Ottoman endgame: war, revolution, and the making of the modern Middle East, 1908-1923
2016; Association of College and Research Libraries; Volume: 53; Issue: 10 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5860/choice.194998
ISSN1943-5975
Tópico(s)Middle East and Rwanda Conflicts
ResumoDieser Beitrag kann vom Nutzer zu eigenen nicht-kommerziellen Zwecken heruntergeladen und/oder ausgedruckt werden.Darüber hinausgehende Nutzungen sind ohne weitere Genehmigung der Rechteinhaber nur im Rahmen der gesetzlichen Schrankenbestimmungen ( § § 44a-63a UrhG) zulässig.This is a curate's egg book, good in parts but distinctly not in others.On sure footing among the British, Russian and German protagonists of his narrative, the author, despite the title of his book and its time frame, from the Young Turk Revolution in 1908 to the creation of the Turkish Republic in 1923, slides unhappily around in the Ottoman world only to lose his footing entirely in the post-1918 era.Divided into three parts, 'The Sick Man of Europe', 'The war of 1914: Turkey plays its hand' and 'Death and rebirth', the book begins with an introduction on 'The Sykes-Picot myth and the modern Middle East'.In it the author calls into question the significance of the Sykes-Picot agreement and argues, as he does elsewhere in the book, that in fact Sykes and Picot 'played second and third fiddle' (p.xviii) to the Russian foreign minister Sergei Sazonov and that the agreement should more accurately be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement (p.286), noting that Sykes, a 'diplomatic amateur if there ever was one', was out of his depth (p.285).McMeekin then begins the narrative of the book with a brief prologue on 1876 and the accession of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II.Part one of the book covers the period from 1876 up to 1914 and deals with the reign of Abdülhamid II, the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, the Ottoman war with Italy in North Africa, and the Balkan Wars.Part three examines the situation after the war, covering the ensuing settlements of Mudros and Sèvres and the Turkish National War of Liberation, and ends with an epilogue, 'Lausanne and the Ottoman legacy'.Part two begins with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, the Duchess of Hohenberg and gives a gripping account of the well-known escape of the Goeben and the Breslau.It then proceeds through the various campaigns of the war, starting with Basra, Suez and Sarıkamış, McMeekin describing Enver Paşa's Caucasian offensive of December 1914 as having 'a certain air of mystery' about it 'because it so egregiously violated common sense' (p.145).McMeekin handles the issue of the Armenian massacres well, seeking to present a fine balance and to avoid political posturing.Perhaps the most interesting chapter of this section is that on the Dardanelles.Here McMeekin explains how the Russian Grand Duke Nicholas's 'passive-aggressive burbling was transformed into a fullblown strategic-diplomatic initiative' (p.164).Grand Duke Nicholas's request to the British military attaché Major General Sir John Hanbury-Williams for a British diversionary strike against the Ottomans at the time of the Ottoman offensive in the Caucasus had been received enthusiastically by Hanbury-Williams but any such idea should, McMeekin argues, have been shelved after the disaster of Sarıkamış.This did not, however, happen for 'it was already too late for a rethink' (p.165) and the planning for a Dardanelles diversion went ahead.McMeekin argues that 'had Churchill and Kitchener been thinking sequentially in terms of regional and inter-Allied strategy' they would have launched an attack not on the Dardanelles but on Alexandretta (pp.171-2).Had they done this, a separate peace with the Ottomans 'would …certainly have followed', leaving the Turks with a rump state 'more or less in its actual borders settled in 1923 ' (p.172).The reason this 'eminently logical' option was not taken, McMeekin suggests, was because it 'may have been too small-scale -too easy -to appeal to Kitchener and Churchill in their search for a grand move on the global chessboard' (p.173).Churchill's neglect of the Cilician option was in part political, for he was anxious to keep his 'suspicious' French allies happy (p.174).A factor in the British decision to go ahead, with the issue of ground troops still unresolved, was the British belief in the panic which would result in Istanbul when news reached of the attack in the Dardanelles, Grey apparently being convinced that a revolution would break out there, a belief he based on Kitchener's intimate knowledge of 'the Turkish psychology' but not on any knowledge Sir Louis Mallet, appointed British Ambassador at Istanbul in 1913, might have possessed, having not bothered to ask him (p.178).McMeekin's conclusion on the British Dardanelles campaign was the rather bleak one that 'In essence … Churchill, Grey, and Kitchener would make things up as they went along' (p.180).
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