06/20/14 – Sheldon Richman – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
I'm Scott Horton, and this is my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And our first guest on the show today is our good friend Sheldon Richman, Vice President of the Future Freedom Foundation and editor of their journal, The Future Freedom.
His TGIF today is called The Middle East Harvests Bitter Imperialist Fruit.
Indeed.
Welcome back to the show.
Sheldon, how are you doing?
Oh, I hit the wrong damn button.
Hey, great article here.
I'm going to shut up and let you tell the story.
Well, thank you.
Yes, it's a story that actually has been told a lot.
There are many books and articles that have been written over the years, but I wanted to tie it into what we're witnessing today in Iraq and Syria and the Middle East generally.
And it tells the story of how during World War I, the Great Britain and the French, mostly Great Britain was pushing this, wanted to hurt the effort of the Turks, the Ottoman Empire, to help Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
And so they went to the Arabs.
The Ottoman Empire ruled the Arab world in those days.
The Arabs weren't necessarily happy about that, but the British went to them or went to their leaders of people who were regarded as leaders and said, we'll make a deal with you.
If you revolt against the Turks, we will make sure you have independence, independence at the end of the war.
And they made a few exceptions.
There were some areas of what is today Lebanon.
They said the French had an interest in and the English had an interest in Baghdad, actually, and Basra in southern Iraq.
But they said, generally, the rest of it will be yours to govern and we'll just leave you alone.
So that was a nice promise and it was taken up.
It was accepted by the Arabs.
There was correspondence between the High Commissioner, British High Commissioner in Cairo.
The British had, of course, occupied and ruled Egypt since the 19th century.
There was correspondence between the Sharif Hussein, who was one of the leaders of the Arabs and certainly one of the most, head of one of the most prominent families, the Hashemites.
And so between McMahon, the High Commissioner, and Hussein, they had an understanding in a series of letters written in 1915 and 16, asserting that Arab independence would be respected after the war, assuming England won the war.
So this is the famous story of the Lawrence of Arabia.
A lot of people have probably seen the movie and while that might not have been totally historically accurate, there's a lot of controversy about around Lawrence.
That's generally what happened.
He and other Brits went there and led Arab forces to disrupt the Turks' war effort, blowing up railroad tracks and attacking Aqaba, which is between Israel and Egypt, and really hassling the Turks.
But the key thing here is the British never had any intention of keeping its promise to the Arabs.
And around this same time, in 1916, the English and the French, along with the Russians at the time, still ruled by the Tsar, were negotiating an agreement about how they would divvy up the Middle East after the war.
This was known as the famous Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Mark Sykes and a friend, I forget his name, Francois-Georges Picot, British diplomats and so-called experts on the Middle East, sat down and basically carved things up.
Russia was still in the war then and so Russia was going to get the piece of what is today the Republic of Turkey.
France was going to get greater Syria, which includes what's now Lebanon.
Britain would get a good bit of Mesopotamia, namely Iraq, and some ports on the Mediterranean.
So those were the best developed parts of the Arab world and that's what was going to be taken by the French and the British.
The greater part of the Arabian Peninsula, what we know today as Saudi Arabia and Yemen, was undeveloped and its oil potential had not yet been discovered.
And so they kind of said to each other, well we'll give that to the Arabs, they can have that.
We'll rule the rest of it.
So they took what they thought was the best part of it.
This was a secret, obviously it was a secret, because if you've made a promise of independence to the Arabs, you're not going to want this published.
You at least want to wait until the war's over and you've actually got your troops there to enforce your will.
But one little thing happened that was not anticipated by the French and the English, namely the Bolsheviks.
By then the Russians had left the war, the Tsar was overthrown, then they had this provisional government which stayed in the war and which enabled the Bolsheviks, which was a rather small segment, to have their own revolution in the fall of 1917.
They overthrow the Kerensky provisional government and take over.
And one of the, in my view, the only decent thing that Lenin did in his whole adult life, I suppose, was to discover the Sykes-Picot agreement telegrams and whatnot in the Tsar's records and release it to the world to embarrass the English and the French.
And well, that was a little bit earlier than the French and the English wanted it exposed, but the Arabs were already sort of fully in, there was nothing much they could do about it at that point, and so things went ahead.
And then, well, the Sykes-Picot agreement, the terms of that agreement were modified in various ways through other agreements, through changes in the world situation, namely the Bolshevik revolution, and later conferences in 1920, like San Remo in Italy, they did some modifications and it ended up with, you know, pretty close to Sykes-Picot, but some differences.
So, like I said, England gets what they, they created Iraq out of Mesopotamia, they created the new state of Iraq, the French got Syria and created Lebanon, and Palestine was to be a, which was originally supposed to be internationally supervised, became a, what they called a mandate, which was their euphemism for colony.
In fact, they were all colonies, they just didn't use the term anymore, they thought, well, here in the 20th century, 19th century colonialism isn't going to fly, so they changed, they used words like protectorate and mandate.
And so England got Palestine and they separated Jordan as a separate state, it was called Transjordan at that point later, just plain Jordan, and they created states, they just created states, they drew lines through religious sects, like separating, I mean, you know, sometimes dividing sects like, you know, Sunnis or Shiites, just draw an arbitrary line in the sand bisecting tribes and ethnic groups, like the Kurds, the Kurds are sort of scattered around, Kurdistan could be a sort of a contiguous area, but at the moment it's parts of, what, three or four different states, including Iran and Turkey.
And so they decided, you know, they're just colonial planners creating states out of whole cloth without any regard for the people, they never asked the people, they were not involved in any of the conversations or conferences or anything, it was just the colonial mindset that we know better, we're civilized, they're savages, you know, maybe someday, they might have said in some theoretical frame of mind, they'll be ready for self-government, but for the time being, we know best.
So they were lying to the Arabs, they made a promise they never intended to keep.
Meanwhile, in 1917, before Palestine had been conquered, the Balfour Declaration is issued, in which, you know, the King of England is saying that he looks with favor on the creation of a Jewish national home in Palestine, which created more headaches.
Right, well, now the music's playing, we got to take this break, but yes, when we get back, we'll talk more about how everything wrong in the world is Woodrow Wilson's fault with the great, oh, and the British and the French, with the great Sheldon Richman, fff.org.
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Me, welcome back, I'm Scott, this is my show, the Scott Horton Show.
I'm on the Liberty Radio Network, scotthorton.org, talking with the great Sheldon Richman from the Future Freedom Foundation, fff.org, subscribe for the journal The Future Freedom, which he edits, which I ought to write for, if I wasn't so busy and lazy.
All right, we're talking about his great article today, The Middle East Harvests Bitter Imperialist Fruit.
And it's about, well, the British and the French having their way with the former Ottoman Empire at the end of World War I.
I have to point out here that if Woodrow Wilson had not got America into World War I, then the war would have ended as a stalemate, rather than a total victory for the British and the French, who were then able to dictate all these terms, and the British Empire was able to expand by a million square miles.
And, you know, other things would have happened instead, I don't know, but boy, oh boy, it didn't have to be that way.
And so not only can we blame the rise of Nazi Germany and even the rise of the Soviet Union on Woodrow Wilson's intervention in World War I, but also all the consequences in the Middle East as well.
And where we left off at the break was this promise from Lord Balfour to Lord Rothschild that yes, the English will support the creation of a homeland for the Jews in Palestine.
Right.
And, you know, like, you have to look at that as part of the whole picture.
I mean, it fits in with Sykes-Picot.
The main question is, by what right or authority or power, or I guess power, if you put it in terms of power, it answers itself, but by what authority does the British dispose of Arab lands?
I mean, it's Arab-occupied land.
They've been there a long time.
They worked the soil.
They grew farms.
They had towns and villages.
I mean, it belonged to the Arabs.
I don't mean in a collective sense.
I mean, in an individual John Locke sense.
By what right does the English say, or the British say, we're going to create states here.
We're going to put, you know, you on the throne of one country and you on the throne of another country.
I mean, so what they did, they just, they picked out members of the Hashemite family and said, okay, you're the king of Iraq and you're the king of Jordan.
And then they said to the Zionist movement, and you know, they didn't get very specific at this point.
They said, yeah, we look with favor on the formation of a national home for the Jewish people and we'll do everything possible to bring it about.
And then they throw in like boilerplate, and by the way, nothing about this is to prejudice the rights of the other people there.
I like how they refer to the Arabs, the other people there, they were like 85, at least 85% of the population of Palestine.
And they threw in Jews in other countries.
And the reason they threw that in was because, you know, the Zionist movement had been going on for, since the end of the 19th century, and most Jews opposed Zionism.
They thought it was a crazy idea.
Nobody wanted to go live in the desert or live in Palestine.
And so they were making it clear that they feared that their rights in wherever they were now living, like America or other places, would be jeopardized if Palestine was seen to be the official national home of the Jews, because you have questions then of dual loyalty and stuff like that.
And they were very nervous about it.
Most Jews were not Zionists.
That comes later, that comes after World War II.
So I think that's why that line ends up in there.
But the general point is why, you know, how dared the British and French decide what to do with this land?
They didn't live there, it wasn't theirs.
They had no authority.
They only had their imperial claim, which was the result of military might.
And I think decent people will say that's wrong.
And it has now bequeathed to us all of these issues.
What ISIS and others are doing is in a way erasing Sykes-Picot and the San Remo conference and all this other stuff.
They are trying to undo this.
It's a terrible thing now because it's happening by violence, but we shouldn't be surprised.
Because see what happened, look, here's the thing, here's the most, the broadest point of all.
The Arabs and the Muslims in that part of the world, they have their, they obviously have sectarian differences, they have other differences, ethnic and whatnot, because, you know, Iranians are Persians, they're not Arabs.
All that stuff needed to be worked out without foreign intervention.
Look, the Christian world had vicious wars, right, in the, what is this, 16th and 17th centuries.
Terrible, terrible wars, 30 years war, you know, of warfare.
They didn't have outside intervention.
They figured things out and they finally put that stuff aside and they try to work things out.
And that's what needed, that's what the Islamic world needed, but was never allowed because of Western intervention, which, you know, began, like I said, in World War I and has never stopped.
Well, I like how you say that too, because it's not necessarily implied that you would really certainly have a separate sovereignty for Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra necessarily, you know, those are the districts under the Ottomans.
I've seen a map of, you know, the Levant and Mesopotamia and Arabia that show all the different, you know, what would presumably sort of kind of be the borders.
And I don't mean drawn by, you know, Zionists trying to destroy all their Arab enemies.
I don't mean those maps, but I mean maps that are more like just, however you, I don't know the term for it, ethnocartographic or whatever the hell about which sects live here, there, and the other places all through Lebanon and Syria and Iraq.
And that's not necessarily, again, where national sovereignties and borders would be drawn, but it does go to show that, you know, just how arbitrary it is when the British and the French come in and draw their borders.
And really that's the curse of much of South Asia and all of Africa, even to this day, right?
Well, they drew it for their convenience.
You know, I'm not saying it all would have been peaceful if the West had stayed out.
I'm not saying everything would have been peaceful.
They would have sat down and talked it all out.
I'm not saying that.
And it wasn't true of the Christian world in Europe.
It wasn't peaceful.
What I'm saying is it would have been more organic and spontaneous.
And I think eventually they would have realized violence is not the way to settle things.
Much better to not be each other's throats, you know, let's live peacefully, but let's also not shove our religion down the throats of people who don't accept our particular approach to it.
They would have eventually discovered that.
But what outside intervention does is it radicalizes things and it gives an advantage to the most extreme, you know, violence minded people.
Because, you know, anybody who seems more moderate is then accused of being an accommodationist, maybe even an agent of of the foreign power.
And so they are at a disadvantage.
Any voice of peace is at a disadvantage internally.
And the most radical are at an advantage.
And I think we're seeing that today.
Well, yeah, I mean, certainly you can see it in Iraq and it's, you know, my theory and I don't state that well because I'm not much of an economist, but I like economists.
I'm interested in the things they say.
And all just seems like basically it's the army serves as dollars in an inflated bubble of power for certain groups who wouldn't necessarily have had it.
So, for example, just as a thought experiment, never mind how horrible and immoral it is, but if the Americans had somehow zapped Saddam Hussein from the sky, but without the regime change and the entire invasion and overthrow and what have you, that the Supreme Islamic Council and the Dawa Party and the Bata Brigades, they might have showed up.
Ahmed Chalabi and his guys, they might have showed up.
But like you're saying, how it would have really worked out among the power factions just among the Shia and then how it would have worked out among the power factions fighting over Baghdad in the fights versus the former Baathists and whoever else, jihadis and whoever else, that it would have been a much more organic thing.
In other words, not that they would always adopt peace, like you're saying, and everybody would work together or whatever, but whatever resolutions would be much closer to representing natural amounts of power among the leaders of the different factions compared to having America come in and say, well, you know, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim is George Bush's guy.
And so we're going to go ahead and do what he and the Ayatollah Khomeini want.
Right.
That aggravates things.
You also need to keep in mind that over the many years, we're talking about almost 100 years now, August will be the centenary of the beginning of the war, August 4th, 2014.
We have to remember that over all that time, you know, the Western powers, particularly the French and English, would buy off various people and factions to do their bidding.
You know, a lot of people are susceptible to living a cushier life and getting some sort of power if they do the bidding of the imperial, you know, overseer.
And that creates a lot of scores to be settled later on.
People have long memories.
And so even when the imperialists maybe loosen their grip for whatever reason, maybe they're busy somewhere else or something like that, people then say, well, good, now's my chance to settle the score to get even with those people that, you know, were bought off by the imperialists and did their bidding and hurt us.
Now we're going to go get them.
So you see how it fuels future violence that doesn't just stop the moment the imperialists get out, even if they were to just suddenly say, OK, you're right.
We never should have done this.
We're leaving.
Everything doesn't then automatically become peaceful and liberal and everything that we like.
People still will have grievances and they'll want revenge.
So it doesn't you can't put the, you know, the toothpaste back in the tube very easily.
Right.
Well, yeah.
I mean, I just think you're absolutely right in that Iraq really shows where, you know, even though it was a fake country that was invented by the British and the French, hey, that was a hundred years ago.
So the Iraqi people, they've been through a lot together.
And after all, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra always have been pretty nearby.
And so even though the Turks and whatever.
So there's you could call it Iraqi civilization.
There wasn't, you know, Shia civilization and Sunni civilization there.
Maybe there's a little bit more discrepancy when it comes to the Kurds kind of having more of their own thing going on in the north.
But and in certain parts of the country, you might have had the percentages a bit different.
But it was really the foreign policy of the American occupation that did more than anything to drive the Iraqi people apart.
You know what I mean?
Even though the dictatorship, the foreign backed dictatorship under Saddam Hussein, the minority dictatorship, it was a minority dictatorship.
I mean, there were Shiites in the Baath party, but it was dominated by the Sunnis and all that.
But the people in general were, you know, have much better attitudes.
I don't know.
Do you see the thing on Twitter where the husband's sign says I'm a Shia and the wife's sign says I'm a Sunni and the baby's sign says I am Sushi?
Yes, I did see that.
So you make a very important point.
Once you after 100 years, you can't just say, oh, let's go back to the way it was before the original intervention, because you're right.
A lot has changed.
And you're right.
Even an artificial state will know some sort of nationalism will be developed over 100 years.
It's definitely true.
And it's things that you've pointed out and guests of yours have pointed out the Shiites in Iraq.
Lots of the Shiites in Iraq are not terribly fond of Iran because there are other reasons.
They're nationalists.
They're also Arabs and the Iranians are not.
And so that doesn't mean just because they're Shiite that they want the Iranians to march in and run things either.
Right.
So you can't just say, well, let's go back to, you know, before Sykes-Picot.
No, that would be wiping out almost 100 years of events and new generations and thinking, you know, is spontaneously emerges under the new conditions.
So there's no way you can say, well, let's restore the conditions.
That's that's impossible.
And it would be a disaster to try to do it.
Right.
Well, and, you know, I don't know exactly how deliberate it was, you know, in driving the wedge in there under the occupation.
But the El Salvador option was adopted just under the name of, well, here we got the Bata Brigade is ready to fight already.
And they know who the leaders of the Sunni based insurgency are, who have everything to lose, obviously, if they lose Baghdad and lose their privileged status in the in controlling the government.
And but so these Bata Brigade guys can really help us hunt them down where.
But, of course, that was just, again, citing doubling down on our on our on Bush's bet on the Hakeem faction, the Supreme Islamic Council.
And that's what really created the civil war.
You know, the attacks on Fallujah and the supporting of the of the El Salvador option, Bata Brigade option on the American side, and then the al-Qaeda in Iraq response from that is what led to the whole civil war.
So I'm not saying it would have been anything like nice at all, but you can just look right at how the Bush policy had just completely distorted the hell out of who had what power and the devastating consequences of those distortions.
There's just no doubt about it.
So, in other words, your theory proven all the way up to the present day.
Well, I think that's right.
I mean, you know, it hardly originated the theory, but lots of people have been writing about this.
But unfortunately, they're never the most prominent voices.
And the imperial mindset, even if it's even though it changes the language, changes the terms.
So always seems to be dominant.
I don't know why, because people expect the government to be active.
I mean, everybody's looking to Bush to Obama saying, you know, OK, what are we going to do about this?
Well, why do we have to do anything about it?
I mean, we helped cause this.
We can't we really can't make things better there because, you know, bombs aren't going to make things better.
And meddling in their politics also not going to make things better.
All right.
Well, thank you very much for your time.
It's great to talk to you as always, Sheldon.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
Appreciate it.
Everybody, that's the great Sheldon Richman.
He's at FFF dot org, FFF dot org slash subscribe for the future of freedom.
And in just a second, FFF President Jacob Hornberger.
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