Thought I’d share this with anyone interested. Basically, it’s a quick and dirty primer on how the mess in the Middle East originated and discusses at a high level how we got to where we are today. This is from one of the channels I subscribe to, AlternativeHistoryHub, but this video isn’t really an alternative history take on the question, just talks about the history. I’d guess based on the video that he will be doing an alternative history of the ME at some point…probably one based on the UK and French not chopping up the region between themselves and actually honoring the agreements with the Arabs in the region that they had negotiated. Anyway, it’s not a long video…let me know what you think if you watch it.
Yes, that is a point that has been made by many. The Brits, in divvying up the ME likely caused the current shitstorm.
However, that vid is poorly done, and breaks no new ground. They also use a vid to discuss what could have been put into a good paragraph and add no useful graphics to make watching it worthwhile.
I like his channel so figured I’d post it. The video aspects are kind of how he does things, so it’s one of those things that some like and some don’t. No, it doesn’t break new ground, but since in a lot of the ME discussions it often seems like some folks don’t really know much of the history I thought it might be useful.
I don’t think it’s just the Brits who are to blame for the current mess. The French didn’t help either, and the modern day superpowers can hardly be said to be improving matters.
At the risk of sounding like an apologist for Europeans, I think this video puts too much blame on the British and the French.
They didn’t conquer a bunch of independent Arab countries. The Turks had done that centuries earlier. And the Turks, like most imperial powers, tried to limit any attempts by their Arab subjects to form institutions that could lead to self-government. So when control was transferred from Turkey to Britain and France, the Europeans found there was nothing in place to form the basis for a stable Arabic government. The closest thing to an Arab power structure was a bunch of local tribal warlords.
And that brings us to the second issue the video downplayed; there was no central Arab movement. The video talks about handing the region over to “the Arabs” but the reality was that there were several different rival leaders all of who wanted to be named supreme and absolute ruler of everything. Civil war was the inevitable result of internal rivalry not outside interference.
So the British and the French divided the region up like a pie and gave everyone they had made promises to a slice. Which didn’t work out because everyone had wanted the whole pie and thought all those other slices belonged to them.
It isn’t possible to say what would have happened had things been done differently. The current scenario is the only one that can be fully critiqued because it is the only one that actually happened.
Sure the current mess is the one that followed from those decisions but we have no way of knowing whether a different course of action would have been better or worse.
Life is complicated, a single whole country is a complex entity, a whole area full of complex countries is even more so. Roll back time and imagine those lines were not drawn with a ruler and pen whilst sipping tea and crumpets, how else does that region self-determine? does it self determine? and does it do so peacefully or by glazing over its neighbours?
I don’t know, you don’t know, nobody knows and be very wary of anyone claiming that they do.
No, not one knows how it would have played out. But basically it would have been up to them. If you watch the video, Cody says that the original agreement would have had the Sharif of Mecca, Hussein bin Ali as the king of the unified lands of what is today Saudi, Yemen, Oman, Israel, Iraq, Iran, Syria and southern Turkey. Could they have held all of that territory? Probably not. But instead of arbitrary national boundaries created and imposed by outsiders, presumably some of those provinces would have broken away into more natural territorial regions based on ethnic delineations.
According to Cody in the video, Hussein bin Ali was relatively moderate, at least compared to the house of Saud who ended up winning against his regime and taking over Saudi Arabia…something that wouldn’t have happened if the British had honored their original agreement and turned the entire region over to him instead of just a small coastal region.
It’s still up to them. The provinces would have had an easier time breaking free of the relatively small states they were shoehorned into than they would from an Arabian superstate.
yeah…ethnic groups seeking to breakaway from a powerful religious superstate in an area of the world whose natural resource status is both “rich” and “poor”. I’d take some convincing that such scenario would be peaceful and orderly.
Also, i’m not sure what a “natural territorial region” is.
You do realise that that area has been at war on and off for the last 10,000 years?
The Kurds have a home territory that basically spans the artificial countries of Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. That’s a ‘natural territorial region’ for them and would have, in theory, been one to break away and reform as it’s own nation. The Europeans basically just drew lines on a map that didn’t take into account the various ethnic tribes and peoples in the region.
Those arbitrary national borders are now nearly a century old, and the inertia that has to be overcome at this point is huge. I disagree that ‘it’s still up to them’ today…the Kurds, for instance are probably never going to have their own homeland, and this is a direct result of the lines drawn on a map post-WWI and how history has played out from that point.
Okay, I can see how the creation of Iraq and Syria might make them artificial countries but how does that apply to Iran or Turkey? They were both independent countries long before WWI. The ancestors of the modern Turks came out of Central Asia over a thousand years ago and conquered the territory that’s now Turkey. And Iran is one of the oldest countries on Earth.
Turkey was carved out of the Ottoman Empire, which indeed goes back far.
But definitely after 1513.
In the same sense that Austria and Hungary were carved out of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Turks weren’t a liberated people suddenly being given their own country to govern. They already had a country (and an empire to go with it) before the war.
Yes, but the boundaries of modern Turkey were pretty arbitrary.
Certainly, but the boundaries of a ‘Turkey’ that formed in a more natural process wouldn’t be the boundaries we see today, since a large chunk of south eastern Turkey would almost certainly be part of a natural forming Kurdistan. Same with Iran…almost certainly some unified nation would form naturally in that region, but not with the arbitrary lines drawn by Europeans who were just carving up the region for themselves and their own internal motivations. Like I said, I doubt that if the British actually honored their initial word to grant the entire region to Hussein bin Ali and his faction that this would have stood, but I think there would be a lot less mess today. As Cody points out in the video, a lot of the anger in the region stems not only from artificial borders where groups that essentially hate each other are now supposedly in the same nation-state but also the betrayal of those promises and the blatant land grab that ensued. Also, there is the unintentional consequence that in the end it was the (more radical) House of Saud that came out on top and formed Saudi Arabia that has given us a more fundamentalist Islam in the region as well as heightened the Sunni/Shi’a antipathy.
I think the border pretty much divided the area which had a Turkish majority from the area that had an Arabic majority.
As for the Kurds, I’ll admit I don’t know the demographics. Were there areas where there was a Kurdish majority? Or did the Kurds just represent a distinct minority in regions where there was a non-Kurdish majority?
That’s a description of the entire world; not just the ME.
I know this is a serious issue and thread, but I had to snicker when I saw the phrase “Turkey was carved”.