07/16/12 – John Taylor – The Scott Horton Show

All right, y'all, welcome back.
I'm Scott Horton, and our next guest is John Taylor.
He's a historian and writes occasionally for antiwar.com, original.antiwar.com/John-Taylor.
Sorry, it could be easier, I guess, but it ain't.
This one's on the front page today in the highlights section at the top of the page at antiwar.com, deconstructing a piece to end all peace.
Welcome to the show.
John, how are you?
I'm good, Scott.
How are you today?
I'm doing great.
Appreciate you joining us.
Now, here's the thing.
It's been a rule all this time, pretty much.
This may be the first time ever that I've had someone on to talk about a book review that they wrote, because usually that ain't right.
I should just read the book and interview the guy about it myself kind of thing, but the truth is, I ain't never going to read this thing that you're writing about, A Piece to End All Peace, the establishment's new self-justifying history of the end of the First World War.
You've done such a great job deconstructing it right there, like in the title, that I figured I'd just have you on to do my hard work for me, since you already did.
That's quite nice, and I certainly hope your audience will go look at my review.
But there are some things that I left out of the review that might be of interest.
For instance, David Fromkin, writing about the Ottoman Empire, says that the Turks, who were the Ottoman Turks, never managed to learn the arts of government.
Well, since the Ottoman Empire had been around for 600 years or so, it kind of makes you wonder how he could make a statement like that.
I suppose maybe he thought the Ottomans were a little bit like Catherine the Great, that is, they never learned to love, but they were in their trying.
Anyway, I found it an extraordinary statement.
And then the other bizarre statement he makes about the Ottomans is that, quote, invading new territories was the only path they knew to economic growth.
Well, he turned the Ottomans into sort of a 1960s conglomerate, like, say, Lytton Industries.
But instead of using green mail and hostile takeovers, the Ottomans were using janissaries and scimitars.
So, I don't know, pretty bizarre stuff in places.
And this is a very, very well-regarded history book.
Well, and see, that's really the first point here, is that, as you describe in the first few paragraphs here, this is the establishment's favorite new book about the end of World War I, and it's full of a lot of errors, as you cite, and they all kind of lean the same direction, don't they, these errors?
They do.
And another very, well, you know, it's not all that, the book is not all that new.
It's been around for a long time.
It recently came out in the 20th edition, 20th anniversary edition.
There's one other really bizarre note, which I really want to touch on, and that is, I guess, Mr. Fromkin thought criticizing people by suggesting they were homosexuals was something that was acceptable.
Personally, I don't care for that sort of thing.
So, let me read to you what he says about Herbert Lord Kitchener.
He doesn't like Kitchener, so he's going to trash him by saying...
Well, first, tell us who that is.
Kitchener was a minister of war for Great Britain in World War I.
He was something of a failure during the war.
He lost his life on an expedition to Russia when the heavy cruiser Hampshire was mined in the North Sea.
But of course, prior to World War I, he was a great colonial leader.
But anyway, Fromkin says this about him, avoiding not merely women, as he always had done, but the outside world as a whole.
The war minister lived in a masculine preserve with his personal military secretary, Lieutenant Colonel Oswald Fitzgerald.
Well, as I say, I find it despicable that he's kind of suggesting that Kitchener was a homosexual.
I don't care whether he was or he wasn't.
But the big, the interesting point here is that to suggest that Kitchener had always avoided women is totally wrong.
He was, had been engaged to Hermione Baker, the daughter of the chief of the Egyptian police force, for several years until the woman died of typhoid fever.
I mean, obviously, Fromkin's really keen to trash people, but you'd think he'd at least have a fact checker to help him get things right occasionally.
This is really bizarre.
That's funny.
That's funny.
Well, you know what?
I learned, I forget at what point, that, wow, history is just like the lies in the New York Times today, only later.
So it really, it didn't take very long, for example, before an actual history book on the 1990s will have, yeah, and then the Branch Davidians all set themselves on fire to death so that people don't have to watch their siege on TV anymore, or whatever.
And that's actually history now, is what was obviously a lie then becomes official and that's sort of, it seems to be what's going on here, where there's always the popular narrative of this, that, and the other detail of the post-World War I period in the Middle East there, and actually each and every one of them are wrong when you go back and examine the facts.
Quite strange.
Quite strange indeed.
Like I say, you kind of get the feeling that since he was writing well over 500 pages that he sort of left off fact-checking.
I don't know.
Strange.
And this is a book which has been out for a while, is used at every university from Harvard on the East Coast to Evergreen State on the West Coast, from Charleston Honors College in the South to the University of Kansas in the Midwest.
I mean, it's used everywhere.
But nobody, all these academics are assigning this book, but nobody is taking the time to read it or see what they're actually assigning.
This book is not well-written, it's not good history, it's extraordinarily prejudiced, but none of the academics seem to be willing to stand up and say anything critical about it.
I don't know.
It strikes me as strange.
Well, you say the errors here mostly are in minimizing any role that the Arabs played in benefiting the Allied powers of World War I, and then especially also you focus on the British negotiations with the Arabs during the war, that if only you'll do this for us, then we'll guarantee a fight on our side against the Ottomans, then we will guarantee an Arab nation-state there at the end, which might as well have been a treaty with the Sioux Indians or something.
Exactly.
Exactly.
Yeah, that's true.
And then the role that the Arabs played was minimized.
Again, it's as if he, it's as if Fromkin is trying to undo Lawrence of Arabia and the participation of the Arabs.
You know, I understand that you can react to the Hollywood movie, but maybe he's overreacting.
For example, he talks about Aqaba and the Gulf of Aqaba as being this tiny, narrow place that, and that when Lawrence took it, he really didn't accomplish very much.
When I read that, I thought back to the film Lawrence of Arabia, because in the film, it is a really narrow place.
However, in truth, the Gulf of Aqaba has got the town of Aqaba at its head.
On one side, it's got the Israeli resort city of Eilat on the other side.
It's a really big place.
I don't know.
Strange.
I'm sorry that, I'm sorry we have to hold it here.
We've got this hard break built in, but when we get back, we'll talk about that battle and the significance and a couple more examples.
It's John Taylor at Antiwar.com deconstructing the book A Piece to End All Peace by David Fromkin.
All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with John Taylor.
He's got this piece at Antiwar.com today, Deconstructing A Piece to End All Peace by Fromkin.
I usually don't do interviews on the basis of a book review, but, well, you know, this gets right to the point.
It's a really good thing here.
I strongly encourage people to go and take a look at it.
As you know, I blame Wilson.
I actually once wrote an article like that.
If only America had stayed out of World War I, then it would have been a stalemate instead of a win outright for the Allies, and then there never would have been a Soviet Union or a World War II or the expansion of the French and British empires in the Middle East, which America inherited at the end of World War II and which we've been committing so much violence in the name of maintaining ever since then.
So, maybe it's a slippery slope argument, but I like it.
This is about this book that's sort of the underpinning of the modern American establishment's fake understanding of that period, and not necessarily the role America played, but the results of the win for the Allies in the Middle East.
We talked about how the British had promised to recognize an Arab state and then immediately broke that promise with the Sykes-Picot Agreement and then especially with the Balfour Declaration, which makes me speculate, John, that a lot of this argument has to do with justifying after the fact the breaking of that treaty and the creation of the state of Israel and saying that for whatever reason...
I think there's a lot to be said for that point of view.
The promise of the Arabs to have a state of their own if they helped the Allies win World War I, that was actually quite early.
It was, I believe, about two years before the Balfour Declaration, and it was also significantly before the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
You know, if you think of the arrangements the British were making in the Middle East as a set of polygamous marriages, when you have polygamy, only the first marriage is valid.
The other two can be disposed of.
And perhaps most important, any offspring, for instance, of the state of Israel from the arrangement made under the Balfour Declaration, clearly, if we go with my analogy, that would be illegitimate as well.
So I believe Mr. Fromkin has a major incentive to disparage the promises that the British made to the Arabs, and which he does.
Interestingly enough...
Well, and now the same thing happened, actually, during World War II, right, where Franklin Roosevelt promised the Arabs that he was not for the creation of the state of Israel, but then I guess he up and died and turned the question over to Harry Truman.
Yeah, I'm not an expert in that area, but you may well be right.
Clearly, you know, it's very interesting that Harry Truman put it in terms of that he had a lot of constituents wishing for the success of the Zionist enterprise, and on that basis, he supported it.
Well, at least he was honest.
Yeah, exactly.
That's why everybody likes Harry Truman so much.
He did all the worst, dumbest, wrongest things.
Remember Operation Keelhaul?
Yeah, good old book stops here, Truman.
All right, well, so here we go with...
Oh, where we left off, actually, at the break, was we were talking about this battle at Aqaba, and this is another part of minimizing the role of the Arabs in the First World War, ultimately to minimize in the narrative the degree of their betrayal by the British at the end.
Right, exactly, and what the capture of Aqaba meant was that there was no way the Ottoman Turks would ever be able to renew their assault against the Suez Canal, and for the British, the Suez Canal was absolutely key because it was their water connection to their empire in India, which was a source of wealth, of troops, of raw materials, so on and so forth.
So it was a very important victory that the Arabs achieved at Aqaba.
But really, their greatest achievement, which few people know about and which, it seems to me, is minimized by Frumpkin, is their activity in cutting the Hejaz Railway in what's now southern Syria around the town of Daraa.
They cut it north and south of Daraa, which meant that the Ottoman armies on the east side of the Jordan River were cut off from their base.
But most important, they also cut the branch line into Palestine, and that meant that when Allenby attacked the Ottoman Empire, the Ottoman Turks in Palestine, his opposition was much less, and that's because the Turks were unable to move their troops on that rail line to oppose him.
So it was an extraordinarily important thing that was accomplished by the Arabs, and not only did it lead to a swift conclusion to the campaign, it also led to a relatively bloodless confusion because the three Turkish armies simply surrendered.
They couldn't go forward, they couldn't go back, they couldn't go sideways.
Oh, well that's no big deal at all.
It doesn't have to do with anything.
Exactly.
And of course, Frumpkin also minimizes the Arab resistance to the French.
It will be recalled that under the Sykes-Picot Agreement, that the French were given Damascus, Aleppo, the towns of interior Syria, along with Lebanon, even though they'd been promised to the Arabs.
But anyway, the Arabs decided to resist, but according to Frumpkin, the Arabs didn't resist, they simply ran away.
Well, there was a battle west of Damascus, 400 Arabs were killed, about 50 French troops.
The French had 9,000 soldiers, the Arabs had 3,000.
The French had airplanes, artillery, mechanized vehicles.
The Arabs didn't have anything like that.
Yes, there was a battle, it was one-sided, but according to Frumpkin, there was no battle.
And then, if you go on, according to Frumpkin, the French faced no resistance after Damascus fell in 1920.
The truth is, in 1925, there was a minor uprising amongst the Druze, and when the French went to put it down, all of Syria rose against them, and it took until 1927, from 1925 to 1927, for the French to master the country.
But we don't hear anything like that from Frumpkin.
A two-year insurgency omitted from the book.
Exactly.
It's kind of as if we were to claim there was no insurgency in Iraq between 2003 and 2005.
It's crazy.
Wow.
So, can I really blame this guy for the misunderstanding of so many brilliant CFR types, just full of ideas for what's next to be done with, I don't know, Syria, for example?
I mean, it's pretty sad.
We know from history, they don't ever resist a foreign occupation.
They're actually really docile folks.
Right.
Right.
I mean, whoever owns the past owns the future, and whoever controls the present controls the past.
And this is very much a book by the establishment for the establishment.
The fact that the establishment has gotten everything wrong in the Middle East for the last 20 years or so, well, what can anyone say?
I mean, it's not Republican government.
It's not Democratic government.
It's not Democratic foreign policy.
It's not Republican foreign policy.
It's just really stupid and immoral.
Yeah.
In other words, it's both Republican and Democratic.
You bet.
Yep.
Well, and it's extremely expensive, too, and it just keeps going on.
Like David Vine was saying earlier on the show, more and more bases are being added all the time to America's empire.
I mean, what business do we have in Mongolia?
I don't know.
It's hard for me to justify.
It's hard for me to imagine what we're doing there.
Did you say Mongolia?
Yes.
I thought that was the one place we didn't have troops.
I believe we were in joint maneuvers there a number of months ago.
Joint maneuvers with people living in yurts?
Hard to believe.
Oh, man.
All right.
Well, there you go.
They read it in a Frumpkin book.
That was a good idea, I guess.
All right.
Well, thanks very much, John.
Appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Nice to chat with you and to say a word or two to your audience.
All right.
John Taylor at Antiwar.com today, everybody.