The Iraq war and the Future of the Middle East: Historical perspective

A renowned professor of International relations Fred Halliday said that the reverberations of the Iraq war will be as profound for the future of the Middle East as were two epic dates in its 20th- century past He is right indeed.
In Variations on Day and Night - the first volume of his great historical trilogy of the modern Arab world - the late Saudi writer Abdelrahman Munif describes the impact on the region of the first world war and the collapse of the Ottoman empire:
“The world, the whole world, in that quaking era, so full of anticipation and possibilities, looked around, as slow as a tortoise, as swift as a bolt of lightning, to question, to listen carefully for distant thunder, watching with dread for the approaching morrow. Then, everything was open to reevaluation, to reapportionment: ideas, regions, countries, even kings, sultans and little princes. New states rose suddenly, and others vanished.”
This is a good time to recall such words. Amid all the retrospective analysis, after forty years, of the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 it is necessary to set this event in some perspective and context. It was arguably one of the most important moments in the modern history of the Middle East, on a par with the Iranian revolution of 1978-79 and the American invasion of Iraq in 2003 - but it was not the most important. That honour belongs to the early part of the 20th century, the moment in relation to which the regions of today and all Israeli-Arab wars - past and future - have to be seen.
The first world war more than any other since the rise.
The Ottoman empire in the 15th century, defined the modern middle east. It was this war that created the system of states - twenty or so Arab and three non-Arab - that characterise the region today.
It was also this event that drew the boxes within which, like some great historical colouring scheme, modernity created the modern nations of the region out of a motley collection of pre-existing peoples, geographical terms and myths (even as, like those everywhere else in the world, they proceeded to claim ancient affiliation). In larger measure, indeed, the map of the region has remained the same since Winston Churchill and his associates drew it around 1920: this was the founding moment.
The “great war” of 1914-18 finished a process that had begun long before its outbreak. In the 19th century, colonial Europe had implanted itself on the other peripheries of the Ottoman Empire: the French and Italians in North Africa, the British in Egypt, Cyprus, Aden and the smaller Gulf states. The formerly Ottoman Balkans had already been carved up by Russia and Austria, with bit parts for the Greeks, Bulgarians, Albanians and Romanians in their wake.
But it was after the defeat of the Ottomans in the Great War, in a war they unwisely and unnecessarily chose to enter, that the French and British delimited and indeed invented (by transforming hitherto loose names into specific territorial boxes) what became Iraq, Lebanon, Syria.
In the territories that remained outside colonial control, new authoritarian and nationalist military regimes arose - modernising, secular and nationalist in Iran and Turkey, conservative and tribal in Yemen and Saudi Arabia. In Palestine, Zionism - the movement that aimed to create a Jewish state in the territories once inhabited for a few centuries by the modern Jews’ remote ancestors - received a green light from the British in the form of the Balfour declaration of November 1917.
The losers were those peoples who, trusting in the promises of British diplomats and of American President Wilson, had sought recognition and support from the western states: the Kurds who, despite a vague promise of consultation in the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, got nothing; the Armenians, who emerged from genocide with a rump state around the hitherto provincial town of Yerevan that immediately fell under Soviet control; and the Arabs, who found themselves fragmented and dominated.
Thus did the global conflict shape the territorial map and state character of the Middle East. No subsequent conflict - not the Second World War, the decolonisation that followed it or the cold war - had any comparable effect. In the eight decades since the 1920 settlement, all attempts at Arab unity have failed, with the exception of the fusion of the two Yemens in 1990; the consensual unity of Egypt and Syria broke apart in 1961, Saddam’s “unity of tanks” failed in 1990 with regard to Kuwait.
With regard to the Turks, it was one of the great achievements of Kemal Ataturk that, after he completed his “liberation war” in 1923, he got his people to accept the much reduced boundaries that eventuated from the great war (even if his successors have eroded this: episodically in regard to northern Iraq, more enduringly in northern Cyprus).
The Iranians on their side have not used force to pose any serious territorial demands on anyone in the past century and half: in today’s tense times, it is worth remembering that the last occasion Iran invaded a foreign country was when Shah Nader Shah occupied Delhi in 1736 - a non-aggression record of nearly three centuries which no other significant state in the world, even including Scandinavia, can claim.
The same is true, despite all the changes of frontier and speculations about settlement and withdrawal, of the Arab-Israeli conflict. In summary terms, a civil war has continued with sporadic intensity between the two communities, Israeli and Palestinian, who have been formed in Palestine (neither a Jewish “Israeli” nor an Arab “Palestinian” nation existed before); yet the actual borders within which this conflict has been fought out are that of 1920.
The first Arab-Israeli war of 1948-49 did repartition the area of Palestine, between Israel and the Arab states (Jordan on the West Bank, Egypt in Gaza) but this redrawing of the map proved to be temporary: 1967 brought all into one box again. This is all the clearer since 2000, when the collapse of the Yasser Arafat-Ehud Barak talks at Camp David and the outbreak of the second intifada marked the end of any realistic prospect of a two-state solution.
The point about Hamas - reinforced by its combative campaign against Fatah in Gaza in these days of internecine conflict - is that it is not interested in what may be termed “the agenda of 1967”, i.e. some kind of compromise or repartition. Nor, as is evident, is the majority of Israeli public opinion.
(To be continued…)