Dreams of Past Glory

Last week I published an item here that showed a new map for Greece, published in 1920, which depicted the portions of Anatolia it believed it had separated from Turkey.  Cultural Greeks did live in those places, but they went far beyond those areas where Greeks were the majority.

And Greek troops went far beyond those places.

Italians took a set of islands off Anatolia as well.

Italy had already taken territory from the Ottomans by that time. More specifically, they'd taken Libya in 1912 as a result of the Italo-Turkish War.  Italians, in the form of Romans, had governed Libya at one time, but hadn't since the collapse of the Roman Empire.*  If a person wished to be more generous, Greco Roman culture hadn't governed there since the Byzantine Empire had been pushed out in 647, although at least one Christian city remained as late as the 1400s at the absolute latest.

Basically, both powers were asserting claims to territory they hadn't actually governed since 1453.

Yesterday we looked at the French conquest of Syria.  The French had been very influential in Syria. . . up until the 1190s.  At least that claim was there, however, which it really wasn't for Algeria which the French started colonizing in 1830.

What the heck, however.


*Italian immigrants would ultimately make up 20% of the Libyan population.

July 25, 1920. Saladin, nous voici

Syrian volunteers uniformed and equipped in the fashion of the former Ottoman Army, 1920

On this day in 1920 the French, largely using native troops drawn from North Africa, officially entered Damascus and put an end to the Emir Feisal's independent Syrian government.  The French commander, Mariano Goybet, made the unfortunate reference to the Crusades on the occasion at the Umayyad Mosque when he declared, "Saladin, nous voici", which translates (at bit roughly), to "Saladin, we're back", or "Saladin, we're here."

Probably more fortunately most of the people in Damascus didn't speak French, but nonetheless the sentiment expressed the really aggressive and arrogant position taken by France in regard to Syria, which had only lately been freed from Ottoman rule by the Arab Army and the British Commonwealth during World War One.  The Arab Army's late war goal had been the occupation of Damascus.

Syria was then, as it is now, a multicultural nation which featured a variety of ethnicities and which retained a significant Christian population.  The reference to Saladin recalled the defeat of Christian forces at the hands of Saladin at the end of the Crusader era in the 1170s through 1190s.  France had at that time been heavily invested in the region and, in spite of the passage of centuries, that had not been forgotten by the French who regarded Syria as a special charge even if the Syrians did not want them back.

Feisal would flea to British protection and was given Iraq as a consolation prize, a kingdom that ultimately cost him his life.

Syria would remain a French mandate until 1946, with French rule being unpopular.  A long running revolt broke out in 1926 which ultimately lead to an effort to create an independent state by the French in 1936, but the French government did not ratify it.  The British supported Syrian independence following World War Two and a Syrian government formed during the mandate period took it into independence.   

Following Syrian governments have proven themselves to be unstable since that time, with coups taking place within a few years of independence.  The Ba'ath Party, an Arab nationalist fascist party, has been in power since 1961, but obviously its rule is far from unchallenged.

Syrian soldier in 2012.

What would have occurred had the French simply acquiesced to a Hashamite kingdom in 1920 remains a great historical, "what if".

The Turkish Spin and a proposal that will be ignored.

According to Turkey, it's invading northern Syria in order to allow 2,500,000 Syrian refugees to return home.

Saladin, the Kurd who conquered the Middle East (and who spent more time fighting fellow Muslims than he did Christians, although he certainly fought Christians too).  He lived in the last era in which things were on the downside for the Kurds, 800 years ago.

Hmmm . . . all for humanitarian reasons you see.

The endless spins that the current situation in Northern Syria creates are mind boggling.  We armed a Syrian rebel group composed of Kurdish militias to take on the Syrian government under the quixotic belief that disparate light infantry bands could take on a modern armored army back by the Russians without direct U.S. involvement.  That was naive in the extreme, and no less of military expert (and I mean that sincerely) as John McCain lobbied for it. 

We should have know that was absurd from the onset. 

Toppling the Syrian Baathist regime was always going to require direct western military involvement to be followed by at least a decade, if not more, of western occupation of the country.

No matter, we ended up committing some troops and, beyond that, we gave moral and material support to the one entity in the war that wasn't either comprised of Islamic extremist or incompetents, the Kurds.

The Kurds can't be blamed for rising up in rebellion on their own ground.  They now have a quasi state in Iraq and they've been where they are on the ground in Syria for eons.  They'd have their own country now if Woodrow Wilson's alterations of the map of Turkey that ended up in the Treaty of Sevres had come into full fruition.  That would have required more American involvement in diplomacy in 1919-20, more military backbone for an already tired France and Britain at the same time (heck, they were both already bogged down in Russia and the British were fighting a war in part of its own "united" kingdom, who can blame them for not getting tied down in Turkey), less greed and blood lust on the part of Greece, and less bizarre territory avarice on the part of Italy.

That would have been asking for a lot.

So, the Ottoman's fell and the Allies carved up the Ottoman Empire as they saw fit, splitting the Ottoman Kurdistan into three separate state administered by three different sovereigns, to which we might add that a World War One neutral, Persia, already was another entity they had to deal with.

And so now, one of our NATO allies is invading a region occupied by one of our Syrian rebellion allies, which we armed, with the invading army using military equipment designed by us and our ally, Germany (most Turkish weapons, but not all, are produced in Turkey) because our President decided to stand aside after we'd already made all the inconsistent commitments. Added to this, this means that Turkey is now effectively the military ally of the Syrian government which will come in and occupy northern Syria as soon as the Turks have subdued the Kurds.

What can be done about this now?

Well, maybe not much. 

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, one of Trumps most solid supporters, is outwardly outraged and has sponsored a bill to sanction Turkey.  It'll pass. Wyoming's Congressman Liz Cheney, who has been more independent regarding Trump than we might suppose, is also supporting it.

But what will sanctions do now?  It won't force Turkey out of Syria and it won't stop their invasion.  Shoot, by the time any sanctions come into effect, the Turks will be out and the Syrians back in.

Just how successful have our sanctions in the region been anyway?  Iran hasn't collapsed.  Syria's government is going to win its civil war.

No, what the sanctions will likely do is to drive Turkey into the arms of the arch conspirator Vladimir Putin.  And we don't need that.  It'll be a marriage of convenience, but Putin will be just fine with that.

A better proposal, now that we have blood on our hands and have allowed this mess to occur, would be to require the Turks to remain where they are supervised by a United Nations peacekeeping force. That would be a direct UN intervention in the Syrian civil war and it might be hard to bring about. Absent that, as Turkey remains a NATO ally, the next best proposal would be for a joint NATO force to occupy the region until a real peace settlement can be reached. Failing that, we should see about occupying it in place of the Turks, which the Turks probably wouldn't be too keen on now. And failing all of that, the Turks should just stay there in a supervised fashion until Syria joins the 21st Century with it being made clear that should they screw up, they'll have no friends in the west at all.

But none of this will occur.