The War of the Four Seas

AS THE WORLD GETS PREGNANT once more with war, there is inevitable speculation about parentage. Genes do not die. The gathering storm is a direct descendant of epochal events between 1914 and 1918: the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, the decision of the victors Britain and France to replace empire with neo-colonisation in the 1920s, Britain’s promise to create a home for Jews persecuted in Europe in Biblical land, and the Soviet Union’s determination to retain its Tsar­ist expanse under the bogus excuse of communist ideology. The battlefields have been myriad over the past century, with consequences shaped by shifting factors.

The current contagion is concentrated in the lands adjoining four seas: Mediterranean, Black, Caspian, and Red. But their shores encompass a far larger world. The Mediterranean laps Europe and Africa, and the Red Sea floats into the Indian Ocean. Ukraine’s Crimea is the principal port of the Black Sea, now in the hands of Russia; its waters touch, apart from direct belligerents, Turkey, Georgia, Bulgaria, and Romania. The Caspian supplies caviar and shipping routes to Iran, Russia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, and Turkmenistan.

The linkage between the First and Second World Wars of the 20th century is a staple of school textbooks, but the onward impact is still hazy in public perception.

World War I, triggered by a terrorist bomb in Sarajevo, began in 1914 and merely paused in 1918, with the defenestration of three empires, Tsarist-Russian, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman-Caliphate, that had for centuries ruled swathes of Eurasia. Ottoman de­cline begins with its defeat in the Crimean War of 1854, but it was protected from further disintegration by the differing objectives of the victorious allies, Russia, Britain, and France. This became irrelevant when the Ottomans joined Germany in the Great War of 1914-18, which they described as a jihad. One of the intentions of their jihad was to keep Indian Muslims out of British mobilisation but employment in the British forces proved a stronger lure for the Punjab and Frontier peasantry than religion. Ironically, Indian Muslims discovered a passion for this jihad only after Ottoman defeat, but that is not the only irony on record.

The principal victors of 1918, Britain and France, were also the major colonial powers in Asia and Africa. It was not in their interest to set a self-destructive prec­edent by offering true independence to the Arab regions now released from Turkish rule. Having lost the first phase of the 1914 war in West Asia, Britain and France lured Arab tribal chiefs with a promise of independence which they never intended to keep. The deceit was recorded in a secret document, the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

“The lamps are going out all over Europe, we shall not see them lit again in our lifetime,” intoned Sir Edward Grey, foreign minister of Britain, on the eve of August 3, 1914, when the Great Powers of Europe began their Great War of the World. The lights went out for more than one lifetime because deceit is almost guaranteed to breed instability. It is still dark in Eurasia, and the darkness is lit with drones and missiles.

The secret Anglo-French pact would make war endemic in what the West calls the Middle East and a rational map defines as West Asia. The pact, negotiated by two diplomats, Mark Sykes of Britain and François Georges-Picot of France, divided the Arab regions into “zones of influence” controlled by Britain, France, Italy, and Tsarist Russia. Britain got the hinterland including Iraq and Arabia; France the “blue zone” along the eastern Mediterranean, principally Syria, Lebanon and a chunk of southern Turkey. Russia was given Armenia. Palestine was left to an undefined international administration but became British territory. Sir Edward signed the Sykes-Picot Agreement on May 16, 1916, just before he lost his job as foreign secretary.

In 1917 Grey’s successor Arthur James Balfour announced support for a “home for the Jewish people” in Palestine. In the same year an upheaval brought the Red Flag to power in Moscow and Leon Trotsky became foreign minister of the Soviet Union. He revealed the details of Sykes-Picot but the Arab leaders chose to believe what they heard from London and Paris. They retreated into frustration as Britain and France exposed their impotence and implemented their neo-colonial plan. They were interested in colonial exploitation, not an architecture of stability.

Turkey survived the crisis of defeat and thereby its future because it was fortunate to find a leader like Kemal Atatürk, a general whose genius lay in nationalism. He fought to protect Turkey’s integrity rather than a flatulent empire. Britain and France were defeat­ed when they tried to dismember Turkey through an invasion by their proxy, Greece. The Arab regions had monarchs whose interests did not always coincide with the demands of a new era of history.

The foundation of Israel was laid in Ukraine’s Kharkiv; Ukraine is clearly a country where history and geography often get together. On January 25, 1882, 25 Russian Jewish students launched a campaign for the formation of a homeland to be called Israel; on July 6 that year, 14 of the founding members went to Jaffa; and on July 31, 10 volunteers established Rishon LeZion, to initiate the Jewish emigration to the dream state, known as Aliyah, meaning ascent in both Hebrew and Arabic. It was an active year. On December 12, the first Jewish settle­ment was set up in Galilee. These territories were part of the Ottoman Caliphate, which, unlike Europeans who condemned Jews to ghettos, was comparatively benign.

Within two years, in 1884, the first international Zionist con­vention gave a further fillip to the dream. On March 5, 1891, a peti­tion was sent to American President Benjamin Harrison asking for help to establish a Jewish state around Jerusalem. In another six years, on August 27, 1897, the World Zionist Organization was established in Basel by Theodore Herzl, who made his only visit to the holy land in October 1898, reaching Jaffa. Jaffa became the home of the first Jewish labour movement; the first medical centre opened in Jerusalem in 1902; the first Hebrew high school in the world in 1903 in Tel Aviv. The continued persecution of Jews in Europe prompted Herzl to ask for a temporary home in Uganda, an idea that did not travel far. On October 29, 1907, Bar-Giora, for the defence of the Jewish people, was born.

Jewish organisations supported the Anglo-French alliance in World War I. On November 2, 1917 they were rewarded with the Balfour Declaration. By 1922 America and the League of Nations had added their voices to the promised land. Israel became a fact after World War II; and a recognised fact on November 29, 1947 when the United Nations accepted its existence. That made Israel a permanent fact. But no commitment could guarantee security in a volatile environment where one man’s safety was another man’s threat. Continual war, from set-piece action by recognised armies to evolving forms of violence, drains life out of the region.

In 1917 Tsarist Russia became the Soviet Union. Lenin and Stalin promised liberation from hunger through the untested doctrines of Karl Marx and sent armies to colonise Asians and Caucasians, and later East Europeans, in what became a massive empire from Berlin to Vladivostok. In 1945 America accepted the Russian empire as a fact of life at the famous conference in the Crimean city of Yalta. But military parades could not sustain an empire seething with lava beyond six decades. The brittle com­munist edifice crumbled in the 1980s; the Western alliance spear­headed by NATO advanced through East Europe in the 1990s.

It was not until the rise of Vladimir Putin in 2000 that Russia managed to restore a degree of stability in Chechnya by handing over local power to the enemy. In the confrontation with NATO, he decided to draw the line at Ukraine, a buffer state. America and its allies did absolutely nothing in 2014 when Putin took Crimea. He may have assumed that they would do nothing much again when he advanced into Russian-speaking parts of the country in 2022. If he did make such an assumption, he was wrong.

About a year after Putin consolidated his place in Moscow, history returned to breathtaking gymnastics. Al Qaeda’s carefully crafted terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 9/11 shifted America’s priorities. The pressure was off Putin. George W Bush marched into Afghanistan, to universal acclamation. He then invaded Iraq, to universal puzzlement. America’s zone of influence in West Asia became a zone of turbulence.

The only immediate victor of America’s war on Iraq was Iran because it released Iraq’s Shia majority from the subjugation of Sunni dynasts and dictators. When America left Iraq, it had to obey the laws of a rudimentary democracy, and handed over governance of Iraq to a civilian government in which the Shia would dominate because of their population percentage. This did not make Iraq a co-ordinate of Iran, but it ended the age of hostility. Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had gone to war for eight years to destroy the Ayatollah regime in Iran. Once the Americans left Baghdad, Iran could work towards a strategic Shia alliance in an arc that reached its Hezbollah surrogates in Lebanon, since Syria also had a government controlled by a Shia sect, the Alawi­tes, under the command of Hafez and then Bashar al-Assad.

From 1963 Syria had been ruled by the Ba’ath Party which was under the effective control of the elite, left-secular Shia Alawites, a minority community constituting some 15 per cent of the population. In 1970 Hafez al-Assad became the virtual dictator of the country, and was succeeded by his son Bashar al-Assad. In December 2024, Bashar was ousted by a force led by 42-year-old Ahmed Hussein al-Sharaa, supported by Turkey. He became president and told the world on December 8, from the precincts of the famous Umayyad Mosque, that Syria could no longer be a “playground for Iranian ambitions”. Israel im­mediately advanced from the Golan Heights in southwest Syria to establish a new border.

The fracture of the Shia crescent with the defenestration of Assad in Damascus was an important precondition for Israel’s attack on Iran.

Such are the acrobatics of time that Washington now sup­ports a man who was their prisoner between 2006 and 2011 as an activist of Al Qaeda. Ahmed al-Sharaa then formed the Al Nusra Front to fight the Assad regime. He broke with Al Qaeda in 2016, merged Nusra into Hayat Tahrir al- Sham, and decided that power in Da­mascus was a far better option in this transient life than jihad against the Christian West. In a sign of change, he has ordered all Syrian women to wear a burqini. There is little outrage in the Western chanceries. Bashar al-Assad, who did not confuse Islam with a veil, lives in exile in Moscow under the care of Putin.

So far, no Arab neighbour state is on Israel’s radar. Although the Hamas-led Palestinians are Arabs, Arab states do not see this conflict as their war. For them, Hamas and Hezbollah are in Iran’s camp.

Egypt and Saudi Arabia are risk-averse; Jordan has protested against Iranian drones flying through its airspace; Syria is neutered. Arab public opinion has been kept under control.

Israel felt confident enough to attack Iran despite American doubts. At the moment of writing, Benjamin Netanyahu’s bravado has been tempered, and internal analysis entered the hazardous space between calculation and miscalculation. The accuracy and depth of Israel’s missiles are not a surprise; Iran’s ability to spread anxiety in Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, Haifa and a dozen other cities is a shock. It must have hurt Netanyahu to ask America and Britain for military help against Iranian drones. The much-vaunted infallible Iron Dome over Israel was broken. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) have publicly warned Israelis that pain is the price of war. We cannot predict the course of conflict, but every assumption is in flux. This war will be studied for a long while in the future.

Iran has not sought military assistance yet but will expect the support of Russia and China in the framework of a larger confrontation with the US. China has, for a change, taken a clear stand, condemning Israel in categorical terms. Perhaps only West Asia could take Ukraine off the front page, but the fire is still raging there. The geography from Ukraine to Aden is infectious because smaller fires can easily join the conflagra­tion: Ukraine, Chechnya, Caucasus, Kurdistan, Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and down the Red Sea to Aden.

We can always mark the calendar to mark the beginning of a war. To find the end we can only check with God and the Almighty has so much else to do in an endless universe.

Ayatollah Ruhollah KhomeiniBenjamin NetanyahuDonald TrumpIsrael-Iran conflictJewish refugeesMiddel East crisis