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**DUShock** · June 16, 2014, 03:12 PM

An article in Forbes on the matter:

Iraq Crisis: Six Reasons Why America's Military Should Not Re-Engage

http://www.forbes.com/sites/lorenthompson/2014/06/16/iraq-crisis-six-reasons-why-americas-military-should-not-re-engage/

There are plenty of places in the world where aggression would require an American military response. Mexico, NATO, and South Korea to name a few. However, Iraq does not belong on that list. As most Americans understand all too well, U.S. forces should never have been sent there in the [...]

Iraq Crisis: Six Reasons Why America's Military Should Not Re-Engage

There are plenty of places in the world where aggression would require an American military response. Mexico, NATO, and South Korea to name a few. However, Iraq does not belong on that list. As most Americans understand all too well, U.S. forces should never have been sent there in the first place. Having finally been extricated after nine years of trying to fix Iraq’s dysfunctional political culture, re-engaging in response to recent advances by Sunni extremists would be a mistake. I’m not just talking about putting American “boots on the ground,” which President Obama has ruled out, but also playing any other on-going military role in supporting the corrupt and sectarian government of Nouri al-Maliki.

There isn’t much doubt that applying U.S. air power would slow the advance of ISIS, the radical Sunni militia that has seized control of several northern cities. It is easy to see why many Americans might feel that some sort of military response is required to blunt the brutality of the extremists. But one reason history will remember Barack Obama as a better president than George W. Bush is because he is able to grasp what the late Townsend Hoopes called the limits of intervention, and look beyond the emotions of the moment to see the long-term consequences of military action. Here are six analytic reasons why avoiding any visible military role in Iraq’s latest crisis would be a wise move.

1. The military situation will stabilize on its own. The collapse of Iraqi forces in the country’s northwestern quadrant was caused less by the tactical brilliance of ISIS than by the political and military incompetence of the Maliki regime. The number of ISIS fighters that have entered the country from Syria at most represents 3-4% of the Iraqi military’s active-duty strength, and that’s not counting reserves that swell the ranks of the military to nearly a million personnel. Baghdad’s forces melted away because they were poorly trained, poorly led, and hated by the predominantly Sunni population in the area. The further south ISIS moves, the more it will enter predominantly Shia areas where the military and local residents are motivated to put up a fight. About 60% of Iraqis are Shiites who hate ISIS just as much as Sunnis in the northwest hate Baghdad. And if ISIS pushes east, it will get mauled by the Kurdish Peshmerga. Either way, the situation will stabilize without American intervention.

2. We shouldn’t be taking sides in a religious war. Describing what is happening today in Iraq as a “civil war” is like calling the Crusades a military intervention. The fundamental divide in Iraq that makes it ungovernable by anybody other than dictators is the split between the Sunnis and the Shiites, the two major sects within Islam. That struggle traces its origins back to the death of Muhammed in 632, and is so deep-seated that it defies rational discourse. Nearly 90% of the world’s Muslims are Sunnis, but the dividing line between predominantly Sunni and predominantly Shiite areas in the Persian Gulf region runs right through the middle of Iraq (Iran to the east is 90% Shiite). Until America invaded Iraq in 2003, the country had always been ruled by Sunnis — just like every other Arab nation. With all the countries in the region lined up on one side or the other of this religious divide, any U.S. aid to Maliki’s sectarian regime amounts to taking sides in a religious struggle.

3. We don’t need the oil. Twenty years ago, maintaining stability in the Persian Gulf region was deemed essential to the health of the global economy because that’s where most of the world’s recoverable oil reserves were located. Times have changed. New drilling techniques and changing consumption patterns have made Persian Gulf oil less important than it used to be. Not only is America on a path to energy independence in the next decade, but two of the top three countries in terms of recoverable petroleum are now located in the Western Hemisphere — Venezuela (Number 1) and Canada (Number 3). Although Iraq still ranks high on the list of countries with extensive reserves, its government is so hard to deal with that it only contributes about 4% of current global production. If its oil were cut off other countries could cover the shortfall, and since Iraq’s biggest oilfields are in the south, far from the fighting, it probably won’t be cut off anyway.

4. Re-engaging would make America a target of extremists. The Sunni extremists who have invaded Iraq hate America, but they don’t have a good reason right now to attack it. Quite the opposite: having made headway in both Syria and Iraq because America is not actively engaged, they are strongly incentivized to avoid provoking U.S. military action. However, if the U.S. visibly took the side of Baghdad in repulsing ISIS attacks, its followers would draw the obvious conclusion that Americans needed to be punished — either in their homeland or somewhere overseas where they are more exposed. Either way, the U.S. might suffer the kind of devastating attack that forced a massive military response and derailed the economic recovery. Steering clear of further military involvement in Iraq might not be emotionally satisfying, but it would have tangible benefits for America’s economy and political culture.

5. Iraq needs to be partitioned, not propped up. Iraq is a mess because its borders were drawn a century ago by outsiders who knew little about the people that lived there. As David Fromkin recounts in his book A Peace To End All Peace, the British officials who took over from the Ottomans after World War One inherited an area in which 75% of the population was tribal, with no history of obedience to a central government. The Brits sowed the seeds of future dissension by favoring Sunni Arab overseers even though they were outnumbered locally by Shiites, and almost completely ignoring the interests of Kurds included within the arbitrary borders they laid out. The Iraq they fashioned from three pre-existing Ottoman provinces can never be democratic in the sense of protecting individual rights, because it has no such traditions and leaders like Maliki maintain power by exploiting sectarian loyalties. It needs to be broken up, not preserved with U.S. military power.

6. The U.S. public opposes military action. Popular opinion in the U.S. views the Bush Administration’s military campaign in Iraq as a big mistake and favors reducing the nation’s exposure to new foreign conflicts. President Obama would have maintained a residual military presence in the country if the Maliki government had assented to a status-of-forces agreement protecting U.S. warfighters from being charged with crimes, but no such agreement was reached and U.S. forces departed. Any new military action would thus mark the beginning of the third U.S. campaign involving Iraq in a quarter century, and would be strongly opposed by a majority of Americans. Past experience indicates that the U.S. probably could not sustain an effective military operation in the absence of popular support at home, especially given the likely news reports of civilians being killed by U.S. bombs aimed at ISIS fighters. It won’t help that few if any U.S. allies will be inclined to join us.

General James M. Dubik, the officer who oversaw training of Iraqi forces during the U.S. military surge seven years ago, made a trenchant comment about Iraq’s military and political system in the June 12 New York Times: “If the Iraqis could solve their problems by themselves, they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” He went on to state that “they need sustained help in both the security and policy areas. This means a concerted diplomatic and security advisory mission.” Or said differently, it means Americans would need to go back to Iraq for an indefinite period of time, with no assurance in the end that Maliki or whoever replaces him could hold the place together. That is not what the American public wants, nor is it what America’s global strategy requires. The joint force should not be used to save failed states from the consequences of their own incompetence. Rather than re-engaging in Iraq, America needs to move on.

**DUShock** · June 16, 2014, 03:20 PM

A book I highly recommend reading for anyone interested in the quagmire that is the Middle East is a book by David Fromkin entitled "A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East". The book was released in 1989 but should be on every American's bookshelf since September 12, 2001.

http://www.amazon.com/Peace-End-All-Ottoman-Creation/dp/0805068848/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1402946007&sr=1-2&keywords=a+peace+to+end+all+peace+by+david+fromkin

Amazon description follows:

The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling account of how the modern Middle East came into being after World War I, and why it is in upheaval today

In our time the Middle East has proven a battleground of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and dynasties. All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the First World War.

In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies came to remake the geography and politics of the Middle East, drawing lines on an empty map that eventually became the new countries of Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism-seemed possible he raises questions about what might have been done differently, and answers questions about why things were done as they were. The current battle for a Palestinian homeland has its roots in these events of 85 years ago.

The New York Times Book Review:

NYTimes

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/12/06/specials/fromkin-peace.html

THE GREAT MIDDLE EAST GAME, AND STILL NO WINNER

Date: August 27, 1989, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Section 7; Page 3, Column 1; Book Review Desk
Byline: By WM. ROGER LOUIS; Wm. Roger Louis is the Kerr Professor of English History and Culture at the University of Texas, Austin, and is a fellow of St. Antony's College, Oxford. His books include ''The British Empire in the Middle East.''
Lead: LEAD: A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922. By David Fromkin. Illustrated. 635 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company. $39.95.
Text:
A PEACE TO END ALL PEACE Creating the Modern Middle East 1914-1922. By David Fromkin. Illustrated. 635 pp. New York: Henry Holt & Company. $39.95.

The recent rerelease of David Lean's film ''Lawrence of Arabia'' enables audiences to relive Britain's World War I campaign to carve an independent Arab state out of the old Ottoman Empire. But even the new, expanded version of the film will leave viewers little the wiser about the reasons the British were supporting the Arabs, why the Ottoman Turks were allied with the Germans and what T. E. Lawrence was doing in the Arabian desert in the first place. Fortunately, people can now turn to an outstanding book that will provide them with the full historical and political background - and much more.

''A Peace to End All Peace'' is about the dissolution of the centuries-old Ottoman Empire at the close of World War I and the consequences of that breakup for the Western powers, the Soviet Union and, to a lesser extent, the peoples of the Middle East themselves. On a still larger scale, the book concerns the political origins of the present-day Middle East. It concludes with the piecemeal territorial settlements of 1922, when political lines were drawn that bear a striking resemblance to the boundaries of today.

These are heroic themes, seldom pursued collectively because of their complexity and the difficulty of seeing them whole. David Fromkin rises to the challenge. He combines the adventure of Alan Moorehead's ''White Nile'' with the drama of Barbara Tuchman's ''Guns of August.'' It would be an exaggeration to say that ''A Peace to End All Peace'' succeeds as well as those popular classics - indeed, it has a major flaw - but it rivals them.

Like Moorehead and Tuchman, Mr. Fromkin is a nonacademic historian (an international lawyer, in fact, though one would never guess it from his straightforward narrative style). Sometimes it requires an outsider to make the work of academic historians comprehensible to a general audience. And sometimes there are subjects about which so much has been written that one needs a single book to sum up everything cogently yet not simplistically. Mr. Fromkin scores on both points. Drawing on a vast number of specialized studies that have never before been satisfactorily synthesized, he is the right person at the right time.

From the Napoleonic era on, the broad arena of the Middle East was the battleground of Britain's struggle to protect the road to India from its traditional rivals, France and Russia. During the First World War this grand 19th-century contest, known as the ''Great Game,'' reached its climax; partly in fear of expansion by its wartime ally, Russia, Britain forged alliances with the Arabs, encouraging them to revolt against their Turkish rulers. ''A Peace to End All Peace'' is one of the first books to take an effective panoramic view of what was happening, not only in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey and the Arab regions of Asia, but also in Afghanistan and central Asia. Among the reasons for Mr. Fromkin's success is the breadth of his vision, which takes the reader deep into areas normally not associated with the Middle East.

The book is Anglocentric in the sense that it relies on English-language sources and focuses mainly on British military actions and decisions. Nevertheless, the Turkish and Russian parts of the story are effectively told, with the help of such work as that of Richard Ullman on Britain and the Russian Revolution. Mr. Fromkin successfully relates as well how the wartime competition between Britain and France over Syria, Lebanon and Palestine became part of the Great Game. After Gen. Sir Edmund Allenby marched into Jerusalem on Dec. 11, 1917, opening up Palestine to British occupation, hopes were raised in several Government offices throughout London that French claims in the area might be minimized.

Even when the British were fighting alongside the French and Russians against the Germans and Turks, the Great Game was never far from their minds. From the time of the outbreak of hostilities in 1914, Lord Kitchener, Britain's Secretary of State for War, aimed to obstruct the possible expansion of Russia into the Middle East. The Prime Minister, David Lloyd George, once likened Kitchener to ''a great revolving lighthouse.'' Sometimes, he said, Kitchener's intellect would project light, then there would be sudden darkness. He might have added that on the subject of Russian aggrandizement, the beam never shut off.

After Kitchener's death in 1916, Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, became ''guardian of the flame of the Great Game.'' Though Curzon was the most historically minded of the British statesmen during the First World War, his judgment was not especially reliable. He had a tendency to exaggerate. In 1918 he said, ''The great power from whom we have most to fear in [ the ] future is France.'' Two years later he claimed ''the Russian menace in the East is incomparably greater than anything else that has happened in my time to the British Empire.''

Yet it was Curzon, probably more than anyone else, who grasped the basis of self-determination, the principle on which the United States hoped to establish peace in the Middle East after the war. ''I am inclined to value the argument of self-determination,'' he said, ''because I believe that most of the people would determine in our favour. . . . If we cannot get out of our difficulties in any other way we ought to play self-determination for all it is worth wherever we are involved in difficulties with the French, the Arabs, or anybody else, and leave the case to be settled by that final argument knowing in the bottom of our hearts that we are more likely to benefit from it than anybody else.''

Not surprisingly, Mr. Fromkin characterizes British promises to the Arabs as ''sheer dishonesty.'' He says, for example, the Arab Bureau in Cairo ''did not believe that Arabs were capable of self-government,'' that behind the ''fac,ade'' of Arab self-rule would be indirect British rule.

Seen in this perspective, all parts of the Middle Eastern puzzle begin to fall into place, including the Balfour Declaration. In 1917 the British promised the Jews a national home in Palestine, while simultaneously assuring the Palestinian Arabs that the pledge would not be carried out at their expense. The Great Game was once again a key reason. According to Philip Kerr, secretary and adviser to the Prime Minister, a Jewish Palestine was considered ''a bridge between Africa, Asia and Europe on the road to India.'' (Other historians have pointed out that the Balfour Declaration was also designed to protect the Suez Canal. Mr. Fromkin seems not to have read Michael Cohen's ''Churchill and the Jews,'' for example, where Curzon is quoted as asking in 1918, ''Has not the whole history of the War shown us . . . that Palestine is really the strategic buffer of Egypt?'') Lloyd George himself held a somewhat different view, believing that a Jewish state would be agreeable to God's will as well as to British interests. His attitude should not be taken as hypocritical. ''Lloyd George's Zionism'' is the title of one of the best chapters in the book. Unlike most of his colleagues in the British Cabinet, who had been trained in Greek and Latin classics, the Prime Minister had been brought up on the Bible. He once said, in the words of I Samuel 15, that it would not be worth conquering the Holy Land only to ''hew it in pieces before the Lord.'' Lloyd George also believed that Palestine ''must be one and indivisible to renew its greatness as a living entity.'' All that did not prevent him from shrewdly foreseeing Britain's future in Palestine: ''We shall be there by conquest and shall remain,'' he predicted. Among the more obscure pieces of the puzzle is Sir Mark Sykes, the mastermind behind the redrawing of the boundaries of the Middle East and therefore, in a sense, the man most responsible for ''creating the modern Middle East.'' Mr. Fromkin has brought this relatively unknown statesman to light, making excellent use of the work of such scholars as Roger Adelson. Before the war, Sykes was one of the few members of Parliament who had traveled widely in the Middle East. He served as the Middle East expert to Kitchener and later to the War Cabinet secretariat. His goal, opposed by some anti-French members of the Government, was the construction of a French buffer zone in Lebanon and Syria as a sort of Chinese Great Wall that would prevent Russian penetration into the Middle East, just as the British, seeking to consolidate their Middle East holdings after World War II, welcomed American influence in Greece and Turkey as a check against Soviet expansion.

Sykes' ideas about the region bore a remarkable resemblance to those of T. E. Lawrence. Cautioning the reactionaries in the British Cabinet against treating the Middle East as another India, he warned: ''If you work from India you have all the old traditions of black and white, and you can not run the Arabs on black and white lines.'' Lawrence, similarly, wrote in 1919: ''My own ambition is that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony.'' Mr. Fromkin does not do justice, in my opinion, to Lawrence's quirky brilliance, yet he does reduce the legend of ''Lawrence of Arabia'' to historical reality. ''Lawrence possessed many virtues,'' he writes, ''but honesty was not among them; he passed off his fantasies as the truth.'' Mr. Fromkin takes a jaundiced view of the romantic interpretation of Lawrence as the liberator of the Arabs, describing him as ''a teller of fantastic tales whom the American showman Lowell Thomas transformed into 'Lawrence of Arabia.' ''

One part of the jigsaw does not quite fit, Mr. Fromkin's insistence on Winston Churchill's central role in his story. He writes in the introduction, ''Churchill, above all, presides over the pages of this book: a dominating figure whose genius animated events and whose larger-than-life personality colored and enlivened them.'' Elsewhere, he seeks to demonstrate Churchill's contribution to the cause of Zionism, and indeed to resolving all the problems of the Middle Eastern settlement following the war. In 1921, Mr. Fromkin points out, the consistently pro-Zionist Churchill warned an Arab delegation: ''The British Government mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. I have told you so again and again. I told you so at Jerusalem. I told you so at the House of Commons the other day. I tell you so now. They mean to carry out the Balfour Declaration. They do.''

Yet the theme of Churchill's centrality during the war cannot be sustained. He makes a major appearance at the beginning of the book, shortly before the war, and at the time of the Dardanelles campaign in 1914-15, but does not reappear in the Middle Eastern context until he becomes Colonial Secretary in 1921. Though committed to the Zionist cause, he was not a member of the War Cabinet in 1917, and though certainly on the fringes of Middle Eastern issues during the time of the British intervention in the Russian civil war following World War I, he did not participate in the decisions being made about the Middle East itself. In fact, Churchill himself once observed that Curzon was ''as responsible as any man alive for the promises that were given to the Jews and to the Arabs.''

It is important to get Churchill right, not only in the Middle East but also in the spirit of the time. In my own view, he was a throwback to an earlier age. He formed his attitudes toward Indians and other dependent peoples in the British Empire during the Victorian era and he never abandoned his early ideas, once writing in characteristic vein that the Egyptians were no more than degraded savages. He did not believe that the Arabs even in a thousand years could bring modern technology to Palestine. He imposed a Victorian sense of administrative parsimony at the Colonial Office, cutting costs by trying to rule the Middle East with armored cars, airplanes and machine guns. In the act for which he will probably always be remembered in the Middle East, he decided not to encourage the building of a Jewish national home on both sides of the Jordan River, and established instead the separate state to the east known today as Jordan.

What is particularly noteworthy about Churchill's role in these events is that he always participated in them with memorable ebullience and conviction. It is therefore curious that Mr. Fromkin writes, emphasizing the point with italics, that ''British policy-makers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in 1922 in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed.'' Not so. Churchill's own words indicate the contrary. As Colonial Secretary in 1922, he stated to a group of Palestinian Arabs that a national home for the Jews in Palestine ''will be good for the world, good for the Jews, good for the British Empire.'' He added that it would also be ''good for the Arabs who dwell in Palestine.'' This was still an age of great confidence. To read pessimism or defeat in the ideas of the British at this time is the flaw of this book. It is to project the post-World War II spirit into an earlier era.

This criticism does not detract from Mr. Fromkin's overall achievement. It merely reinforces the axiom that a worthy book can be based on a misguided premise. Readers will come away from ''A Peace to End All Peace'' not only enlightened but challenged - challenged in a way that is brought home by the irony of the title. The phrase comes from Archibald Wavell, later Lord Wavell, who became Viceroy of India in World War II. He believed that Churchill harbored obsolete Victorian ideas about the Middle East and India, and, in addition, possessed neither the temperament nor the tenacity to deal positively with virtually insoluble problems over a long period. Wavell thought that peace in the Middle East had been imposed by men who knew little of the peoples or problems of the region, and that the sponsoring of a Jewish national home would be a source of endless trouble. Wavell and Churchill were at loggerheads on these issues in 1945. The problems have not become any easier since. THE BRITISH EMPIRE, WRONG AGAIN

A friend once challenged David Fromkin to name the historical turning points of the modern Middle East. Mr. Fromkin's first reaction was to recall the events just after World War I. His more thoughtful reply is ''A Peace to End All Peace,'' a book that took him 10 years to complete.

Originally he intended a slender work. ''But of course books write themselves and I kept having to go back,'' he said in a telephone interview from the Greek island of Syme, where he was vacationing.

While writing, Mr. Fromkin found it necessary to focus constantly on Winston Churchill, poring through his war cables and private papers. ''One feels privileged,'' he said, ''being able to look at the 20th century through his eyes, always at the center of events, living a life much bigger than the life I or any of my friends lead.''

Mr. Fromkin, 56 years old, did not always plan to write history. A graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, he began a career with a Wall Street law firm. ''My first day's work,'' he said, ''was for a then-junior partner - Cyrus Vance.'' In the years to come he would work closely with other policy makers and politicians, and in the 1972 Democratic Presidential primary campaign he was chief of foreign policy for Hubert H. Humphrey.

That political experience, he said, gave him a rich sense of the false assumptions under which governments sometimes labor. But nothing prepared him for how misguided the British Empire was in the Middle East. ''Again and again,'' he said, ''they were hopelessly wrong.'' J.R. MOEHRINGER

**DUShock** · June 24, 2014, 02:17 PM

As someone who trained and fought with the Kurds, even attending the Kurdi SOFLA course, I hope they are able to finally secure their long over due independence. In 2004 my detachment was an honored guest of Mr. Barzani at his home in Dahuk, he is a very likable and entertaining gentleman.

Below is clip of Kurdish President Barzani speaking with CNN on the Kurdish independence movement. The Kurds are the only folks over there who their **** together. They are the West's only hope for a Western style Jeffersonian democracy in the Middle East. Barzani starts at the 1:44 mark and continues to the end of the segment at 12:51. The Kurds warned the central government about ISIS several weeks prior that Mosul was in danger. The threat was reiterated 2-3 days before Mosul's fall.

Iraq government claims gains in anti-militant fight | CNN

http://www.cnn.com/2014/06/24/world/meast/iraq-crisis/index.html?hpt=hp_t2

Iraqi officials insisted Tuesday they were holding on to a key oil refinery while making gains elsewhere against militant fighters.

**DUShock** · June 26, 2014, 04:29 PM

ISIS doesn't know history but we can can still blame the French for this colonial quagmire.

The Map ISIS Hates | Malise Ruthven

http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2014/jun/25/map-isis-hates/

After sweeping into Iraq, the jihadists of ISIS tweeted pictures of a bulldozer crashing through the Syria-Iraq border. This symbolic action against a century-old imperial carve-up shows the extent to which such groups are nurtured by the myth of precolonial innocence, when Sunni Islam ruled over an unbroken realm and the Shias knew their place.

As a side note: During 2004-05 we did a couple of jobs in and around the British cemetery in Mosul, it breaks my heart to this day the condition of the cemetery as it is dilapidated and overgrown. Article from the link below:

The Map ISIS Hates
Malise Ruthven

@albaraka_news
An image posted by ISIS of a bulldozer destroying a section of the Iraq-Syria border, June 2014
When the jihadists of ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) tweeted pictures of a bulldozer crashing through the earthen barrier that forms part of the frontier between Syria and Iraq, they announced—triumphantly—that they were destroying the “Sykes-Picot” border. The reference to a 1916 Franco-British agreement about the Middle East may seem puzzling, coming from a radical group fighting a brutal ethnic and religious insurgency against Bashar al-Assad’s Syria and Nouri al-Maliki’s Iraq. But jihadist groups have long drawn on a fertile historical imagination, and old grievances about the West in particular.

This symbolic action by ISIS fighters against a century-old imperial carve-up shows the extent to which one of the most radical groups fighting in the Middle East today is nurtured by the myth of precolonial innocence, when the Ottoman Empire and Sunni Islam ruled over an unbroken realm from North Africa to the Persian Gulf and the Shias knew their place. (Indeed, the Arabic name of ISIS—al-Dawla al-Islamiya fil-Iraq wa al-Sham—refers to a historic idea of the greater Levant (al-Sham) that transcends the region’s modern, Western-imposed state borders.)

But why is Sykes-Picot so important? One reason is that it stands near the beginning of what many Arabs view as a sequence of Western betrayals spanning from the dismantling of the Ottoman Empire in World War I to the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. The Sykes-Picot agreement—named after the British and French diplomats who signed it—was entered in secret, with Russia’s assent, in May 1916 to divide the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into British and French “spheres of influence.” It designated each power’s areas of future control in the event of victory by the Triple Entente over Germany, Austria, and their Ottoman ally. Under the agreement Britain was allocated the coastal strip between the Mediterranean and the river Jordan, Transjordan and southern Iraq, with enclaves including the ports of Haifa and Acre, while France was allocated south-eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, all of Syria and Lebanon. Russia was to get Istanbul, the Dardanelles, and the Ottoman Empire’s Armenian districts.

A 1916 map of the Middle East showing French (“A”) and British (“B”) areas of control, according to the secret Sykes-Picot agreement
Under the 1920 San Remo agreement, which built on Sykes-Picot, the Western powers were free to decide on state boundaries within these areas. The international frontiers—with Iraq’s framed by the merging of the three Ottoman vilayets of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra—were consolidated by the separate mandates granted by the League of Nations to France in Lebanon and Syria, and to Britain in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq. The frontier between French-controlled Syria and British-controlled Iraq included the desert of Anbar province that was bulldozed by ISIS this month.

Kept hidden for more than a year, the Anglo-French pact caused a furor when it was first revealed by the Bolsheviks after the 1917 Russian Revolution—with the Syrian Congress, convened in July 1919, demanding “the full freedom and independence that had been promised to us.” Not only did the agreement map out—unbeknownst to the Arab leaders of the time—a new system of Western control of local populations. It also directly contradicted the promise that Britain’s man in Cairo, Sir Henry McMahon, had made to the ruler of Mecca, the Sharif Hussein, that he would have an Arab kingdom in the event of Ottoman defeat. In fact, that promise itself, which had been conveyed in McMahon’s correspondence with the Sharif between July 1915 and January 1916, left ambiguous the borders of the future Arab state, and was later used to deny Arab control of Palestine. McMahon had excluded from the proposed Arab kingdom “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo [that] cannot be said to be purely Arab.” This clause led to lengthy and bitter debates as to whether Palestine—which Britain meanwhile promised as a homeland for Jews under the terms of the November 1917 Balfour Declaration—could be defined as lying “west” of the vilayet, or district, of Damascus.

In his 1922 white paper, Winston Churchill insisted that “the whole of Palestine west of the Jordan was excluded from Sir Henry McMahon’s pledge,” but Arab writers, including George Antonius, argued with forensic precision that Palestine was not among the exclusions specified and agreed to in the Hussein-McMahon correspondence. Antonius’s argument was strengthened by the fact that successive British governments refused to publish the correspondence, on public-interest grounds. The poorly drafted and geographically imprecise commitment McMahon had made to the Arab leader was too embarrassing to be exposed to public scrutiny until 1939, after Antonius had produced his version of it (translated from Arabic sources) in his 1938 book The Arab Awakening.

Pardoxically, even as the Sykes-Picot agreement was reached, a different vein of British policy was unfolding that aimed at liberating the Arab Middle East, though under British guidance. The British had been installed in Egypt since 1882, and had long pursued a dream of Arab unity—hence their interest in encouraging the Sharif of Mecca, whose sons Faisal and Abdullah led the Arab revolt against the Turks. In fact, the British “Arabists,” including McMahon and Sir Gilbert Clayton, head of Military Intelligence in Cairo, and the redoubtable T.E. Lawrence, took a commanding role in the liberation of the Arab provinces, encouraging the establishment of local governance in ways that contradicted the Anglo-French agreement. As the British army swept up from Egypt through Syria, it refrained from entering the larger towns, allowing Faisal and his forces to occupy them to maintain the momentum, and legitimacy, of the Arab national movement. The conquest of Damascus by the British in October 1918 was the outstanding example. As the Israeli scholar Eyal Zisser points out: “The aim was to create a situation in which these towns and areas could be characterized as liberated by the Arabs, who would then have a rightful claim.”

Sir Mark Sykes, the Middle East advisor to the secretary of state for war, Lord Kitchener, who signed the Sykes-Picot agreement with the French diplomat François-Georges Picot, was somewhat Francophile in comparison with the “Arabists,” who he thought were in danger of alienating the French. In view of the devastation the French were suffering on the Western Front (with the loss of a million men more than the British), compounded by the failure of the Gallipoli campaign, Britain, he felt, had a compelling need to humor its French ally. France could claim historical interests in Greater Syria stretching back to the sixteenth century and point to the protection that it had granted Lebanon’s Maronites in 1649. This protection was activated in 1860, when the French sent 6,000 troops to defend the Maronites when large numbers of them were being slaughtered in a civil war with the Druzes.

In the event, the Arabists’ hope for an independent Arab kingdom under British tutelage was trumped by French ambitions. It may be particularly telling that Mosul, the Iraqi city that has just been captured by ISIS and like-minded Sunnis from the US-backed Maliki government, was also a pawn in this earlier colonial struggle between France and Britain. In the course of the murderous and costly Mesopotamian campaign against the Ottoman army (1915–1918) the British had installed themselves in Iraq, and on a visit to London the French leader George Clemenceau conceded that the British should have Mosul, and a free hand in Palestine (which was supposed to be international under the Sykes-Picot terms), with the French acquiring the German stake in what became the Iraqi Petroleum Company.

Faisal with his delegation to the 1919 Paris Peace Conference (T.E. Lawrence is second from right, middle row)
Though Lawrence took Faisal to the Paris peace conference in 1919, and arranged for him to meet British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, his plan for an Arab kingdom based in Damascus was doomed. In July, 1920, four months after Faisal was made King of Syria in March, the French took over Damascus, expelled him, and imposed a form of direct rule that lasted till the British arm—with token Free French forces—removed the colonial Vichy government in 1941. British claims that French control in Syria violated that Sykes-Picot concept of “spheres of influence” in the Arab areas were undermined by the degree of control the British were exercising in Palestine, Transjordan, and Iraq (where Faisal from 1921 was able to rule as king under British Mandate rule).

By formally abolishing the Syrian-Iraqi border ISIS doubtless hopes to evoke memories of the Ottoman era before supposedly artificial states were constructed for the convenience of European powers—a time when frontiers were porous and the ways of Islam were universally observed. The fatal flaw in this utopian vision—apart from its obvious historical inaccuracy—is its failure to recognize the division between Sunnism and Shiism that long predated Western interventions in Iraq and Syria. Indeed, Iraqi tribes, traditionally hostile to government, began adopting Shiism in large numbers during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. However much the leaders of ISIS seek to draw on the imagery of an international Arab jihad rolling back a century of Western imperialism, the growth of ISIS feeds on these sectarian tensions that have been reanimated across the region. Politically, the jihadists have gained support from the widespread hatred of the Shiite cronyism of the Maliki regime, which replaced the cronyism of Saddam Hussein’s, as well as from the brutality of its counterpart in Damascus. And to the extent that foreign powers are driving the situation, the underlying dynamic flows less from the West than from the rivalry between the Sunni monarchies of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf on one side and Shiite Iran on the other.

June 25, 2014, 1:45 p.m.

**DUShock** · June 27, 2014, 01:42 PM

The Pesh are kicking some ass.

The Daily Beast

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/06/13/kurdish-forces-are-pushing-back-against-isis-gaining-ground-around-mosul.html

Content Below:

Kurdish Forces are Pushing Back Against ISIS, Gaining Ground Around Mosul
Iraqi security officials and locals around Mosul say that Kurdish forces have moved to block ISIS’ advance and are gaining ground west of the ISIS held city.
Despite the rapid collapse of Iraqi forces in Mosul, the ethnic patchwork of towns around the city are desperately banding together to build their own defensive line in preparation for more ISIS attacks. With northern Iraq emptied of most government security forces, and ISIS attempting to consolidate its gains and preparing its next move, Kurdish Peshmerga forces have advanced into several of the areas not yet under ISIS control.

Here are developing events on the ground west of Mosul, according to security officials and locals in the area who spoke with The Daily Beast.

As towns west of Mosul have been cut off from Baghdad and bypassed by ISIS, an improvised line of defense between Kurdish, Yezidi, Turcoman, and Arab communities is forming from Duhok south to Sinjar mountain and east to Tal Afar.

In a desperate bid, an Iraqi Border Patrol battalion stationed along the Syrian border in Anbar province, abandoned their position yesterday to break out to the relative safety of nearby Kurdish Peshmerga forces. The Iraqi unit fled to the town of Sinjar believing that ISIS had made no gains there. But the convoy of sixty trucks and hundreds of border police were thrown into disarray and panic when a small force of ISIS vehicles attacked them en route. By the time Peshmerga forces arrived, the police force had been completely routed—unknown numbers were killed or captured, while others fled into the desert leaving all their vehicles behind. Two were reported to have arrived at Sinjar on foot. The border is said to be completely open south of Sinjar but the Peshmerga are reportedly attempting to construct a barrier south of Sinjar to prevent further ISIS incursions.

In the wake of the catastrophic collapse of Iraqi forces in Mosul, Kurdish Peshmerga have moved decisively into positions west of the city to prevent more war material from falling into the hands of ISIS. The only road from the Kurdish city of Duhok, north of Mosul, to Sinjar, west of the city, has been opened with the Peshmerga now occupying the Sunni Arab town of Rabiah on the Syrian border. An unknown number of Syrian Kurdish forces from the PYD, a Syrian Kurdish party, reportedly crossed the border into Iraq in a show of solidarity with their Kurdish brethren against their common enemy ISIS.

Iraqi Army humvees recovered by the Peshmerga are immediately being moved north, repainted with Kurdish insignia, and entering the Peshmerga’s inventory.
Residents of Tal Afar are reporting that a large number of the Iraqi forces who deserted from Mosul were Turcoman Shia who made their way west back to their hometown of Tal Afar. Many have augmented local police to establish a city defense force in preparation for an attack by ISIS. Peshmerga forces contacted Tal Afar’s mayor and requested he relinquish the heavy weaponry under his control to prevent it from falling into the hands of ISIS if the city capitulated, but the mayor refused and told them the city would manage its own security. The forces at Tal Afar also took control of the city’s airport—known as FOB Sykes when US forces controlled it—and secured the helicopters stationed there, maintaining a vital air link with Baghdad. While they have a working relationship, the leadership in Tal Afar is reportedly not willing to trust the Peshmerga with the defense of their city and its neighboring villages.

The Peshmerga have also seized the Iraqi base known as Al Kasik located between Mosul and Tal Afar after the Iraqi Army fled, to prevent more war material from winding up in the hands of ISIS. Iraqi Army humvees recovered by the Peshmerga are immediately being moved north, repainted with Kurdish insignia, and entering the Peshmerga’s inventory.

Meanwhile in western Mosul, a frightened calm has fallen over the city as citizens mostly stayed in their homes and businesses remained closed. ISIS forces within the city have setup checkpoints, but are leaving local citizens mostly unmolested. One resident reported a sociable encounter with an ISIS checkpoint manned by 15 fighters, all young men in their twenties, in possession of two Iraqi Army trucks. Of the fifteen, he reported only one with an Iraqi accent. The rest of the ISIS group spoke the formal Arab dialect of a non-native speaker, indicating they were mostly likely not even Arabs, let alone Iraqi, according to the source. He described their appearance as ‘Afghani’, a common Iraqi epithet for unidentified non-Arab Muslims from southern and central Asia, or those who dress like them. Those who could speak Arabic bragged of being in possession of supplies and equipment from the US and Saudi Arabia, possibly acquired from supplies these countries intended for more moderate rebel groups in Syria.

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