Sunday, March 22, 1922. Before jackhammers.

Usually, if I put a newspaper up here, it's due to some historically significant event it discusses.  But that's not the case here.  In this case I put it up as the cartoon depicts a tool that never even occurred to me.  A "pounder", which is probably not what it was called, is shown. Something that came before, apparently, hydraulic jack hammers.

In news of the day, the Allies agreed to amend the Treaty of Sevres, the peace treaty with the now defunct Ottoman Empire, but Turkish Nationalist refused to sign it as long as Greek forces, now fighting alone in Turkey, remained there.

Anti treaty officers of the Irish Republican Army convened a convention in Dublin.  The one-day convention rejected the treaty and the authority of the Dail.

September 24, 1920. The Turkish-Armenian War

Armenian coat of arms.

This day in 1920 is regarded as the start of the Turkish Armenian War, but in reality it would be better regarded as the recognition of a conflict that had commenced several days earlier.

The root of the war was a Turkish decision to take back lands allotted to Armenia in the Treaty of Sevres which the Allies had negotiated with the Ottoman Empire but which the Turkish rebels, who had displaced the Ottoman government, did not recognize.  They correctly gambled that the Allies would not intervene on Armenia's behalf and commenced an invasion of Armenia on September 13, which should be regarded as the real beginning of the war.  On this date Armenia declared war on Turkey and commenced offensive actions, which worked at first.

The war soon went badly and the Armenians were forced to accept an armistice on November 18, 1920.  The Soviets then invaded on November 29, 1920, effectively putting an end to the country.  A peace treaty by the new government, essentially a treaty between the USSR and the Turkish rebels, was concluded on December 2, 1920.

The early 20th Century was one disaster after another for the Armenian people.  The Ottoman government killed over 1,000,000 Armenians during World War One and the Turkish rebels committed further atrocities upon Armenian civilians as it entered the country.  The country regained its independence on September 21, 1991.

August 10, 1920. Turkey and the Blues

Panoramic view of Lake Fairlee from Quinibeck Lookout,  August 10, 1920.

On this day in 1920 Mamie Smith recorded Crazy Blues, which would go on to be the first blues recording in American musical history to cross over the racial divide and be a general musical hit.

Mamie Smith

Smith would go on to have a short but successful blues career, but after her retirement from music things did not go as well.  She died penniless in 1946 at age 55 and was buried in an unmarked grave in New York City.  A gravestone was finally erected after a campaign to have one installed in 2012.

The Ottoman government signed the Treaty of Sevres in which they agreed to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, recognize Greek and Italian claims to Anatolian domains, and grant Armenia independence.

Signed outside of Paris, the Ottoman government was already fighting a revolt from Ataturk and therefor the treaty would never really come into full effect in the way envisioned.  Those parts of that would more or less be carried out were in those areas where the Allied already controlled Ottoman domains outside of Anatolia.

Regarded as an example of outrageous overreach by the Allies today, the treat wasn't completely without its merits.  The release of non Ottoman territories in Arabia, if only into mandates that were effectively European colonies, did recognize that those areas should eventually be independant, even though they definitely were not at the time.  Achieving a free Kurdistan and Armenia would have been a real achievement, the former of which has never occured and which continues to plague the region today.  Greek claims to the Anatolian mainland grossly overreached, however, and doomed any chance of acceptance of the treaty, which in turn doomed Armenian and Kurdish independence.

Photographed on this day in 1920, with "US" service lapel pins, campaign ribbons, Nurses service pin, and overseas stripes.  Still really don't know what more is here, but something is as it was a news photograph.

March 15, 1920. The Ides of March sees Germany in near revolt, the Allies in Constantinople, Congress Acting on the Versailles Treaty, and a Blizzard in North Dakota.

The headline was quite correct, a new civil war loomed in Germany, but at the same time the Reichswehr was pulling back from the putschists, proving once again that the army's instinct for self preservation remained paramount.

And perhaps it also reflected the fact that the rank and file of the Germany army differed little from the average man in the street to some degree.  This was no doubt not the case for the Freikorps, but German soldiers had played a role in the revolution of 1918, something that their leaders couldn't afford to forget.

Not forgotten in the U.S. was the Treaty of Versailles. The Senate ratified it, but not as written, substituting a compromise alternative Article X.

On the same day, but only hinted at here, British forces, acting under the Treaty of Sevres, occupied Constantinople.  The Allies in Turkey were acting as if the surrender of the Ottoman regime meant that the end of Turkey as a state capable of waging war against those on their own soil was over, which was far from true, and which would ultimately lead to disaster.

Allied troops marching in Constantinople, Greek flag flying from a building.

The occupation of the Ottoman capital city did not go well.  It commenced the night prior and was expansive on this day.  British Indian troops engaged in gunfire at a Turkish military school, killing ten students and British authorities arrested Turkish nationalist, including some members of the Ottoman parliament.  The overall human toll on the occupation isn't known.

The occupation of the parliament effectively eliminated the Turkish government which in turn put only the Sultan in a position of supporting the peace treaty with the Allies.  This would discredit the peace and a putative government anticipated by the treaty, which in fact had not yet been signed by the Turks.  The entire affair would strengthen Turkish nationalist who were already fighting the Allies in Anatolia.  

Constantinople would be occupied until 1923 when it was evacuated under the terms of a treat with the new Turkish government, the result of which would in part be the expulsion of most of Turkey's Greek minority population.

Closer to home, the deadly Spring Blizzard of 1920 hit North Dakota.

And U.S. passports suddenly became invalid due to Robert Lansing departing the office of Secretary of State with no replacement in place.  The crisis would continue for a week until Bainbridge Colby was confirmed for the office.

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.

The Secondary Waves of the Great War.

World War Two, for obvious reasons, looms large in our imagination as the biggest event of the 20th Century.  The biggest, and the most significant.

But are we wrong?  

It seems lately that the echos of World War One are resounding pretty loudly.

World War One smashed the old order and demolished the borders of centuries.  The interbellum tried to reconstruct them, but did so in a metastasized and imperfect form, giving rise to new malignant orders that sought to fill the voids left by the death of the old imperial ones.  World War Two pitted three forces against each other, fascism, communism, and democracy, with democracy and communism ultimately siding with each other against fascism. After the war, the results of the Second World War gave rise to a contest between the two victors, communism and democracy, against each other until the vitality of free societies and free markets drove the rigidness of communism to and beyond the breaking point.

And now that communism is dead and gone, buried alongside its evil cousin fascism, the old unsolved questions of the Great War are back.  The rights of small nations, including those with out countries, against the possessions of older larger ones.  The demise of great empires giving rise to smaller ones.  Nationalism of all stripes against everything else.

It's 1919 all over again.

Turkey didn't sign the Treaty of Sevres.

Indeed, rather than do that, it fought it out.

It can't be blamed.  The Greeks had a quasi legitimate claim to Smyrna, but only quasi. A lot of ethnic Greeks lived there, which is no surprise as Anatolia had been Greek. The Ottoman's were invaders to the region, finally taking it in the 1450s.  But it had a large Ottoman population that they were bloodily brutal towards and they engaged in conquest, with the help of their Western allies, in Anatolia proper, seeking in a way to reverse what was lost centuries prior.

The Italian claim, moreover, to islands off of Turkey was absurd.

But the Armenian claims to their lands weren't.

The region sought of Armenia marked for a plebiscite is Kurdistan.  The Syria that ran to the sea and down to Palestine was an Ottoman province carved away from the Empire.  So was the Mesopotamia, i.e., Iraq, that appears on the map.

In 1990, the United States intervened in the Middle East to force Iraq, the British post World War One creation, out of Kuwait, a desert province that the British had protected during their stay in the Middle East, launching operations, with the assistance of others, from that region of Arabia named for the Sauds, that Arabian family that spent the Great War and the immediate interbellum consolidating power at the ultimate expense of the Hashemites, that Arabian noble family who had made war on the Turks.  The British dolled out kingdoms to that family as consolation prizes, with the Hashemites taking Iraq and the Transjordan.  The French got to administer Syria, a region that it claimed an historical affinity to, with the British taking administration of Palestine and Egypt, both of the latter having been Ottoman provinces although Egypt was long administered by the British in an arrangement that nobody can possibly grasp.

And so now, the old fights, and the interbellum struggles, reappear.  The peoples not accorded nations would like to have them. The old empires would like to keep their domains.  Borders drawn by European nations, with the help of Woodrow Wilson, are treated as real, when perhaps they were never correct.