Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

The next document concerned with the disposition of the Ottoman Empire was the famous “Balfour Declaration” of November 1917. Probably no document of the wartime period, except Wilson’s Fourteen Points, has given rise to more disputes than this brief statement of less than eleven lines. Much of the controversy arises from the belief that it promised something to somebody and that this promise was in conflict with other promises, notably with the “McMahon Pledge” to Sherif Hussein. The Balfour Declaration took the form of a letter from British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour to Lord Rothschild, one of the leading figures in the British Zionist movement. This movement, which was much stronger in Austria and Germany than in Britain, had aspirations for creating in Palestine, or perhaps elsewhere, some territory to which refugees from anti-Semitic persecution or other Jews could go to find “a national home.” Balfour’s letter said, “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.” It is to be noted that this was neither an agreement nor a promise but merely a unilateral declaration, that it did not promise a Jewish state in Palestine or even Palestine as a home for the Jews, but merely proposed such a home in Palestine, and that it reserved certain rights for the existing groups in the area. Hussein was so distressed when he heard of it that he asked for an explanation, and was assured by D. G. Hogarth, on behalf of the British government, that “Jewish settlement in Palestine would only be allowed in so far as would be consistent with the political and economic freedom of the Arab population.” This reassurance apparently was acceptable to Hussein, but doubts continued among other Arab leaders. In answer to a request from seven such leaders, on June 16, 1918, Britain gave a public answer which divided the Arab territories into three parts: (a) the Arabian peninsula from Aden to Akabah (at the head of the Red Sea), where the “complete and sovereign independence of the Arabs” was recognized; (b) the area under British military occupation, covering southern Palestine and southern Mesopotamia, where Britain accepted the principle that government should be based “on the consent of the governed”; and (c) the area still under Turkish control, including Syria and northern Mesopotamia, where Britain assumed the obligation to strive for “freedom and independence.” Somewhat similar in tone was a joint Anglo-French Declaration of November 7, 1918, just four days before hostilities ended in the war. It promised “the complete and final liberation of the peoples who have for so long been oppressed by the Turk and the setting up of national governments and administrations that shall derive their authority from the free exercise of the initiative and choice of the indigenous populations.”

There have been extended discussions of the compatibility of the various agreements and statements made by the Great Powers regarding the disposition of the Ottoman Empire after the war. This is a difficult problem in view of the inaccuracy and ambiguity of the wording of most of these documents. On the other hand, certain facts are quite evident. There is a sharp contrast between the imperialist avarice to be found in the secret agreements like Sykes-Picot and the altruistic tone of the publicly issued statements; there is also a sharp contrast between the tenor of the British negotiations with the Jews and those with the Arabs regarding the disposition of Palestine, with the result that Jews and Arabs were each justified in believing that Britain would promote their conflicting political ambitions in that area; these beliefs, whether based on misunderstanding or deliberate deception, subsequently served to reduce the stature of Britain in the eyes of both groups, although both had previously held a higher opinion of British fairness and generosity than of any other Power; lastly, the raising of false Arab hopes and the failure to reach any clear and honest understanding regarding Syria led to a long period of conflict between the Syrians and the French government, which held the area as a mandate of the League of Nations after 1923.

As a result of his understanding of the negotiations with McMahon, Hussein began an Arab revolt against Turkey on June 5, 1916. From that point on, he received a subsidy of £ 2 25,000 a month from Britain. The famous T. E. Lawrence, known as “Lawrence of Arabia,” who had been an archaeologist in the Near East in 1914, had nothing to do with the negotiations with Hussein, and did not join the revolt until October 1916. When Hussein did not obtain the concessions he expected at the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, Lawrence sickened of the whole affair and eventually changed his name to Shaw and tried to vanish from public view.

The Arab territories remained under military occupation until the legal establishment of peace with Turkey in 1923. Arabia itself was under a number of sheiks, of which the chief were Hussein in Hejaz and Ibn-Saud in Nejd. Palestine and Mesopotamia (now called Iraq) were under British military occupation. The coast of Syria was under French military occupation, while the interior of Syria (including the Aleppo-Damascus railway line) and Transjordan were under an Arab force led by Emir Feisal, third son of Hussein of Mecca. Although an American commission of inquiry, known as the King-Crane Commission (1919), and a “General Syrian Congress” of Arabs from the whole Fertile Crescent recommended that France be excluded from the area, that Syria-Palestine be joined to form a single state with Feisal as king, that the Zionists be excluded from Palestine in any political role, as well as other points, a meeting of the Great Powers at San Remo in April 1920 set up two French and two British mandates. Syria and Lebanon went to France, while Iraq and Palestine (including Transjordan) went to Britain. There were Arab uprisings and great local unrest following these decisions. The resistance in Syria was crushed by the French, who then advanced to occupy the interior of Syria and sent Feisal into exile. The British, who by this time were engaged in a rivalry (over petroleum resources and other issues) with the French, set Feisal up as king in Iraq under British protection (1921) and placed his brother Abdullah in a similar position as King of Transjordan (1923). The father of the two new kings, Hussein, was attacked by Ibn-Saud of Nejd and forced to abdicate in 1924. His kingdom of Hejaz was annexed by Ibn-Saud in 1926. After 1932 this whole area was known as Saudi Arabia.

The most important diplomatic event of the latter part of the First World War was the intervention of the United States on the side of the Entente Powers in April 1917. The causes of this event have been analyzed at great length. In general there have been four chief reasons given for the intervention from four quite different points of view. These might be summarized as follows: (1) The German submarine attacks on neutral shipping made it necessary for the United States to go to war to secure “freedom of the seas”; (2) the United States was influenced by subtle British propaganda conducted in drawing rooms, universities, and the press of the eastern part of the country where Anglophilism was rampant among the more influential social groups; (3) the United States was inveigled into the war by a conspiracy of international bankers and munitions manufacturers eager to protect their loans to the Entente Powers or their wartime profits from sales to these Powers; and (4) Balance of Power principles made it impossible for the United States to allow Great Britain to be defeated by Germany. Whatever the weight of these four in the final decision, it is quite clear that neither the government nor the people of the United States were prepared to accept a defeat of the Entente at the hands of the Central Powers. Indeed, in spite of the government’s efforts to act with a certain semblance of neutrality, it was clear in 1914 that this was the view of the chief leaders in the government with the single exception of Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. Without analyzing the four factors mentioned above, it is quite clear that the United States could not allow Britain to be defeated by any other Power. Separated from all other Great Powers by the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, the security of America required either that the control of those oceans be in its own hands or in the hands of a friendly Power. For almost a century before 1917 the United States had been willing to allow British control of the sea to go unchallenged, because it was clear that British control of the sea provided no threat to the United States, but on the contrary, provided security for the United States at a smaller cost in wealth and responsibility than security could have been obtained by any other method. The presence of Canada as a British territory adjacent to the United States, and exposed to invasion by land from the United States, constituted a hostage for British naval behavior acceptable to the United States. The German submarine assault on Britain early in 1917 drove Britain close to the door of starvation by its ruthless sinking of the merchant shipping upon which Britain’s existence depended. Defeat of Britain could not be permitted because the United States was not prepared to take over control of the sea itself and could not permit German control of the sea because it had no assurance regarding the nature of such German control. The fact that the German submarines were acting in retaliation for the illegal British blockade of the continent of Europe and British violations of international law and neutral rights on the high seas, the fact that the Anglo-Saxon heritage of the United States and the Anglophilism of its influential classes made it impossible for the average American to see world events except through the spectacles made by British propaganda; the fact that Americans had lent the Entente billions of dollars which would be jeopardized by a German victory, the fact that the enormous Entente purchases of war materiel had created a boom of prosperity and inflation which would collapse the very day that the Entente collapsed— all these factors were able to bring weight to bear on the American decision only because the balance-of-power issue laid a foundation on which they could work. The important fact was that Britain was close to defeat in April 1917, and on that basis the United States entered the war. The unconscious assumption by American leaders that an Entente victory was both necessary and inevitable was at the bottom of their failure to enforce the same rules of neutrality and international law against Britain as against Germany. They constantly assumed that British violations of these rules could be compensated with monetary damages, while German violations of these rules must be resisted, by force if necessary. Since they could not admit this unconscious assumption or publicly defend the legitimate basis of international power politics on which it rested, they finally went to war on an excuse which was legally weak, although emotionally satisfying. As John Bassett Moore, America’s most famous international lawyer, put it, “What most decisively contributed to the involvement of the United States in the war was the assertion of a right to protect belligerent ships on which Americans saw fit to travel and the treatment of armed belligerent merchantmen as peaceful vessels. Both assumptions were contrary to reason and to settled law, and no other professed neutral advanced them.”