La Perfide Albion

      I grew-up in an Arab Syria where passionate patriotic discourse was the norm and Arab Nationalism often bordered on jingoism.  Every national narrative has to have its heroes as well as its villains. The latter could be native quislings or alien conspirators whose strings are pulled by some hostile power. Of heroes -real or imaginary- there certainly is no shortage and same goes for villains: the stronger those villains (rather super-villains), the better as there is no glory struggling against unworthy foes.  This is self evident: you need the darkness to better define the light and every thesis needs an antithesis.

      The Super-Villain that I grew up with was those United States of America. They were the sworn enemy of all “Progressives” worldwide and their unconditional support for a militaristic Israel needs no elaboration for anyone interested in the politics of the Near East. The USA, with their notorious Pentagon and CIA, were plotting against the Arab World in general, and Syria in particular, day and night. Their nefarious designs aimed at nothing less than global hegemony, usurping Arabs’ national resources (oil first and foremost),  and propping-up “reactionary” Arab regimes and client states.

      But the Super-Villain that my grandparents and great grandparents were acquainted with was a different one. That evil power was -in those days- at least as threatening as the USA of my youth, perhaps even more demonic. That Super Power was, as my grandmother used to admiringly repeat, the “empire on which the sun never sets”. It was mighty Great Britain, whose king or queen claimed the Indian Empire and ruled the Seven Seas. By contrast we all know that England is now a has been. To be sure it still is prosperous and proud but it no longer dominates Europe, let alone the World.


      So at the beginning of the Twentieth Century we have a rising “Arab Nation” struggling to be born and courageously facing the great power that was the United Kingdom. To an Arab Nationalist of the first half of the Twentieth Century, the British committed two unforgivable sins: the first was to betray their promises to the Arab revolutionists and the second was to issue the ominous Balfour Declaration committing Great Britain to facilitate the immigration of (mainly European at the time) Jews to Palestine. Nothing the British would do could erase those twin crimes from Arab memory. Not even the White Paper of 1939 or the rapid decline of British influence after a ruinous WWII that they supposedly “won”.

      It certainly is not my intention to exonerate England or to apologize for the Zionists. The British acted according to what they thought was their national interest and -as I will try to demonstrate later- were as generous with the “Arabs” as could realistically be expected; as for the Zionists, they used every “legal” or illegal mean to make their dreams into realities, something that they must have known would come at the expense of the natives. No, my purpose in writing this post is to indict the Arabs (rather their self-appointed representatives) , their political immaturity, and their infantile ideology.

      The once imposing Ottoman Empire was agonizing by the beginning of the Twentieth Century. From without, hungry European powers were disputing the left over of its vast territory when WWI erupted in 1914; from within, Sharif Hussein of Mecca raised the banner of the Great Arab Revolution that was to revive the glory of early Islam while Egypt declared its independence from Constantinople under British auspices. As everyone knows, the Sublime Porte cast its lot with the Central Powers and lost, whereas the Hashemites of Hejaz bet on the Allies and won, or so they fancied.

      The Sharif of Mecca negotiated what many Arab historians described as an agreement with Great Britain to grant the Arabs their independence in a territory that extended from the Taurus Mountains in the North to the Indian Ocean in the South, and from the Mediterranean in the West to Iraq in the East; that was in exchange of the Arabs supporting the British campaign against Turkey with their guerillas -themselves armed with British weapons and financed by British money-. The details of this understanding were elaborated in the infamous Hussein-McMahon Correspondence that spanned the interval between July 1915 and January 1916.

      The fine print exchanged in those letters is public knowledge and I will not dwell on it Suffice it to say that the British did not promise a whole lot no matter what Hussein understood, and understandably so. England, that sacrificed hundreds of thousands of its young men and a tremendous treasure to defeat Germany and its allies, understood the proposed “independent” Arab kingdom as a client state to be stirred in the right direction by British “advisers”. Moreover, their vague promises were made to the Hashemites of Mecca, not to the “Arabs” whatever that term means.  I would also argue that, after all was said and done, the British were fabulously generous with the Hashemites: they created a kingdom for Feisal -recently expelled from Syria by the French- in Iraq and concocted a realm for his brother Abdullah in a Transjordan forbidden to would be Jewish immigrants. Hussein would likely have kept his Hejaz fief, and his son Ali after him, had he had any touch with reality. Instead he kept grumbling and whining until the frustrated British decided to abandon him to his fate at the hands of ibn Saud and his Ikhwan. In another word the British were prepared to grant three kingdom to the Hashemites and were perhaps justified in thinking that the territory claimed by Hussein was vast enough to satisfy the appetite of many vassals and bribe quite few would be foes.

      For in reality Sharif Hussein was asking the British to grant him a vast empire AND to conquer this empire on his behalf.  Let there be no mistake about it: the Ottoman’s defeat was achieved by the British and only the British. Not only were Hussein’ irregulars little more than British mercenaries but also, the entire “great Arab Revolution”  as T. E. Lawrence would put it:  was a “side show of a side show”. WWI was fought and decided in Europe and the Ottoman Empire would have been terminated with or without Hussein’ s contribution. Had Hussein and his apologists possessed a healthy dose of common sense they would have realized that empires are conquered, not given.

      Contrast Arabs’ attitude with that of the Zionists. Chaim Weizmann worked tirelessly towards preparing the conditions that would eventually lead to the creation of a Jewish state. He accepted a relatively modest territory and did not insist on a state right from the start. To him, a vague promise of a “Jewish National Home in Palestine” was adequate to begin with, it being implied that more could be demanded in due time. Indeed, there was no reason back in 1917 to conclude that a Jewish state was inevitable.

      In summary, England deliberately issued vague promises to Arab AND Jew and its politicians went out of the way in wording their letters as to leave ample room of maneuver for their successors. While it is true that the Balfour Declaration gave a “legal” basis for the Zionist enterprise, it remains undeniable that Israel became a reality in 1948 mainly thanks to the commitment of wealthy European and American Jews financing the  -mainly Eastern European- Jewish settlement in Palestine and providing the settlers with arms and ammunition to conquer the land to the disadvantage of its original inhabitants.  For conquer they did: contrary to the Hashemites, the Zionists relied first and foremost on themselves.


      “Heroes” and Villains” is the stuff out of which movies are made and tales are told. In real life we have “winners” and “losers”. If you win, all is forgiven or at least would be forgiven in time. If you lose, you accept the crumbs the victor might leave you out of the goodness of his heart or hold your peace. Many losers did not even survive to relate their ordeal

Une Mission Liberatrice

      Years  ago I came across a curious narrative concerning the conquest of Egypt by Amr ibn al Aas, completed by the end of 642 CE. Muslim chroniclers have from time immemorial glorified what undoubtedly was an impressive military achievement and a seminal event in the epical history of Egypt. According to Muslim tradition, the conquered peoples of Egypt and Syria, the overwhelming majority of whom were Christians, welcomed their Muslim brethrens from Arabia with open arms as deliverers from the Byzantine yoke and went out of the way to collaborate with them against their Roman oppressors.

      There certainly is an element of truth in this account that goes a long way in explaining the ease with which Muhammad’s followers were able to defeat the vast and -in theory- mighty powerful Eastern Roman Empire.  I stress “in theory”, for Byzantium at the time was a mere shadow of its former self,; it barely survived a protracted and ruinous conflict with Sassanid Persia and its peoples were engaged in an endless and bloody civil strife concerning the nature of Christ: did Jesus have a divine nature? a human nature? or both? The Incarnation Controversy preoccupied legions of theologians and was slowly but surely tearing the Byzantine empire asunder.  For the sake of brevity, suffice it to say that Egypt’s Christians followed the Monophysite Doctrine -which maintained that Jesus had one single divine nature as opposed to the “official” Chalcedonian Definition that insisted that Jesus had two natures, one divine and the other human- a definition favored by Constantinople.

      The Copts, relieved to see the back of the Romans lost no time in dispatching a delegation to the victor. To summarize, they congratulated Amr, professed allegiance to the rising Arab Empire, and expressed happiness at what they thought was he dawn of their newly-found religious freedom. They went a step further, and proceeded to explain to Caliph Omar’s lieutenant the irreconcilable differences between them and Byzantium. They meant to explain the Monophysite Doctrine and the persecution they had to endure for adhering to it. Perhaps they also harbored the hope that Amr would let them exact revenge against the defeated followers of the Chalcedonian Creed thus satisfying an age-old vendetta.


      Unfortunately for them, Amr understood next to nothing about their esoteric disputes. He was a brilliant general and an astute politician but a theologian he most certainly was not. His practical mind could not fathom the nuanced and convoluted arguments about the nature of Christ. Worse still, he expressed not the least interest in the subject. He laconically replied that they all were Christians, they all were subject to the Poll Tax “Jizya”, and no one was to retaliate against anyone. Amr’s decree was backed by his might and that of a nascent and vigorous kingdom and the Copts were to toe the line or else.. The rest is history, and history has been written by victors from time immemorial.

      It would be too simplistic to attribute cynical motives to Amr or many other great conquerors for that matter. It is indeed quite likely that he and his fellow desert warriors genuinely believed that they were “liberating” the Copts from Byzantine occupation, the same way Saad ibn abi Waqqas “freed” Sassanid Iraq from Persian tyranny. Most humans love to attribute lofty, even altruistic motives to their deeds and many manage to convince themselves at some level of the truthfulness of those motives. I see no reason to doubt the good intentions of Napoleon or that Tamerlane considered himself a devout and pious Muslim though everyone knows that those two men perpetrated or at least participated in wholesale slaughters.

      Fast forward to the year 1920 CE when General Henri Gouraud marched on Damascus, deposed Faysal, and inaugurated the French Mandate of Syria. British arms “liberated” Syria from the Ottoman rule in 1918 and now comes the French to “civilize” a then barbarous Syria. The “Liberating Mission” of Great Britain begat the “Civilizing Mission” of France or, as the French would put it “la Mission Civilatrice”. Enfranchising and civilizing the backward peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America were sacrosanct goals in the best tradition of “the White Man’s Burden”.

      To state the obvious, the French managed to commit quite a bit of atrocities during their relatively brief stay in Syria -a little more than 25 years- but the Mandate was more than a brutal occupation by a ruthless colonial power. Along with soldiers and High Commissioners came the educators, the missionaries, the scientists, the archeologists, the financiers, and the administrators. True many of these came pursuing a career but quite few truly believed that they had the best interests of the natives at heart.

      The Mandate was doomed to fail, however, and for numerous reasons both internal as well as external. The French discovered that there was no peaceful way to keep Syria and they were too weakened by WWII to impose their will by crude force. Even were they to try to do so, the price in blood and treasure would have been simply unacceptable. The year 1946 witnessed the last French soldiers leaving Syria; for most Syrians it was celebration day but for the French it was a mere episode in a long series of retreat that would culminate in evacuating Algeria in the early 1960’s following a blood bath that disillusioned all but the most fanatic believers  in “Civilizing Missions”.


      Decades would pass before the West, this time led by an almighty Transatlantic empire, recovers its appetite for “liberating” and Civilizing”, especially the former. I no longer can keep track of how many countries were “liberated” within the last 25 years: we have Kuwait, Bosnia, Iraq, Libya.. To name but few. Syria is the most recent candidate for “liberation”, a process that started in 2011 and is still underway today.

      To be clear about where I stand and what I believe in, the vast majority of Syria’s would be “liberators” are acting according to their own geopolitical calculations and with utter disregard to Syria’s best interests. To add to the confusion, those “benefactors” represent numerous nations with sometimes conflicting goals and discrepant methods of achieving those goals.

      That those nations would pursue their perceived interests is not at all surprising. What I find hard to digest is the ease with which many Syrians have put their trust in those outsiders. This post would be too lengthy were I to analyze the motives of each and every actor separately and I don’t even believe that I qualify for such a complex task. I will therefore choose one actor, unquestionably the major actor, without whom the Syrian scene would have been drastically different as I type those sentences. This actor is none other than the American Union, or its government to be precise.


      I can’t repeat this frequently enough: not all those who advocate “liberating” Syria are cynics though there is no dearth of hypocrisy. I have no doubt in my mind that some American statesmen would love to help Syria and Syrians and perhaps they -like many warriors throughout history- really believe that the best way to help Syria would be through some military intervention that may include bombing this hapless country into “freedom and democracy” whatever those terms mean.

      My questions to those Syrians who would entrust outsiders -in this case the USA- with their fate are:

      1. Regardless of what US politicians state and what US media repeat, do you really think that Syria is a priority for the USA? Now I am an American and I love my adoptive country but one has to separate rhetoric from fact. Americans have many things to worry about far more important to them than anything that might or might not happen in Syria: jobs, healthcare, education, retirement benefits, and so one. This is totally understandable.

      2. Do you know that millions of Americans can’t locate Syria on a map if their life depended on it? Do you know that millions of Americans (perhaps most Americans) can’t tell the difference between Arab and Muslim, let alone between a Sunni and an Alawite?

      3. Suppose America does indeed “liberate” Syria, how long do you think would it take for Syria to vanish from US news like magic, not unlike the way Libya disappeared from the headlines no sooner than Gaddafi fell, with one notable exception? Heck the Kardashians’ exploits are a much higher priority for many Americans than anything happening or that might happen in the Near East.


      Syria is imploding before our eyes while some Syrians busy themselves imploring foreigners to “liberate” them. They seem to be anticipating a Messiah or a Mahdi but I am afraid they’ll be waiting for a long time.