Terrorism in Paris, Sydney
the Legacy of Colonial Blunders
By Stephen
Kinzer
January 20, 2015 "ICH"
- "BG"
- Gertrude Bell was a key architect of the
Sykes-Picot world, the Middle East that
existed for much of the 20th century.
‘A
lot of the problems we are having to
deal with now,” the British Foreign
Secretary Jack Straw said a decade ago, “are
a consequence of our colonial past.” That
was a classic piece of diplomatic
understatement. Wars in the Middle East, and
their recent spillover in Sydney, Ottawa,
and Paris, are the legacy of reckless
colonial blunders. They teach us that
although outside powers may be able to
control faraway lands for a long time, the
final reckoning is often tragic.
In 1921 the British
diplomat and spy Gertrude Bell wrote that
she was “dreadfully occupied in making kings
and governments.” It all seemed quite
romantic. Bell spoke Arabic, charmed sheiks,
and could ride a camel for hours. Nicole
Kidman plays her in a big-budget film
scheduled for release later this year.
Bell was a key architect
of the
Sykes-Picot
world, the Middle East that existed for much
of the 20th century. Along with diplomats
like Mark Sykes and Francois Georges-Picot —
who drew arbitrary lines creating new Arab
countries after World War I — adventurers
like T. E. Lawrence, and a handful of
statesmen in London and Paris, she created
the order that is now collapsing amid
unfathomable violence. If a film about Bell
had been made a generation ago, it might
have been possible to give it a happy
ending. Now she and her fellow colonialists
may be seen as having created a long-fused
time bomb whose explosion is shaking
nations. The collapse of the Sykes-Picot
order is the great geopolitical story of our
age.
It is a mistake to see the
various political and military conflicts now
shaking the Middle East as isolated from
each other. All are part of a broad struggle
to shape a new map of the region. That map
will look quite different from the one that
Bell and her fellow imperialists bequeathed
to us.
Some countries in the
Middle East are doomed. They are unfortunate
accidents of history. Lamentably, their
collapse will take years, with an immense
cost in human suffering.
Syria, which was created
as a French protectorate, exists today only
in name. Iraq, originally dominated by
Britain, is likely to be the next to go. The
way these countries were created — by
outsiders concerned only with their own
interests — all but guaranteed that they
would ultimately collapse.
Elsewhere in the
neighborhood, Yemen is in deep turmoil.
Bahrain is quiet only because its Sunni
government has temporarily managed to
suppress the Shiite majority. Even
long-stable Oman may be in trouble after its
ailing sultan passes from the scene.
Two small countries that
also emerged from the imperial spasms of the
1920s, Lebanon and Jordan, may survive the
coming years of war, but that is far from
guaranteed. In the outer ring of the region,
the long-term future of Libya is bleak, and
Pakistan’s prospects are highly uncertain.
The most intriguing
candidate for collapse is Saudi Arabia. For
more than half a century Saudi leaders
manipulated the United States by feeding our
oil addiction, lavishing money on
politicians, helping to finance American
wars, and buying billions of dollars in
weaponry from US companies. Now the sand is
beginning to shift under their feet.
King Abdullah of Saudi
Arabia is in his 90s and ill. One of his
half-brothers will likely succeed him, but
that will be the end of the line for sons of
the founding ruler, Ibn Saud. After that, a
power struggle within the royal family is
likely. No one can say how intense or
violent it might become, but the prospect of
crisis comes at an especially bad time. The
region is afire and oil prices are
plummeting. It would be foolish to bet that
Saudi Arabia will exist in its current form
a generation from now.
In a region full of fake,
made-up countries, one Muslim power is sure
to survive: Iran. It is the opposite of a
fake country. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan,
and Saudi Arabia are less than a century
old. Iran has existed — more or less within
the same boundaries, with more or less the
same language — for 2,500 years.
Colonialists never managed to divide it, and
it stands today as an island of stability in
a volcanically unstable region.
The arrogance of Middle
East colonialists is easy to see from the
vantage point of history. Lawrence admitted
before his death that they had made “clear
mistakes.” Gertrude Bell wrote, “I’ll never
engage in creating kings again; it’s too
great a strain.” Neither could have foreseen
the horror to which their decisions would
lead. Today’s chaos is a result of their
ignorant meddling. It is an object lesson
for outsiders who today seek to shape the
Middle East.
Stephen Kinzer is a
visiting fellow at the Watson Institute for
International Studies at Brown University.
Follow him on Twitter
@stephenkinzer.
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