Collapse

Barrett: The Collapse of Iraq and Syria
involving the Middle East including the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement that not
only undermined the aspirations of the Hashemites in the Greater Levant
but also resulted in a mandate system that fractured the political structure
of the region. It created the basis for nation-states with boundaries arbitrarily
drawn to accommodate the ambitions of the Western powers and
to show some gain from the calamitous financial and human costs of the
war. The war and the treaties of Paris 1919 and San Remo 1920 fractured the
controlling imperial political structure of the region and opened the door
to a century of instability first as the Western powers and then Westernized
Arab elites attempted to impose nation-state structures on the Greater
Levant. David Fromkin’s description of World War I as A Peace to End All
Peace squarely hits the mark in discussing the Greater Levant.
Between 1920 and 1945, despite British promises made to the Hashemite
family of Mecca concerning a united Arab state and the declaration by
Feisal bin Hussein that he was King of Arabs and Damascus was his capital,
the British stood aside and allowed the French to depose Feisal and use the
League of Nations mandate system to impose a colonial regime on Syria.
In Sunni-dominated Syria, the French system increasingly relied on pliable
Sunni politicians and on minorities—Alawite, Christian, Shi’a, and Druze—
to support its rule. 7 This would have long-term consequences and contribute
significantly to the ongoing conflict of today.
In combining the separate and distinctly different Ottoman provinces
of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, the British precipitated a revolt and then
narrowly avoided a mass uprising by creating a monarchy under Feisal bin
Hussein, the former King of Arabs now relieved of his title by the French,
in which the British established indirect rule through the Hashemites and
the Sunni elite in a new state called Iraq. The British understood that for
350 years the Sunni elites under Ottoman administration had dominated
Baghdad and Mosul and formed the principal support for Ottoman rule
in Basra. By creating a Hashemite monarchy, the British believed that at
minimal cost they had avoided a prolonged revolt and created a controllable
substitute for the now defunct Ottoman system. Focusing on the educated
and often Westernized urban elites,
... both the British and the French created systems in which the
ruling elites in the now divided Greater Levant were minorities
relative to their respective territories.
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