I think it will be more than Iraq this time around. Here are some reasons, you can agree with them or not.
THE CURSE OF LAWRENCE OF ARABIA
by Jack Wheeler
The most legendary American journalist of the 20th century
was Lowell Thomas. I had the opportunity to meet him in
1978, when we were both guests on The Merv Griffin Show.
Off camera, I asked him, "Do you feel you contributed,
however inadvertently, to the political mess that is the
Middle East today?" He looked at me sharply and asked me
what I meant. "Well, after all," I answered, "it was you
who gave Lawrence's promise to the Hashemites so much
power." His eyes narrowed, and he responded, "That was a
long time ago."
In 1917, Lowell Thomas was a young, ambitious journalist
in search of an interesting story in the lost backwater of
World War I. In Jerusalem, he met a small (5 foot 4)
British Army captain assigned as a liaison officer to
Arabs living in a desert no one had ever heard of. Thomas
saw his chance. His breathless dispatches had the purpose
of creating a myth around the liaison officer who had
begun teaching Arab tribes to blow up Turkish trains
nobody cared about in the desert nobody ever heard of.
The liaison officer's name was T.E. Lawrence, but Lowell
Thomas called him "Lawrence of Arabia." In 1919, Thomas
went on a lecture tour in the United Kingdom and United
States, showing pictures of Lawrence posing in a sheikh's
robes in a London studio, and entranced audiences with
stories about the 'White King of the Arabs.' By the time
the Treaty of Sèvres was negotiated in 1920, with Lawrence
in attendance and the media mob hanging on his every word,
the British felt compelled to keep Lawrence's promise to
the chieftains of an Arab tribe called the Hashemites.
The political structure of the Middle East today is the
result of that promise. The Treaty of Sèvres permitted the
British to seize pieces of the Ottoman Empire, which had
ruled the Middle East for centuries, but joined the
Germans in WWI. Instead of British colonies, the pieces
were called League of Nations 'mandates,' for which the
Brits needed puppet rulers.
One of these 'mandated' areas was the west coast of
Arabia, a desert region called the Hejaz. Lawrence had promised the chieftains of the Hashem tribe that if they
would join the British against the Turks, they would get
to rule the Hejaz as their own kingdom. Thus the Hashem
patriarch, Hussein Ibn Ali, became the King of the Hejaz.
At Lawrence's insistence, the Brits installed Ali's son
Feisal as ruler of the 'mandate' of Syria, divided the
'mandate' of Palestine in two, and installed Feisal's
brother Abdullah as ruler of the part east of the Jordan
River (the western part eventually became Israel 28 years
later, no thanks to the British).
Lawrence (and Thomas) had bought into the phony claim that
the Hashem tribal leaders were directly descended from
Mohammad himself. The Hashemites claimed that this assumed
mantle of Islamic holiness gave them a right to rule,
without elections, all Arabs everywhere. So the Brits
created the Hashemite Kingdoms of Hejaz, Jordan and Syria.
Except, the chieftain of the Wahhabi tribe from central
Arabia, Abdul Aziz ibn Saud, kicked Ali out of Hejaz, took
it over, and called his entire conquered area Saudi Arabia
- while France claimed Syria was their 'mandate' and
kicked out Feisal.
As a consolation prize, Lawrence insisted the Brits
install Feisal as the ruler of yet another "mandate," that
of Mesopotamia. Created out of three former Ottoman
vilayets (provinces) without any regard to national
coherence, this area was renamed Iraq. The Hashemite
Kingdom of Jordan still exists (the current ruler,
Abdullah II, is the first Abdullah's great-grandson), but
the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was erased (with the entire
"royal family," including Feisal's grandson Feisal II,
slaughtered) by a military coup in 1958. Through the help
of Soviet KGB agent Yevgeny Primakov, Saddam Hussein
completed his control over the Iraqi military regime by
1979.
The bottom line to this saga is that Iraq is not a real
country - like, say, Persia (Iran) which has existed for
2,500 years. It is an artificial construct and can only be
held together by force. Iraq and its people have no
history of nor familiarity with democratic institutions.
The three former vilayets of which it is composed still
have no mutual cohesiveness. Mosul in the north is Kurdish, Basra in the south is Shiite Arab, Baghdad in the
middle is Sunni Arab. The Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis all
hate each other. It takes a Saddam to hold the place
together.
And that's why Saddam has been kept in place and allowed
to ignore all those U.N. Resolutions. A disintegrated Iraq
could easily mean an independent Kurdistan, which the
millions of Kurds in Turkey, Syria and Iran would clamor
to join, splitting apart those three countries. It could
mean an independent Basra, or just an inchoate anarchy,
another Somalia. The fear of these post-Saddam scenarios
is what drives much of the international frenzy against GW
taking Saddam out.
It is to GW's enormous credit that he has the intelligence
to realize that the threat of Saddam's rule vastly
outweighs the threat of its dissolution, and the
determination to eliminate the former. It will be near
impossible, however, to eliminate the latter. Let us hope
that GW accepts this reality and assiduously avoids
desperate attempts to put the Humpty Dumpty of a post-
Saddam Iraq back together.
America's and the world's security must no longer be held
hostage to a promise made by a junior British officer to a
bunch of camel-herders wandering around a lost desert 86
years ago - a promise made important by an ambitious
journalist's romantic froth of promotional puffery,
resulting in incalculably tragic consequences as the Curse
of Lawrence of Arabia. |
