A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  In Africa, as noted earlier, the political reality is the tribe. In the Middle East, it is religion. Both tribe and religion exert powerful drives. In the search for peace and therefore for accommodation and compromise, they are powerful obstacles. Yet they must be overcome. Uti Possidetis must be applied—at some point—if the Middle East is ever to achieve settlement and peace. The question is: at which point? And the only workable answer is: now.

  The attack on the United States on 9/11 administered a shock test to the Western world. It brought the bloodbaths of the Middle East onto American soil and into our living rooms. Puzzlingly to many, Osama bin Laden, the terrorist chieftain, justified the attack as retaliation for what the Western world had done eighty years earlier. Americans, in particular, know little of history; and for days afterward, news commentators on television screens looked for explanations. What injury, they wondered, had America or its allies done to bin Laden’s people in the early 1920s? The answer, of course, was that Christian armies had occupied the lands of the Muslim Ottoman Empire, had overturned their laws and governments, and in their place had set up states and frontiers of the European sort. The new entities were intended to achieve Western goals and realize Western national interests rather than seek the welfare of the Muslim Middle East. In short, bin Laden was denouncing the Settlement of 1922—and was blaming America for it, even though America was not a party to it. It was a curiously reactionary argument, and also one-sided; for in the past both Muslims and Christians had launched religious wars. The Crusaders might have been deplorable, and perhaps Europe should deplore them; but Westerners could as easily complain to bin Laden of the destruction wrought in Europe by the Huns, Mongols, Turks, and other warrior tribes who had ridden westward out of Asia in times long past.

  The attack on New York’s twin towers alerted the American public, and Europeans as well, to the deadly seriousness of Middle Eastern blood feuds, and of the Middle East’s continuing inability to arrive at peaceful solutions of its ongoing quarrels. The Arab-Israel dispute, in particular, seems—if anything—to get worse. Uti Possidetis has not arrived; it has not even approached. Legitimacy has not been achieved.

  1989—the year that Peace appeared—was the year that the Berlin Wall was torn down and that the worldwide Soviet threat—including its threat to the Middle East—seemingly had disappeared. A similar disintegration of Russian power, followed by its reappearance, had formed the subject of the concluding chapters of Peace. Indeed, seen in longer perspective, the ups and downs in the danger posed by the Russians had been a recurring theme in world politics for the past two hundred years—at least as seen by the West.

  The Soviet presence in world affairs had been a source of frustration for several generations of American policymakers, among them the framers of the United Nations. In designing the peace after World War Two, Franklin Roosevelt and his lieutenants aimed at doing the reverse of what had been done in the Settlement of 1922. They tried to foster independence and self-determination; and their priority—or so they believed—was to consider the needs and desires of the peoples about whom decisions were being made. But everywhere, blocking Washington, was the immovable Soviet Union. The Soviets, despite their communist ideology, were almost as single-minded in serving only the interests of their own country as, for example, France had been in negotiating the Settlement of 1922.

  So when the Soviet Union came apart twenty years ago, it was a liberation for Americans. Now—it was commonly said—our government would be free to do anything we wanted it to do. Endlessly we repeated that exhilarating description of our new situation: “the sole superpower.” After the events of 1989, a U.S.-led international armada was assembled in the early 1990s for the Gulf War that was to express America’s newfound freedom. We undid Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, and announced the arrival of a “new world order.” We claimed that we no longer needed to take into account what the Soviets might do in response. That may have been our undoing.

  We did not bother to remind ourselves of the considerable literature that warns that unrestrained power is something dangerous: dangerous even if exercised by us; dangerous, not only to others, but also to ourselves.

  It now looks as though the United States was never all-powerful. But Americans, especially those in the media and in the academy, did not doubt that we were; and what the United States chose to do—in Iraq and elsewhere—with the unfettered freedom that it had thought it had may suggest that it is a good thing that we were not as powerful as we believed ourselves to be. It might show that we were better off with less freedom of choice and less ability to make mistakes.

  Indeed it appears—in retrospect—that the menacing and countervailing power of the Soviet Union in the Cold War era had provided us with a sort of discipline that obliged us to take careful account of realities and that made us think harder and think better in formulating our own policies; and to some extent that may well have been a salutary thing for us.

  Memento mori: A Peace to End All Peace begins with a reminder of the mortality of even the greatest empires. The book starts with a description of the British Admiralty yacht Enchantress, as it glides into the Mediterranean Sea for a pleasure cruise. Aboard, among others, is the Prime Minister—the leader—of Great Britain. Britain at the time ruled the greatest empire in the world—and indeed the greatest empire that the world had ever seen.

  The Prime Minister and his companions were sightseers. They had come to view the remains of classical antiquity. They wandered through the shattered streets of the ancient empires, created by the great conquerors, Alexander the Great and the Caesars. Mention was made of the Akkadians, who created the planet’s first empire in the dawn of history.

  The guests aboard the Enchantress lived in a world of empires. Other than their own, there were those of their allies, the French Empire and the Russian Empire, and of their enemies to be, the German Empire and the Austrian Empire. The Middle East was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, as it had been for five hundred years, and by the Persian Empire, as it had been, in one form or another, for about 2,500 years.

  All of that changed—all the world changed—after the terrible war of 1914–1918 and the disastrous peace that followed it.

  When the Great War finally came to an end, the Allies, who tried to take the future of the Middle East in hand, imposed on much of the Arab-speaking world a set of political arrangements that, not without reason, was attacked as imperialistic. In thinking of the lessons of this book readers are urged to be lenient in judging persons of an earlier and more innocent age, less experienced than our own—and to keep some mitigating points in mind.

  First, while the authors of the Settlement of 1922 were animated by imperialism, the only world they knew was the world of empires, and it would be unfair to criticize them for that: almost everyone was animated by imperialism. The winners were empires; but so were the losers.

  Second, though these statesmen, in rebuilding the postwar Middle East, pursued only the national interest of their own countries, that—a century ago—was what they were supposed to do. It was their job. Only in our modern interdependent world are broader concerns required or even encouraged. Only today do we claim to speak for mankind.

  Third, while it may have been chauvinist of British officials in the 1920s and 1930s to say that Arab countries were not ready for self-government—which is to say, liberal democratic constitutional regimes with rule of law—evidence as of our own late date does not seem to prove them wrong. The Economist (April 3, 2004, page 47) is on record as saying that “The Arab League’s 22 states remain the most uniformly oligarchic slice of the world. Not a single Arab leader has ever been peacefully ousted at the ballot box.”

  Fourth, the air bases and other military stations that Britain retained in the Middle East pursuant to the Settlement of 1922 enabled the British to suppress threats from dangerous pro-Nazi German forces throughout the Middle East—in Iraq, Iran, Palestine, Syria-Lebanon, and Egypt—when the Second World War began. F
rom a British point of view—which is the only point of view that British officials can be expected to have taken—this both validated the Settlement and showed its value.

  Some of the international problems that arose from events narrated in Peace seem—at the moment—to be insoluble. But if we range ahead, as historians sometimes do, viewpoints can differ. In the long range, problems in politics may be solved; even more often, they are superseded. Old enmities can on occasion be forgotten as new enemies arise. And however slowly, over the long term people change; after all, it took Europe a millennium and a half after the fall of Rome’s Western empire to settle comfortably into its new map, as readers of this book have already been reminded.

  The fall of the Ottoman Empire was one of history’s major upheavals. It was not on the scale of Rome’s fall; nor had the Porte’s roots sunk so deep as those of the Caesars. Nonetheless it was a large happening—a political earthquake—and it was only to be expected that it would take time for the shattered pieces to be reassembled in one lasting pattern, or another.

  As the third millennium and the twenty-first century dawned, the United States tried giving history a push by invading Iraq. A whole library of books waits to be written about this extraordinary event and its consequences. In the perspective of this anniversary of A Peace to End All Peace, what ought to be said about the Middle East then and now is that much has happened, but it does not look as though anything fundamental has changed.

  NOTES

  CHAPTER 1

  1 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), p. 263.

  2 Ibid., p. 264.

  3 Ibid., p. 262.

  4 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 2

  1 For a fuller discussion, with citations, see David Fromkin, “The Great Game in Asia,” Foreign Affairs (spring 1980), p. 936. Also see Edward Ingram, Commitment to Empire: Prophecies of the Great Game in Asia 1797–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); and Edward Ingram, The Beginnings of the Great Game in Asia 1828–1834 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979).

  2 George N. Curzon, Persia and the Persian Question (London: Frank Cass, 1966), Vol. 1, pp. 3–4.

  3 G. D. Clayton, Britain and the Eastern Question: Missolonghi to Gallipoli (London: University of London Press, 1971), p. 139.

  4 J. W. Kaye, according to H. W. C. Davis, “The Great Game in Asia, 1800–1844”, Raleigh Lecture on History (London: British Academy, 1926), pp. 3–4.

  5 Marian Kent, Oil and Empire: British Policy and Mesopotamian Oil, 1900–1920 (London: Macmillan Press for the London School of Economics, 1976), p. 6, and app. 8.

  6 Quoted in Arthur Swinson, North-West Frontier: People and Events, 1839–1947 (London: Hutchinson, 1967), p. 142.

  7 M. S. Anderson, The Eastern Question, 1774–1923: A Study in International Relations (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1966), p. 224.

  8 Lady Gwendolen Cecil, Life of Robert Marquis of Salisbury (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1921), Vol. 2, p. 326.

  9 Paul Kennedy, The Realities behind Diplomacy: Background Influences on British External Policy, 1865–1980 (Glasgow: Fontana, 1981), p. 20; Paul Kennedy, “A Historian of Imperial Decline Looks at America,” International Herald Tribune, 3 November 1982, p. 6.

  10 P. L. Cottrell, British Overseas Investment in the Nineteenth Century (London: Macmillan Press, 1975), p. 9.

  11 Walter Bagehot, The Collected Works (London: The Economist, 1974), Vol. 8, p. 306.

  12 Viscount Grey of Falloden, Twenty-Five Years, 1892–1916 (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1925), Vol. 1, p. 152.

  CHAPTER 3

  1 Thirty million: Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey: 1800–1914 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 1. Fifty million: George Lenczowski, The Middle East in World Affairs, 4th edn (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1980), p. 28.

  2 The Arab War: Confidential Information for General Headquarters from Gertrude Bell, Being Despatches Reprinted from the Secret “Arab Bulletin” (Great Britain: The Golden Cockerel Press, n.d.), p. 9.

  3 Issawi, Economic History of Turkey, p. 353.

  4 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edn, s.v. “Constantinople.”

  5 Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 2nd edn (London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), p. 228.

  6 John Presland (pseudonym for Gladys Skelton), Deedes Bey: A Study of Sir Wyndham Deedes 1883–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1942), p. 19.

  7 Margaret FitzHerbert, The Man Who Was Greenmantle: A Biography of Aubrey Herbert (London: John Murray, 1983), p. 83.

  8 Elie Kedourie, Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies (London: Frank Cass, 1974), p. 244.

  9 Ibid., p. 260.

  10 Ibid., p. 257.

  11 Ibid., p. 261.

  12 Ibid., p. 255.

  13 For accounts of the origins and internal workings of the Young Turkey movement, see Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969); and Ernest Edmondson Ramsaur, Jr, The Young Turks: Prelude to the Revolution of 1908 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

  14 John Buchan, Greenmantle (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1916), ch. 1; Lewis, Modern Turkey, pp. 207–8, n. 4.

  CHAPTER 4

  1 Charles Issawi, The Economic History of Turkey: 1800–1914 (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 151.

  2 Ibid.

  3 Ibid.

  4 Ibid., pp. 146–7 and 152–77.

  5 Ibid., p. 147.

  6 Ibid., p. 177.

  7 Ibid., p. 178.

  8 Harry N. Howard, The Partition of Turkey: A Diplomatic History 1913–1923 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), pp. 47 et seq.

  9 Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliphs’ Last Heritage: A Short History of the Turkish Empire (London: Macmillan, 1915), p. 2.

  10 Ahmed Djemal Pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman: 1913–1919 (New York: George H. Doran, 1922), p. 108.

  11 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 3: 1914–1916, The Challenge of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 189.

  12 Ibid., p. 190.

  13 Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire: 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 20.

  14 Ibid., p. 19.

  15 Ibid.

  CHAPTER 5

  1 Ted Morgan, Churchill: Young Man in a Hurry, 1874–1915 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), p. 314.

  2 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), p. 262.

  CHAPTER 6

  1 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 3: 1914–1916, The Challenge of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), pp. 179–80.

  2 Ibid., opposite p. 156.

  3 Richard Hough, The Great War at Sea: 1914–1918 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 71.

  4 Lord Kinross, Ataturk: A Biography of Mustafa Kemal, Father of Modern Turkey (New York: William Morrow, 1965), p. 79; Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 311.

  5 Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis: 1911–1914 (London: Thornton Butterworth, 1923), pp. 208–9.

  6 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume, Vol. 3, Part 1: July 1914–April 1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), pp. 1–2.

  7 Ibid., p. 3.

  8 Ibid., pp. 2–3.

  9 Ibid., p. 5.

  10 Ibid.

  11 Ibid., p. 10.

  12 Ibid., p. 9.

  13 Ibid., p. 16.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Ibid., p. 19.

  16 Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire: 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 15.

  17 Ibid., pp. 19–20.

  18 Ibid., p. 16.

  19 J. A. S. Grenville, The Major International Tre
aties 1914–1973: A History and Guide with Texts (New York: Stein & Day, 1975), p. 24; Harry N. Howard, The Partition of Turkey: A Diplomatic History 1913–1923 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), p. 49.

  20 Trumpener, Ottoman Empire, pp. 14, 22.

  21 Trumpener, Ottoman Empire.

  22 Gilbert, Churchill: Companion Volume, p. 36.

  23 Y. T. Kurat, “How Turkey Drifted into World War I,” in K. C. Bourne and D. C. Watt (eds), Studies in International History (London: Longman, 1967), p. 299.

  CHAPTER 7

  1 The account in the text follows that in Ulrich Trumpener, Germany and the Ottoman Empire: 1914–1918 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1968).

  2 Violet Bonham Carter, Winston Churchill as I Knew Him (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode and Collins, 1965), pp. 321–2.

  3 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill: Companion Volume, Vol. 3, Part 1: July 1914–April 1915 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), p. 73.

  4 Ibid.

  5 Stanford J. Shaw and Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, Vol. 2: Reform, Revolution and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, 1808–1975 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 312.

  6 Ibid., p. 311.

  7 H. H. Asquith, Letters to Venetia Stanley, ed. by Michael and Eleanor Brock (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), p. 168.

  8 Ibid., p. 171.

  9 John Presland (pseudonym for Gladys Skelton), Deedes Bey: A Study of Sir Wyndham Deedes 1883–1923 (London: Macmillan, 1942), pp. 138–9.

  10 Gilbert, Churchill: Companion Volume, p. 58.

  11 Harry N. Howard, The Partition of Turkey: A Diplomatic History 1913–1923 (New York: Howard Fertig, 1966), p. 49.

  12 Martin Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Vol. 3: 1914–1916, The Challenge of War (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971), p. 210.