is not even that the British government at that time failed to devise a settlement that would satisfy the needs and desires of the peoples of the Middle East; it is that they were trying to do something altogether different. For Lord Kitchener and his delegated agent Mark Sykes the Middle Eastern Question was what it had been for more than a century: where would the French frontier in the Middle East be drawn and, more important, where would the Russian frontier in the Middle East be drawn?

  That, as I say, is the story which I set out to tell. But in the telling of it, another emerged: the story of how, between 1914 and 1922, Britain changed, and British officials and politicians changed their minds, so that by 1922—when they formally committed themselves to their program for remaking the Middle East—they no longer believed in it. In the course of the narrative we see the British government of 1914, 1915, and 1916, which welcomed a Russian and a French presence in the postwar Middle East, turn into a postwar government that regarded Russia in the Middle East as a danger and France in the region as a disaster. We see the pro-Zionists of 1917 turn into the anti-Zionists of 1921 and 1922; and the enthusiasts for Feisal’s Arab Movement turn against Feisal as untrustworthy and against his brother Abdullah as hopelessly ineffectual. Above all, we see Britain embarking on a vast new imperial enterprise in the Middle East—one that would take generations to achieve, if its object were to remake the Middle East as India had been remade—at the very time that the British public was turning to a policy of scaling down overseas commitments and was deciding it wanted no more imperial adventures.

  It may well be that the crisis of political civilization that the Middle East endures today stems not merely from Britain’s destruction of the old order in the region in 1918, and her decisions in 1922 about how it should be replaced, but also from the lack of conviction she brought in subsequent years to the program of imposing the settlement of 1922 to which she was pledged
.

  The book I intended to write was only about how Europe went about changing the Middle East; the book that emerged was also about how Europe changed at the same time, and about how the two movements interacted.

  Lloyd George, Woodrow Wilson, Kitchener of Khartoum, Lawrence of Arabia, Lenin, Stalin, and Mussolini—men who helped shape the twentieth century—are among those who played leading roles in the drama that unfolds in A Peace to End All Peace, striving to remake the world in the light of their own vision. Winston Churchill, above all, presides over the pages of this book: a dominating figure whose genius animated events and whose larger-than-life personality colored and enlivened them.

  For Churchill, as for Lloyd George, Wilson, Lenin, Stalin, and the others—and for such men as Jan Christian Smuts, Leo Amery, and Lord Milner—the Middle East was an essential component or a testing area of their worldview. Their vision of the future of the Middle East was central to their idea of the sort of twentieth century they passionately believed would or should emerge as a phoenix from the ashes of the First World War. In that sense, the history recounted in the pages that follow is the story of how the twentieth century was created, as well as the modern Middle East.

  PART I

  AT THE CROSSROADS OF HISTORY

  1

  THE LAST DAYS OF OLD EUROPE

  I

  In the late spring of 1912, the graceful yacht Enchantress put out to sea from rainy Genoa for a Mediterranean pleasure cruise—a carefree cruise without itinerary or time-schedule. The skies brightened as she steamed south. Soon she was bathed in sunshine.

  Enchantress belonged to the British Admiralty. The accommodation aboard was as grand as that on the King’s own yacht. The crew numbered nearly a hundred and served a dozen or so guests, who had come from Britain via Paris, where they had stayed at the Ritz. Among them were the British Prime Minister, Herbert Asquith; his brilliant 25-year-old daughter Violet; the civilian head of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill; and Churchill’s small party of family members and close colleagues. In the final enchanted years before the First World War brought their world to an end, they were as privileged a group as any the world has known.

  Violet Asquith kept a diary of her journey. In Pompeii she and her friends wandered “down the long lovely silent streets” that once had pulsated with the life of Imperial Rome; now, she noted, those once lively streets were overgrown with grass and vegetation.1 In Sicily her party climbed to the ruins of an ancient Greek fortress and, amidst wild lavender and herbs, had a picnic lunch, sitting on blocks of stone from the fallen walls. Later they went higher still to watch the sunset over the sea from what remained of the old Greek theater on the heights. There they lay “among wild thyme and humming bees and watched the sea changing from blue to flame and then to cool jade green as the sun dropped into it and the stars came out.”2

  Rotations and revolutions—the heavenly movements that cause day to become night and spring/summer to become autumn/winter—were reflected in her observations of the landscape and its lighting; but a sense of the mortality of civilizations and of political powers and dominations did not overshadow Violet’s cheerful vision of her youthful voyage to the lands of antiquity. Her father presided over an empire roughly twice as large as the Roman Empire at its zenith; she may well have thought that her father’s empire would last twice as long too.

  The Prime Minister, an enthusiastic sightseer, was inseparable from his Baedeker guidebook. An ardent classicist, he read and wrote with ease and pleasure in classical Greek and Latin. Winston Churchill, no scholar of ancient languages or literature, was as jealous as a child. “Those Greeks and Romans,” he protested, “they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I’ve said just as good things myself. But they got in before me.”3

  Violet noted that, “It was in vain that my father pointed out that the world had been going on for quite a long time before the Greeks and Romans appeared upon the scene.”4 The Prime Minister was an intellectual, aware that the trend among historians of the ancient world was away from an exclusive concern with the European cultures of the Greeks and Romans. The American professor James Henry Breasted had won wide acceptance for the thesis that modern civilization—that is, European civilization—had its beginnings not in Greece and Rome, but in the Middle East: in Egypt and Judaea, Babylonia and Assyria, Sumer and Akkad. Civilization—whose roots stretched thousands of years into the past, into the soil of those Middle Eastern monarchies that long ago had crumbled into dust—was seen to have culminated in the global supremacy of the European peoples, their ideals, and their way of life.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, when Churchill and his guests voyaged aboard the Enchantress, it was usual to assume that the European peoples would continue to play a dominating role in world affairs for as far ahead in time as the mind’s eye could see. It was also not uncommon to suppose that, having already accomplished most of what many regarded as the West’s historical mission—shaping the political destinies of the other peoples of the globe—they would eventually complete it. Conspicuous among the domains still to be dealt with were those of the Middle East, one of the few regions left on the planet that had not yet been socially, culturally, and politically reshaped in the image of Europe.

  II

  The Middle East, although it had been of great interest to western diplomats and politicians during the nineteenth century as an arena in which Great Game rivalries were played out, was of only marginal concern to them in the early years of the twentieth century when those rivalries were apparently resolved. The region had become a political backwater. It was assumed that the European powers would one day take the region in hand, but there was no longer a sense of urgency about their doing so.

  Few Europeans of Churchill’s generation knew or cared what went on in the languid empires of the Ottoman Sultan or the Persian Shah. An occasional Turkish massacre of Armenians would lead to a public outcry in the West, but would evoke no more lasting concern than Russian massacres of Jews. Worldly statesmen who privately believed there was nothing to be done would go through the public motions of urging the Sultan to reform; there the matter would end. Petty intrigues at court, a corrupt officialdom, shifting tribal alliances, and a sluggish, apathetic population composed the picture that Europeans formed of the region’s affairs. There was little in the picture to cause ordinary people living in London, or Paris, or New York to believe that it affected their lives or interests. In Berlin, it is true, planners looked to the opening up of railroads and new markets in the region; but these were commercial ventures.* The passions that now drive troops and terrorists to kill and be killed—and that compel global attention—had not yet been aroused.

  At the time, the political landscape of the Middle East looked different from that of today. Israel, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, and Saudi Arabia did not exist then. Most of the Middle East still rested, as it had for centuries, under the drowsy and negligent sway of the Ottoman Empire, a relatively tranquil domain in which history, like everything else, moved slowly.

  Today, toward the close of the twentieth century, the politics of the Middle East present a completely different aspect: they are explosive. No man played a more crucial role—at times unintentionally—in giving birth to the Middle East we live with today than did Winston Churchill, who before the First World War was a rising but widely distrusted young English politician with no particular interest in Moslem Asia. A curious destiny drove Churchill and the Middle East to interfere repeatedly in one another’s political lives. This left its marks; there are frontier lines now running across the face of the Middle East that are scar-lines from those encounters with him.

  2

  THE LEGACY OF THE GREAT GAME IN ASIA

  I

  Churchill, Asquith, and such Cabinet colleagues as the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George, and, later, the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, were to play a decisive role in creating the modern Middle
East; but in doing so they were unable to escape from a Victorian political legacy that Asquith’s Liberal government thought it had rejected. Asquith and Grey, having turned their backs on the nineteenth-century rivalry with France and Russia in the Middle East, believed that they could walk away from it; but events were to prove them wrong.

  II

  The struggle for the Middle East, pitting England against European rivals, was a result of the imperial expansion ushered in by the voyages of Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Magellan, and Drake. Having discovered the sea routes in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the European powers went on to vie with one another for control of the rest of the world. England was a relatively late starter in the race, but eventually surpassed the others.

  During the eighteenth century the British Isles, despite their small size, finally established an empire that encircled the globe. Like the Spaniards and the Dutch before them, the British boasted that their monarch now reigned over dominions on which the sun never set. By 1912, when Winston Churchill and Herbert Asquith cruised aboard the Enchantress, their monarch, George V, ruled a quarter of the land surface of the planet.

  Of none of their conquests were the British more proud than those in the storied East. Yet there was irony in these triumphs; for in besting France in Asia and the Pacific, and in crowning that achievement by winning India, Britain had stretched her line of transport and communications so far that it could be cut at many points.

  Napoleon Bonaparte exposed this vulnerability in 1798, when he invaded Egypt and marched on Syria—intending, he later maintained, from there to follow the path of legend and glory, past Babylon, to India. Though checked in his own plans, Napoleon afterwards persuaded the mad Czar Paul to launch the Russian army on the same path.