Syria and Iran
(Some background)
Throughout
the First World War, assuming the eventual defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the
allies planned the carving up of the Middle East. France was planning to claim control
over Syria (a claim they dated back to the crusades), leaving 'Palestine' and
'Mesopotamia' (now Iraq) to the British. At the post-war peace conference at Versailles,
the Syrian Arabs were given (at the urging or TE Lawrence and others) some
autonomy as a reward for their military involvement; by popular acclaim they
chose their war hero Faisal I to be their king. However, within months,
Faisal's regime ran into money troubles, the French declared they would rule
Syria. King Faisal was expelled and went to live in England. The following year
(1921), the British decided to foist King Faisal on their mandate in
Mesopotamia, creating the kingdom of Iraq with Faisal as king. Faisal (supple,
enlightened, and popular) ruled quite successfully until 1933, though his
dependence on Britain placed an intolerable burden on him, for his people
strongly resented Western interference. He died of a heart attack (or poison)
in 1933. His son Ghazi, and his grandson Faisal II, both fared worse. Ghazi was
killed in a car 'accident' in 1939, while Faisal II was shot with all his
family in 1958, victims of the rising tide of Arab nationalism. Since then Iraq
has been a republic. In Syria, the French mandate ended in 1946. Syria became a
parliamentary republic but subject to incessant coups d'état until the Ba'ath
party took control of the country in 1966. In 1970 the Assad family took control of the Ba'ath
party, on behalf of the 'military'.
The Ba'ath
party was founded in Syria in 1947 jointly by two teachers, an orthodox
Christian (Aflaq) and a Suni Muslim (al-Bitar), both Arab, both educated in
Paris in the late nineteen twenties where they absorbed ideas on nationalism
and Marxism. Its motto became "Unity, Liberty, Socialism", the unity
referring to Pan-Arabism. Under this influence, Syria fused with Egypt to form
the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958, a union which lasted till 1961. Party branches
existed in most Arab countries from the Maghreb to the Gulf, but Iraq was the
only country besides Syria and Egypt where the Ba'ath were in power. In each
national branch there was a political wing and a military wing. Though
initially the Iraqi branch contained a majority of Shia Muslims, Pan-Arabism is
more a Suni concept and the branch became predominantly Suni. In February 1962
the Iraq branch staged a coup d'état, but in November of the same year were
driven underground by a reactionary coup. During their hidden period (1963 –
68) the Iraqi Ba'athists purged Nasserite and socialist concepts, and developed
a secret security apparatus (answering to Saddam Hussein) to counter the power
of the military wing.
The story of oil exploitation is a strange mixture of
commerce and Realpolitik, of respect for commercial contract law, and the
blatant flouting of it. USA found oil in Texas in 1901. The British found oil
in Iran in 1908 and created the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) to exploit it.
In 1913, just before the outbreak of the First World War, Churchill switched the British Navy from coal to
oil so the British war effort was totally dependent on oil. The British
government acquired a controlling share in APOC, and this enormous injection of
capital allowed it to acquire rights and access to outlets all over the world. BP
(British Petroleum) started life as a exporting branch of a German company operating
in Britain. Their assets were acquired by Britain during the war. Exploitation
of Iraqi oil began in 1912 with APOC capital and the drive of an Armenian Turk called
Gulbenkian, born in Constantinople but who fled with his family after the
Armenian massacres of 1896, eventually becoming as a British citizen. The Iraqi
oil deposits turned out (October 1926) to be large and a composite company was
formed by a number of major European and American oil companies, registered in
London and designed to make no profit (and pay no tax!), but to sell its oil at
cost price to the component companies. Iraq received royalties. The British
suggested that the Iraqi government be allowed to buy shares, but other parties
seem to have successfully prevented that. After the Second World War,
nationalist movements in Iran and Iraq were pressing for ownership of their own
oil. British oil interests in Iraq were nationalized by the Ba'athist Iraqi
government in June 1972.
(The assets of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company were
nationalized in 1951. Britain appealed to the International court for
restoration, but the case was dismissed, whereupon MI6 with CIA help engineered
a putsch that ousted the nationalist prime minister (Mossadeq) and strengthened
the westward-leaning Shah, who survived until the revolution of 1979. From 1953 till 1979 BP extracted and
marketed the oil on behalf of the National Iranian Oil Company sharing 50% of
the profit, but did not let Iran see the accounts! In 1979 all foreign oil
assets in Iran were confiscated by the revolutionary government.)
The Ottomans were not popular 'overlords' in the middle east
because no one likes to be a subject people. But at least they were Islamic.
And in fact they were peculiarly successful at governing countries of mixed
ethnicity and religion; Jews, Muslims (Shia, Suni), Christians (Orthodox, Roman,
Nestorian), lived together in peaceful co-existence equally in Turkey, Arabia, and the Balkans, Constantinople, Damascus, and Sarajevo.) The
history of British, French and American intervention has not proved so successful.
