Menu
Ireland's political and cultural magazine
70June 2015
I
F Colonel Gadaffi were still running
Libya there would not be mass
migration across the Mediterra-
nean, with thousands drowned because
of unscrupulous traffickers. Gadaffi was
guilty of the sin of all those secular dic-
tators. He was too independent of ‘the
West’. Britain and France, backed by
America, bombed him out of existence.
Their excuse was that he intended
assaulting civilians in a provincial town.
They got the cover of a UN Security
Council resolution, which a weak Russia
failed to veto. Now Libya is a failed state
racked by civil war.
Where do these Mediterranean
migrants come from? Many are from
Syria, another state afflicted by civil war
encouraged by the West. Since the
Syrian rebels against the Assad regime
have been covertly financed and armed
by Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Turkey, with
the CIA and Israeli intelligence oversee-
ing the details.
Recall the House of Commons vote
which denied Tory Premier David Cam-
eron permission to bomb Syria by
votes to in . Encouraged by
the US, Cameron and France’s Hollande
wanted to repeat in Syria the regime-
change they had brought about in Libya
two years before. It was surely Ed Mili-
band’s finest moment as Labour leader
that he refused to go along. Tories
and nine Lib Dems voted against Cam-
eron too. This House of Commons No in
turn gave the US Congress the impetus
to stop Obama’s impending assault on
Assad.
In Syria the pretext was to be that
Assad used chemical weapons against
his foreign-financed rebels. If these
rebels succeed in overthrowing the
Assad regime, the country’s Christians,
Alawites and many Shia Muslims are
likely to have their throats cut.
The paradox now is that support for
the Assad regime in Syria and its Shia-
backed counterpart in Iraq looks like
being the best hope of holding back the
ISIS monster which these ‘rebel’ groups
with their dubious sources of arms and
finance have spawned. America needs
Iran and its clients as allies, not oppo-
nents, in the region.
Najibiullah in Afghanistan, at the
time of the Russian intervention there,
was the first of the secular dictators
America sought to overthrow by back-
ing the mujahideen fundamentalists
against him. Osama Bin Laden was on
the US payroll then. Najibullah was exe-
cuted by the Taliban in .
Saddam Hussein was the second,
overthrown by Bush and Blair in their
invasion of Iraq. When Saddam
ruled Iraq, Sunni, Shia and Christians
lived peaceably side by side. Now Iraq
too is well on the way to being a failed
state, racked by the Shia-Sunni conflict
which America encouraged until the
tormented politics of the region
spawned ISIS. Najibullah, Saddam Hus-
sein, Gadaffi and Assad were certainly
dictators but the West did not realise
that worse could follow.
Since Bush invaded Iraq the USA has
become self-sufficient in oil because of
the fracking revolution. America no
longer needs Saudi oil as it once did.
This is the basis of Obama’s turn
towards Iran, which in turn causes con-
sternation among the Saudis and
Israelis. The Saudi-Israeli response is to
try to up Sunni-Shia antagonism fur-
ther, building on what the Americans
had started, seeking thereby to under-
mine Iran’s clients in the Iraqi and
Syrian governments and in the Leba-
nese Hezbollah, in the hope of stymying
a US-Iran deal.
A seminal book on the historical
Western imperialism stitched up
the area, but it is unravelling.
By Anthony Coughlan
World War 1 and
the Middle-East
INTERNATIONAL Middle-East
June 2015 71
background to the region’s current
anguished politics, is James Barr’s ‘A
Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the
Struggle that shaped the Middle East’.
The catastrophe in the Middle East is
rooted in Western power-grabbing for
the provinces of the Ottoman Empire a
century ago in World War . Iraq, Syria,
Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan were all
Ottoman provinces then. The different
religious communities had lived peace-
ably side by side in them for centuries.
Getting hold of them was one of the war
aims of imperial Britain and imperial
France in . It was why Britain and
France pushed Turkey into an alliance
with Germany in the first months of the
Great War.
What was presented to British and
French public opinion as a war to defend
the rights of small nations and to pre-
vent ‘poor little Belgium’ from falling
under German rule, was seen by these
countries’ Governments as an opportu-
nity to expand their empires in the
Middle East at the expense of the Turks.
Britain particularly wanted to gain con-
trol of Palestine and with it the eastern
approaches to the Suez Canal, that vital
route to Britain’s empire in India.
The Bolsheviks published the secret
treaties between the Entente Powers
within a month of the Revolution,
while simultaneously repudiating them
and announcing Russia’s withdrawal
from the War. The British were embar-
rassed, the Arabs dismayed and the
Turks delighted.
The most important secret treaty was
the agreement in March , just one
month before the Gallipoli operation,
promising Russia control of Constanti-
nople and the Dardanelles after the war,
in return for Russian agreement to sup-
port British interests in Persia, next to
India.
Britain had fought the Crimean War
in to prevent Russia taking Con-
stantinople and establishing itself on
the Mediterranean. For the same reason
Disraeli risked war with Russia in
and sent the British Mediterranean fleet
through the Dardanelles at the time.
In the lead-up to World War , how-
ever, a century of British rivalry with
Russia – the “Great Game” that was
given literary form in Kipling’s novel
‘Kim’ – was abandoned in order to
induce Russia to join France in encir-
cling Germany. Russia and France
together were the only European land
powers that could crush Britain’s rising
commercial rival, Germany. As a sea-
power Britain could help in that defeat,
but only land power and large armies
could ensure a decisive victory.
In early , with stalemate on the
Western Front based on static trench
warfare from the Channel to the Swiss
border, the British and French Govern-
ments were worried that Russia might
pull out of the war altogether in view of
the pasting its armies were taking at the
time from the Germans on the Eastern
Front.
This was the political reason for the
Gallipoli campaign, which began one
hundred years ago last April and con-
tinued until it was aborted in January
. The British undertook it to keep
Russia in the war. At the same time
some historians contend that the Brit-
ish did not really want the Russians to
take Constantinople, which they would
do if Gallipoli succeeded. They suggest
that the Gallipoli campaign was deliber-
ately set up to fail and that that was the
real reason for the disastrous way in
which it was planned and conducted
from the start. Could such cynicism
have characterised Britain’s policy on
Gallipoli? Some believe it could indeed,
especially if it were mostly Australians,
New Zealanders and Irish who were to
die there.
The second important secret treaty,
also at the expense of the Ottomans,
was the Sykes-Picot agreement of May
. Britain promised the Arabs inde-
pendence if they would rebel against the
Turks. Colonel T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence
of Arabia) helped the Arabs in their
rebellion. The Kurds were promised
independence too if they rebelled. But
Lawrence was unaware of the activities
of the French diplomat Georges Picot
and British agent Mark Sykes who on
behalf of their respective governments
drew a line on a map of the region
dividing the Ottoman provinces of the
post-war Middle East between Britain
and France, with the Russians
assenting.
The map signed by the two of them is
still in the archives. It shows a thick
line going from the “A” in Acre to the
“K” in Kirkuk, dividing the entire area
between the Entente Powers after the
War. Sykes-Picot agreed that Britain
would get Palestine, Jordan and Meso-
potamia (now Iraq) and the French
would get Syria and Lebanon. Neither
Arabs nor Kurds would get independent
states.
The Sykes-Picot Agreement led to the
Balfour Declaration the following year,
, which in turn led to the modern
State of Israel. In this British Foreign
Secretary Arthur Balfour promised
Lord Rothschild, leader of Britain’s
Jewish community, that the British Gov-
ernment “views with favour the
establishment in Palestine of a national
home for the Jewish people”. At the time
Britain and France were desperate to
get America into the war on their side.
One motive for the Declaration was to
appeal to the strong Zionists then advis-
ing President Wilson.
When America did join the war the
first item of Wilson’s famous -point
programme for a just peace was that
there should no longer be any secret
treaties between states. Wilson spon-
sored the League of Nations and, to
placate the Americans, Britain and
France agreed that the former Ottoman
provinces carved up by Sykes-Picot
should be run by them as League-man-
dated territories.
Today’s Middle Eastern politics
derive from those events of -.
The main new factor added since is that
the USA took over from Britain and
France following World War , reducing
these former imperial powers to the
status of American satraps. •
Support for
Assad in
Syria and its
Shia-backed
counterpart
in Iraq is the
best hope
of holding
back the ISIS
monster.
America needs
Iran and its
clients
“
Anthony Coughlan is
Associate Professor
Emeritus in Social
Policy at Trinity
College Dublin.
France above;
Britain below
