A Peace to End all Peace Read online

  A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE

  ALSO BY DAVID FROMKIN

  The Independence of Nations

  The Question of Government

  DAVID FROMKIN

  A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE

  THE FALL OF THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE AND THE CREATION OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST

  A HOLT PAPERBACK

  HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

  NEW YORK

  “After ‘the war to end war’ they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris at making a ‘Peace to end Peace.’”

  Archibald Wavell (later Field Marshal Earl Wavell), an officer who served under Allenby in the Palestine campaign, commenting on the treaties bringing the First World War to an end

  CONTENTS

  List of Illustrations and Maps

  Photo Credits

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Spelling

  Introduction

  PART I At the Crossroads of History

  1 THE LAST DAYS OF OLD EUROPE

  2 THE LEGACY OF THE GREAT GAME IN ASIA

  3 THE MIDDLE EAST BEFORE THE WAR

  4 THE YOUNG TURKS URGENTLY SEEK AN ALLY

  5 WINSTON CHURCHILL ON THE EVE OF WAR

  6 CHURCHILL SEIZES TURKEY’S WARSHIPS

  7 AN INTRIGUE AT THE SUBLIME PORTE

  PART II Kitchener of Khartoum Looks Ahead

  8 KITCHENER TAKES COMMAND

  9 KITCHENER’S LIEUTENANTS

  10 KITCHENER SETS OUT TO CAPTURE ISLAM

  11 INDIA PROTESTS

  12 THE MAN IN THE MIDDLE

  PART III Britain is Drawn into the Middle Eastern Quagmire

  13 THE TURKISH COMMANDERS ALMOST LOSE THE WAR

  14 KITCHENER ALLOWS BRITAIN TO ATTACK TURKEY

  15 ON TO VICTORY AT THE DARDANELLES

  16 RUSSIA’S GRAB FOR TURKEY

  17 DEFINING BRITAIN’S GOALS IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  18 AT THE NARROWS OF FORTUNE

  19 THE WARRIORS

  20 THE POLITICIANS

  21 THE LIGHT THAT FAILED

  22 CREATING THE ARAB BUREAU

  23 MAKING PROMISES TO THE ARABS

  24 MAKING PROMISES TO THE EUROPEAN ALLIES

  25 TURKEY’S TRIUMPH AT THE TIGRIS

  PART IV Subversion

  26 BEHIND ENEMY LINES

  27 KITCHENER’S LAST MISSION

  28 HUSSEIN’S REVOLT

  PART V The Allies at the Nadir of Their Fortunes

  29 THE FALL OF THE ALLIED GOVERNMENTS: BRITAIN AND FRANCE

  30 THE OVERTHROW OF THE CZAR

  PART VI New Worlds and Promised Lands

  31 THE NEW WORLD

  32 LLOYD GEORGE’S ZIONISM

  33 TOWARD THE BALFOUR DECLARATION

  34 THE PROMISED LAND

  PART VII Invading the Middle East

  35 JERUSALEM FOR CHRISTMAS

  36 THE ROAD TO DAMASCUS

  37 THE BATTLE FOR SYRIA

  PART VIII The Spoils of Victory

  38 THE PARTING OF THE WAYS

  39 BY THE SHORES OF TROY

  PART IX The Tide Goes Out

  40 THE TICKING CLOCK

  41 BETRAYAL

  42 THE UNREAL WORLD OF THE PEACE CONFERENCES

  PART X Storm over Asia

  43 THE TROUBLES BEGIN: 1919–1921

  44 EGYPT: THE WINTER OF 1918–1919

  45 AFGHANISTAN: THE SPRING OF 1919

  46 ARABIA: THE SPRING OF 1919

  47 TURKEY: JANUARY 1920

  48 SYRIA AND LEBANON: THE SPRING AND SUMMER OF 1920

  49 EASTERN PALESTINE (TRANSJORDAN): 1920

  50 PALESTINE—ARABS AND JEWS: 1920

  51 MESOPOTAMIA (IRAQ): 1920

  52 PERSIA (IRAN): 1920

  PART XI Russia Returns to the Middle East

  53 UNMASKING BRITAIN’S ENEMIES

  54 THE SOVIET CHALLENGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  55 MOSCOW’S GOALS

  56 A DEATH IN BUKHARA

  PART XII The Middle Eastern Settlement of 1922

  57 WINSTON CHURCHILL TAKES CHARGE

  58 CHURCHILL AND THE QUESTION OF PALESTINE

  59 THE ALLIANCES COME APART

  60 A GREEK TRAGEDY

  61 THE SETTLEMENT OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN QUESTION

  Afterword to the 2009 Edition

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS AND MAPS

  1 Lord Kitchener

  2 Sir Mark Sykes

  3 Enver

  4 Talaat

  5 Djemal

  6 Crowds gather outside the Sublime Porte, 1913

  7 Turkish soldiers at Dardanelles fort, 1915

  8 Allied fleet at entrance to Dardanelles

  9 Pictorial map of the Dardanelles

  10 H.M.S. Cornwallis

  11 Anzac beach

  12 Australian troops at Gallipoli

  13 Winston Churchill

  14 Russian troop column

  15 Russian advance-guard in Turkey, 1916

  16 Russian occupation of Erzerum

  17 Russian troops in Trebizond

  18 British camel column in the Jordan Valley

  19 British survey party in Palestine

  20 Transport camels

  21 View of Beersheba

  22 The Hejaz flag

  23 Prince Feisal

  24 King Hussein of the Hejaz

  25 T.E. Lawrence with Lowell Thomas

  26 David Ben-Gurion

  27 Vladimir Jabotinsky

  28 Chaim Weizmann with Lord Balfour

  29 Union Jack hoisted above Basra

  30 Street scene in Baghdad

  31 Reading of General Allenby’s proclamation of martial law, 1917

  32 Australian Light Horse entering Damascus, 1918

  33 General Allenby enters Aleppo, 1919

  34 Ottoman soldiers surrender, November 1918

  35 British sentry, Constantinople, 1920

  36 Admiral Calthorpe’s flagship, 1918

  37 Woodrow Wilson

  38 Lloyd George

  39 Signing of the Treaty of Sèvres, 1920

  40 British bluejackets in Constantinople, 1920

  41 French quarter of Smyrna after the fall of the city, 1922

  42 French troops enter Damascus, 1920

  43 Bodies of Greek soldiers in a Turkish field, 1922

  44 Mustapha Kemal

  45 Reza Khan

  46 Amanullah Khan

  47 King Fuad of Egypt

  48 Zaghlul Pasha

  49 Sons of King Hussein of the Hejaz: Feisal, King of Iraq; Abdullah, Emir of Transjordan; and Ali, later briefly to be King of the Hejaz

  50 Ibn Saud with Sir Percy Cox and Gertrude Bell

  Photo Credits

  1, 3, 4, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 47, 80 are reproduced courtesy of The Illustrated London News Picture Library, London.

  2, 5, 25, 45, 49 are reproduced courtesy of UPI/Bettmann Newsphotos, New York.

  26 is reproduced courtesy of the Bettmann Archive, New York.

  27 and 28 are reproduced courtesy of the Zionist Archives and Library.

  Maps (Between pages 20 and 21)

  The Middle East in 1914

  The Campaign in Central Asia

  The Greek-Turkish War

  The Middle East in the 1920s

  Cartography by Sue Lawes

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The idea of writing this book came to me in the course of a conversation with Timothy Dickinson in which he asked my views about the history of the Middle East. Later I put my ideas in written form. Jason Epstein suggested that the book be structured around a personality
. I took his suggestion and chose Winston Churchill. Now I cannot think of how the book could have been structured any other way.

  As books on my subject appeared in London, my friend and colleague Robert L. Sigmon would buy them for me and send them to me by airmail. And Professor Stanley Mallach of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee helped me find books I could not find elsewhere.

  Alain Silvera, Professor of History at Bryn Mawr College and a lifelong friend, kept me abreast of the latest scholarship by supplying me with articles from learned journals as well as valuable ideas, information, and suggestions. He read and re-read the manuscript and offered detailed marginal corrections and comments. He showed the manuscript also to his Ph.D. student Kay Patterson, who offered extensive and careful comments. At my request, Professor Ernest Gellner of Cambridge University kindly arranged for me to meet Professor Elie Kedourie, whom I wanted to persuade to be the other academic reader of my manuscript. Professor Kedourie read the manuscript and gave me the benefit of his immense erudition and authoritative comments. I am grateful to him, and to Mrs Kedourie for her kindness and patience in putting up with my demands on her husband’s time. Dr Nicholas Rizopoulos read the Greek-Turkish episodes and offered valuable suggestions. I hope I need not add that Professor Kedourie, Professor Silvera, Dr Rizopoulos, and Mrs Patterson are not responsible in any way for the opinions and conclusions I express in the book. Moreover, the manuscript has been extensively rewritten since they saw it, so there may well be factual or other statements in it they would have advised me to change.

  Academic readers, in particular, will observe in reading the book that I owe an immense intellectual debt to the books and essays of many other scholars—more, indeed, than there is space to name here. Chief among those to whom I am thus indebted are Elie Kedourie, for his masterful studies of Middle Eastern and British history and politics, and Martin Gilbert, whose great life of Winston Churchill is essential to anyone writing about this period. I have leaned heavily on Gilbert’s volumes—as everyone now must. And I was inspired by the example of Howard Sachar to believe that a history of the Middle East can be written—as I was attempting to do—on a very broad scale.

  Samuel Clayton, the son of Sir Gilbert Clayton, was kind enough to spend the best part of an afternoon talking to me about his father. My thanks to him, and to his wife, the Lady Mary, for their hospitality in having me to tea at Kensington Palace.

  In the course of my research in archives in Britain and elsewhere over the years, I have benefited from the kindness and patience of such unfailingly helpful librarians as Lesley Forbes of the University of Durham, Clive Hughes of the Imperial War Museum, Norman Higson of the University of Hull, Alan Bell of Rhodes House, Oxford, and Gillian Grant of the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford. My heartfelt thanks to them all.

  I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Rob Cowley, my editor at Henry Holt and an authority on the First World War, for his knowledgeable and helpful suggestions and for his constant encouragement and enthusiasm. Marian Wood at Henry Holt and Sara Menguç at André Deutsch saw me through the publication process with unfailing cheer and awesome efficiency.

  For permission to reproduce quotations from documents I am indebted to the following:

  —The Clerk of the Records, House of Lords Record Office, for permission to quote from the Lloyd George Papers in the Beaverbrook Collection in the custody of the House of Lords Record Office;

  —the Sudan Archive of the University of Durham, on whose extensive collection I have drawn freely;

  —Mrs Theresa Searight, and the Rhodes House Library, for permission to quote from the diaries of Richard Meinertzhagen;

  —the Brynmor Jones Library of the University of Hull and Sir Tatton Sykes, Bart., for permission to quote from the papers of Sir Mark Sykes;

  —the Middle East Centre, St Antony’s College, Oxford, for permission to quote from their extensive collection, including the papers of Sir Hubert Young, T. E. Lawrence, Lord Allenby, William Yale, F. R. Somerset, C. D. Brunton, and the King Feisal and Balfour Declaration files;

  —the Warden and Fellows of New College, Oxford, for permission to quote from Lord Milner’s files;

  —the Trustees of the Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives at King’s College, London, for permission to quote from Lord Allenby’s papers.

  Transcripts/Translations of Crown copyright records in the Public Record Office appear by permission of the Controller of H. M. Stationery Office.

  For access to documentary material, I wish also to thank the British Library, London; Camellia Investments, Plc, London; the Weizmann Archives, Rehovot, Israel; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; the Imperial War Museum, London; the Houghton Library of Harvard University; and the New York Public Library.

  A Note on Spelling

  In spelling Turkish, Arabic, and Persian names and titles, I have used whatever form of spelling I am most familiar with from my reading over the years. So there is no system or consistency in it; but I would guess that the spellings most familiar to me will be the most familiar to the general reader as well.

  INTRODUCTION

  The Middle East, as we know it from today’s headlines, emerged from decisions made by the Allies during and after the First World War. In the pages that follow I set out to tell in one volume the wide-ranging story of how and why—and out of what hopes and fears, loves and hatreds, mistakes and misunderstandings—these decisions were made.

  Russian and French official accounts of what they were doing in the Middle East at that time were, not unnaturally, works of propaganda; British official accounts—and even the later memoirs of the officials concerned—were untruthful too. British officials who played a major role in the making of these decisions provided a version of events that was, at best, edited and, at worst, fictitious. They sought to hide their meddling in Moslem religious affairs (pages 96–105) and to pretend that they had entered the Middle East as patrons of Arab independence—a cause in which they did not in fact believe. Moreover, the Arab Revolt that formed the centerpiece of their narrative occurred not so much in reality as in the wonderful imagination of T. E. Lawrence, a teller of fantastic tales whom the American showman Lowell Thomas transformed into “Lawrence of Arabia.”

  The truth has come out over the course of decades in bits and pieces, and now, toward the end, in one great heap, with the opening of archives of hitherto secret official documents and private papers. It seemed to me—in 1979, when I started my research—that we had arrived at a point where at last it would be possible to tell the real story of what happened; hence this book.

  During the past decade I have worked in the archives, studied the literature, and put together the findings of modern scholarship to show the picture that is formed when the pieces of the puzzle are assembled. The authors whose works I cite in the Notes at the end of the book made most of the new discoveries, though I have made some too: what the Young Turk leaders may have done in order to persuade the Germans to ally with them on 1 August 1914 (pages 60–6), for example, and why the Arab negotiator al-Faruqi may have drawn a line through inland Syria as the frontier of Arab national independence (page 178).

  Then, too, I may be the first to disentangle, or at any rate to draw attention to, the many misunderstandings which in 1916 set off a hidden tug-of-war within the British bureaucracy between Sir Mark Sykes, London’s desk man in charge of the Middle East, and his friend Gilbert Clayton, the head of intelligence in Cairo (page 193). I found that neither Sykes nor Clayton ever realized that Sykes, in the 1916 negotiations with France, misunderstood what Clayton had asked him to do. Sykes did the exact opposite, believing in all innocence that he was carrying out Clayton’s wishes, while Clayton felt sure that Sykes had knowingly let him down. Since Clayton never mentioned the matter to him, Sykes remained unaware that differences had arisen between him and his colleague. So in the months and years that followed, Sykes mistakenly assumed that he and Clayton were still at one, when in fact within the bu
reaucracy Clayton had become an adversary of his policy—and perhaps the most dangerous one.

  Getting the bureaucratic politics right—and I hope that is what I have done—has been one of my chief endeavors. But I have tried to do more than clarify specific processes and episodes. The book is meant to give a panoramic view of what was happening to the Middle East as a whole, and to show that its reshaping was a function of Great Power politics at a unique time: the exact moment when the waves of western European imperial expansionism flowed forward to hit their high-water mark, and then felt the first powerful tugs of the tide that was going to pull them back.

  The Middle East, as I conceive it, means not only Egypt, Israel, Iran, Turkey, and the Arab states of Asia, but also Soviet Central Asia and Afghanistan: the entire arena in which Britain, from the Napoleonic Wars onward, fought to shield the road to India from the onslaughts first of France and then of Russia in what came to be known as “the Great Game.”