POLI 395 NOTES

Fromkin Article Notes: This article discusses how the modern middle east map came to be drawn. When the ottoman Empire collapsed in 1918, the british created new boarders; and rulers to keep the peace and protect their interests. In 1961 iraqi dictator said that Kuwait belonged to Iraq. Page 1 This pushed to a invasion. In 1973 a deal was struck when other arab states supported Kuwait and tropps withdrew. August 2nd 1990 at 2 am saddam inaided Kuwait again On page 2 it seems as though that during the ottoman empire rule there was no real laws within these small tribes. He was En-ver Pasha, and he mistook himself for a sort of Napoleon. Of modest origins, Enver, as a junior officer in the Ottoman Army, joined the Young Turks, a secret society that was plotting against the Ottoman regime. In 1913, Enver leda Young Turk raiding party that overthrew the government and killed the Minister of War. In 1914, at the age of 31, he became the OttomanMinister of War himself, married the niece of the sultan and moved into a palace. Page 2 To him the time seemed ripe: in the first month of the war German armies overwhelmingly turned back a Russian attack on East Prussia, and a collapse of the czar's armies appeared imminent. Seeing a chance to share in the spoils of a likely German victory over Russia, Enver entered into a private conspiracy with the German admiral commanding the powerful war-ship Goeben and its companion vessel, the Breslau, which had taken refuge in Turkish waters at the outset of hostilities page 2-3 By needlessly plunging the empire into war, Enver had put everything in the Middle East up for grabs.In that sense, he was the father of the modern Middle East. Had Enver never existed, the Turkish flag might even yet be flying-if only insome confederal way-over Beirut and Damascus, Baghdad and Jerusalem. *** Initially, the British Navy seemed poised to take Constantinople, and Russia panicked again. What if the British, having occupied Constantinople, were to hold onto it? The 50 percent of Russia's export trade flowing through the strait would then do so only with British permission. Czar Nicholas II demanded immediate assurance that Constantinople would be Russia's in the postwar world. Fearing Russia might withdraw from the war, Britain and France agreed. In return, Russia offered to support British and French claims in other parts of the Middle East. About who gained which parts*** With that in mind, on April 8, 1915, the British Prime Minister appointed a committee to define Britain's postwar goals in the Middle East. I It was clear that the British needed to maintain control over the Suez Canal, and all the rest of the route to their prized colonial possession, India. They needed to keep the Russians and Germans and Italians and French in check. Es-pecially the French, who had claims on Syria. Page 4 By October 1918, Allenby had taken Syria and Lebanon, and was poised to invade what is now Turkey. But there was no need to do so, because on October 31 the Ottoman Empire surrendered. Accordingly, early that year the ambitious 45-year-old politician was asked by the Prime Minister to serve as both War Minister and AirMinister. ("Of course," Lloyd George wrote Churchill, "there will bebut one salary!") Maintaining the peace in the captured-and now occupied-Arab Middle East was among Churchill's new responsibilities xhausted from years of war, be demobilized. He understood what meeting those demands meant. Relying on that army, Prime Minister Lloyd George had decided to keep the whole Arab Middle East under British influence; in the words he once used about Palestine: "We shall be there by conquest and shall remain." Now Churchill repeatedly warned that once British troops were withdrawn, Britain would nolonger be able to impose its t page 5 1920, Lloyd George's Middle East policy was under attack from all sides. Churchill, who had warned all along that peacetime Britain, in the grip of an economic collapse, had neither the money, the troops, nor the will to coerce the Middle East, was proved right-and placed even more directly in charge. On New Year's Day 1921 hewas appointed Colonial Secretary, and soon began to expand his powers, consolidating within his new department responsi-bility for all Britain's domains in Arabic-speaking Asia. One of the leftover problems in 1921 was just how to protect Transjordan's new governor, Abdullah, and Iraq's new king, Faisal, againstthe fierce warriors of Ibn Saud. In August 1922 Ibn Saud's camel-cavalry forces invading Transjor-dan were stopped outside Amman by British airplanes and armored cars. Earlier that year, the British forced Ibn Saud to accept a settlement aimed at protecting Iraq. With this inmind, the British drew a frontier line that awarded Iraq a sub-stantial amount of territory claimed by Ibn Saud for Arabia: all the land (in what is now Iraq) west of the Euphrates River, all the way to the Syrian frontier. Page 6 t is this frontier line between Iraq, Kuwait and Arabia, drawn bya British civil servant in 1922 to protect Iraq at the expense of Kuwait, that Iraq's Saddam Hussein denounced as invalid when he invaded. n 1922, Churchill succeeded in mapping out the Arab Middle East along lines suitable to the needs of the British civilian and militaryadministrations. T E. Lawrence would later brag that he, Churchill and a few others had designed the modern Middle East over dinner. Seventy years later, in the tense deliberations and confrontations of half the world over the same area, the question is whether the peoples of the Middle East are willing or able to continue living with that design. Notes from Angrist chapter 1. Beginning in December 2010 and throughout 2011, asdemonstrators confronted dictators across the Arab world demanding moreaccountable, more participatory, and less corrupt governance, it seemedeverything was changin With presidents falling out of power in Tunisia, Egypt, lybia and yemen. Page 1 The name MiddleEastwas not attached to the area by its residents them-selves. Rather, beginning in the nineteenth century, political elites in Europeand the United States coined the terms NearEastand MiddleEastto refer to(various delineations of) territories that lay between Western Europe and theFarEast(China, Japan, etc.). Because the term MiddleEastwas bestowedon the region by outside powers according to their own particular political,strategic, and geographic perspectives, it has been criticized as West- orEuro-centric. Still, it is in wide use today and typically refers to the geo-graphic region bounded to the north by Turkey, to the east by Iran, to thewest by Egypt, and to the south by the Arabian Peninsula (see Figure 1.1). Inaddition to Egypt, Turkey, and Iran, the Middle East thus includes SaudiArabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Qatar, Bahrain,Kuwait, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Page 2 . Meanwhile, the Muslim world extends well be-yond the Middle East. Muslim- majority countries are found in sub-SaharanAfrica, Central Asia, and South and Southeast Asia. So the Middle East isjust a small slice of the Muslim world in terms of both geography and pop-ulation. Indeed, a majority of the world’s Muslims live outside of the Mid-dle East. Page 4 Page 10 prophet mohammed started islam in Egypt in 610 ce he 1500s the Ottomans challenged Venice,Italy, and Spain for supremacy in the Mediterranean. The Ottoman Empirealso laid siege to the Habsburg capital of Vienna twice—once in 1529 andagain in 1683. While it was victorious neither time, it did implant a pro-nounced sense of threat among Europeans page 11 critical point is that the tables began to turn in the seven-teenth century as European states became increasingly powerful while theOttoman Empire weakened. European powers successfully challenged theOttomans for control over lucrative trade routes and penetrated the OttomanEmpire with European-controlled operations that imported European prod-ucts and exported raw materials. These developments harmed the Ottomanseconomically, reducing revenues accruing to Ottoman coff ppage 12 Nationalism became a powerful ideology that undermined the multiethnicOttoman Empire by inspiring many of its subject peoples to attempt to se-cede. Finally, by the turn of the nineteenth century, European armies hadbecome more professional and deadly, utilizing new technologies, tactics,and organizational strategies. Meanwhile, internal to the empire, the qualityof sultans was declining and the central government was weakening relativeto provincial power-holders. Military morale and discipline too were wan-ing, in part because the inflation that struck Eurasia at this time devaluedtroops’ pay. The Ottomans’ painful experience of decline vis-à-vis an increasingly power-ful set of European countries was only the first of a series of conflicts be-tween the Middle East and Europe. The second was an era of direct rule byvarious European countries over territories in the Middle East. Specifically,beginning in the nineteenth century and continuing through the end of WorldWar I, Britain, France, and Italy took control of the vast majority of theregion. Page 12 Perhaps even more dramatically, at World War I’s end, Franceand Britain literally drew the modern-day boundaries of Lebanon, Syria,Iraq, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine; engineered their respective political sys-tems; and—in Iraq and Jordan—selected which kings would be placed ontheir respective thrones. 14 or a generation, from 1920 to 1947, Britain attempted to manage whatwould prove to be an intractable conflict. The number of Jews in Palestinegrew, as did the amount of land owned and worked by Jews. A rise in Arablandlessness and poverty followed, as the Arabs who had worked the landspurchased by Jews were forced to find employment elsewhere. The Arabcommunity grew increasingly frustrated and despairing. Serious violencebetween Jews and Arabs broke out in the late 1920s and again in the mid-1930s. The economic strains of the Great Depression, and then Hitler’s ex-ecution of millions of Jews during World War II, magnified and sharpenedthe conflict. In 1947, Britain, exhausted by the war and unable to reconcileJews and Arabs, informed the world it would take its leave of Palestine andturn the problem over to the newly created United Nation page 15 On May 14, 1948, Zionistleaders proclaimed the State of Israel. Almost immediately, the surroundingArab countries invaded. Israel would be victorious in this war, extendingthe lands under its control beyond what would have been its borders ac- cording to the UN partition. A wave of independence achievements then cameduring and after World War II, with Lebanon, Jordan, Syria, Libya, Mo-rocco, and Tunisia becoming independent—in that order—between 1943and 1956. Kuwait, Algeria, and (South) Yemen became independent in the1960s, and Bahrain, Qatar, and the UAE followed in 197 Page 16 Middle East countries were often too weak to do otherwise. Insome instances, they were simply unable to force Europeans to leave com-pletely. F