How the Middle East boiled over

The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East, Simon Sebag Montefiore, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25

By my desk I keep a copy of Plate 51 of the 1920 Times Atlas. It covers ‘Asia Minor, Syria & Mesopotamia’ and is very much a work in progress. Pale red dashes mark many of the borders, including those of an Armenian state. Stretching south-eastwards from the Black Sea coast, it would have formed a buffer between the rest of Anatolia and the Soviet Union. It never came into being because, no sooner had the map been published than Mustafa Kemal – later Kemal Atatürk – ordered his forces to ‘eliminate Armenia physically and politically’ before he turned west to attack the Greeks, who had grabbed a bridgehead on the Aegean coast.

The Armenians’ story is one of many told with characteristic brio by Simon Sebag Montefiore in The Cauldron. This is a wildly ambitious book, which chronicles events in the lands between Morocco and Iran since 1900, and while its sweep and pace mean that it does not always fully explain why things happen, Montefiore’s enthusiasm for his subject will nonetheless carry you along with him. The Armenians had watched enviously as other Christians broke free from Ottoman rule in the late 19th century. When some of them then turned to Russia for help, the Ottoman sultan was furious: ‘such great impudence, such great treachery to religion and state’, he spluttered, ‘I curse them.’ After the Armenians turned to terrorism, he set his Hamidiye – Kurdish cavalry, trained along Cossack lines – on them. An estimated 300,000 Armenians, as well as tens of thousands of Assyrian Christians, were massacred before the First World War broke out, by which time the sultan had been deposed and the ill-named Committee of Union and Progress had taken over.

After the Russians invaded Anatolia in 1914 and smashed the Ottomans, the new government blamed the Armenians. ‘We’ve been blamed for not making a distinction between guilty and innocent Armenians,’ the interior minister, Talaat Pasha, told a German newspaper, before explaining that doing so was ‘impossible. Because of the nature of things, one who was still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow’. By early 1917, Talaat reckoned that only 400,000 out of 1.5m Armenians were still alive. In 1920 Mustafa Kemal cut a deal with the Bolsheviks to divide the territory that had been set aside for the Armenians between them. Talaat, meanwhile, had fled to Germany, where he was shot dead by an Armenian assassin. The genocide caused outrage at the time, but, as Montefiore reminds us, the fact that it was just as swiftly forgotten would later encourage Hitler in his pursuit of the Final Solution.

On the other side of Europe, the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, had already twisted his French counterpart’s arm. ‘Tell me what you want,’ Georges Clemenceau said wearily when the two men met a month after the armistice. ‘I want Mosul,’ Lloyd George replied, then added ‘Jerusalem’ when he was asked if that was all. The two powers had cut a secret deal to carve up the Ottomans’ Arab lands between them, but it was not until 1920 that Britain finally acquiesced to French rule in Syria, in order to secure League of Nations mandates that legitimised its rule of Mesopotamia and Palestine, at least in European eyes. Montefiore sees the Balfour Declaration, in which the British government expressed its sympathy with the idea of a Jewish national home in Palestine, as an opportunistic play for American and Russian support in the specific circumstances of 1917, rather than the product of antisemitic views about Jewish influence, in finance in particular, which were general at the time.

The mandate era, as the period between then and 1948 is known, followed. The British and the French both faced challenges to their rule, in Iraq, then Syria, and finally in Palestine, where the British faced an Arab uprising and, having restricted Jewish immigration to appease the Arabs, were forced to abandon the mandate by a Jewish insurgency to which they had no answer.

Montefiore’s approach is chronological and so he leaps from place to place, at one point claiming that the Berber separatist Abdel-Krim ‘inspired’ the Druze in southern Syria to follow his example and rebel against French rule. I don’t think there is any evidence for this, though it is true that the two wars were intimately connected, because the French did not have enough troops to fight both simultaneously. Only once they had pacified Morocco could they turn their attention to Syria.

The link that Montefiore makes between Algeria and the 1956 Suez Crisis, in the next part of the book, is, however, spot on. He rightly casts the crisis as a conspiracy hatched by Israel and France, which believed the Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser was behind its troubles in its North African colony. After persuading the Israelis to attack Egypt by offering them nuclear know-how, the French roped in the British, who felt hamstrung by the fact Nasser had not broken international law. The subsequent campaign was, of course, a fiasco.

‘Nasser’s triumph over the Mandatory empires electrified the Arab world,’ Montefiore writes, ‘He was the spoiled child of fortune, but in his glory he was no longer willing to tolerate any opposition at home or abroad.’ He went on to expel 65,000 Egyptian Jews and launch a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, whose leader he had mocked for calling on the government to make the hijab obligatory, pointing out that the man’s own daughter did not wear a headscarf. A failed union with Syria, a sapping counterinsurgency in Yemen and then the 1967 Six Day War with Israel all cut him down to size. Long before he died in 1970 he looked like ‘a live corpse’, in the words of his successor, Anwar Sadat.

After Nasser came a surge in Arab terrorism, supported by Muammar Gaddafi, whom Fidel Castro described as ‘crazy’, and Saddam Hussein, whose tailored suits included a secret pocket for a pistol. Meanwhile, Sadat and Syria’s president, Hafez al-Assad, launched a surprise attack on Israel on Yom Kippur in October 1973. Sadat’s goal was to claw back some of the land Nasser had lost in 1967, and before he went to war he got the backing of the Saudis, who imposed oil sanctions.

The impact of the ‘Oil Weapon’ attested to the Saudis’ growing role in the region. The book starts with Ibn Saud’s dawn attack on Riyadh in 1902; the family’s rise as the rulers of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (proclaimed in 1932) forms a sinew running through the narrative. Montefiore describes the Kingdom’s current ruler, Mohammed bin Salman, or MBS, as ‘a radical authoritarian reformer in the style of Muhammad Ali the Great, Reza Shah and Ataturk’ but notes ‘a dark side’ to his reforms.

The shock of spiking fuel prices in late 1973 forced Henry Kissinger to take Sadat seriously, paving the way, eventually, for peace. Montefiore strikingly points out that just as US President Jimmy Carter welcomed Sadat and his Israeli counterpart Menachem Begin to the White House to sign their peace agreement, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was consolidating his position in Tehran. Khomeini’s rise, and its galvanising impact across the Islamic world, dominate the final part of the book. ‘To those who did not understand him, Khomeini was a medieval fanatic’, says Montefiore, ‘Actually, he was the future.’

From there on the story only becomes more and more chaotic. Saddam invaded Iran. Sadat was assassinated during a military parade. When Israel then invaded Lebanon in a bid to kill Yasser Arafat and destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation, which he led, the Iranians saw an opportunity. The group they set up, Hezbollah, began kidnapping and murdering Americans in Beirut because the Reagan administration was helping Saddam. The CIA’s chief in Beirut was flayed alive by Imad Mughniyeh, one of Arafat’s bodyguards. The Americans would get their revenge in 2008, killing Mughniyeh in Damascus with a car bomb in an operation they mounted with the Mossad.

Once Khomeini had sued for peace, Saddam invaded Kuwait. The Americans drove him back and then made a concerted effort to resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict, which the Iranians did their best to thwart by offering support to the Palestinian terror group Hamas. A wave of suicide bombings in Israel ensured the peace process was dead even before a Jewish extremist assassinated the Israeli prime minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who had reluctantly shaken Arafat’s hand, bringing Benjamin Netanyahu to power for the first time.

Iran was the major beneficiary of the United States’s attempt to use 9/11 to finish off Saddam. The book takes us right up to the present day, via the Arab Spring, Islamic State, the Syrian Civil War, Sudan, Gaza and Trump’s latest blunder in the Gulf. The Cauldron is a richly illustrated guide to the law of unintended consequences.

‘History in this region seems more alive than anywhere else, the past less dead’, Montefiore writes in the introduction: ‘many die and others kill for it – passions that those who rule our Western democracies find hard to grasp.’ This book might help them do so.