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Letter to the editor

Peace treaty paved a path to war in Iraq

The ill-conceived map-juggling at Versailles in 1919 further inflamed cultural antipathies still boiling over in the Middle East. David Andelman writes all about it in A Shattered Peace.

By Colette Bancroft, Times Book Editor
Published October 25, 2007

The Iraq War: Roots and Realities
David A. Andelman (A Shattered Peace), Aidan Delgado (The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes From a Conscientious Objector) and Malcolm MacPherson (Hocus POTUS) will appear at the Times Festival of Reading at 10:15 a.m. Saturday in the Fish & Wildlife Institute auditorium. 

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David Andelman has had a stellar career. Currently executive editor of Forbes.com, one of the Web's largest business and financial sites, he was for many years a foreign correspondent for the New York Times and CBS News, reporting from more than 50 countries.

For his new book Andelman, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, has expanded the honors thesis he wrote while a student at Harvard. A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today is an insightful history of the post-World War I treaty that redrew the maps of Europe, Asia and the Middle East - and the dire consequences of that political exercise, not the least of which is the current threat of terrorism by Islamic extremists.

As Andelman writes in his prologue: "If there was a single moment in the 20th century when it all might have been different, this was the moment: Paris, 1919. The end of the Great War, which in perfect hindsight we call World War I, changed everything. Certainly the peace imposed at Versailles by the Western powers - Britain, France, Italy and the United States - on the vanquished, not to mention the weak, the powerless, the orphaned and the friendless, determined much of what went wrong for the balance of the century and beyond."

In this excerpt, Andelman examines the origins of the modern nation of Iraq, which was created by the treaty. He also describes the installation as king of Iraq of Feisal ibn Hussein, a Bedouin prince born in Arabia who sought the unification of the Arab peoples.

Excerpt from A Shattered Peace:

This kingdom of Mesopotamia, its tight boundaries also drawn by the Peace Conference, comprised a pernicious stewpot of hostile religions and conflicting nationalities. Kurds, Sunnis, Shiites, and Jews - each group sought to preserve at all costs its religion and its way of life. This was far from the grand, loose pan-Arab confederation Feisal had envisioned. Yet within the borders of Mesopotamia were the holiest sites for the practice of the religious beliefs that were as important to each Moslem as life itself. For Shiites, the city of Samarra is the place where their last and greatest leader, the mystical Twelfth Imam, disappeared as a child but where he will reputedly come again to save the world. Pilgrims pray for the return of this "Hidden Imam." Karbala, site of the massacre of Husayn ibn Ali, the Prophet Muhammad's grandson, is another of Shiites' holiest shrines. At Najaf, site of the tomb of the man Shiites believe is the righteous calif and first imam, many Moslems begin the hajd - the pilgrimage to Mecca. For the Sunnis, who dominated the Ottoman Empire, Baghdad served as the sacred Abassid capital from which the caliphs ruled for more than five centuries. But with the arrival of British overlords, suddenly all these religions felt threatened. The Ottomans, though Turkish foreigners, at least were not infidels. Now infidels were at the gates of their shrines - and, whether British or American, they would stay there until the present, despite every violent effort to expel them.

Like the other mandates, Iraq was little more than nineteenth-century imperialism barely covered with the fig leaf of Wilsonian self-determination. Geographically it was an amalgam of three Ottoman provinces. Basra, Baghdad and Mosul had little in common. Much like the similarly artificial nation of Yugoslavia, with multiple religions and ethnicities, Iraq was destined for internal conflict and bloodshed from its birth. From the beginning, even its Arab majority was divided along religious lines. Over half were Shiites, concentrated in the oil-rich southern sectors, more closely aligned with the populace of neighboring Iran than with the Sunni tribes who dominated the countryside. This was a reality that no Western occupier has ever understood. In the north and center were large Sunni Kurdish populations along with Assyrian Christians and large numbers of Jews in Baghdad, many of them businessmen and tradesmen. Most ultimately fled to Israel, leaving behind an economic vacuum. Yet the Sunni leadership was born to rule - inheriting political and military skills from the once all-powerful Ottoman establishment.

The first explosion was not long in coming. In June 1920, the tribes of the Euphrates rose up against their British masters - a rebellion that cost Britain 40-million pounds and 450 troops, leaving 10,000 Iraqis dead. That's when Winston Churchill finally realized that direct rule would never work and he sought a ruler he could control. Enter Feisal. The Hashemite prince, stateless since the French deposed him in Syria, was the perfect puppet. Though a foreigner to the people of Mesopotamia, he was quickly "elected" in a stage-managed national referendum, paraded into Baghdad, and crowned in a comic-opera ceremony that might have been produced by Gilbert and Sullivan, complete with a small military band playing God Save the King.

Excerpted from "A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today" by David A. Andelman; © 2008 by David A. Andelman. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, John Wiley & Sons.

[Last modified October 24, 2007, 20:07:00]