Note from "A Peace to End All Peace" by David Fromkin
I placed the creation of the modern Middle East in a wider
frame work: I see what happened as the culmination of the 19th century Great Game, and therefore saw Russia,
too, playing a leading role in the story. It was in whole or in part because of
Russia that Kitchener initiated a British alliance with the Arab Muslim world;
that Britain and France, though they would’ve preferred to preserve the Turkish
Empire in the region, decided instead to occupy and partition the Middle East;
that the foreign office publicly proclaimed British support for the
establishment of a Jewish national home in Palestine; and that, after the war,
a number of British officials felt that Britain was obliged to hold the line in
the middle east against crusading Bolshevism.
This is a book about the decision making process, and in the
1914 to 1922 period, Europeans and Americans were the only ones seated around
the table when decisions were made. It was an era in which Middle Eastern
countries and frontiers were fabricated in Europe. Iraq and what we now call
Jordan, for example, we’re British inventions, lines drawn on an empty map by
British politicians after the First World War; while the boundaries of Saudi
Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq were established by a British civil servant in 1922,
and the frontiers between Muslims and Christians were drawn by France in
Syria-Lebanon and by Russia on the borders of Armenia and Soviet Azerbaijan.
The European powers at that time believed they could change
Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their
attempts to do so introduced an artificial state system in the Middle East that
has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today.
The year 1922 seems to me to have been the point of no
return in setting the various clans of the Middle East on their collision
courses…By 1922, however, the choices had narrowed and the courses had been
set; the Middle East had started along a road that was to lead to the endless
wars (between Israel and her neighbors, among others, and between rival
militias in Lebanon) and to the always-escalating acts of terrorism that have
been a characteristic feature of international life in the 1970s and 1980s.
Above all, we see Britain embarking on a vast new imperial
enterprise in the Middle East—one that would take generations to achieve, if
its object were to remake the Middle East as India had been remade…
