WWI and Our Present Day

As the centenary of the Great War comes upon us and passes, much attention will be focused on Flanders Fields, the Somme, and Belleau Wood. But, aside from Gallipoli, the struggles and sacrifices of the global armies that fought on the Ottoman front will largely be ignored. This is a shame.

As the war is remembered in the rest of the world, the part played by combatants on the Ottoman front must be taken into account. For the Ottoman front with it’s soldiers from Britain, France, India, New Zealand, and the Arab states, turned Europe’s Great War into the First World War. And in the Middle East more than in any other part of the world, the legacies of the Great War continue to be felt to the present day.

Allied war planners, believing that a quick victory over a weakened Ottoman empire might bring about a surrender of the Central Powers committed to attacks on Gallipoli and Basra. Instead, after the debacle of Gallipoli the allies found themselves drawn into a series of campaigns in the Sinai, Palestine, Arabia, Mesopotamia, and Syria. These diverted hundreds of thousands of men away from the western front. Rather than bringing about a quick end to the war, the Ottoman front served to prolong it.

The First World War was also tremendously influential in shaping the modern Middle East. The allies capitalized on an emerging Arab independence movement to turn Arabs against the Ottoman Empire. The allies encouraged Arab nationalism, while at the same time wanting to further their own post war territorial ambitions. Of course, the Arabs lost out. With the fall of the Ottoman Empire, European imperialism replaced Turkish rule. After four centuries united in multinational empire under Ottoman Muslim rule, the Arabs found themselves divided into a number of new states under British and French domination. A few countries achieved independence within borders of their own devising, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Iran. But they too were heavily influenced by European interests.

During the entire period of the war post war partition of the region was the subject of intense debate between the allies. In hindsight, the partitions that occurred only make sense within the context of the war. The Constantinople agreement of 1915 when the allies anticipated quick victory at Gallipoli; The Husayn-McMahon correspondence of 1916 when the British desperately needed a Muslim ally; the Balfour Declaration of 1917 when the British wanted to revise the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and take Palestine away from the French. These outlandishly imperialist, or deceptive agreements which were only conceivable in wartime, were designed solely to advance British and French interests.

The borders of the post-war settlement have led to intractable conflict. The Kurdish people were divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria.. The Kurds have been embroiled in conflict with each of their “host” countries in pursuit of their political and cultural interests. Lebanon, created by France as a Christian state succumbed to a string of civil wars as Muslims came to outnumber Christians. Syria was never reconciled to the loss of Lebanon, and seized upon the civil wars to occupy it for 30 years.

Iraq has never known an enduring peace, having a coup and conflict with Britain after WWII, war with Iran from 1980-1988, and an unending cycle of war since Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait to the present day.

That brings us to the Balfour Declaration. The Arab - Israeli conflict, more than any other legacy of postwar partition, has defined the Middle East as a failure. Four major wars between Israel and its Arab neighbors have left the middle east with even more intractable problems that have left refugees scattered over three countries and a created a heavily militarized area. While the Arabs and Israelis share primary responsibility for this, the roots of their conflict are in the fundamental contradictions of the Balfour Declaration.

The legitimacy of frontiers has been called into question since they were first drafted. Since at least the 1940s Arab nationalists have openly called for unity schemes to overthrow boundaries they condemn as imperialist legacy. Pan-islamists have advocated a broader Islamic union with the same goal.

In 2014, a militia calling itself the Islamic State tweeted to its followers that it was “smashing Sykes-Picot” and establishing a Caliphate in territory spanning over northern Syria and Iraq. So, one century later, the borders of the Middle East remain unsettled.




Middle East 1920