Carving up the spoils of war

Carving up the spoils of war

Monday 05 October 2009
John Wight

In order to understand today's "special relationship" between Britain and the US, you need to head back to the aftermath of the World War I. It was then that the Middle East's vast oil reserves first became the subject of the inter-imperialist rivalry that has shaped global and historical events ever since.

It was in the aftermath of the "war to end all wars" that the US first began to emerge as a global power.

The US entered the war in late 1917, the point at which the European powers had fought themselves to a near standstill and their economies were exhausted.

The US entry on the side of the allies ensured that the axis powers could not conceivably continue what had become a war of attrition and the allied victory was cemented first with the signing of the 1918 armistice, which ended the fighting, followed in 1919 by the infamous Treaty of Versailles, which set the terms of the peace.

The glittering prize for the victorious allies was the former Ottoman empire in the Middle East, which was duly carved up according to the provisions of the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, a hitherto secret treaty between the French and British empires in 1916 that was made public by the Bolsheviks in the wake of the Russian revolution in 1917, along with various other "secret" treaties between the imperialist powers.

Under the terms of Sykes-Picot, what were to become Lebanon and Syria were incorporated into the French empire, while what was to become Jordan, Palestine and the two southern provinces of Iraq - Baghdad and Basra - were granted to the British.

What couldn't be agreed was who was to get Mosul in northern Iraq. Under Sykes-Picot it was originally accorded to the French, but with the huge and as yet undeveloped oil deposits known to be located there, the British were determined to have Mosul under their control. Four days after the Turkish surrender in 1918, British troops moved in to create that very fact on the ground.

http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/index.php/news/features/Carving-up-the-spoils-of-war