12.5 — The Middle East: Oil, Borders and Wars

In 1916, while the First World War was being fought, a British diplomat named Mark Sykes and a French diplomat named François Georges-Picot agreed in secret how they would divide the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces between them.

Sykes is reported to have described his proposal to the British cabinet by drawing a line on a map from the "e" in Acre to the last "k" in Kirkuk.

At the same time, Britain was promising Sharif Hussein of Mecca an independent Arab state in exchange for a revolt against the Ottomans. And in 1917 the Balfour Declaration promised British support for a national home for the Jewish people in Palestine.

Three commitments, to three parties, that could not all be honoured. The Sykes-Picot agreement was published by the Bolsheviks in 1917 from the Tsarist archives, which is how the Arabs found out.

This chapter is about the consequences, and it is the region where the largest number of this volume's threads converge.

The borders

The Ottoman provinces were reorganised as League of Nations mandates after 1918 (Chapter 11.4): Britain took Iraq, Transjordan and Palestine; France took Syria and Lebanon.

The borders were drawn for administrative and strategic convenience. Iraq combined three Ottoman provinces with a Shia Arab majority in the south, a Sunni Arab centre and a Kurdish north. Lebanon was carved from Syria with a delicate confessional balance. Kuwait's separation from Iraq is the basis of a claim Iraq revived in 1990.

And the Kurds — perhaps 30 million people, the largest ethnic group in the world without a state — were divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. The Treaty of Sèvres in 1920 provided for Kurdish autonomy; the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, after Turkey's war of independence under Ataturk, did not.

The claim that Sykes-Picot explains everything is overstated — the region has enormous internal diversity and its states have had a century to develop — and the specific fact that borders were drawn by outsiders without regard to who lived where is real and its consequences are traceable.

Oil

Chapter 1.12 explained the geology. Here is the politics.

Oil was found in Persia in 1908, Iraq in 1927, Bahrain in 1932, Saudi Arabia in 1938 and Kuwait in 1938.

The original arrangements were concessions. A foreign company obtained the right to extract for decades in exchange for a royalty, with the company setting production and prices. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company, later BP, is the standing case: majority-owned by the British government from 1914, and paying Iran a small share of profits.

Iran, 1953, is the event that shaped everything after.

Mohammad Mosaddegh, the elected prime minister, nationalised the oil industry in 1951. Britain imposed a blockade and, with the United States, organised a coup in 1953 — Operation Ajax — that removed him and restored the Shah's personal rule.

The CIA acknowledged its role in documents released in 2013.

The consequences ran for decades. The Shah ruled increasingly autocratically with American support and a feared secret police, and when he was overthrown in 1979 the revolution was intensely anti-American — with 1953 cited constantly as the reason.

OPEC was founded in 1960 by Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela, to take control of production and pricing from the companies.

And the 1973 oil shock is the moment the balance shifted. Following the Yom Kippur War, Arab producers embargoed states supporting Israel and cut production. The price roughly quadrupled. The effects on the world economy were profound — the stagflation of the 1970s, the end of the post-war boom, and enormous transfers of wealth to producer states.

And Chapter 1.12's resource curse applies with full force. Governments funded by oil do not need to tax their citizens and therefore do not need their consent. The Gulf monarchies built extensive welfare states funded by oil, with no representative institutions. The exceptions to the pattern are informative: the states in the region with the least oil have tended to have the most functional politics.

Israel and Palestine

This is the most contested subject in this volume and it is treated the same way as Chapter 6.12: what the documented record supports, with the disagreements named.

The background. Zionism developed in late nineteenth-century Europe in response to persistent antisemitism and specifically to the pogroms of the Russian Empire and to the Dreyfus affair (Chapter 10.7). Its argument was that Jews would only be safe with a state of their own.

Jewish migration to Ottoman and then British Palestine increased from the 1880s, accelerating sharply in the 1930s as Nazi persecution grew and as other countries closed their doors (Chapter 11.9).

The Arab population of Palestine, which was the large majority, opposed it, and the Arab Revolt of 1936–39 was suppressed by British forces.

Britain, unable to reconcile its commitments, referred the question to the United Nations, which in 1947 voted for partition into Jewish and Arab states with Jerusalem under international administration. The Jewish leadership accepted; the Arab leadership and the neighbouring states rejected it, on the ground that a majority population was being asked to cede more than half the land.

Israel declared independence in May 1948 and was immediately attacked by neighbouring Arab states. It won.

And around 700,000 Palestinians left or were expelled — the Nakba, catastrophe. The historiography here has moved substantially: Israel's own archives, opened from the 1980s and used by historians including Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim and Ilan Pappé, document expulsions, massacres including at Deir Yassin, and a general policy of preventing return, alongside cases of flight from fear and of encouragement to leave by Arab sources. The historians who agree on the documents disagree sharply on the interpretation, and this book records that.

Around 850,000 Jews left or were expelled from Arab countries and Iran over the following decades, most going to Israel. Both displacements are part of the record.

The subsequent wars. 1956 over Suez. 1967, the Six-Day War, in which Israel took the West Bank, Gaza, East Jerusalem, the Sinai and the Golan Heights — which created the occupation that is the core of the present conflict. 1973, the Yom Kippur War. Lebanon in 1982 and 2006. And the Gaza wars.

UN Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967 called for withdrawal from territories occupied in the conflict in exchange for recognition and secure boundaries — and its wording, "territories" rather than "the territories", has been disputed for over fifty years.

The Oslo Accords of 1993 established mutual recognition and a Palestinian Authority with limited self-government, and the final status issues — borders, Jerusalem, refugees and settlements — were deferred and never resolved. Rabin was assassinated in 1995 by an Israeli opposed to the accords.

The settlements. Israeli civilian settlement in the West Bank has grown continuously since 1967 to a population of several hundred thousand. The International Court of Justice and the great majority of states regard them as illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention; Israel disputes the applicability.

The current state of the conflict is beyond this book's ability to summarise responsibly, and the historical structure above is what any account of it has to start from.

The Iranian Revolution

1979. The Shah, whose rule had become steadily more autocratic and whose rapid modernisation had alienated both the clergy and the traditional merchant class, was overthrown by a coalition of Islamists, leftists, liberals and nationalists.

Ayatollah Khomeini's faction then eliminated the others — the pattern of Chapter 10.3 and 11.5 — and established a system combining elected institutions with clerical supervision, in which a Supreme Leader has final authority.

The hostage crisis — the seizure of the American embassy and the holding of 52 diplomats for 444 days — defined the relationship with the United States for the following four decades.

And it changed the region. A revolutionary Shia state exporting its model frightened the Sunni monarchies, which is a substantial part of why Saudi Arabia funded the propagation of its own religious doctrine internationally from this period, and why the Sunni-Shia dimension of regional politics intensified.

The Iran-Iraq War, 1980–88. Iraq invaded, expecting a quick victory over a revolutionary state in disorder. Eight years, around a million dead, trench warfare, human wave attacks, and chemical weapons used by Iraq against Iranian troops and against Iraqi Kurdish civilians at Halabja. Both superpowers and most regional states supported Iraq to varying degrees.

The Gulf and after

Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, over debts from the Iran-Iraq war, oil pricing and the border. A UN-authorised coalition expelled it in 1991.

Sanctions on Iraq through the 1990s are estimated to have contributed to very large numbers of child deaths, and the figures are disputed. The oil-for-food programme was created to mitigate it and was itself corrupted.

And 2003 is Chapter 12.9.

What actually drives the region's conflicts

Five factors, and reducing it to one is where most commentary fails.

Borders drawn by outsiders, containing groups with no shared political history.

Oil, which funds governments that do not need consent and which makes the region strategically indispensable to outside powers.

Outside intervention, continuously, from 1916 to the present.

Authoritarian governments with no legitimate mechanism for changing them, which means change comes by coup or by uprising.

And religious and sectarian division, which is real and which is more often a mobilising instrument for political competition than its cause. The Sunni-Shia split is 1,400 years old (Chapter 7.1) and its current salience is recent and traceable to specific events after 1979.

The Arab Spring

From December 2010, beginning with a Tunisian street vendor's self-immolation after harassment by officials, mass protests spread across the region.

The outcomes diverged sharply. Tunisia produced a democratic transition that has since substantially reversed. Egypt produced an elected government that was removed by the army in 2013. Libya, Syria and Yemen produced civil wars, in Syria's case with over half a million deaths and the displacement of half the population. The Gulf monarchies used money and repression and were unaffected.

The variable that best predicts the outcome is whether the country had institutions independent of the ruler — a professional army, a civil society, a functioning bureaucracy — which is Chapter 9.4's finding appearing again.

Where this shows up in your life

Oil prices, which affect Indian inflation directly (Chapter 6.28), and India's dependence on imports from this region.

Around nine million Indians work in the Gulf states and send home a very large share of India's remittance inflow (Chapter 9.15). Their working conditions, particularly under the kafala sponsorship system that ties a worker's legal status to an employer, are a documented and continuing issue.

And energy security is why the region's stability matters to countries with no other connection to it.

What the next page covers

Chapter 12.6 covers the collapse of the Soviet Union — an event almost nobody predicted, which happened without a war, and which ended the order this Part opened with. It covers what actually caused it, what Gorbachev intended and what he got, how fifteen states emerged from one, what happened economically in the 1990s, and why the manner of that transition shapes Russian politics today.