Iraq

IN NOVEMBER 1914, the Ottoman Empire threw in its lot with that of imperial Germany and the Austrian Empire in World War I. Consequently, when the Western Allies were victorious, the Muslim Ottoman Empire, which had once posed a mortal threat to Christian Europe, was swept away. The words of the Iranian poet Firdawsi, which Ottoman Emperor Mehmet II spoke as he entered vanquished Constantinople in 1453, now stood as an epitaph for his empire. Firdawsi wrote, “the spider serves as gate-keeper in Khusrau's [Cyrus the Persian's] hall; the owl plays his music in the palace of Afraisiyab.”

With the fall of Damascus, Syria, in 1918 to the British Empire forces of General Edmund Allenby, the future of what would be Irak—later Iraq—entered the spotlight. Captain T E. Lawrence, the future Lawrence of Arabia, had joined the Arab Revolt in December 1916, after having served British military intelligence in the Arab Bureau in Cairo. The revolt was led by Sharif Hussein, the keeper of the great Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina. However, operational control was invested in his son, Prince Faisal, and it was to Faisal that Lawrence traveled with promises of British support and shipments of British gold. Even then, Lawrence saw future promise in Hussein and his sons. (Another son, Abdullah, served as his father's astute political advisor.) In February 1917, Lawrence wrote, “the Arab Movement has the capacity for expansion over a very wide area.” While a guerrilla force, and thus unable to face the Ottoman Turks and their German advisers in open battle, Lawrence, Faisal, and the Arabs pinned down a significant number of Turks with their hit-and-run desert war. Peter Mansfield wrote in A History of the Middle East that the Arab Revolt “immobilized some 30,000 Turkish troops along the Hejaz Railway from Amman to Medina and prevented the Turco-German forces in Syria from linking up with the Turkish garrison in Yemen.” When Allenby launched his Big Push with his attacks on Gaza and Beersheba on October 31, 1917, the Arabs played a vital role in harassing the Turkish Fourth Army. Lawrence and Faisal continued to make a signal contribution up to the ultimate triumph at the fall of Damascus in September 1918.

However, while Lawrence was urging Faisal and the Arabs to carry on against the Turks, at the same time he was cognizant of the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, which had divided up the Middle East possessions of the Turks between the French and English. Roughly speaking, Great Britain would fall heir to Palestine, today's Israel, the West Bank, and Jordan, and France would receive modern Syria and Lebanon.

Feeling guilt at his duplicity, Lawrence nevertheless backed Faisal to be king of Syria and Lebanon. France responded with a military invasion that defeated Faisal and his followers. A French League of Nations mandate was proclaimed by the French for Greater Syria (Lebanon and Syria) on September 1, 1920. Faced with this patent betrayal of the promises of freedom that Lawrence and the British had given during the war, the entire Arab world simmered on the brink of a massive jihad, or holy war. British Colonial Secretary Winston S. Churchill, faced with the possibility of a situation England might not be able to contain (the rebellion in Ireland was raging at the same time) called a conference in Cairo in March 1921 to address the fulminating Middle East. Churchill, later a conservative luminary in London, as was his father Randolph Churchill, sought the advice of Lawrence, Allenby, and Gertrude Bell, perhaps the most influential woman in British foreign relations.

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