The roots, of course, of Arab hostility to Britain lie far deeper than even Prime Minister Tony Blair is likely to recognize. Here are the opening lines of A Shattered Peace:
Spring in Paris, a brilliant Tuesday May 13, 1919. At four o’clock the city is still bathed in that crystal light that washes every building clean, even the aging, but elegant townhouses in the city’s fashionable sixteenth arrondissement. There, on the Rue Nitot, President Woodrow Wilson has gathered the leaders of the four victorious Allies. World War I is over. And now, this small group of statesmen is remaking the world – in their own image. The issue today is Iraq – carving what will become a new nation out of the sands of Mesopotamia. The brilliant young British diplomat, Harold Nicolson, has been cooling his heels in the ante-room, engrossed in The Portrait of Dorian Grey, when suddenly a door flies open and he is summoned into the presence of the leaders. He picks up the story in his diary:
“A heavily furnished study with my huge map on the carpet. Bending over it (bubble, bubble toil and trouble) are Clemenceau, Lloyd George and PW. They have pulled up armchairs and crouch low over the map….They are cutting the Baghdad railway. Clemenceau says nothing during all of this. He sits at the edge of his chair and leans his two blue-gloved hands down upon the map. More than ever does he look like a gorilla of yellow ivory….It is appalling that these ignorant and irresponsible men should be cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake.…Isn’t it terrible, the happiness of millions being discarded in that way? Their decisions are immoral and impracticable….These three ignorant men with a child to lead them….The child , I suppose, is me. Anyhow, it is an anxious child.”
This is only the debut of a startling series of mis-steps by Britain, its prime minister at the time, David Lloyd George, and a host of successors including the redoubtable Winston Churchill, that led to the installation of a puppet King on the throne of an artificial Iraq (née Mesopotamia) and the ultimate arrival in power of Saddam Hussein who held this artificial nation together only by virtue of a reign of terror unprecedented even in this often violent and unpredictable corner of the world.
The fact is that the British, in their own way far more so than the U.S. have been wont to tinker in some mad scientist fashion with remote regions of the globe that they see could serve their own narrow, often parochial interest. That this methodology has found some contiguity in Washington today is a tribute less to the remnants of Britain’s colonial mentality, helas, than to the transmogrification of some sense of western democracy into a political system that can be grafted onto Third World regions that have been designed to our own specifications and which are scarcely prepared or even barely interested in adopting it.
This fundamental theme of A Shattered Peace is applicable equally to the Balkans and communist Europe, to Indochina and the wars that tore that region apart as well as the centuries-old frictions between Japan, China and the West that have been transferred from the battlefield of the 20th century to the trading floor of the 21st.
1 comment:
This looks to be a terrifically timely book. Can we hope the stewards of empire in this benighted 21st-century America will learn anything from it? How silly to think that ours is the only way the world would want to live (whether they realize it or stubbornly do not)! And how much of this "tinkering" is all for the great corporate tailors who fashion what we all think we desire and pocket the handsome profits from the cloth of their now electronically broadcast illusions?
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