 Well, good afternoon, and let me do a mic check made since I'm here at the booming set. Okay if my name is Mike to Lee and my topic today is Western imperialism and the new Middle East in in World War two slightly before it and slightly after so I'm centered on World War two and and What I like to talk about in particular is the invasions of Iraq and Iran during the war, but I get around to that in a bit In a 1926 paper the University of Chicago international law expert Quincy Wright spoke of recent events in the Middle East and he wrote this The Syrian insurrection culminating in the bombardment of Damascus in October 1925 is an incident of a kind Which has frequently marred the relations of Western powers with less advanced peoples So bombing the city with defenseless civilians in it no army to resist that has frequently marred relations It would mar relations with me, but At contemporary almost writing at exactly the same time and this is a letter that I found in the archives just last week Another quotation about the same the same kinds of with the same for example instant This is an Arab intellectual in Cairo Nessim Saiba who wrote To an American friend the French can be proud now and proclaimed they have applied their mandate just as they intended to do Nothing behind them is left but ruined cities and villages the fields are uncultivated and the population is everywhere Terrorized by the vandalism of their officers and soldiers Cowards they cry for help when the Germans invade them, but when fearing no punishment their savagery knows no limits Two sides of the same point I think on the one hand a less advanced people bring being brought into line by the European power Which had been designated to nurture the country's board government by the people and on the other hand a defenseless people Brutalized by the power that has been designated to protect At this point I have a third quotation, but since Professor Stone just quoted the T. E. Lawrence and exactly the same quotation I'll let that stand and use a use a little of that time. It was the quotation about hundred thousand men holding down holding down Iraq at a time when When there were insurrections and so forth and and In this letter to the Times of London T. E. Lawrence also says in this most recent insurrection. He's writing in the summer of 1922 We've just killed 10,000 in the in putting down this insurrection, so That's the magnitude that we're talking about so at my point here with this quotation is That it's not just the French who were Carrying out their mandate in the Middle East Well the years before and during World War two really shaped the modern the Middle East to create many of the issues Now regarded as international problems and domestic problems in the Middle East, too Though we sometimes speak as if the Imperial age of Empire was blunted by World War one the British French Americans and Russians carried out many aggressive invasions there This invasion Occupation scenario repeated throughout the century represents a long-term rhythm in the imperial exploitation of the Middle East though in every single case of invasion Occupation the invading power professed only altruistic motivations My subject today is rhythmic variation of this same pattern and the variation is World War two The modern democratic Interpretation of the two great wars of the 20th century carry a simple and uplifting message Message for Americans, Britons and other partisans of the Allies That message is the world would have been okay It had not been for the Nazis who wrecked the peaceful aspirations of democratic states like Poland and And Just carried their imperialism all over Europe and if it hadn't been for the Allies then Well peace and freedom would have if it hadn't been for the Allies hell would have rained and if the Allies had been in charge It would have been peace freedom and democracy. I Hope you will excuse me if I try to sketch a less enthusiastically Allied vision of the Strategic and political picture here and I want to do it in part by standing the standard Allied narrative on its head just a little bit The mandate system which the Allies set up in the Middle East after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire Was clothed in high-sounding phrases like national self-determination and the expressions of the will of the population Helping people toward democracy, but by and large the mandates were run as extensions of the pre-war French and British empires The French ran Syria in particular with high-handed brutality with the exception of Lebanon We're fairly stable multi-confessional regime mainly Christians emerged As for Syria itself the French were granted control by the peacekeepers But found a Hashimite pan-Arab kingdom set up before they could get there The the welcomed in Lebanon by the Christians the French were feared by both the populace and the existing regime in Syria hence to take control the French invaded and defeated the Syrian army in a Fairly bloody battle a moderately bloody battle on July 23rd 1920 and they entered Damascus the next day driving out the king Faisal the former head of the revolt in the desert friend of T. E. Lawrence Revolts throughout Syria began almost immediately and the French Eventually over the next several years would spend an inordinate amount of their time teaching the Syrians democracy By repressing insurgencies the climax of violence came in 26 when the French holding on to Damascus already having captured the city and from within the city bombarded The other parts of it to kill numerous civilians British rule in the Iraq and Palestine mandates went only somewhat more smoothly in both areas the Balfour Declaration in 1917 represented a Substantial problem for the British vis-a-vis local elites almost from the outset of British occupation the first new waves of Jews who immigrated to Palestine in in the sense of the of Zionist national home and And with help from the international Zionist movement from contributions and the organization set up in New York and London and so forth This happened around the turn of the century and a number of people a number of Jews came to Palestine at that time But it was the Balfour Declaration this declaration that there was an official policy on the part of a great power That would in fact promote this national home without really defining what the national home was and and with all Kinds of Zionist speakers explaining that why by national home we mean a national home where Where everybody is it's Jewish then? then this this Shocked the Middle East it shocked land-owning classes in Palestine and Iraq and and and everywhere else British clashes with the Palestinian opponents to the Zionist program began in the 20s and Pan-Arab nationalists in Iraq Syria and Egypt were all quite aware of such clashes and When needed they fostered Palestinians who escaped the British the British authorities in Palestine Put in charge of the mandate of Mesopotamia or Iraq the British helped install the recently booted Syrian king now without a job Prince Faisal and Made him king of Iran This arrangement suited the older British preference for indirect rule in its colonies But in Palestine traditional political leadership was more dispersed part of this problem would be solved by By installing Faisal's brother Abdullah as king of trans Jordan later Jordan in 1922 So that Jordan was organized in the same manner as Iraq But for the rest of Palestine what we today call Palestine and Israel that Local leadership was more dispersed decentralized Mediated from the beginning and the growth of Jewish settlement along with rising anti Zionist clashes clouded this picture Further complications For British rule in the mandate Was Created by the resistance of the new Iraqi government to having an exploitative oil Contract forced on the country by an international Group of Western powers including the League of Nations in 1925 so a contract that they didn't want but was forced on the Despite these problems the British and Iraqi government worked out a treaty which granted partial independence to Iraq in 1932 though clearly Iraqi oil Iraq foreign policy and much else was controlled by the British who likewise retained the right to maintain air bases at Basra and Javania Now next door to Iraq in other words to the east is a bigger or more a bigger richer country Iran Had a surprisingly unrelated history To that of her poor and less populous neighbor the oil and imperialism was crucial to the 20th century Histories of both countries Even in a short summary we must go back to 19 for just momentarily when the Iranians carried out a Constitutional revolution that established a parliamentary system run by elites who were decidedly opposed to Persia being exploited by either the Russian or British Empire that's in nineteen in nineteen five nineteen six Russia and Britain famously settled their differences that they had had for over a century by creating the third leg of that happy a diplomatic pact the Entente Corgiall and Transforming it into the still more cordial triple entente in 1907 and the occasion of this happy union of empires was the splitting of Iraq into two spheres of influence So the country just took each took a chunk breaching the south Russians next door themselves Almost immediately Britain began laying plants not only to exploit Persia's oil sources, but to To make a use for that because the British then Converted the Navy to Petroleum fuel from coal just after that that event so that they were now the largest consumer of fuel in the single consumer in the world and they possessed all this oil in Persia In World War one though Persia was officially neutral it was still Divided its fears of influence and it served as a kind of extension of the old great game between Britain and Russia With the addition of the Germans at mounting a kind of Notional attack or a stirring up at least attempting to stir up an attack on India and also nationalist Turkish fantasies about a panterranean empire resulting in Turkish incursions Armenian dreams of territorial Exploitation an expansion really came into the issue too amazingly and so what this meant was that for the war The result of all this fighting of different groups in different directions in different places Was part comic opera part tragedy hundreds of thousands of bystanders died in the wakes of the crisscrossing armies Apparently chiefly by starvation and starvation related diseases So last man standing at the end of the war the British prepared to add the north of Persia to the south that they've already possessed The Russians being occupied with the Bolshevik Revolution at that moment Indeed the British were just about to solidify a genuine Protectorate status and just make Persia officially a colony when a new force emerged there And this was a Persian officer who in a sense paralleled Auto-Turk in calling for national pride for rallying the forces of national unity In fighting Bolshevik spillover from Russia and various other threats to the country This individual was Raisa Khan and in 1923 Raisa Khan managed to get himself named the Shah of Persia Except that he insisted on the older name of Iran which He thought was a name more linked to the ethnic groups that had settled the region many centuries before Raisa Khan actually the now Shah of of Iran Became fairly close to the British using the proceeds from oil deals to submit his modernizing and authoritarian rule still The British were the main danger to him and to the new Iran and the Russians represented slightly less of a threat Raisa Shah was also fascinated by some aspects of Italian fascism and by the Nazi movement and Indeed he clamped down on the Iranian Parliament in 1925 and his Autocracy faced substantial opposition from a number of Parliamentarians including Mohammed Mosadek who would become a famous victim of the CIA in the 1950s In 1932 Raisa Shah canceled the old Anglo-Persian oil contract with Britain which had been a keystone of British control in the region the Allied invasions of Iran and Iraq in 1941 and the subsequent wartime occupations followed patterns that that really go along with these earlier trends that I've described and Kind of tied these various strands of issues together closely We have to hurry through the interesting details of these invasions, but a fuller story is available in in Longer paper that this comes from and that will be available Pretty soon at the outbreak of the war to get back to just Iraq We'll take you the Iraq invasion first and then the Iran invasion Iraq was firmly in the Allied camp I mean the British had had it as a mandate and then let it have this slight independence and one reason that this could work was because the Hashimite monarchy was very relatively pro-British and Their chief political man now foreign minister sometimes prime minister was a person called Nuri al-Said Said and these were all committed to the British cause more or less Making it into the future by being loyal to the British One reason that Britain could with some confidence Face the combined might of Hitler and his allies Stalin in in the World War two before June 1941 Was that Britain felt secure in possession of this Iraqi oil? Yet some signs were signs were clear that the non-aggression pack pack would would not last forever moreover The massive German successes against Britain and France in 1940 and that was a really bad year for them gave hope to anti-British Nationalists all over the Middle East One of the most important influences in these considerations was the grand mufti of Jerusalem This was the head of Islam in Palestine and his name was al-Hajj. I mean al-Hussein al-Hussein And he was the leader of Islam and also the head of really the protests against Zionism in in Palestine organizer of anti-British riots and so forth and With the British after him in 1939 he fled and ended up in Baghdad The Grand Mufti organized an Arab nationalist committee which entered into secret negotiations German diplomats and officials at the highest level were assuring the Grand Mufti's committee that that That they would support Iraq and that the British were losing all of their all of their battles And losing all their allies to Blitzkrieg and that it was an opportune moment to just declare war on the British By the end of 1940 even the pro-British Iraqi Foreign Minister Nouri al-Said began to consider whether an alliance with Germany might not be suitable For most other Arab nationalists in Iraq and elsewhere the British were the problem and the Germans were the potential solution The monarchy was still loyal to the British. However Standing in the role of Monarch was a regent to an underage prince and The brother of Faisal had died in 1933 Yet as Britain found herself pounded by the Germans in the Battle of Britain She increasingly put pressure on Iraq to make more guarantees to be closer to give the oil at better prices to To declare war on Germany and so forth a lot of pressure there Indeed as the moderate Nationalist Iraqi government tried in 1940 to sell oil to Japan in hopes of getting arms Which the British had consistently Interdicted the British blocked the financial aspects of the deal and threatened other economic Consequences if the Iraqis did not support the war against the Germans actively The United States was still theoretically neutral in the war But the Britons had still had full support from Washington In December 1940 Secretary of State Cordell Hall ordered the American ambassador in Baghdad to support the British quote with all possible a short of war and in general the American State Department records show that the United States government backed by standard oil company and Sinclair and some other companies held it as a core American interest that Iraq support the British It's significant also that Colonel William J. Donovan Wall Street lawyer and And politician and government insider and just five months away from becoming Coordinator of information the forerunner of the OSS and CIA made a special visit to Baghdad in February 1941 among other things trying to gain The Grand Lifty support for Britain in the current dispute with the government He was disappointed in this but he may have worked out other arrangements while he was in town We don't know the full story of this mission yet to summarize in 1940-41 the relations between the United States and Britain on one side and Iraq on the other were conditioned by the West's desire to Have free access to Iraqi Iraqi oil And also by the Iraqi desire to buy arms and outrage generally against the British for their policy policies in the mandate of Palestine So the stage was set and in April 1941 nationalist politician Rashid Ali al-Galani and four prominent Colonels let a coup which took over the previous cabinet the government immediately demanded a new Iraqi treaty with more independent terms for Iraq and In May 1941 the Grand Mufti declared a jihad against the British calling for a general Arab uprising and Hitler even mentioned the These events in a in a general communication Indicating you might support that Germany might support this the British ambassador in Iraq refused to deal with the new government and The Americans backed him up to make a Sort of long story short the The the British and Americans put increasing pressure on the Iraqi government and so the Iraqis just went took a An army down to Habaniya to take over the air base there and while they waited and Filled around the local air base can RAF commander just simply organized an air attack on the Iraqis and And won the battle of Habanias because they ran away so The war was over a few weeks later and the Grand Mufti took off. He went to Iran the All-deleting persons in the coup took off and so it was a failed thing And an occupation ensued which meant that it was total British occupation Once the war started the Americans were there to occupying Iraq It wasn't particularly horrible But it was certainly an occupation in which the allies were exploiting the Iraqis in which Iraqis were poor and which food Stuff's were were taken away and so forth to Turn to the Iran case You remember razor Shaw is in power in the 30s and increasingly independent the the British were really upset at this a strong sense of independence and Increasingly raise a tribe to turn to the Germans to trade to kind of counterbalance the British demands that they That they Be the only trading partner in a kind of colonial situation And so there were some contacts with with Germany by the time of 1939 Maybe maybe a thousand German businessmen and Technicians and spies and so forth lived in Iran It's also true that razor Shaw was interested by the Nazi fascination with Aryans Since he himself razor promoted an interest in the pre-islamic history of Iran and the Aryan race and those words are the same basically But most scholars these days conclude that there is little danger of Iran becoming an ally of Germany in this war nonetheless The the Americans and the British Started Started up the process of pressuring the Iranians and particularly on this issue of German Nationals who were who were living there? so the And I've kind of flipped to the wrong place in this This issue of national seems unimportant to us a thousand Germans more or less and and so forth But in fact the Americans got on the horn and told the British you gotta you gotta stop them on this This is the point that we pressure them on and so this issue of a thousand German nationals became the key of course the real issue was Persian or Iranian oil And Diplomatic records indicate a very substantial American or input of American oil interests These are throughout the diplomatic documents throughout the foreign relations papers and so forth The Soviets were planning to attack Persia in a few months When the Germans attacked them and they had to call it off But from the moment that Russia changed from being Hitler's ally to being the allies June 22nd 1941 operation Barbarossa Just three weeks after the British full-fledged occupation of Iraq began Taking Iran seemed an imperative The Americans pushed for it now remember the Americans are not in the war. Yeah I mean Pearl Harbor is still five and a half months away at this point But the Americans push very hard where they had dawdled previously in creating Contacts with the with Iranian oil and actually the Shah had made some overtures to the United States oil companies but Where they had dawdled now the companies came in and started trying to get a high percentage because they knew that the the Shah was Would feel himself under the under the gun In any case the the Shah would not relent and So the allies attacked the Anglo-Soviet invasion occurred on August 25th or began on August 25th Two months after Barbarossa began lasted about three weeks casualties were likewise low here by World War two standards Civilian and military the Iranians lost about a thousand dead And so the British and Russians now divided up Iran for a second time within 40 years In essence the Iranian occupation was a reworking of that 1977 division of Persia but this time with the additional support and help of the United States Eventually Raisa Shah would be booted and his son the last halabi Shaw the the more pliable and hedonistic Mohammed Raisa became the Shah of Iran This was just shortly after Raisa Shah appealed to the Americans to enforce the self-determination Sections of the Atlantic Charter in Iran so the reply was to kick him out Yet both of these hard-pressed Conquerors the British and the and the Russians and remember they both had the Germans on their hands at the same time both seem unable to organize Iran and Shortages cropped up and Starvation Starvation emerged in very real ways for one thing. They were disrupting all the the the rose Because the key to this attack had been that the idea of getting a lend lease road where the Americans could land supplies and take those Supplies across Iran to Russia so using up all the trucks using up all the resources using up all the materials in the country There was really Huge privation was visited on the population and it was only when Franklin Roosevelt sent a special envoy Patrick Hurley to Iran to make a report that the conditions were exposed and a new group took over the Americans import tuned the Russians and British and took over They brought in an American mission put advisors at every level and Patrick Hurley said this is great This is what we really need to do Nation building and quoting their nation building. This is wonderful thing So they they carried out this process of nation-building. They had organizers at Every level advisors to everybody. I think the most striking one is Brigadier General Norman Schwartzkopf Not the hero of the Gulf War, but the father of the hero of the Gulf War Schwartzkopf knew a lot about police matters since he had organized the New Jersey State police in coincidentally at the same time that William J. Donovan was state attorney of New York They both fought prohibition together and they were both in the OSS together and Schwartzkopf organized the the state police the gendarmerie of Iran and then came back for a second tour in the early 50s and organized the Sabak the most dreaded secret police for a long time in the Cold War Insom the Iran of trucks refineries modernization and highways comes in part from the legacy of razor-shaw and in part from this legacy of Invasion and regime change just a few concluding remarks here, and I've got a couple minutes Only First of all I intended this talk to be a story about the Middle East that explains Some of the human misery of this region in modern times in terms of Western manipulation But I realized in putting together putting it together that it also follows the kind of revisionist trajectory in in talk about allied Behaviour in World War two so there was allied bombing of civilians and these kinds of things ethnic cleansing of German populations and all that And then there was the invasion and occupation Etc. I'm not comparing here the allies to the or England and Britain to Russian occupation or German occupation I'm just comparing them to their rhetoric of the Atlantic Charter and the documents Britain was again summing up still a very much an aggressive power in the Middle East after world Before World War two and during the United States became involved directly in the region at this at this juncture Especially with this kind of nation-building Edge to the whole thing in the end I think that the story also points up the kind of generational aspect of American foreign policy there So during and after World War two Norman Schwartzkopf senior organizes the Shah's secret police Teaches Persians the good old SS techniques of interrogation and then later his son comes back to smash Iraq Just after Iraq has fought an eight-year war with Iran It's something like a family business And I think I think there are several of these many of these continuities in them in modern American foreign policy That we should pay more attention to You know the issues in the end are the same issues from this period to the present invasion occupation nation-building Zionists in Palestine control of petroleum and then the kind of distinct Brutality in the Western views of the Middle East So one conclusion we might draw as opposed to the old saw that in the Middle East They've been killing each other for centuries and constant wars and all that stuff That old saw just doesn't correspond to reality indeed based on this little story I've told today the woes of the resource rich Middle East have come about chiefly In these stories because the imperialism and Western nation-building and other cynical interventions in the Middle East. Thank you