The fall of the Ottoman Empire is the key to the shape of today’s Middle East. Since 11 September 2001 it has also affected the West, since the restoration of the Islamic Caliphate that accompanied the Sultan’s title is one of the main aims of Islamic terror groups worldwide.
In 1998 and in many pronouncements since, Osama bin Laden began to refer to the ‘suffering of the past eighty years’. Since we are used to statements from Palestinian nationalists, and their anger over the creation of Israel in 1948–50 – not eighty years before 1998 – this might at first seem puzzling. But although bin Laden has now added the Palestinian cause to his list of grievances, it was indeed to the events of 1918 he was referring, namely the defeat of the Ottoman Empire.
In the twenty-first century we live with the consequences – Islamic terrorism, Palestine vs. Israel, the Intifada, the war in Iraq, Saudi petrodollars, and even the wars in Europe’s backyard, in Bosnia and Kosovo. All these stem from the Ottoman Empire’s demise. In the same way that historians have attributed the Second World War to the unfinished business of Versailles in 1919, we can do the same with the results of the Ottoman defeat in 1918 in relation to the conflict in the contemporary Middle East.
While I was writing this chapter, Hamas, the radical Islamic group, won the Palestinian elections, to considerable comment in both the Middle East and the West. Although it is too early to predict the consequences of their victory, it has certainly increased the stakes in the Palestinian conflict, since Hamas, unlike the more secular PLO, rejects the very right of Israel to exist. Thus do the decisions of the Allies back in 1918–21 still reverberate strongly.
At the beginning of this book a warning was given against the dangers of reading the present back into the past. The history of both World Wars is a classic example of writing what happened in the light of the known ending. There were many times, beloved of counter-factual historians who love to explore different endings, when both wars could have easily gone the other way. We are very aware of this in relation to the wars against Germany, how 1914 nearly repeated the French defeat of 1870, and how the actual defeat of France in 1940 almost led, had the Battle of Britain gone the other way, to a British disaster as well. In both wars the intervention of the USA made all the difference towards the final Allied victory.
In the Second World War, the immense, and sadly all-too-easily-forgotten, bravery of the Red Army made the crucial difference to the outcome of the war in Europe. But in the First World War, the Russians were, for all intents and purposes, defeated, with the Soviet decision in 1917 to cease fighting. The Russian juggernaut, so crucial to victory in 1944–5, played no such role in Allied victory by 1918.
The historian John Charmley argued in his book review in the Guardian of Winston’s Folly on 27 November 2005 that the Ottoman defeat was by no means inevitable. This is surely correct, for the reasons that we saw in the last chapter. In fact we are so used to the nineteenth-century story of the Sick Man of Europe that we tend to see history from 1798 onwards as leading to the Empire’s inexorable disappearance. But such a view, while understandable, is mistaken. Yes, the Ottoman Empire did fall in 1918, to be abolished in 1922 (and the Caliphate in 1924). But nothing that happened was foreordained.
To begin with, what proved fatal to the Empire was the decision of the Young Turk-dominated government to join Germany, and the other Central Powers, in the autumn of 1914, some weeks after the war in the rest of Europe had already begun. This was a major shift in policy, since the Ottomans had traditionally been friendly with both Britain and France. But as these two powers were now allied to the traditional Ottoman enemy, the Russian Empire, the strategic situation had thus changed from the Ottoman perspective. In addition, the Kaiser of Germany had been actively courting the Ottoman government, and the Germans helped to train the Ottoman army in the same way as the British had been giving active assistance to their fleet.
Here Churchill made a foolish move. Turkey had ordered two brand-new battleships – Dreadnoughts – from Britain. But when war broke out Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, impounded them for the Royal Navy, which infuriated the Turks. Germany, seeing an opportunity, promptly gave two of its battleships that were at the time in Ottoman territorial waters to the Ottoman government. This proved immensely popular, and combined with the close links now being established between German officers and the Ottoman military elite, enhanced German–Ottoman relations. Churchill’s major diplomatic blunder had played straight into the hands of those Young Turks, such as Enver Pasha, who wanted the Ottomans to switch allegiance to Germany.
Had the Turks decided to stay neutral, as they chose to do for all but the last few weeks of the Second World War when they joined the Allies at the end in 1945, there would have been no defeat. Without losing a war, the Empire could well have tottered on for several more years, and then, possibly, have imploded from within rather than being conquered from without.
Now however the Ottoman government was firmly allied to Germany and Austria-Hungary, and since these two powers were on the losing side, the Ottomans were to be as well, albeit in the long run rather than the short term, as we shall now see.
Two things could, even after the Ottomans took their fatal decision, have still resulted in the war going the other way. These are the Desert Revolt, in which Arab rebels, with British help, fought against their fellow Muslim overlords, and secondly, the consequences of the Ottoman victories over the Allies at both Gallipoli and Kut, a town to the south of Ctesiphon, on the river Tigris.
With the revolt in the desert, we are misled, especially by the self-propagated legend of Lawrence of Arabia, not to mention the nature of the revolt itself. For, as historians such as David Fromkin and Efraim and Inari Karsh have demonstrated – along with a recent, non-hagiographical biography of T. E. Lawrence by Michael Asher – the whole story of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom is more fantasy than truth. It is not just a case of events happening very differently from the way that Lawrence portrays them, though that is now probably the case. It is also the uncomfortable fact that most Arabs did not join the revolt and were happy to continue under Ottoman rule. In terms of what happened later in the Middle East, this is important to remember, as it has twenty-first-century consequences.
When war broke out in late 1914, the British decided to attack the Ottomans on two fronts. The first, and far more famous assault, reflected the daring of its inventor, Winston Churchill, the First Lord of the Admiralty.
If one looks at a map, it is clear that the Ottoman capital, Istanbul, was highly vulnerable to a seaborne attack, through the Dardanelles and into the Bosporus. Capture the capital city, and the whole empire could fall quickly. Churchill, with his usual flair for thinking the unthinkable, realized this and began planning a sea and land invasion to finish off the Ottomans in one bold stroke.
Had he been successful, there is little doubt that the war could have ended much more quickly, millions of lives would have been saved, and events would have taken a radically different turn. The British and French could then have opened up a second front against Germany’s more precarious ally, Bulgaria, which would in turn have meant that the Germans would be fighting a war on three fronts: in the Balkans, in the West, and in the East. This might in turn have helped sustain the increasingly rotten edifice of Tsarist Russia, which was to collapse in 1917, in large part as a result of the corrupt and gross mismanagement of the war.
Had it succeeded, as the Cabinet Office War Rooms Museum in London reminds us, Churchill might even have become prime minister sooner rather than later. As it was, the inefficiency, inter-service rivalry and lack of co-ordination, and numerous other factors doomed the British, Australian and New Zealand forces trying to capture the Dardanelles from the very beginning. Almost as soon as they had landed at Gallipoli, the invasion started to go wrong, and after much carnage the Allies had ignominiously to withdraw.
Here it is fair to say that although Gallipoli is remembered with much bitterness in Australia and New Zealand, since the ANZAC forces suffered huge casualties, many British lives were lost as well. It was, in short, a military disaster for the West, and for Churchill’s career in particular. He lost his post in the Government, and the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, had to resign over Kut. It only confirmed the view that many held of Churchill as a rash, self-promoting adventurer, whose reckless gamble had needlessly cost far too many lives. While there is much truth in this, the real tragedy is that if his stroke of the imagination had succeeded, far more lives would have been saved on all fronts of the war than were lost in the Gallipoli debacle; in addition the main assault on the Ottoman Empire would not have had to wait another two years and one of the worst incidents of the war could have been averted, namely the massacre of the Armenians. This still rankles, with the whole subject remaining a strong taboo in twenty-first-century Turkey, as we shall see.
It was not just Western bungling that led to the disaster. The West seriously underestimated their Ottoman enemy, as they would do at several other battles; they had witnessed Ottoman forces losing to Balkan armies in 1912–13, and made the probably racist assumption to the effect that European armies were innately superior to those of Turkish origin. This proved very far indeed from being the case: Turkish soldiers proved themselves to be some of the very best in the world, and consistently so throughout the conflict.
In addition Western leaders were ignorant, until too late, of the brilliant generalship of the Ottoman commander, a Turkish general from the Greek part of the Empire called Mustapha Kemal (later Kemal Ataturk) who would ironically win a major war over the Greeks in 1922. He learned many lessons from his victory, and would soon put them to excellent use.
Gallipoli was not the only British disaster against the Turks. Less remembered today, but no less important, was the equally major loss to the Ottomans of the siege of Kut. This was a town in Mesopotamia to which the British-commanded troops – a mix of British and Indian – were obliged to withdraw ignominiously after being hammered by strategically superior Turkish troops just outside Baghdad at Ctesiphon.
The British commander, Sir Charles Townsend, had become famous years earlier through his brave leadership in 1895 of the British forces besieged in Chitral, a town on the Indian North-West Frontier. Now, in 1915, he was asked to lead an army all the way from Basra, the port town that the British had captured easily, to Baghdad, the capital of the Ottoman vilayet (province) of the same name.
(It is important to remember that no such state as Iraq existed in 1915 since all the borders of the present-day Middle East are the artificial, post-1918, creation of the European powers.)
This was a tall order; the temperature was often well over 100°F, the British and Indian soldiers were drastically under-equipped and the troops lacked the protection needed both from the excessive heat and from the ravages of upset stomachs. The best way forward was by boat, but apart from inadequate local barges no major transport ships were available. Nor were there really enough troops for the job, such were the arrogant assumptions of Western superiority over Ottoman troops.
But despite these numerous shortcomings – of which Townsend was not unaware – the British/Indian flotilla began its slow journey up the Euphrates in the autumn of 1915.
Initial progress seemed most promising – by November they had captured some key towns along the river, and had reached Ctesiphon, the ancient capital of the Sassanian Empire that had been destroyed by Muhammad in the seventh century. But here everything began seriously to unravel. The actual battle at Ctesiphon, in November 1915, can best be described as a draw. But Townsend realized that he did not now have anywhere near enough troops to proceed on to Baghdad, since the Ottoman positions were exceptionally well fortified. Once again, Turkish troops showed that they easily matched their opponents and were the equal of any European army.
Townsend therefore retreated to the town of Kut with all his wounded, many of whom died en route because there were not proper stretchers to convey them. But the Anglo-Indian army was no sooner embedded at Kut than it was surrounded by Ottoman troops. The siege of Kut, the longest in the history of the British army, had begun. Townsend, with his victory at Chitral, knew all about sieges, and in theory a relief force should have been swiftly upon its way to relieve the garrison. This however proved not to be the case.
For as month after month went by, no relieving force came, and when some finally arrived, several months later, they were utterly unable to dislodge the Turks, break through along the Euphrates, and rescue their besieged comrades. So after five months of attrition, starvation and utter despair, Townsend was forced to surrender to the Turks.
This was a military catastrophe for the British, one of the very worst in the history of the British Empire. Worse still, while Townsend and some of the top officers were taken to luxury imprisonment in Constantinople, the vast bulk of the ordinary soldiers endured forced marches across the desert into captivity, with many dying in the blistering sun en route.
But far worse than any British suffering in Mesopotamia or Australian losses in Gallipoli was the massacre of hundreds of thousands of innocent Armenian civilians by Turkish soldiers and also by Kurdish auxiliary forces. This was, as has now been realized, the first genocide of the twentieth century. Since the Turks escaped any responsibility for this atrocity, Hitler in the 1930s sometimes asked, ‘Who remembers the Armenians?’ Sadly all too few people do – it is the forgotten Holocaust, even though it was every bit as savage as that of the Jews in the 1940s and the tragically, equally forgotten near-million who died in the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, together with those many more whose lives were adversely affected by it.
As recently as 2005, the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk came very close to being prosecuted and imprisoned for telling the truth about the Armenian massacres, so sensitive a topic does this remain in twenty-first-century Turkey. The American bestseller The Burning Tigris by Peter Balakian, about the massacres, shows that the Armenians have just as much right to be remembered as genocide victims as their equally tragic Jewish counterparts twenty and more years later.
As we saw from the earlier bin Laden statement, the Arab sense of betrayal, stemming from the First World War, remains acute to this day. In discussing this part of Middle Eastern history, we are entering a historiographical minefield! Who said what to whom has become part of the debate on the foundation of the state of Israel, since without the decisions made by British and French soldiers and politicians in this period, the very existence of a Jewish state might never have taken place.
Efraim and Inari Karsh, in their highly influential (and thus equally controversial) Empires of the Sand show that the sequence of events leading to the Arab Revolt, and the actual fighting itself, was also very different from the popular version. Their argument in a nutshell is that the key Arab players were not betrayed pawns, as David Lean’s 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia and Arab myth would have us believe, but active participants in a complex series of games in which they won some and lost some. In other words, they argue that the powerful Arab/ Islamic sense of victimization that has permeated the Middle East for decades is from this perspective unjustifiable.
This is what has made their work so debatable, and in reality a step too far. The situation, while easy to explain, was actually more subtle than that, and the Arabs do have good cause to feel at least some grievance at what happened next.
When the British found themselves at war with the Ottoman Empire, they also found themselves with two major problems. In some ways the less important was the geographical/security issue – the protection of the Suez Canal route to Asia. This was the vital artery to the Raj, the Jewel in the British Crown. It had to be defended, and so holding on to Egypt became vital.
(Two British historians, Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, argued in their book Africa and the Victorians that this also led to the decision to colonize vast swathes of Africa in the late nineteenth century. While debatable, it does show the critical importance of the Suez Canal route to India, something that obsessed the British imperial class for many decades, right down to the Suez crisis of 1956. This was nine years after the granting of independence to India, but still at a time when Britain had a large presence in East Asia.)
Procuring the safety of the Suez Canal in 1914 proved easy. Nominal Ottoman suzerainty over Egypt was replaced with a British Protectorate, which made the country into the British-ruled state it had been to all intents and purposes for the previous thirty years. All Ottoman attempts to seize both Egypt and the canal failed – the British position remained safe throughout the war.
There was, however, a much bigger problem that worried the new Secretary of State for War, Lord Kitchener. This was the presence in the British Empire of tens of millions of Muslim subjects. While these were mainly in India (which in those days included present-day Pakistan and Bangladesh), other imperial possessions also had large Muslim populations, from Kenya with an Islamic minority through to the Malay states and their large Muslim majorities. The same applied to the Russian Empire, which had from the late eighteenth century onwards similarly acquired millions of Muslim subjects, from Chechnya to Samarkand. France, too, ruled over large swathes of Muslim Africa, including Algeria and territories such as the present-day Senegal.
When the Ottomans declared war on Britain and Russia, the Sultan, simultaneously, in his capacity as Caliph and Commander of the Faithful, also issued a fatwa, declaring jihad on the Empire’s enemies. (This move was done with enthusiastic German support.) Had the numerous Muslim subjects of the British, French and Russian Empires obeyed the call to overthrow their Christian overlords, the effects would have been catastrophic for the three European imperial powers. The suppression of vast rebellions would have taken more manpower than was available, quite apart from draining vitally needed resources from the war in Europe against Germany. In fact such revolts never happened. For Britain this was especially fortunate, since thousands of soldiers were drawn from the Indian Army, who fought not just in Asia, but also on the Western Front.
But we have hindsight, and Kitchener did not. He had the problem of not only preventing rebellion, but also of persuading Muslim troops under British rule to fight against their spiritual leader, the Caliph, since that same person was also the enemy Sultan.
Here, as David Fromkin, the Karshes and others have shown, came the opportunity for which the leaders of the ambitious Hashemite clan of the Hijaz had been waiting for so long.
The great Abbasid dynasty, as has been shown, was drawn from the tribe of the Prophet Muhammad himself – the Quraysh. However, plenty of members of the Prophet’s own immediate clan, the Hashemites, still existed. Much revered in the Muslim world on account of their blood kinship with Islam’s founder, members of the Hashemite clan had been chosen over many years as custodians of the two holiest Muslim shrines, in Mecca and Medina. Bona fide descendants of the Prophet were known – as they still are – as sharifs, and the Sharif of Mecca and Medina was the official guardian of the two cities. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the current holder of the post was Sharif Hussein, of the Hashemite clan.
We now know that he dreamed of restoring a large Arab empire, not perhaps as vast as that of his Abbasid ancestors, but certainly including all the Arab parts of the Ottoman Empire. Sharing his ambitions were his sons, the most important being Abdullah and Feisal, the latter spending much of his time in Istanbul as a representative in the Ottoman parliament.
Even before Britain and the Ottoman Empire went to war, Abdullah visited Cairo, to see if the British would help with the Hashemite goal of liberating the Arabs from Ottoman rule. Here the story begins to be controversial, as authors such as Efraim Karsh and Inari Karsh attribute the machinations of the Hashemites to personal ambition rather than their professed goal of liberating the Arabs from Turkish oppression. At this distance, and without sufficient firm documentation, it is perhaps impossible to tell – and there is no reason why Abdullah and his family could not have had both ambitions, personal and ethnic, at the same time. Few of us always have pure motives in all that we do and there is no reason to suppose that the Hashemites were any exception, so there seems no reason not to give them the benefit of the doubt, something that Empires of the Sand chooses not to do.
But whatever the motivation, the British authorities in Egypt realized that a golden opportunity was presenting itself, all the more so when war was declared. Here it is important to remember that the British now spoke in two distinct voices. For those in London and Cairo, winning the war was the essential objective, especially on the all-important Western Front. Anything that could help achieve this was worthwhile, including talking to Arabs prepared to help against the Ottoman enemy.
For the Raj however, moves that helped nationalists of any description were unhelpful. While Gandhi was not as famous as he was soon to become, ideas of independence from imperial overlords were not seen as something to be encouraged, especially as they would make British rule in India more difficult to maintain. While British troops in Cairo were commanded from London, those in the Middle East in general, including thousands of Indian Army troops, were under the Raj.
Kitchener realized the potential of a direct descendant of the Prophet Muhammad leading a rebellion against the Ottomans. No one could accuse the Sharif of Mecca of being un-Islamic, and any British conspiracy in which he was involved could thus be defended on religious grounds. From the Hashemite point of view, they had nowhere remotely near the resources to overthrow Ottoman rule themselves. However, aided by no less than the British Empire anything might be possible. British wartime necessities and Hashemite dynastic/ethnic ambitions thus combined in an alliance of convenience against the mutual Ottoman enemy.
On one thing the Lawrence legend is correct – the British were duplicitous. But the actual picture is far more complex than the simplicities of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom or Lawrence of Arabia. The India Office wanted the Arab lands to be British ruled. If a suitable Maharajah-style figure could be interposed between the British and the natives, that would be fine so long as the British were the real rulers, as in certain of the Princely States in the Raj, such as Hyderabad or Mysore.
However, in 1914, the British also had allies and a war in Europe to win. This meant being nice to the French and the Tsarist Russians. It also meant giving part of the Austro-Hungarian enemy to the Italians, as a bribe to switch sides. This succeeded. Italy entered the war against its own former Allies Austria-Hungary, Germany, Bulgaria and the Ottoman Empire.
Italy was also promised some Ottoman territory, mainly in the Aegean – the island of Rhodes, which should by rights have gone to Greece, is one example. But when it came to carving up the Arab Ottoman territories, the spoils were to go to Britain, France and Russia.
This was the infamous deal named after its two organizers – the professional French colonial official, M. Georges Picot, and the amateur diplomat, the British aristocrat, Sir Mark Sykes. Both were, in their own ways, old Middle East hands, and in early 1916 they duly produced what their masters wanted – a carve-up of the Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire.
This was old-fashioned imperialism of the worst kind. Although the agreement allowed for an Arab-ruled state, such an entity would still have been under the protection of European governments, and would certainly not have been the genuinely independent Arab kingdom dreamed of by Hussein and by the Arab nationalists. In essence, Britain, France and Russia would take over much of the Ottoman Empire and rule most of it themselves – there was no room here for Hussein’s wishes, or for anything that he thought that the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, had promised him.
Sykes–Picot gave Britain the two Ottoman vilayets of Basra and Baghdad outright, and France the Lebanese and Syrian coastlines. Palestine, which many people wanted, was to be put under international rule, which would include the still-Imperial Russia. (This was before President Woodrow Wilson of the USA had created his idea of a League of Nations, as America was still neutral at this stage.) In the middle was an Arab zone under British and French protectorate – with the French getting the oil-rich Mosul vilayet of what is now Iraq, and some of the Kurdish areas of present-day Turkey. Britain gained what is now Jordan.
(Russia’s main gains were to be their long-desired presence in Constantinople and some territorial gains in the Caucasus.)
Needless to say, all this contradicted what Sir Henry McMahon had agreed with the Sharif of Mecca. In essence, in a correspondence between McMahon and Sharif Hussein – regrettably not all of which still exists – McMahon promised a large new territory to the Hashemites with no mention of French and British zones, and which looked to Hussein as if the British were giving him nearly all of what he dreamed. This, of course, completely contradicted the other British policy of carving up the area with their French, and initially also Russian, European allies. It is this feeling that the British were duplicitous – saying one thing to Arabs to enlist their support against the Turks, and another to their French co-belligerents – that has caused the story of the great British betrayal to arise, and not without reason.
At the time, Hussein, believing the British, launched the rebellion against his Ottoman overlords that we now know as the Arab Revolt. In reality it was a sideshow despite the aura of romance associated with it in Lawrence of Arabia’s memoirs.
This point, while perhaps new to many, was in fact established back in the 1950s by the London University historian Elie Kedourie, and was eventually published in book form in his work The Chatham House Version. Needless to say, it too is controversial, since it substantially reduces the impact made upon the course of the war by the Arab forces under the nominal command of Hussein’s son Feisal, and helped by Lawrence and the British. On their own, the Arabs involved were certainly able to annoy the Ottomans, but all the major victories that were eventually to be won were by British, Australian, Indian and other regular troops on the two fronts, Egypt/Palestine, and Mesopotamia.
However, unfortunately for the British and French, the Tsarist regime was overthrown in the first of the revolutions in Russia in 1917. The second uprising saw Lenin and the Bolsheviks seize power by promising to take Russia out of the war against Germany. They surrendered substantial territory – including today’s Ukraine – to the Germans and concluded the war formally in the Treaty of Brest Litovsk in 1918.
(Thankfully 1917 also saw American entry into the war, and this considerably offset much of the damage caused by Russian withdrawal.)
The Bolsheviks refused to sign up to any imperialist agreements, and, to the embarrassment of Britain and France, they made public the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916, drawn up when the Russian Empire still existed and was fighting the Turks alongside its British and French allies. Needless to say, the difference between the Sykes–Picot plan and the Hussein– McMahon correspondence became apparent to all.
Many Arabs felt betrayed at the time, and have continued to feel aggrieved ever since. Sykes–Picot has entered the infamy of Western imperialist treachery towards the Arabs, and has not been forgotten. This feeling was not entirely unjustified because, although the British were indeed duplicitous with their Arab ally Hussein, they simultaneously began to regret just how much they had conceded to the French. In fact, the situation was even more complex, as Margaret Macmillan (Lloyd George’s descendant) shows in Peacemakers, her book on the peace treaties.
First of all, the leading British politician, Lord Curzon, himself no mean expert on India and the Middle East, felt that the Sykes–Picot deal was ‘unfortunate’ from the beginning. More important, so did Lloyd George, and he was prime minister. In addition, it made no mention of any Jewish entity in the lands that were to be taken after what everyone hoped would be the Ottoman defeat. But this precise point was at the heart of what became by far the most controversial offer of all, that by British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, in a public letter to Lord Rothschild known as the Balfour Declaration of 1917. In essence, this signified full British agreement to a Jewish homeland in Palestine, in what were then still Ottoman territories but already under British and Australian assault.
This completely contradicted Sykes–Picot, under which the core of Palestine was to be in the international zone. If the Balfour Declaration Jewish-homeland plan was to work, however, the British would need to control Palestine directly, and the relevant parts of Sykes–Picot would need to be overturned. The Declaration also flatly contradicted the promises made to Sharif Hussein, since the latter contained no mention of Jewish immigration to an area that Hussein thought was going to be under his own control. Here we cannot say that McMahon was being deceitful, since his correspondence predates Balfour’s decision on a Jewish homeland. But there is no question but that the latter promise was completely incompatible with the earlier pledges made to Hussein. This too is one of the major causes of the Arab sense of betrayal by the West that has vitiated the Middle East ever since, and from the Arab point of view, with due cause.
By 1917, therefore, in terms of Sykes–Picot, Lloyd George, Curzon and other leading British politicians, already with the ink barely dry, much regretted their decision to allot so much to the French. Furthermore, with the Russians out of the war, and in ideologically hostile hands, all concessions to the old Tsarist regime were now worthless. Far from wanting to carve up the Middle East in accordance with the Sykes–Picot Agreement, Britain wanted now to grab as much of the area for itself as possible, including Palestine, where the Jews were to go, and Mosul, which Lloyd George suspected, correctly, of having large oil reserves.
(It should be noted here that both Winston Churchill, soon to play a key role in the Middle East, and Curzon, Foreign Secretary after 1919, did not rate the oil reserves highly – and no major oil finds were made until the late 1920s. But Lloyd George was right, as we now know: Iraq, in the twenty-first century, is second only to Saudi Arabia in oil reserves.)
So Britain, therefore, especially after 1917, wanted to do all possible to tear up Sykes–Picot and start afresh. If the British were duplicitous towards the Arabs – and there is a good case for saying so – Sykes–Picot had nothing to do with it, and the Lawrence legend that it was that agreement that betrayed the Arabs is wrong. This is because Sykes–Picot, from 1917 and the Balfour Declaration onwards, was no longer British policy.
In other words, as shall become obvious, the West did betray the Arabs, but it was events after Sykes–Picot that caused that to take place, not that notorious agreement itself. Britain now wanted to seize as much Ottoman territory as possible, and for the French to have far less than was originally allocated in 1916 by Sykes and Picot. There was also now the new dimension of the promise to the Jews for a homeland, something that Lloyd George believed in strongly for religious reasons, as shown in the Duchess of Hamilton’s book God, Guns and Israel. The Arabs were going to be betrayed, but for reasons very different from those in the Lawrence legend and Arab mythology, since Sykes–Picot was a dead letter almost as soon as it had been written.
But in order to implement any plan for the Middle East, the Allies first had to beat their Ottoman foes. When Sir Mark Sykes and Georges Picot were meeting and drawing lines in the sand, the situation, from the Allied point of view, was going very badly. Not only that, but in some respects the Ottomans were actually winning.
By 1917 the British had finally learned the lessons of the debacles in Gallipoli and Kut. This time, with far better logistics, a two-pronged invasion was launched against the Ottoman Empire, the main thrust being from Egypt, under Lord Allenby, with a second in Mesopotamia. Both proved successful. Baghdad and Jerusalem were captured in 1917, and by 1918 the Ottoman Empire, like its German and Austro-Hungarian allies, was forced to surrender.
There was one difference, however – whereas the German and Austrian empires disappeared, the Sultan initially remained, along with a vestigial Ottoman administration. Not only that, but events were certainly not as T. E. Lawrence and the myth of Arab betrayal have portrayed. This is entering contentious territory, since present-day twenty-first-century disputes are read backwards, and history is used in contemporary political battles. Since one of the most controversial of these is the struggle between the Arab world and Israel, the history of this period is a minefield.
A treaty with the Ottoman Empire – the Treaty of Sèvres – was finally signed in 1920. Not only did the Empire lose all its Arab lands, but it was obliged to give territory to a new Armenian state – a Kurd state still being an unresolved issue – and, perhaps most controversial of all, cede large swathes of territory to Greece, including land around Smyrna, presentday Izmir. This proved profoundly controversial within the rump Ottoman lands. But unlike in Germany, the Turks rebelled and war broke out between the official government and the rebel army under Mustapha Kemal.
Meanwhile, the British and French had not agreed among themselves what to do with the Arab territories. As we saw, Britain wanted to get out of as much of Sykes–Picot as possible, and to gain far more land than that agreement had allocated them. Fortunately for Lloyd George, Clemenceau, the French prime minister, was far more interested in crushing Germany than in creating a Levantine empire for France. It therefore proved easy for Britain to gain Mosul from the French zone, and to have Palestine under a British League of Nations mandate rather than under international rule. The sticking point was Syria, and it is here that the legend of the great Arab betrayal, beloved of people from T. E. Lawrence to Osama bin Laden, really begins.
It had been British and Australian forces that had liberated Arab territory from the Ottomans – not the campaign waged by Arab troops under Feisal and Lawrence that has become known as the Arab Revolt. In fact, historians, such as Efraim and Inari Karsh, Elie Kedourie and David Fromkin, have now proved that the Arab Revolt made virtually no military difference at all. Its real benefit was in public relations, since in terms of the war, Feisal’s troops were little more than an irritant. Not only that, but the key thing is that most of the Arabs stayed loyal to the Ottomans.
The importance of this cannot be over-emphasized. Not merely did the Arab Revolt change little, but most Arabs failed to support it. They were Muslims, and Ottoman rule had suited them fine. In fact, many of the early Arab nationalists were Christians, from Syria – including Michel Aflaq, the later founder of the Ba’ath Party, the Arab nationalist party through which Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq, and another branch of which rules Syria to this day.
That is not to say that there were no Muslim Arab nationalists. They certainly existed – but in Egypt, over which the British had established a protectorate in 1914, having, as we saw, effectively ruled it since 1882. But these – the Wafd (delegation) – were not anti-Ottoman, but wanted independence from Britain, their colonial overlord.
Nor is this to overlook episodes such as the Arab capture of the Red Sea port of Aqaba in 1917, an incident considerably played up by Lawrence in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, and in David Lean’s film. It is not that the Arabs played no role, but rather that the actual effect that they had is much smaller than many before and since would like to attribute to them.
So the people who wanted Arab independence from the Ottomans were, in essence, the Hashemite dynasty: King Hussein, who proclaimed the independence of the Hijaz, and his most important sons, Feisal, of the Arab Revolt, and Abdullah.
Britain, as John Charmley has pointed out, traditionally ruled its empire through collaborators. The Maharajahs in India, the Sultans in Malaya, various Kings in Africa – all were part of the British policy of indirect rule. It was one of the reasons why the British were able to rule such a vast empire with so few troops and officials, and at comparatively so little cost.
In 1914 the Hashemites in effect offered themselves as Britain’s collaborators in the Arab world. They wanted to rule much of the Middle East, and Britain, as well as needing help in winning the war, needed an intermediary local ruler in classic British imperial style. Hashemite ambition and British necessity thus happily came together in 1918, when the post-war settlement was being worked out.
Part of the legend of betrayal is evident in the scene set in Damascus in Lawrence of Arabia. Feisal had thought that he could be King of Syria, but the wicked British deprived him of power and broke all their promises to the Arab people. Such an argument certainly makes for powerful emotions, but it seriously compresses events, since Feisal was in Damascus for several months in increasing chaos until expelled by the French, a sense that you do not get from either watching the film or from Lawrence’s autobiography.
The legend, therefore, is in fact misleading.
Left to themselves the British would have been happy for Feisal to stay in Damascus as King. However, while Clemenceau could cheerfully concede Palestine and Mosul to Britain, domestic opinion at home prevented him from similarly conceding Syria. So long as British troops controlled Damascus, Feisal was at liberty to stay, accept the Syrian throne, and do whatever he liked. When, however, in 1920, French forces took over, he was instantly expelled, and found himself stateless, with only Lawrence to plead his case. France generally believed in direct rule, and there was no room for puppet rulers in Syria or Lebanon. When the League of Nations formally gave France the mandate, Feisal’s dreams ended.
This was European realpolitik in action; it was not that the British were against Feisal, but more that they had to concede Syria to their French wartime ally, even though British and Australian troops had liberated the territory in 1917. Pleasing Clemenceau was strategically preferable to allowing Feisal to continue on the putative Syrian throne.
Britain, however, still needed an intermediary ruler for its exclusively Arab mandate territories – Mesopotamia (now including Mosul) and Transjordan, the part of Palestine that was not open to Jewish settlement under the 1917 Balfour Declaration. By 1920 the need for a local collaborator had become especially pressing, particularly in the three Mesopotamian provinces, where a major anti-British rebellion had broken out, with not inconsiderable British casualties.
Also by this time, Winston Churchill had returned to office, thanks to the patronage of David Lloyd George. As Secretary of State for War in 1920, Churchill realized that the British Empire was massively over-stretched, and simply did not have the ability to maintain, let alone pay for, a large army in the Middle East. Then in 1921 he became Colonial Secretary and, despite serious reservations by his officials, made T. E. Lawrence one of his key advisers.
Churchill believed in the British Empire. But he was also realistic, and understood that direct rule was no longer feasible. Britain had a debt of honour to the Hashemites, and Feisal, in particular, had a firm ally in both Lawrence, and in Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist who had become one of the mainstays of British policy in the region. They felt that they had let Feisal down in Syria, and wanted to make it up to him. A local collaborator would save money, and in the Hashemites, such people were available. Britain could have its collaborator, and the debt to Feisal could be paid.
As I showed in Winston’s Folly, Churchill’s main aim in 1921 was to save as much money as possible, while also saving British face. His knowledge of the area was woefully small; he had no idea about the difference between a Sunni and a Shia, for example, and while he sympathized with the Kurds, he never delivered when it came to creating an independent Kurdistan. So when Churchill, Lawrence, Bell and various other assorted British officials met in Cairo in early 1921, Churchill opted for the cheapest solution – a new state, to be called Iraq, under Feisal as puppet ruler, and British protection.
Iraq, it is vital to remember, had never existed before. It is an entirely artificial creation, like so many colonial entities all over the world. It was simply the three Ottoman vilayets under British mandate put together as one country – predominantly Shia Basra, Sunni Baghdad, and largely Kurdish Mosul, with, for example, the single largest ethnic group in Baghdad not being even Muslim, but Jewish. A referendum was duly rigged that enabled Feisal, who had never lived in the country before, to be invited to become King. Real power however still lay with the British, even after the mandate ended in the 1930s, right up to the violent overthrow of the Hashemite dynasty in 1958.
Feisal was a Sunni, and while the Sunni Arabs remained – as they are today – very much a minority, they dominated the country right up until the elections of 2005, since both the Hashemite regime and those that followed, such as that of Saddam, were all Sunni as well. Genuine democracy was never able to take root.
Also in 1921, Britain suddenly became concerned with Abdullah, Feisal’s brother. He launched an attempted invasion of Syria against the French. His army was in the Transjordan, when the British stopped him, and bought him off by offering him the Transjordanian throne, again under British protection. Here the story for the Hashemites proved happier, since his descendant, the half-British King Abdullah II, is still on the Jordanian throne. But here again the country created was artificial, with local Bedouin in the same state as town-dwelling Palestinians.
Egypt also gained its nominal independence in 1922. But here the British insisted on reserving all the key powers, such as control of the Suez Canal, a veto on foreign policy, a continued say over the national debt, and the right to maintain an army on Egyptian soil. Since the kings – Mehmet Ali’s descendants – remained corrupt and incompetent, the situation for ordinary Egyptians stayed as bad as ever.
However, the really controversial British decision, fully endorsed by the pro-Jewish Churchill, was the creation of a mandate in Palestine to which Jews could come. This was then as today not accepted by the local Arab population. Their resistance against both British rule and Jewish immigration lasted up until the creation of Israel in 1948. Here the important thing to remember is that Israel was the result of British policy, and that the cause of all that is happening in the region today dates back not to 1948 but to decisions made by Churchill and other Western leaders between 1917 and 1921.
The losers were the Kurds, Armenians, Greeks and ironically, the Hashemite King Feisal. While Efraim and Inari Karsh are right to say that the al-Saud dynasty were winners, so too were the Turks, and the Zionist activists who were busily creating a new Jewish state.
The Kurds, Armenians and Greeks all lost because of the military victories of Mustapha Kemal. Greece wanted too much former Ottoman territory, and after a series of major military defeats, both Greek troops and civilians were expelled from Asia Minor in 1922, in what we today would call ethnic cleansing. (One of the losing Greek generals was Prince Andrew of Greece, father of Britain’s Prince Philip.)
The expulsion of the Greeks, with much violence in Smyrna, ended thousands of years of Greek presence in Anatolia, going back to the time of Xenophon, the Graeco-Persian wars, Alexander the Great, and the Byzantine Empire. Similarly, all Turks were expelled from Greece, where many families had also lived for hundreds of years. (Mustapha Kemal himself had been born in Thessaloniki, for example.)
Lloyd George, a great hellenophile, had wanted to help the Greeks. But the Conservatives in his coalition government regarded this as a war too far, and overthrew him in 1922. (This was not the only reason so far as many Conservatives were concerned – their prime reason was domestic politics rather than overseas strategy. But the risk of dragging a war-weary Britain into yet another conflict certainly gave leading Conservatives the excuse that they had long wanted.)
The French had refused to support Britain against the Turks, and the result was another British withdrawal, this time without conflict, and victory for Mustapha Kemal, who now renamed himself Kemal Ataturk, or Father of the Turks. Lloyd George, the victorious prime minister of the First World War, left power, never to hold it again.
The successful Turkish campaign also put an end to hopes of a greater and independent Armenia, and to any kind of Kurdistan. The original hope was for a greater Armenia to arise, under some kind of American protection or mandate. But this fell through, along with any US involvement in the League of Nations. That part of Armenia conquered by Russia was absorbed into the new USSR, and the rest was seized by Mustapha Kemal’s victorious campaign. Similarly Kemal and his forces overran the northern part of Kurdistan, and this led the British to conclude that the southern Kurdish areas that they protected should be unified with the rest of the new Iraq, rather than become an independent state. The reduced Armenian state finally achieved independence in 1991, but the Kurds, many of whom live in present-day Iran and Syria as well as Iraq and Turkey, never achieved a country of their own.
Kemal Ataturk became president of the new Turkish Republic in 1922, after unifying the country under his rule. He abolished the Ottoman Empire straight away, although initially permitting one of the former ruling family to continue as Caliph of Islam. But in 1924 the Turkish Parliament abolished this post too, thereby ending an office that had existed, off and on, since the death of Muhammad in 632, nearly 1,300 years earlier. Ataturk then began a major modernization programme, reducing the role of Islam, abolishing the Islamic fez, liberating women, introducing the Western alphabet, and much else besides. Turkey was not a pluralistic democracy under his rule, but nor was it a monarchical dictatorship or theocratic state.
The former decision – to opt for a republic over a monarchy – was the opposite of the one taken by Ataturk’s contemporary, Reza, in Persia, which now became Iran.
As we saw, Persia survived Western conquest by being in between the Russian Empire and British Raj in India. After the Bolshevik Revolution, Britain retained an army in Persia, both to stop Soviet incursion and also to protect its oil investments, especially after the huge oil fields of Baku, on the Caspian Sea, became part of the USSR.
The Qajar dynasty was now tottering fatally, and Reza overthrew it in 1925. But instead of establishing a republic, as Ataturk had done in Turkey, he proclaimed himself Shah instead, establishing a new dynasty. This proved fatal to Iranian liberty, and was an instrumental cause of the Shiite theocratic takeover of Iran in 1979.
The decision to opt for a theocratic-based regime was taken by the other major winner of the post-1918 settlement in the Middle East, the al-Saud dynasty. Originally just rulers of the central Arabian state of Nejd, Abdul Aziz al-Saud, known in the West as Ibn Saud, decided to embark on a series of dynastic conquests, with the aim of ruling over as much of the Arabian Peninsula as possible.
The Ibn Rashid state of Shammar in north-western Arabia proved easy to conquer, as that dynasty had foolishly backed the Ottomans. Another, smaller state called Afar on the borders of Yemen, was also captured – the region which would produce most of the 9/11 hijackers in 2001.
Yemen itself however proved impossible to conquer, and both Aden and many other Gulf states (such as Oman, Dubai, Bahrain and Qatar) were under direct British protection. The borders of Kuwait were uncertain, and here Ibn Saud was able to gain much more terrain, under British adjudication, than originally thought possible. He also wanted to take presentday Jordan, and to expand his frontiers at the expense of Iraq, but in both of these the British frustrated him, as they wanted to keep all the territory in their new mandate.
The key area he needed to seize was the large coastal kingdom ruled by the Hashemites – the Hijaz. This was the sacred land of Mecca and Medina, and since, in the days before oil, revenue from the Haj was the most lucrative source of state income, Ibn Saud determined to have it.
Here the ambitions of Hussein played into his hands, with effects that are with us today.
In Islamic terms, the Hashemites – like their modern descendants in Jordan – were moderates, following the mainstream schools of Muslim thought. By contrast the al-Saud followed the very hard-line Hanbali School of interpretation, thanks to the eighteenth-century reformer, al-Wahhab. The deal made then – the Wahhabis would support the al-Saud, in return for the al-Saud clan’s support of Wahhabi Islam – had continued down to the twentieth century (and remains fully in force today). The Wahhabis had a religious shock troop army, the Ilkwhan, and these were the dedicated, elite forces the al-Saud used on their conquests.
With the abolition of the Caliphate, King Hussein had coveted the title, as a descendant of Muhammad, as did the King of Egypt. Neither obtained the title, which was in any case not theirs to demand. Hussein was also angry with the British over Feisal’s failure to gain Syria, and the restrictions placed upon his sons in Iraq and Transjordan by Britain. As a result, he lost the right to British protection, and, in 1924, this proved fatal.
Using his fanatical Ilkwhan holy warriors, Ibn Saud invaded the Hijaz, and conquered it by the end of the year. Mecca and Medina, the two holiest cities in Islam, were now in the theological hands of the hardest-line Muslim group in the Islamic world. Those shrines deemed syncretistic, or somehow un-Islamic, were destroyed, Ibn Saud proclaimed himself ruler of the Hijaz, and in 1932 his conquests were consolidated into a new state, named after his own dynasty, Saudi Arabia. Only the Wahhabi form of Islam was permitted, the version of the Muslim faith not only practised there today, but, thanks to Saudi petrodollars, now spread around the entire Islamic world.
So Turkey became a republic, Iran continued as a monarchy under a new dynasty, and most of the Arabian Peninsula fell under the rule of a clan closely allied to the Wahhabi sect of Islam.
Fareed Zakaria points out the vital importance of all these events in his Newsweek articles written in the aftermath of 9/11 (‘The War on Terror Goes Global’ 13 September 2001 and ‘The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?’ 15 October 2001).
First of all, Turkey lost the war but won the peace. This is crucial. For as Zakaria shows conclusively, the Turks were able to feel good about themselves, despite defeat in 1918 and the loss of their entire Arabic empire. Ataturk was a victorious hero, so modernization, and Europeanization were associated with success, especially as the Turks had beaten a European power – Greece – and humiliated the great British Empire in the process. As I write this, Turkey is a pluralistic parliamentary democracy, a linchpin of the NATO alliance and may soon also be a member of the European Union, French, Greek and Austrian public opinion permitting. Not only that, but the human rights Turks enjoy, while harsh towards the suppressed Kurdish minority, are far ahead of anywhere else in the Islamic world. Furthermore, the Turks’ democratic rights were not forced upon them externally, but introduced by themselves in the aftermath of victory over the Greeks in 1922.
Turkey, one could also point out, was the one losing power of the First World War successfully to be able to negotiate its post-war treaty. The Treaty of Sèvres was torn up and the Treaty of Lausanne, in 1923, recognized Ataturk’s conquests and the withdrawal from Turkish soil of all European armies. This is in contrast to Germany, where German defeat and humiliation in 1918 and the ravages of the Great Crash of 1929 led to Nazi Germany and the Second World War. Turkey, by contrast, stayed neutral for most of the latter conflict, was essentially sympathetic to the West, and joined the Allies just as fighting ended.
This is not the case, however, with the Arab world. While, as has been argued, the myth of betrayal is historically oversimplified, it is, nonetheless, still widely believed in the Middle East today, along with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the post-9/11 myth that all Jews were told not to turn up for work on 11 September 2001. Yet a myth is no less potent for being false or illusory, as the continuing rage of the Islamic world against the West gives credence. We too in the West have many myths, some so potent that we fail to see them as myths at all.
What is especially important is that Muslim Turkey abolished the Caliphate, not the West. Nor did Ataturk try to revive the old Ottoman Empire. He did not, contrary to Churchill’s fears at the time, even attempt to occupy the Mosul province of Iraq, despite its not inconsiderable Turcoman ethnic minority (which is still there). Turkey gained the tiny Alexandretta province of Syria (now called Iskanderun) in 1938 from the French, and has made no territorial demands ever since. Turkey has been ruthless to the Kurds, and also helped Turkish Cypriot separatists in 1974. But the Turkish victories in 1922 enabled the Turks to start their new state on a wholly positive note, and the psychological benefit this has brought is therefore enormous.
In the Arab world it is very different. There, liberation from their fellow Muslim Ottoman Turks was replaced with Western rule, direct in the case of Syria, indirect in the case of the British-mandated areas (except for Palestine). As we saw in the chapter on the Crusades, the Muslim world forgot about the brief loss of territory to the Crusaders, especially since the Muslims won. Now French and British rule, along with the legitimatization of Zionist wishes for Palestine, engendered an Arab/Muslim sense of humiliation and betrayal that still burns in our own time. Not until Nasser’s triumph over Britain and France at Suez in 1956 and the murder of the British-puppet Hashemite dynasty in 1958 could the Arabs feel that they had overthrown the colonial yoke. Then there was Israel, not just after 1948 but after 1967 as well.
The Pakistani academic Akbar Ahmed has pointed out in his many books on Islam that there is a major culture of shame in the Islamic world. While sorrow for events now long past should, one can argue, now be overcome, such a sense of shame is potent and most of it, in the early twenty-first century, can still be attributed to the circumstances of the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
As Efraim and Inari Karsh remind us, the one Arab victor of 1918–24 was the al-Saud family. While the West did not realize it at the time, this was a costly victory. In the light of 9/11, and the Saudi petrodollar-financed spread of Wahhabi Islam to the rest of the hitherto moderate Muslim world, it would have been far better to back Hussein of the Hijaz, whatever his sulk towards the British.
This is, historically, a perfectly legitimate position, and also the fairest. But the unavoidable conclusion is that we still live in our present century with the consequences, often for ill, of the fall of the great Ottoman Empire.