HOW THE OTTOMANS RUINED THE 20TH CENTURY
The Daily Beast
April 14 2015
World War I was only a global conflict when the Ottoman Empire joined
the fray. Those consequences–from genocide to new borders–are still
felt today.
After reading the fascinating initial chapter of Eugene Rogan’s new
history of the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, The Fall of
the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East, I was struck with
a recurring thought: The wonder is not so much that this sprawling
600-year-old Muslim empire fell victim to the convulsions of world
conflict in 1918, but that it somehow managed to survive at all as a
world power up to the war’s opening salvos. Founded by Central Asian
Muslim tribes in 1299, at its height in the late 17th century the
empire spanned three continents, taking in the Balkans in southern
Europe, Arab lands from Mesopotamia to Morocco, and much of Asia
Minor. Since the beginning of the 18th century Istanbul found itself
almost continually at war with Europe’s imperial powers. Invariably,
it came out on the losing end. Egypt and most of North Africa were
lost to Britain and France by 1882, while Russia gobbled up one
province of eastern Anatolia after another.
Nor were the predations of the Great Powers the only serious problem.
The Ottomans were mired in internal conflicts between the dominant
Turks and the many other peoples who paid allegiance to the Sultan
in Istanbul, including Serbs, Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Arabs.
These groups had begun to absorb Western ideas of nationalism and
self-determination–ideas that sparked numerous rebellions and
crackdowns on suspected subversives within the Empire. The most
notorious of the latter would ultimately fester into the 1915-1916
deportation-mass murder campaign against the Christian Armenians from
their Anatolian homelands. As many as a million defenseless Armenians
lost their lives.
It was not a foregone conclusion that the Turks would fight in
World War I at all. Many leading political figures in Istanbul
favored neutrality as the surest road to bringing about long-overdue
administrative and economic modernization with the aid of investments
from all the European powers. In the end, however, the triumvirate
of pashas who ruled the Empire came to believe an alliance with an
ascendant Germany, in which Berlin would pay for much of the war effort
and military training, would be the surest path to re-conquest of lost
provinces, the shoring up its faltering influence in the Middle East,
and internal modernization. It was the Ottoman entrance into the war
on the side of the Central Powers that transformed a European war
into a truly global conflict.
For their part, the Germans gained the use of a large Ottoman army that
could take the pressure off their inevitable battle against Russia
in the East by launching a campaign in the Caucasus. More important,
Germany hoped to exploit the Ottoman sultan’s role as caliph over the
entire world community of Muslims. Of course, the British, Russian,
and French empires contained millions of Muslims.
The Germans wanted the Caliph to declare a jihad against their
adversaries, hoping to bring about mass uprisings that would cripple
the war efforts of the Triple Entente, and the Caliph was happy
to oblige.
The initial Ottoman campaigns did not go well. Enver Pasha, the Ottoman
minister of war, hoped to duplicate the Germans’ masterful envelopment
at Tannenberg against the Russians, prompting the destruction of an
entire Russian army. Geography, poor weather, and inadequate logistics,
however, led to a crushing Ottoman defeat and the loss of 80,000
troops. Several divisions of Armenian Christians fought on the Russian
side in the campaign, and in the wake of the loss, the large Armenian
population within the Ottoman Empire found themselves victims of the
20th century’s first genocide. Rogan unpacks the complicated tragedy
of the Armenian persecution deftly and sensitively, concluding that
“the bitter irony is that the annihilation of the Armenians and other
Christian communities in no way improved the security of the Ottoman
Empire,” though that was its primary object.
Rogan unpacks the complicated tragedy of the Armenian persecution
deftly and sensitively, concluding that “the bitter irony is that
the annihilation of the Armenians and other Christian communities in
no way improved the security of the Ottoman Empire,” though that was
its primary object.
Next, the Ottoman 4th Army attacked the British defending the
Suez Canal across the Sinai Desert, but the thrust was detected by
aerial scouts and repulsed handily. The first two Ottoman campaigns,
observes Rogan, “revealed Ottoman commanders to be unrealistic in
their expectations and the average Ottoman soldier to be incredibly
tenacious and disciplined even under the most extreme conditions.”
These early Allied victories lulled the Allies into a “false
complacency about the limits of Ottoman effectiveness.” Prompted by
a Russian plea to mount a diversionary campaign, Britain and France
decided in spring 1915 to go for a knockout punch. They launched an
ambitious amphibious attack through the heavily mined Dardanelles
straits on the Gallipoli Peninsula. Such an attack would threaten
Istanbul itself–if successful. Now it was the ordinary Allied
soldiers’ turn, particularly the Australians and New Zealanders,
to suffer at the hands of their commanders’ incompetence.
For eight months, the agony in the trenches at Gallipoli continued,
with little substantial Allied progress. Here Colonel Mustafa
Kemal–later called Ataturk, leader of Turkey in its successful war
of independence of 1919-1923–first distinguished himself, as did the
entire Ottoman army in their heroic defense of the Peninsula. Suffice
it to say that in the years between the two world wars, the Gallipoli
campaign was held up as proof by leading military strategists
that the amphibious assault against a well-defended beach would
never again succeed. The U.S. Marines, however, weren’t buying the
message. They conducted an extensive study of Gallipoli, determining
that the British and French had made a complete hash of the operation,
and that, with proper training, specialized doctrine and equipment,
heavily fortified beaches could indeed be taken. (In this they were
correct, as World War II proved.)
Impending defeat at Gallipoli prompted London to order a British-Indian
army to march on Baghdad to rekindle support for the war at home, and
assuage suspected Muslim restiveness within their Empire. Once again,
the tough Turks managed to repulse the British drive, capturing 13,000
Indians and Britons at the Siege of Kut.
After Kut, the war generally went quite badly for the Ottomans. A
crucial factor in their misfortunes was Istanbul’s failure to win
over the Arab tribes, loosely united under Sharif Husayn of Mecca,
the great-great grandfather of Jordan’s current head of state, King
Abdullah II, to fight for the Empire rather than against it. The Turks
were badly outmaneuvered on the diplomatic front by the British,
who concluded an alliance with Husayn in March 1916 in which false
promises of postwar independence for the Arabs played no small role.
The Arab Revolt was born. For the rest of the war, Husayn and his
trusted adviser, T.E. Lawrence, effectively tied down Ottoman forces
with guerrilla operations against (already thin) supply lines in
Palestine, Syria, and the Arabian Peninsula.
Meanwhile, the Ottoman Sultan’s call to jihad utterly failed to
strike a chord among the Muslims within the Allied empires, mainly
because their clerics saw cynical German aspirations behind the
call. In addition, as scholar Bernard Lewis has written, “The moral
significance of an Arab army fighting the Turks, and still more, of
the ruler of the holy places [Sharif Husayn] denouncing the Ottoman
Sultan and his so-called jihad, was immense, and was of particular
value to the British and incidentally to the French empires in
maintaining their authority over their Muslim subjects.”
In fall 1917, a bold and very smart British general, Edmund Allenby,
assumed command in the Middle East. He broke the main Ottoman defensive
line in Palestine, centered on Gaza. The Turks retreated, surrendering
Jerusalem without a shot. By this point, as Rogan points out, the
Ottomans’ ambitions “had been narrowed from victory to survival.”
Setbacks on the Western front forestalled Allied operations in the
Middle East until fall 1918. The Turks, badly in need of reinforcements
and resupply that would never come, grimly held on. In a three-day
operation in September around Megiddo in Palestine, Allenby used his
cavalry to sweep around Ottoman forces, capturing tens of thousands
before going on to completing his conquest of demoralized Ottoman
forces in Syria.
With the final defeat of the Ottomans and Germany in 1918, European
imperialism replaced Turkish rule throughout the Middle East. After
four centuries united in a multinational empire under Ottoman Muslim
rule, the Arabs found themselves divided into new states under the
control of Britain and France. The 200-year retreat of Islamic power
before the West had run its course. New boundaries were established
to suit the expansionist designs of the conquerors, and, as Rogan
points out in his excellent Conclusion:
The borders of the post-war settlement have proven remarkably
resilient–as have the conflicts the post-war boundaries have
engendered. The Kurdish people, divided between Turkey, Iran, Iraq,
and Syria, have been embroiled in conflict with each of their host
governments over the past century in pursuit of their cultural
and political rights. Lebanon, created by France in 1920 as a
Christian state, succumbed to a string of civil wars as its political
institutions failed to keep pace with its demographic shifts and
Muslims came to outnumber Christians. Syria, unreconciled to the
creation of Lebanon from what many Syrian nationalists believed
to be an integral part of their country, sent in its military to
occupy Lebanon in 1976–and remained in occupation of that country
for nearly thirty years. Despite its natural and human resources,
Iraq has never known enduring peace and stability within its post-war
boundaries, experiencing a coup and conflict with Britain in World
War II, revolution in 1958, war with Iran between 1980 and 1988,
and a seemingly unending cycle of war since Saddam Hussein’s 1991
invasion of Kuwait and the 2003 American invasion… to topple Hussein.
The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East is a
remarkably lucid and accessible work of history, involving a large
cast of contradictory and complex characters. Rogan, who teaches
the history of the modern Middle East at Oxford, seems equally at
home explaining the parameters of Ottoman grand strategy and the
tensions of the British-Arab alliance as he is at conjuring up the
unique challenges of maneuver warfare in the Sinai and Palestine, or
the brutal stalemate in the Gallipoli trenches. Telling quotations
from diplomats, field commanders, and ordinary soldiers of all the
combatants lend the narrative a powerful sense of immediacy.
Rogan wrote the book in part to challenge the conventional view that
the Turkish campaigns against Britain and France in the Middle East
and against the Russians in the Caucuses were strictly sideshows to
the main events on the Western and Eastern fronts, and to convey to
English speakers a flavor of the Muslim experiences of an event that
did more than any other to give birth to the modern Middle East. Rogan
certainly succeeds in demonstrating that “the sick man of Europe”
proved to be a far more important player in the Great War than its
opponents believed possible, in ways they never imagined.