How we got here

I’ve just finished reading A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin’s account of how the modern Middle East emerged from the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

I have to say, I don’t know why I read it, because I knew it wasn’t going end well, even if I didn’t know the precise mechanisms. (I felt the same when I read An Honourable Defeat, a history of German resistance to the Nazis. The efforts were indeed honourable, but defeat was definitely the operative term. Likewise when I went to see Glory. I didn’t really know anything about the Massachusetts 54th, the regiment of black volunteers sent to fight in South Carolina. But I did know those coastal forts weren’t taken until the end of the war, and only then from the sea. So I knew the film was going to end badly.)

Really, being a historian is a depressing vocation. Again and again you are faced with the reality that governments, being composed of people with all their venalities and foibles, act not for the common good, but for personal and short-term advancement. And decade after decade, century upon century, we the people end up picking up the tab for these policies.

In the case of the Middle East, our current geo-political pickle was put into brine during and after World War I by France, Germany, Britain and Russia/USSR, all licking their chops at the possibilities of scooping up land and assets once the Ottoman Turks went down the tubes. Regardless of their actual resources (which were being poured into the trenches of Europe like water down a drain), they planned and plotted to absorb great swaths of Ottoman territories, in utter ignorance of Turkish capabilities. The Turks, it seems, were expected to collapse on demand.

Alas, it didn’t go to plan. All the jockeying for land-grabs, putting up puppet kings and emirs to represent interests, intrigues, deals made with no intent to ever honor them—this is what we ended up with. The British pols in particular (including Churchill) thought they were so clever; but this is their legacy.

I’ve now turned to The Annotated Wind in the Willows. I’m hoping it will be less depressing.