AS FANCIFUL AS it might seem today, there was a time when the Arab world was not only acquiescent to American involvement in its affairs but fairly clamored for it. This occurred at an absolutely crucial moment in the political evolution of the Middle East, the summer of 1919, and began when a small group of American officials set sail from France for Syria with a lofty goal. While its efforts have been largely airbrushed from history, the King-Crane Commission had the opportunity to fundamentally alter the Middle Eastern chessboard we know today.
For most of the previous four hundred years, the Arab lands of the Middle East had been under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. Quite aware of their technological and military backwardness in comparison to their European imperial rivals, the Ottoman sultans had cleverly converted weakness into a virtue by ruling with a very light touch; so long as the locals in their far-flung empire paid their taxes and met military conscription quotas, they were pretty much left to themselves. Most remarkable was how this laissez-faire approach extended to political organization. In recognition of the Arab world’s fantastically complex social order of tribes and subtribes and clans, joined to the region’s myriad religious groupings, the Ottomans divided their empire into a patchwork of largely autonomous provinces, or vilayets. Further, under the milliyet (“nationalities”) system, each minority religious community was effectively self-governing, overseen by its own religious courts that superseded Ottoman law. These progressive arrangements stood in sharp contrast to the conversion-by-the-sword tactics employed by most European powers at the time.
But in 1914, the Ottomans made a fatal mistake. By joining with Germany and Austro-Hungary on the losing side of World War I, the Ottomans left themselves defenseless against the designs of the victorious imperial powers, Great Britain and France. Having previously seized the Ottomans’ North African territories—most notably, Egypt and Algeria—the British and French at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference set their sights on the Arab heartland itself. Under the terms of the once-secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, that heartland was to be carved up into spheres of British and French control. Any expectation that the Europeans might administer these lands with Ottoman-style finesse was belied by the nickname that officials in the British Foreign Office gave their enterprise: “the Great Loot.”
But there stood one potential obstacle in the European imperialists’ path: U.S. president Woodrow Wilson. Having brought the United States into World War I on the promise of ending the age of imperialism, at Paris he eloquently argued for the self-determination of “small states.” When this high-minded sentiment met with the stiff resistance of his British and French allies, Wilson did what politicians are wont to do in such circumstances: he formed a committee. It was this committee, the King-Crane Commission, that sailed into Jaffa Port on the morning of June 10, 1919. On a mission quite without precedent for the time, they had come to poll the local inhabitants on just what sort of governance they desired.
For nearly two months, the commission traveled through Turkey and greater Syria, holding town hall–style meetings with delegations from most every conceivable ethnic and religious bloc. From these gatherings emerged a startlingly uniform consensus. No one wanted to be ruled by the British, and even less by the French. Rather, they wanted independence or, barring that, an American administration, or mandate.
The King-Crane delegation dutifully wrote up their explosive findings during the return journey to France, with the unanimous recommendation that the United States assume the mandate for Syria. In this proposal, however, they had seriously misread the American president. While eager to lecture his European allies on their moral obligations, Woodrow Wilson was loath that the United States itself should assume foreign responsibilities. With the commission’s inconvenient findings now only a potential embarrassment, its reports were simply locked away in a safe, not to be seen or read by anyone until they were leaked by The New York Times three years later. By then, “the Great Loot” had transpired, and with it the creation of those artificial borders that would be torn apart so extravagantly nearly one hundred years later in the Arab Spring. Also established was a precedent for American inconstancy, a habit of raising hopes in the Arab world and then dashing them in a pattern that would be repeated many times over the next century.
In Mesopotamia, the British joined together three Ottoman vilayets and named it Iraq. The southernmost of these provinces was dominated by Shiite Arabs, the central by Sunni Arabs, and the northernmost by non-Arab Kurds. To the west of Iraq, the European powers took the opposite approach, carving the vast lands of “greater Syria” into smaller, more manageable parcels. Falling under French rule was the smaller rump state of Syria—essentially the nation that exists today—and the coastal enclave of Lebanon, while the British took Palestine and Transjordan, a swath of southern Syria that would eventually become Israel and Jordan. Coming a bit later to the game, in 1934, Italy joined the three ancient North African regions that it had wrested from the Ottomans in 1912 to form the colony of Libya.
To maintain dominion over these fractious territories, the European powers adopted the same divide-and-conquer approach that had served them so well in the colonization of sub-Saharan Africa in the late nineteenth century. This consisted of empowering a local ethnic or religious minority to serve as their local administrators, confident that this minority would never rebel against their foreign overseers lest they be engulfed by the disenfranchised majority.
To this end, in Iraq the British brought over one of their Arabian wartime allies, Faisal Hussein, and installed him as king—never mind that Faisal had absolutely no ties to the region. His monarchy established Sunni primacy in a Shiite-majority state. The French did the opposite in Sunni-majority Syria, empowering the Alawites, a Shiite splinter sect, along with the Christian minority to serve as their local intermediaries. In Libya, the Italians came up with a novel approach: given the deep-seated rivalry that existed between its principal regions, Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, the Italians made each region’s largest city, Tripoli and Benghazi, respectively, a co-capital of the new nation.
This was only the most overt level of the Europeans’ divide-and-conquer strategy. Beneath the sectarian and regional divisions in these “nations” there lay the intricate tapestry of tribe and subtribe and clan, ancient social orders that remained the populations’ principal source of identification and allegiance. Much as the United States Army and white settlers did with Indian tribes in the conquest of the American West, so the British and French and Italians proved adept at pitting these groups against one another, bestowing favors—weapons or food or sinecures—to one faction in return for fighting another. The great difference is that in the American West, the settlers stayed and the tribal system was essentially destroyed. In the Arab world, the Europeans would eventually leave, but the sectarian and tribal schisms they fueled remained.
Through the first half of the twentieth century, these arrangements proved quite durable. Much of this had to do with the enduring poverty and limited technological state of the region. By playing to the benefit of the small local elite, and by upholding the authority of their local pliant ruler, the European imperial powers and their allied corporate interests could rather ignore whatever resentments were building beneath the surface. On those occasions when the resentments did bubble to the surface, swift and brutal action was taken. The most extreme example of this was the Senussi rebellion against Italian rule in Libya’s Cyrenaica province in the late 1920s. By the time the rebellion was crushed in 1930, an estimated one-quarter of Cyrenaica’s population had been killed through Italian poison gas attacks and mass executions. In British-ruled Egypt and Iraq, dominance was retained by more subtle means. While granting both nations nominal independence, Egypt in 1922 and Iraq in 1932, the British inserted “mutual assistance” clauses in the independence charters that enshrined both a continued British military presence and control over their foreign affairs.
It all began to change—and rapidly—at the end of World War II. With the British and French empires clearly in a state of terminal decline, nationalist groups throughout the Middle East, as elsewhere in the developing world, began clamoring for independence. At the same time, vast new oil finds in Saudi Arabia and Iraq were converting the region from an economic backwater into a place of vital geopolitical importance. Further awakening political consciousness was the 1948 creation of the state of Israel, a development that caused outrage throughout the Arab world. By the early 1950s, all that was needed to bring Arab nationalism to full flower, it seemed, was the emergence of a charismatic leader who might speak to both the aspirations and frustrations of the Arab people. That leader was found in the form of a thirty-four-year-old Egyptian lieutenant colonel named Gamal Abdel Nasser.