June 1, 2015--Remapping

Over breakfast at Balthazar late last week with a well-travelled friend, despite our attempt to be optimistic about things, he couldn't resist asking what I thought was happening in the Middle East.

"You need to bring that up while I'm still enjoying my scone?" I said as playfully as I could.

"Well, in fact there may be things to feel good about."

"Really?" I was skeptical.

"Put in perspective."

"In perspective?" I was still skeptical.

"Very long term perspective."

"Again, really? How does that work?"

"Maybe what's happening has to happen. If we think about the long sweep of history, I mean."

Beginning to get was he was suggesting, I said, "I guess you could push me to make a very-guardedly optimistic case for the region if you gave me maybe a 100-year time frame to project things onto."

"Look," he said, "I'm British and am old enough to have seen massive changes in our position in the world. I had family members who worked for the Colonial Service in South Asia. When India was in effect a British colony. Some of of the change was bloody others more peaceful."

"More than 'in effect,'" I said. "Look, you're as old as I am--and that's pretty old--and though I don't remember from personal history about the changes in your empire as the result of the American Revolution, they were profound."

"Very amusing," he said, "The  very old business."

"The results of the Revolution changed the map for a large part of the Western Hemisphere. And led to even more change when France made its Louisiana Territory available for purchase."

"And later you follows grabbed from Mexico a large part of what is now the American West. California very much included."

"Yes as a result of the Mexican War during the 1840s and don't forget ten years or so after that the Gadsden Purchase which allowed us to flesh out our southwestern border. And then later still there was the bargain-basement purchase from Russia of Alaska."

"So project onto that what is going on right now in the Middle East."

"For some years I've been thinking about that and writing about it on my blog--how if one looks at the map of the current Middle East, Africa, and parts of Asia for that matter, we see the remnants of big-power colonial domination and the national borders that were imposed on Arab people, as well as Persians, Jews, Turks, and others after, for example, the First World War. Newly constituted or created countries that still exist. On paper at least. Countries without borders that take history or culture or religion into consideration. So, once the colonial powers backed off--and that includes us in the U.S.--things began to unravel."

"That's an understatement," my friend said.

"So perhaps what we're seeing is a remapping. Is that your optimistic scenario?"

"For me as well very-guardedly optimistic. Yes. That's what I'm thinking."

"I've been thinking and saying that too. How what we are seeing is an assertion on the ground of various Islamic factions seeking violently to settle scores and slough off the boundaries that they have been forced to live with by the Western powers. Borders that ignored culture. And, through the support and cynical use of dictators such as Saddam Hussein, the Shah of Iran, and the Saudi royal family, among others, attempted to tamp down and contain nationalistic strivings and the natural forces of history."

"So in your remapping scenario," my British friend said, sipping his morning tea, "you agree that this is something that has to happen? That's inevitable?"

"Yes. In history, there has been a lot of remapping. That which is the result of warfare where the victors impose new boundaries. The American, French, and Russian Revolutions are examples as is the fall of the Ottoman Empire during World War I."

"Other examples are the result of the invasions of exploding empires--the Roman Empire and Islamic Caliphate that dominated most of north Africa and western Europe. And of course our British Empire. The one where the sun never set."

"We could go on. The point being that what gets left behind or imposed as the result of these powerfully aggressive movements result in unnatural affiliations where people of very different backgrounds are forced to think about themselves as Iraqis or Syrians or Libyans. Big picture--there is no such thing as an Iraqi. Nationalities of this kind have been constructed by conquerers. This goes against the history of these peoples where they think about themselves as Sunnis or Shia or Kurds, not Iraqis. And as a result, what we have wrought are powder kegs throughout the region waiting for some spark to ignite them. And we're seeing those sparks all over the world. Very much including the emergence of ISIS."

"Thus my optimistic thought," my friend said. "As I said, perhaps there has to be this movement toward the reestablishment of cultural borders. Maybe even a few that are fluid since some of the people who live in the region are nomadic. Also, in some cases this may not even involve the concept of 'country' or 'nation.' And this of course doesn't mean that peace will break out. There will still be disputes and incursions but hopefully not at the level of all-out warfare."

"Sounds good to me, though, if you're right, I won't be around to see it."

"There you go again about being old. In the meantime, can I treat you to another cup of coffee and maybe some toast?"

February 23, 2015--Lines In the Sand

At the end of the First World War, a territorial plan devised by Sir Mark Sykes of Great Britain and Francois Georges-Picot of France established spheres of influence in the Middle East for the victorious European powers. Some compared this to drawing lines in the sand.

Prior to the War, most parts of the region were under the control of the Ottoman Empire. This included all of present-day Turkey, much of North Africa, and virtually all of the Middle East with the notable exceptions of Arabia, today's Saudi Arabia, and Persia, today's Iran.

The Syke's-Picot secret agreement became the blueprint for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat in the War-to-End-All-Wars. The Great Powers, particularly France and Britain, with the assent of Russia, carved up the former Ottoman territory, creating modern Turkey and the countries that make up the contemporary Middle East, and assigned to themselves mandates and colonial oversight for what became Iraq, Jordan, Syria, and Palestine among other newly established countries.

(The U.S. President Woodrow Wilson was more interested in the establishment of the League of Nations and so effectively kept hands off as the region was carved up and parceled out.)

Based on Sykes-Picot, the Treaty of Paris assigned the blue regions to French authority, the red to British, and the green to Russian.

The more delineated map of the Middle East which was derived from the Sykes-Picot accord is the one we live with today. Take special note of those countries that were assigned straight-line borders. It is particularly revealing that some of the countries that are most in turmoil and include restive populations,  jihadists, and other groups of terrorists, are those with these kind of linear borders that do not take geography, culture, or religion into consideration--Syria, Sudan, Egypt, Yemen, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, and of course Israel.

Thus, "Iraq" should probably be deconstructed into at least three countries with cultural borders, including Kurdistan, and "Libya" into at least that many. The region, and the world would be much more peaceful if those who met in Paris in 1919 would have established borders that took history, religion, and tribal identity into consideration.

One might counter that there are straight line borders in the United States. Many. In fact, two of our states are virtual rectangles (Colorado and Wyoming), and four meet at the Four Corners (Colorado, Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico), but with the exception of the genocidal  example of what we did to our Native populations, territories that became states were not that culturally diverse and applied for statehood, staking out and suggesting their own borders. These borders for the most part were as viable as others that used rivers and mountain ranges as natural ways to divide and assign territory.

October 7, 2013--Peacemakers, 1919

If you've been following this, you know about my obsession with geography.

Specifically, how leaders of the great powers at the end of the First World War redrew the map of the world and, ignoring history, religion, culture, and tradition, created more new countries than any tyrant or conqueror at any previous time in history.

And, you know, this has not been just an idle curiosity of mine, but grows out of an interest in the contemporary world and the problems the leaders of England, France, Italy, and the United States in 1919 bequeathed to us.

Also, I have been commenting here how that map is now in an accelerated way being undone, redrawn by seeming chaos in the Middle East, Africa, Asia Minor and even in some parts of South and Southeast Asia.

I was reminded again about this ongoing interest and the consequences while reading A. Scott Berg's recent, rather decent biography of Woodrow Wilson, Wilson.

Wilson, obsessed by the notion of a League of Nations, which he envisioned giving voice to and representing the interests of peoples whose national aspirations had been subsumed by the colonial reach of England, France, Italy, and Japan, a League of all countries that would stand for self-determination and the protection of human rights for all peoples worldwide.

He was thwarted by partisan politics back in the United States where Congress never voted to endorse the League and, as a result, as Wilson foresaw, the world inexorably drifted toward a second cataclysmic world war.

In Wilson there is a vivid picture of how the leaders of the Big Four powers in Paris in 1919 literally redrew the map of much of the world, insensitive to issues of culture, history, and national aspiration, focusing instead on their own geopolitical territorial self-interest.

Prime Ministers Georges Clemenceau of France, Lloyd George of England, Vittorio Orlando of Italy, and American President Woodrow Wilson.

Here from Berg--

The Big Four often worked from a map in the [French] President's room, one too large for any table to accommodate. Whenever it was needed, they spread it on the floor. One morning Dr. Grayson [Wilson's personal physician] entered the salon, only to find the four most powerful men in the world on their hands and knees, studying the chart. "It had every appearance," noted Grayson, "of four boys playing some kind of game." 

In the spring of 1919, that quadrumvirate on the floor erased more boundaries and created more new nations than had ever been drawn at a single time. And whenever Clemenceau and Lloyd George fell into another argument, scrapping over patches of Asia Minor, Wilson reminded them that they were engaged in the "bargaining away of peoples. . ."  

While the United States had no direct interest in most of the territorial settlements, Wilson continued to involve himself as the others tore at the Habsberg Empire. Austria and Hungary (then in the midst of a series of revolutions) would be divided into two separate landlocked countries, neither of which would ever be powerful enough to rise to any significant stature. The Treaty sanctioned a union of Czechs and Slovaks into a sovereign independent state. Similarly, the Independent Kingdoms of Serbia and Montenegro joined the State of Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs as well as much of Dalmatia and Bosnia and Herzgovina to form Yugoslavia. Parts of the Habsburg Empire--Bessarabia, Bukovina, and Transylvania--joined the Kingdom of Romania. 

The Ottoman Empire offered a map with more blank space on which to draw. Out of secret treaties and mandates and assurances to Arab leaders, new nations would be built in the sand. They proved problematic because they too bundled diversified populations, often with ancient ethnic and religious differences. Tensions naturally rose in the area as each of these disparate peoples sought self-government and independence while they were in conflict among themselves and well as with their mandatories.

Four boys playing some kind of game, indeed.

August 2, 2013--Croissants

Just my luck. At a breakfast place called Chrissy's in downtown Damariscotta, Maine of all places, after decades of searching, I finally found the best croissants in America.

They are bulky yet light and airy. Thick, dark caramel bands wrap them with blisters of tan revealing just how delicate each outer layer is. Tear off a piece and an internal view shows that the croissant is composed of seemingly hundreds of paper-thin layers and emanating from them is the sweet scent of toasted butter.

So wouldn't you know it, just as I was getting used to enjoying my good fortune—ordering two a day to consume with Chrissy’s homemade peach and cherry jams—according to the Washington Post, in rebel-held Aleppo, Syria, a sharia committee has just declared them--via a fatwa--symbols of "colonial oppression" and forbade their consumption. 

Nearly 100,000 Syrians have thus far been killed in the civil war between the government of Bashar al-Assad and various rebel groups and they have time to think about banning the baking and eating of croissants?

People are literally scavenging for scraps of food but there are Syrian religious leaders who are worried about the corrupting influence of these crescent-shaped delights?

I don’t mean to make light of this, but really.

But I do get it. It is because of their suspicious crescent shape. Could it be that croissants are made like that, these Syrian wise men ask, to mock the Islamic Ottoman invaders who in the early 1880s, attempted to capture Budapest? 

When they were repelled by the European infidels, what did the Hungarians do to celebrate their victory? According to the Syrian sharia committee, rather than organize a parade or a fireworks display like normal Western imperialists, life-loving Austrio-Hungarians that they were instead asked local bakers to come up with a new and special treat to commemorate their military victory.

The result, it is alleged, the buttery, flaky viennoiseria bread-roll with its signature crescent-shape, supposedly derisively derived from the crescent part of the crescent-and-star flag of the Ottoman’s.

The fact that this version of the croissant’s origins is apocryphal hardly matters—in reality, the croissant originated much earlier in the 19^th century and was concocted for the first time in Vienna, not Budapest, in what is now Austria. 

But what matters are two things—

First, this reveals that the Syrian rebels are becoming more and more doctrinaire and fundamentalist, recently having banned makeup and women’s tight clothing. If they manage to overthrow the Assad regime (seemingly less and less likely as time goes by), it may be that Syria will wind up more resembling Iran than Turkey.

And then there is my croissant problem: breakfasting on something that is the subject of a fatwa doesn’t sound like much fun. especially before I've had my second cup of coffee.
Note--

On the other hand, coffee is likely never to be fatwaed--it appears, thankfully, to have been first cultivated in the 14th century by Arabs.