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The US-Iran war … beware of false analogies

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

President Donald Trump has described the US bombing campaign against Iran as “a little excursion,” then a “skirmish,” then a “mini-war” – ostensible breaches of a subsequent ceasefire are called “trifles”. He was doing something powerful men have always done: reach for a word small enough to sit comfortably in a sentence while the fires it describes are still burning, without actually committing to the potential political consequences calling the conflict a war. The gesture is familiar. Vladimir Putin called his invasion of Ukraine a “special military operation.” History, in the end, has usually insisted on its own vocabulary. What begins as euphemism tends to end as a chapter heading.

The US-Iran conflict – a sustained bombing campaign, a naval blockade constricting a fifth of the world’s oil supply, and an increasingly fragile ceasefire – is, by any honest accounting, a war. That we have not yet fully agreed to call it one is itself revealing. Language shapes the choices we are willing to contemplate; the choices we refuse to contemplate have a habit of being made for us, usually at greater cost and on someone else’s timetable.

But naming the war is only the first act of reckoning. The second – and more treacherous – is understanding it. And here, almost instinctively, we reach backwards. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, the analogies arrive.

For this is what nations do when confronted with uncertainty: they search the past for usable maps. Yet wars are not equations, and analogies illuminate only by partial light. Gallipoli warns of overconfidence and the fantasy of the decisive stroke. Crimea evokes mismanagement and systemic incoherence. Vietnam and Iraq conjure the slow dread of entanglement – wars that move, expensively and violently, without ever quite arriving at conclusion.

We rarely encounter a new war on its own terms. Before the first campaign has properly unfolded, it is already being narrated through the past – the Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – names invoked less as history than as instruments of comprehension. This reflex is not mere intellectual laziness. War, in its immediacy, is too vast, too contradictory, to grasp without scaffolding; analogy supplies the frame. It tells us where to look for overconfidence, where to suspect mismanagement, where to anticipate drift. Yet it also does something subtler, and more dangerous: it invites us to believe that the present can be read off the past, that by matching patterns we might master outcomes.

The essay that follows proceeds from that tension. It does not treat these conflicts as competing verdicts on America’s confrontation with Iran, but as different lenses trained on different moments of a war’s life: conception, execution, and duration. Each captures a recognisable failure mode – the decisive stroke that overreaches, the system that cannot align means to ends, the conflict that persists beyond its rationale. To “refight” these wars in argument is not simply to indulge historical memory; it is to reveal how deeply our strategic thinking remains shaped by unresolved experiences. The past, in this sense, is not behind us. It is the grammar in which we continue to write the present.

Seeking storylines to explain the present

The quest begins, as these often do, reaching backwards in search of a usable past, a storyline that suits the present and what is now unfolding between America and Iran.

No war arrives naked; it comes draped in analogy. War is too large, too chaotic, to apprehend all at once; analogy shrinks it to something graspable. Analogies, like maps, tell you where to look, but also, just as often, where not to. Gallipoli (1915–16) is summoned, and Crimea (1853–56), and then, inevitably, Vietnam (1955-75, the war of my generation, though one that we British chose not to join) and Iraq (2003-11), those twin lodestars of modern American unease. Each is offered up as a key. Each, in its way, fits a lock. None, taken alone, opens the door.

Start with the British campaign during WWI to seize the strategic Dardanelles straits with the aim of threatening Istanbul and taking the Ottoman Empire out of the war. That analogy tends to be invoked by those who see overconfidence at the top: a belief that a bold stroke – decapitation strikes, limited escalation, a sharp application of force – can produce a decisive political outcome in a complex theatre. Gallipoli was conceived as a shortcut around stalemate; it became a lesson in underestimating geography, logistics, and the enemy’s will. If the critique is that Washington imagined a controlled, almost surgical confrontation with Iran that would bend reality to its design, then Gallipoli fits – particularly in its early optimism curdling into stubborn, costly entanglement.

There is something almost aesthetic about the Gallipoli temptation. It promises clarity. A narrow strait, a defined objective, a hinge upon which the whole great mechanism might turn. Strategy reduced to geometry. Yet wars have a way of refusing such elegance. The Turkish defence stiffened; the terrain asserted itself; the timetable dissolved into dust and flies and blood. The decisive stroke became an extended ordeal. And here the analogy deepens: not merely in the initial miscalculation, but in the dawning realisation that what was meant to be quick has become something else entirely – sticky, resistant, unyielding.

The Crimean War comparison is subtler, and in some ways more damning. Ostensibly a campaign by Britain and France (ironically, the architects of the Dardanelles venture) to challenge Czarist Russia’s design on the ailing Ottoman Empire – the so-called Eastern Question. Crimea was not just a military muddle; it was a war of misaligned systems: unclear objectives, poor coordination, inflated rhetoric masking administrative incompetence, and a media environment that amplified both heroism and absurdity (the Charge of the Light Brigade as both myth and indictment). If the Iran conflict appears strategically incoherent – multiple actors, shifting goals, allies pulling in different directions, public narratives outpacing operational reality – then Crimea begins to look uncomfortably familiar. It’s less about one disastrous decision and more about a system that cannot quite align means with ends.

Here the failure is quieter, but more pervasive. Not the single grand error, but the accumulation of smaller ones: supply chains that falter, commands that overlap, allies who agree in principle but diverge in practice. Crimea is what happens when the machinery of war – bureaucratic, logistical, political – fails to mesh. The guns fire, the troops advance, the dispatches glow with rhetoric, but somewhere beneath it all the connection between effort and outcome frays. One might say, borrowing that withering line in the 1960 Encyclopedia Britannica, that it becomes “perhaps the most ill-managed campaign in English history” – and the sting lies precisely in that word managed. Not conceived, not fought, but managed: as though war were an administrative exercise that has slipped its clerical bounds.

And then, inevitably, we arrive at America’s misbegotten wars in Indochina and Iraq. When people reach for these, they are usually pointing to something deeper: not the opening moves, but the trajectory. Vietnam is the archetype of gradual escalation into a conflict that cannot be cleanly won because its political premises are flawed. Iraq (particularly post-2003) adds another layer: the illusion of quick victory followed by insurgency, fragmentation, and the long tail of unintended consequences. If Iran becomes a drawn-out contest of proxies, asymmetric retaliation, and domestic fatigue – where tactical successes accumulate but strategic clarity recedes – then Vietnam/Iraq is the more predictive analogy.

Vietnam was once called “chaos without a compass,” and the phrase endures because it captures the feeling of the war more than its formal doctrine. There was, in fact, a compass – containment, credibility, dominoes – but it spun uncertainly, pointing in several directions at once. Washington oscillated between coercion and restraint, escalation and negotiation, measuring progress in tonnage dropped and bodies counted, even as the political centre of gravity drifted further out of reach. The war moved, violently and expensively, but it did not arrive. It accumulated.

Iraq echoes that pattern but begins differently – with a burst of clarity that dissolves into ambiguity. The regime falls; the statue topples; the map is redrawn in a matter of weeks; victory is declared. And then the afterlife begins. Insurgency, sectarian fracture, proxy entanglement- the slow discovery that winning the war is not the same as securing the peace. Iraq is what happens when the end state is assumed rather than constructed. It is, in that sense, less a campaign than a condition.

Set beside these, the earlier analogies sharpen. Gallipoli was not “chaos without a compass” at the outset; it had a very clear aim. Nor was it quite Crimea’s administrative farce, though elements of mismanagement crept in as the campaign stalled. Its distinctive flaw was the belief that a bold, limited stroke could shortcut the hard arithmetic of war – geography, supply, enemy adaptation. When that belief failed, the campaign slid, almost reluctantly, toward something more protracted, more wearing, with flashes of Crimean dysfunction flickering at the edges.

And this is the point at which the analogies begin to overlap, to blur into one another. The opening may be Gallipoli: confident, compressed, persuasive in its apparent simplicity. The conduct may drift toward Crimea: systems straining, coordination fraying, rhetoric outrunning reality. The trajectory may lengthen into Vietnam or Iraq: time stretching, purpose thinning, the war becoming less an event than an environment.

So which is most apt? If you’re judging initial strategic conception: then it is Gallipoli. If you’re judging systemic dysfunction and coalition incoherence: it’s Crimea. If you’re judging likely long-term dynamics and risk of quagmire: look to Vietnam and Iraq.

Forced to choose one, the most useful analogy is probably Iraq (with a Vietnam shadow). It captures both the confidence of the opening act and the chronic instability that can follow when political end states are ill-defined. Gallipoli was a failed gamble; Iraq became a condition. And it is the risk of becoming a condition – open-ended, absorbing, resistant to tidy resolution – that should trouble policymakers more than the memory of any single historical blunder.

For there is something peculiarly modern in that transformation. Nineteenth-century wars could be mismanaged; early twentieth-century campaigns could be disastrously conceived; but late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century conflicts have a habit of enduring. They slip their temporal bounds. They resist conclusion. They persist in the form of insurgencies, proxy struggles, regional destabilisations, so-called “forever wars” – echoes rather than endings.

History, in this sense, does not repeat so much as it offers a set of recurring traps, each labelled in a different hand. The names change – Lone Pine and The Nek, Balaclava, Khe Sanh, Fallujah – but the pattern is recognisable: ambition outruns understanding; institutions struggle to keep pace with intention; time erodes clarity; and strategy discovers, too late, that the map was never the territory.

The past, obligingly, provides the metaphors. The present decides which of them it is willing to become.

Forever wars and the persistent Eastern Question

Ironically, the repercussions and ricochets of the Crimea and Gallipoli linger still in the “forever wars” of the Ottoman Succession that continue to be fought in the Levant. Though the “sick man of Europe” has long gone, so-called “Eastern Question” that he precipitated is with us still.  And the irony is not merely poetic, it is structural.

The Crimean War and Gallipoli were not just episodes in the long decline of the Ottoman Empire; they were moments in which the European powers tried, and failed, to manage that decline without resolving it. The Eastern Question – what to do with a weakening empire whose territories sat athwart trade routes, faiths, and ambitions – was never answered. It was deferred, patched, internationalised, moralised, and, when necessary, fought over. But never settled.

Crimea was, in essence, a war about containment without clarity. Britain and France fought not to destroy the Ottoman Empire, nor to reform it decisively, but to prevent Russia from exploiting its weakness. The result was a kind of geopolitical holding operation – costly, confused, and inconclusive. The patient survived, but the illness deepened. The war did not solve the Eastern Question; it ensured that it would return, more complicated than before.

Gallipoli, sixty years later, was almost the inverse: an attempt at decisive intervention that miscarried. Where Crimea sought to stabilise the system, Gallipoli tried to break it open – knock the Ottomans out of what became known as The Great War, reorder the strategic map, and force a resolution. It failed, and in failing, prolonged the life of the very problem it aimed to solve. When the Ottoman Empire did finally collapse in 1918, it did so not through elegant strategy but through cumulative exhaustion – and the settlement that followed (the infamous Sykes–Picot agreement, the Treaty of Lausanne that ended the Great War and shaped the modern Middle East, the mandates, improvised borders, and the legacies inherited by Israel and Palestine, by Syria and Lebanon, and by Iraq carried within it the seeds of future instability.

And here is the connective tissue to the present: the “forever wars” of the Levant are, in a very real sense, the afterlife of those unresolved choices.

The Ottoman system, for all its inequities, provided a kind of imperial coherence – a loose, often improvised order that managed diversity through hierarchy rather than uniformity. Its removal created a vacuum that external powers attempted to fill with lines on maps and imported state structures, often indifferent to local realities, including religious and ethnic divisions. The mandates were not solutions; they were transitional fictions that hardened into permanence. The Eastern Question did not end; it metastasised.

Thus the region becomes a palimpsest of earlier interventions:

  • The Crimean instinct persists in modern coalition warfare – external powers seeking to contain instability without fully committing to its resolution, managing symptoms rather than causes.
  • The Gallipoli impulse reappears in periodic attempts at decisive intervention – strikes, invasions, regime-change strategies – each promising to reset the board, each discovering the board is more complicated than imagined.
  • And over all this hangs the long shadow of Vietnam and Iraq: the recognition that once engaged, these conflicts do not conclude cleanly, but evolve into layered, persistent struggles involving states, militias, proxies, and narratives.

What we call “forever wars” are, in this sense, not aberrations but continuations – the modern form of an old, unanswered question. The Ottoman Empire is gone, but the strategic problem it embodied remains: a region where internal fractures intersect with external interests, where no single power can impose order, and where every intervention alters the conditions for the next.

There is a quiet, almost melancholic symmetry in this. Nineteenth-century statesmen spoke of the “Sick Man of Europe” as though the problem were a patient to be diagnosed and treated. But the illness was never confined to the patient; it was embedded in the system around him. Remove the patient, and the condition does not disappear – it redistributes itself.

So when modern observers reach for Gallipoli, or Crimea, or Vietnam, or Iraq, they are not merely searching for analogies of method. They are circling, perhaps without quite naming it, the persistence of a problem without closure.

The Eastern Question was never answered. It simply changed its language.

Challenging the analogies

You can’t really make sense of the analogies – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – without restoring Iran itself to the centre of the frame. Otherwise the country becomes a backdrop, a stage upon which other powers replay their historical anxieties. But Iran is not the Ottoman Empire in decline, nor Iraq in 2003, nor Vietnam in 1965. It is an old state with a long memory of being acted upon – and that memory shapes how it acts now.

What changes, once you bring Iran back in, is the direction of the analogy. The earlier comparisons mostly describe how outside powers misjudge wars. Iran’s history reminds you how those same powers are often experienced from the inside – as intrusion, manipulation, or existential threat.

Iran enters the story not as an abstraction – “the enemy,” “the regime,” “the theatre” – but as a historical actor formed in the crucible of the very system the earlier analogies describe.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Persia was itself entangled in a version of the Eastern Question, pressured by Russian and British imperial competition, its sovereignty compromised, its politics penetrated. The First World War and its aftermath did not dismantle Iran as they did the Ottoman Empire, but they confirmed its vulnerability to external design. The Second World War made that vulnerability explicit: Anglo-Soviet occupation in 1941, the removal of Reza Shah, and the installation of his son – an early demonstration that great powers could, when required, rearrange Iran’s internal order.

From there, the pattern sharpens. The 1953 coup against the democratically elected prime minister Mohammed Mossadegh – engineered by Britain and the United States – lodges itself in Iranian political consciousness as a defining moment: not simply a change of government, but a lesson about the limits of independence in a world of larger powers. The Shah’s subsequent rule, modernising yet authoritarian, Western-aligned yet domestically brittle, becomes the next act in this long drama of externally entangled sovereignty.

The Islamic Revolution of 1979 then reads, in part, as a rupture with that pattern- a violent reassertion of autonomy, clothed in religious language but grounded in political memory. “Neither East nor West” was not just a slogan; it was a rejection of the very dynamics that had shaped Iran’s modern history. Yet revolutions do not escape geography. The new regime inherits the same strategic environment, the same pressures, the same suspicions.

The Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) is crucial here. For eight years, Iran fights a brutal, attritional conflict against Saddam Hussein – largely isolated, facing external support flowing to its adversary. This is Iran’s Vietnam, one might say, but with a different lesson drawn: not the futility of war, but the necessity of endurance. The war entrenches a doctrine of asymmetry, resilience, and proxy capability – precisely the features that later confound American strategy in the region.

From that point on, the Islamic Republic is not simply surviving; it is adapting. It builds networks – Hezbollah, militias, regional alliances – not as ideological ornaments but as strategic depth. It becomes, in effect, a state that has internalised the lessons of the very wars others use as analogies. Where outside observers see Vietnam or Iraq looming, Iranian planners see something else: a long game in which time, patience, and indirection offset conventional inferiority.

To reinsert Iran into the narrative is to complicate every analogy. Gallipoli assumes an opponent who will react predictably to a decisive blow; Iran’s history suggests otherwise. Crimea assumes mismanagement on one side; Iran’s experience reminds us that what appears as dysfunction externally may be met by coherence internally. Vietnam and Iraq warn of quagmires; Iran has, in many respects, built its strategy around drawing others into them.

In that sense, the question is not only which past war America risks refighting, but which past experiences Iran believes it is reliving – or avenging. The 1953 coup, the isolation of the 1980s, the long memory of foreign interference: these are not background details, but active ingredients in the present.

And so our frame subtly shifts. It is no longer simply about the hazards of analogy, or the repetition of strategic error, but about the collision of historical memories. One side reaches for Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq- warnings drawn from its own past misjudgments. The other carries a different archive: intervention, resistance, survival.

Between those two archives lies the present conflict – less a replay of any single war than a convergence of many, each side reading from a different script, each convinced, in its own way, that history has already shown it how this story goes.

Conclusion

To refight old wars in the mind is, at one level, an act of prudence. It reminds us that others have stood at similar thresholds, armed with confidence, intelligence, and good intentions – and have nonetheless misjudged the terrain, the enemy, or themselves. But there is a fine line between learning from history and being governed by it. Analogy can clarify; it can also constrain. It can sharpen perception, or it can trap us in inherited scripts, seeing Gallipoli where the problem is administrative, or diagnosing Vietnam when the flaw lies in the opening wager.

The deeper unease running through these comparisons is not simply that wars go wrong, but that they linger – that they slip their boundaries and become conditions rather than episodes. From the mismanaged campaigns of Crimea to the failed gambles of Gallipoli, from the disorientation of Vietnam to the long aftermath of Iraq, one sees not repetition but recurrence: ambition outrunning understanding, institutions straining to keep pace, time eroding clarity. And beneath it all, especially in the Levant, the longer echo of an older, unanswered question – how to order a region where external power and internal fracture are perpetually entangled.

History does not offer a single, authoritative mirror. It offers a cabinet of them, each slightly warped, each catching a different angle of the present. The task is not to choose one reflection and mistake it for reality, but to recognise the distortions for what they are – and to ask, with some humility, whether we are illuminating the path ahead or merely retracing, with greater eloquence, the steps that led others into the same uncertain ground.

The Western cabinet of mirrors – Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, Iraq – captures recurring pathologies: the overconfident opening stroke, the misaligned machinery, the war that lingers beyond its logic. Yet these are, inescapably, insider narratives. They describe how campaigns look from the bridge, the штаб, the situation room. They are diagnoses of our own errors.

What the Iranian story, set against the longer afterlife of the Eastern Question, forces back into view is the perspective from the other shore. The Young Turks, confronting encroachment and dismemberment, did not experience Gallipoli as a misjudged Allied gamble; they experienced it as a defence of survival. Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese did not inhabit “chaos without a compass”; they pursued a coherent, if costly, struggle against a foreign presence. Iraqi insurgents, and later ISIS in its own brutal and aberrant way, did not parse the war as a case study in post-conflict planning; they resisted, adapted, endured, and exploited.

They did not conduct war games about us. They fought.

Iran belongs in that lineage – not as an analogue, but as an heir to a particular historical consciousness: one shaped by intervention, by imposed settlements, by long wars of attrition, and by the conviction that time can be turned into a weapon. From that vantage, what appears to Western observers as drift or dysfunction may look like opportunity; what is feared as quagmire may be cultivated as strategy.

And so the question shifts. It is no longer simply which past war America risks refighting, but whether the very act of choosing among Gallipoli, Crimea, Vietnam, and Iraq obscures the more important reality: that the other side is not reading from the same book – or as many commentators are reminding us today, “the enemy has a vote”. One side searches its history for warnings about overreach; the other draws from its own past a repertoire of resistance.

History, then, does not just offer competing analogies. It offers competing memories. And where those memories diverge – where one side analyses and the other endures – there lies the most persistent danger: not that we will repeat the past, but that we will misunderstand the present, even as we describe it with perfect historical fluency.

In That Howling Infinite, May 2026

Read more about history  in In That Howling Infinite in Foggy Ruins of Time.

On World War I, see Ottoman Redux – an alternative, The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye and November 1918 – the counterfeit peace. On the Balfour Declaration and its repercussions, see The hand that signed the paper. On Vietnam, see The Ballad of Denton Crocker – a Vietnam elegy, Tim Page’s War – a photographer’s Vietnam journey, and Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war. On the US-Iran war, see Chaos in without a compass … Donald Trump’s Persian “excursion”

Rojava revisited. Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?

Paul Hemphill Leave a comment

In January 2019, In That Howling Infinite published, Rojava and the Kurdish conundrum. The post wrote of Rojava as both experiment and predicament – a small, improbable polity suspended between larger, harder powers, “trapped between the Turkish hammer and the Syrian anvil.” Aris Roussinos, whose work we have reviewed before, now returns to the same terrain with the sombre clarity of hindsight. His recent essay on the collapse of the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria reads less like contradiction than culmination. What was foreboding then is aftermath now.

Back in 2019, the drama was framed in the key of Trumpian bombast – promises to “totally destroy and obliterate” Turkey’s economy if Ankara stepped out of line — but the underlying reality was austere. The Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces had borne the brunt of the fight against ISIS, lost thousands of men and women, guarded tens of thousands of jihadist detainees, and constructed, under the thin canopy of American airpower, a fragile, decentralised experiment in multi-ethnic governance. Remove the canopy and the weather would change. The Kurds knew it. So did Ankara, Damascus, Moscow and Tehran.

Roussinos describes that experiment –  the AANES – as an attempt to defy the “grim logic” of civil war in divided societies: that conflict eventually collapses into sectarian arithmetic. Ideologically, it was a pivot away from classic PKK ethnonationalism toward Abdullah Öcalan’s “democratic confederalism”: devolved authority, gender parity, communal councils, a deliberate blurring of ethnic hierarchy. In a region shaped by the memory of genocide, forced migration, Baathist Arabisation and mutual suspicion, it was both necessity and idealism. The geography of the Jazira –  oil-rich, landlocked, demographically mixed – demanded accommodation if it was to function at all.

Yet even in 2019 the limits were visible. Rojava was romanticised abroad –  “an anarchist-lite Paris Commune,” as we noted, perhaps half  ironically half-ironised then – but on the ground it was strategically exposed and socially fissured. Arabs and Turkmen did not uniformly welcome Kurdish administration. Kurdish politics itself was riven by clan and party rivalries. Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran all loathed the prospect of a sovereign Kurdistan. The experiment depended not merely on theory but on patronage.

That patronage proved fickle. The likely endgame sketched seven years ago was stark: the Kurds would fight if forced, but ultimately they would deal with Damascus to save their towns and families. Russia would mediate; Turkey would demand a border free of the YPG; Assad would insist on reintegration, autonomy trimmed to vassalage. The analogy to the Paris Commune was offered with unease – bold communal experiments have a habit of ending in blood and absorption.

Roussinos now writes from beyond that threshold. The new Damascus government –  jihadist-derived yet internationally tolerated – has reasserted control. The much-vaunted multi-ethnic Syrian Democratic Forces, proudly described as majority Arab, fractured under pressure. Arab components drifted back toward their ethnic kin in Damascus. What remained was recognisably Kurdish: the YPG under another name. Integration proceeded not as confederal partnership but as coerced subsumption.

Pro–Damascus media have seized on the SDF’s recruitment of women, alleging coercion and forced enlistment of minors. While underage recruitment has been documented in past years and prompted formal pledges to demobilise minors -with uneven implementation – broader claims of systematic kidnapping lack clear substantiation and coexist with extensive evidence of voluntary female participation grounded in the movement’s gender-egalitarian ethos. Such allegations serve a wider political purpose: portraying the Kurdish administration as socially aberrant and incompatible with a re-centralised Syrian state, framing critique of specific practices as part of its broader delegitimisation. In Roussinos’ terms, this is another instrument of Syria’s recurring cycle: peripheral autonomy is undermined not only by coercion on the battlefield but also by shaping perception, marking alternative governance as morally and politically untenable.

His larger point is less about Kurdish miscalculation than Syrian structure. Since independence, Syria has oscillated between peripheral revolt and centralised coercion. Its demographic entanglement – Sunni Arab majorities, Alawite and Druze minorities, Kurds without a state, ancient Christian communities –  renders majoritarian triumph unstable and decentralisation fragile. The AANES sought to transcend that arithmetic; it ultimately succumbed to it. Meanwhile, sectarian reprisals against Alawites and Druze in western Syria deepen minority distrust of Damascus, reinforcing the very cycle the new regime claims to end.

The pattern is not uniquely Syrian. Lebanon’s confessional balancing act has veered between uneasy accommodation and paralysis; Iraq’s post-2003 settlement oscillates between sectarian mobilisation and fragile cross-sectarian moments; the Balkans, from Bosnia to Kosovo, demonstrate how externally brokered pluralism can freeze conflict without dissolving its underlying fears. In each case, demography and memory shape politics as much as constitutions do. Power-sharing without trust calcifies; centralisation without restraint provokes resistance. The pendulum swings.

What is striking is the dialectical twist. The Kurdish movement in Syria attempted to move beyond ethnonationalism toward a post-national confederalism. Its collapse may instead accelerate a harder pan-Kurdish nationalism – the revival of the Ala Rengin flag, the renewed invocation of Rojava as West Kurdistan, the rhetoric of betrayed nationhood. When pluralist experiment yields vulnerability, ethnic consolidation gains appeal. The effort to dissolve identity politics may intensify it.

Can Syria break its sectarian cycle? Roussinos leaves the question open, but the burden is heavy. It would require disciplined control over disparate armed factions, credible guarantees to minorities, and a majority willing to exercise restraint rather than vengeance – feats rarer than battlefield victories. The Kurdish experiment failed not simply because it was naïve, but because it unfolded within a regional system that punishes fragility and rewards coercion.

In 2019, the mood was, borrowing from King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly.” In 2026, the darkness feels less theatrical, more structural. The Kurds remain what they have long been: resilient, battle-hardened, accustomed to betrayal. Their attempt to sketch another way -neither Baathist despotism nor jihadist dominion – has been curtailed. Yet the problem it sought to solve endures, not only in Syria but in every state where demography, memory and power are tightly braided. The lesson, as Roussinos insists, reaches well beyond the plains of the Jazira.

Paul hemphill, February 2026, with assistance in drafting by ChatGPT

For more on the Middle East in in That Howling Infinite, see A Middle East Miscellany.

See also, Syria. Illusion, delusion and the fall of tyrants, Cold Wind in Damascus …Syria at the crossroads, Between Heaven and Hell … Syria at the crossroads

Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?The Kurdish experiment was doomed

Aris Roussinos, Unherd 10 February 2026

Can Syria break its sectarian cycle?

‘The remorseless logic of a country, like neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics.’ (Delil Souleiman / AFP / Getty Imges)

It is generally expected that, whatever the ostensible cause of a civil war, in a country divided on ethnic and religious lines the fighting will sooner or later assume an interethnic or sectarian flavour. The Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), now having surrendered its autonomy under assault from the Syrian state’s new jihadist-derived government, was, whatever else it may have been, an attempt to rebut this grim logic. Indeed, the dusty and unprepossessing plains of the Syrian Jazira — the northeastern portion of the country, east of the Euphrates — served for more than a decade as an unlikely political experiment in the management and diffusion of ethnic conflict.

Whether noble or naive, this project now looks doomed as AANES’s great power backers turn their fickle attentions to Damascus, and the Damascus government has in turn successfully reasserted its control through military coercion. Within a matter of days, as its Sunni Arab levies turned their affections to their ethnic kin in Damascus and their guns on their former allies, Northeast Syria switched from a bold experiment in multi-ethnic governance to a desperate, rearguard battle for Kurdish cultural and political autonomy. The war, at its presumed end, reverted to the dynamics of its earliest days, when Ahmed al-Sharaa, then leader of the Syrian al-Qaeda faction Jabhat al-Nusra, had attempted, along with the Free Syrian Army (FSA) rebels and tribes of changeable loyalties, to seize control of the oil-rich, and newly Kurdish-run region, Syria’s breadbasket.

Simultaneously rich in resources yet neglected by its central government, and host to the country’s richest mix of ethnic and religious minorities, alternately the tools and the victims of the central state, the Syrian Jazira had always run according to its own dynamics. Both colonial French and independent Syrian administrations in distant, Levantine Damascus expended significant, if sporadic, effort in absorbing this neglected region of Mesopotamia within the modern state system, privileging one ethnic group against another for reasons of statecraft, and building model towns and vast dams, as evocative in their current dilapidation of failed modernities as the ancient tells dotting the landscape, now repurposed as gun emplacements, are of earlier lost civilisations.

Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list. Birthed from the fusion of Kurdish nationalism and Marxist-Leninist thought that initially drove the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) independence movement, the AANES, a project of the PKK’s Syrian sister organisation, the Democratic Union Party ‎(PYD), performed an attempted shift to anarchist political theory. The thought of the American writer Murray Bookchin, as reworked by the PKK’s occluded godhead figure Abdullah Öcalan from his Turkish jail cell, was its most notable innovation. Echoing Öcalan’s rejection of the PKK’s previous project of independence for the Kurdish nation, the AANES presented itself as an explicitly multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian state in which the greatest possible autonomy was devolved to religious and ethnic communities, beneath the benign framework of Jazira’s de facto autonomy from Damascus. In practice, the quasi-anarchist devolution of power resulted in the proliferation of bureaucratic structures. Local empowerment, similarly, meant the elevation of new elites loyal to the project, and the freezing out of dissidents, particularly rival Kurdish factions. Imperfect though it may have been, compared to the overt totalitarianism of the Baathist state, the anarchic infighting of the FSA rebels, and the gothic cruelties of ISIS, history is likely to remember it more favourably than today’s discourse would suggest.

“Perhaps the AANES experiment can now be added to this melancholy list.”

Barely populated until the French Mandate period, except during the annual circulation of nomadic Bedouin shepherds, the portion of Syria east of the Euphrates underwent during the early 20th century a transformative period of internal and external immigration and development analogous, in a modest way, to that of California or Australia. Ethnic Kurds fleeing the collapse of proto-nationalist rebellions in Ataturk’s Turkey, along with Syriac Christians fleeing the Seifo genocide and many uprooted Armenians streamed south across the culverts and rusting tracks of the Berlin-to-Baghdad railway line, which still marks the modern border, joining their ethnic kin residing there from the beginning of recorded history. Ethnic Assyrians from British-Mandate northern Iraq similarly sought French protection from the predation of the Iraqi state and its Kurdish, Arab and Turkmen auxiliaries, establishing a string of fiercely Christian villages along the Khabur river. Northeast Syria was shaped by the cultural memory of ethnic conflict; its past decade of governance was an attempt to evade the return of its attendant cruelties.

As such, the AANES project was always as much one of necessity as Leftist idealism. The Kurdish regions of northern Syria, stretching West of the Euphrates into Aleppo, were separated from each other by clusters of Arab and Turkmen towns and villages, in large part the result of the Baathist state’s settlement of Arabs from Syria’s desert hinterland to hinder any Kurdish attempts at secession. While the early successes of the Syrian Kurds under the PYD, following a negotiated handover of control by Assad’s overstretched government, resulted in what was essentially the occupation by its YPG military forces of Arab settlements, loyal to one or other rebel or jihadist faction, America’s decisive intervention in the war against ISIS resulted in both sudden and unexpected great power backing for Northeast Syria and an evolution of Kurdish political attitudes towards local Arabs.

Partly at America’s behest, in a failed attempt to assuage the Syrian rebels’ combative Western think-tank diaspora, and partly a genuine attempt to impose progressive governance among a population Kurds frequently portray as stunted by its own reactionary obscurantism and crude ethnic chauvinism, Northeast Syria’s autonomous quasi-government undertook a project of delegating political and military authority to Arab regions won back from ISIS. It was an ambitious goal which seemed, for a decade, to have won majority acquiescence, if not affection. It became the boast of the regional administration that its armed forces, the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF), was now predominantly composed of Arabs, a feat of enlightened governance that rapidly proved hollow, over the past two weeks, when the majority of these Arab fighters effortlessly switched sides. Having lost almost all its Arab accretions, the SDF was once again, in practice, the Kurdish YPG, an ethnic militia fighting for purely Kurdish goals. Now that, under the threat of military defeat, a shrunken version of these forces will be subsumed under the Damascus government’s control, their future role — on paper, and in reality — remains to be seen.

The integration terms finally accepted, at gunpoint, by the autonomous administration last weekend, though better than those of a fortnight ago are worse than those of the unimplemented March agreement. Consequently, much has been made in recent days of the AANES’s failures to come to terms with al-Sharaa’s shock capture of the Syrian state just over a year ago, and negotiate a settlement with the new reality. Certainly, the region’s political focus had, since the seeming cornering of the Sunni Arab rebellion into its Idlib Bantustan, centred on negotiating re-integration into Assad’s Baathist state in a manner that preserved some means of political and military autonomy. Yet Assad, over-confident of his own position as victor of the long and bloody war, refused to offer more than integration into the central state on terms that amounted to surrender. The new regime in Damascus now offers little different: what has changed is its greater power of coercion, and international backing, compared to its previous Baathist iteration.

Putin, once an occasional, tacit partner of the Kurds west of the Euphrates, has fully backed the new Damascus government, another instance where Russia, once America’s rival in Syria, shares increasingly aligned interests with the Trump White House. Calls for the protection of Kurdish cultural rights and social norms by European states are outweighed by their overriding political interest in the accelerated removal of their more than one million mostly Sunni Arab refugees. Regionally, the success or otherwise of the Northeast’s reintegration will determine Israel’s ability to justify its military protection of Druze autonomists in the southern province of Sweida. Relations with mostly Shia Iraq, which has its own reasons to look askance at Sunni jihadist governance and is currently making a show of reinforcing its border with Syria, will be fraught at best. Given the sheer improbability of fate’s wheel suddenly projecting al-Sharaa into Assad’s Damascus palace, it would be foolhardy to offer any firm predictions, rather than vague anxieties, for the country’s future.

For the Kurds themselves, the experiment in enlightened multi-ethnic governance proved, at the crucial moment, a dramatic and costly Achilles heel. The result, over time, will likely be the weakening of PKK ideology in favour of some form of pan-Kurdish ethnic nationalism, whose early stirrings are apparent in the flow of volunteers from northern Iraq to defend their ethnic kin, the sudden revival of the Kurdish flag, Ala Rengin, in Northeast Syria, and in the readoption of the ethnic term Rojava, or West Kurdistan, in place of its previously bland geographic descriptor. When even Abdullah Öcalan’s nephew Ömer, an MP in Turkey’s parliament for the movement-aligned DEM party, feels compelled to proclaim “Long live the Kurds and Kurdistan”, and “the Kurdish nation will not forgive the enmity committed against it”, we sense the tectonic plates of Kurdish politics shifting away from Leftist post-national idealism towards an embryonic ethnic nationalism. The decade-long experience of Kurdish self-governance, military success and international diplomacy will shape whatever follows the likely collapse of the AANES statelet, whether what replaces it will coalesce in the mountainous redoubts of eastern Turkey, Western Iran and northern Iraq, or in the grey cities of the European diaspora. So, too, will bitter analysis of the project’s failings.

Yet it would be unfair for harsh self-criticism to so soon follow hindsight. For all its faults, the Kurdish project of autonomy from the Syrian central state evolved, through managing the dynamics of their multi-ethnic region, into one that ironically and idealistically attempted to make the very idea of equable Syrian co-existence a political possibility. Inversely, the current Damascus project of re-centralisation has, in western Syria, been accompanied by sectarian massacres and other abuses, which have increased the antipathy of peripheral minority populations towards the central state. Sunni Arab supporters of the al-Sharaa government, whose decade-long displeasure at having their ethnic kin ruled by minorities is accompanied by certainty of their own natural right to rule those same minorities, have made much of Kurdish intransigence while minimising or even justifying the starkest governance failures of their own new regime. Yet the past year’s massacres of Alawites and Druze, punctuating the failed integration talks with the AANES, only heightened the Kurdish disinclination to disarm and dissolve its forces and place the fates of its people in the benevolence of the central state.

Syria’s post-independence oscillation between peripheral revolts and centralised coercion, the very cycle that produced both Assad and his own overthrow, is simply the remorseless logic of a country, like neighbouring Lebanon and Iraq, held hostage by its own tangled demographics. Whether or not the new Syria can break this cycle is an open question. It will take great feats of governance, and of control over his own disparate armed forces, by al-Sharaa to avoid the logic of Syria’s demographic confusion weakening his own state-building project just as, suddenly and catastrophically, it did for the Kurds. Syria’s ethnic and religious complexity makes it a hard country to rule, historically veering, as a result, between instability and oppression. The Kurdish attempt to find another, progressive path ultimately failed, for the same reasons. The lessons, it ought not to need underlining, reach far beyond Syria’s borders.

Aris Roussinos is an UnHerd columnist and a former war reporter.

Feints, refrains and unfinished business. 2025 in review

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
Mathew Arnold, Dover Beach

We called 2024 a “year of everything, everywhere, all at once”, and it earned the name. Crises collided, news arrived faster than we could process it, and the world seemed to exist in a state of constant shock. 2025 did not bring relief. Instead, the chaos began to settle. Wars dragged on, political divides hardened, social tensions deepened, and technology reshaped how we saw and understood it all.

It was the year the world stopped exploding in real time and started being what it had already become: messy, uneven, morally complicated, and stubbornly persistent. A year, indeed, in a world of echoes, refrains and unfinished business. And we spent the year watching power bargain brazenly in plain sight, trying to describe what was happening while it unfolded around us.

From Gaza to Ukraine, Sudan to Syria, from America’s self-inflicted fracture to Australia’s sudden wake-up call on Bondi Bondi, 2025 forced a reckoning: the world did not pause, but it did sort itself – deciding what we would notice, what we would ignore, and what we would learn to live with. Alongside human crises came the continuing advance of AI and chatbots, and the dominion of the algorithms that now govern attention, proving that disruption can be structural as well as geopolitical.

Gaza: War, Then “Ceasefire”

The war in Gaza dominated the year internationally and here in Australia, even as attention ebbed and flowed. Military operations continued for months, followed eventually by a “ceasefire” – a word doing far more work than it should or even justified. Fighting paused, hostages living and dead were returned and prisoners released, but the devastation remained: tens of thousands dead, cities demolished, humanitarian catastrophe unresolved. And the causes of the consequences standing still amidst the ruins and the rubble.

Western governments continued to back Israel while expressing concern for civilians, a contradiction that grew harder to defend, while street protests and online anger seethed all across the world. At the same time, antisemitism surged globally, often hiding behind the language of anti-Zionism. Two realities existed together, and too many people insisted on choosing only one.

By the end of the year, the war had not been resolved – merely frozen. Trust in Western moral leadership had been badly damaged, and Israelis and Palestinians remain in bitter limbo.

See Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy

Iran, Israel and America’s bunker busters

Long-simmering tensions between Israel and Iran spilled into open conflict. What had once been indirect – proxies, cyberattacks, covert strikes – became visible. A brief but destructive war of missile exchanges ended with the United States asserting ordinance, deterrence and control.

The episode was brief but telling. It showed that America still reaches for its guns quickly, even as it struggles to define long-term goals. Another line was crossed, then quickly absorbed into the background of “normal” geopolitics.

Russia, Ukraine and Trump’s “Peace”

Ukraine entered 2025 mired in stalemate. Front lines barely moved. Casualties continued to mount. Western support held, but with clear signs of fatigue. And Donald Trump’s re-emergence reshaped the conversation. His promise to deliver instant “peace” reframed the war not as a question of justice or sovereignty, but of exhaustion. Peace was no longer about what Ukraine deserved, but about what the world was tired of sustaining and what the “art of the deal” could deliver.

The war didn’t end. It simply became something many wanted to stop thinking about. Not Ukraine and Russia, but. The carnage continues.

Donald Trump’s one-way crush on Vladimir gave us the one of the+most cringeworthy moments in global politics – Trump greeting the Russian president in Alaska: As the US president rolled out the red carpet for the world’s most dangerous autocrat, Russia’s attack on Ukraine accelerated. Trump got precisely nothing out of the meeting, except for the chance to hang out with a gangster he so obviously admires and of whom he is embarrassingly in awe.

Syria: Free, but stranded at the crossroads

A year after Assad’s fall, Syria remained unstable and unresolved. The regime was gone, but the future was unclear. Old sectarian tensions resurfaced, often in bloodshed, new power struggles emerged, powerful neighbours staked claims and  justice for past crimes remained distant.

Syria in 2025 was neither a success story nor a collapse – but suspended between heaven and hell, a country trying to exist after catastrophe with the rest of the world largely moving on.

See Between heaven and hell … Syria at the Crossroads

Women in Damascus celebrate the fall of the Assad regime

Sudan: what genocide actually looks like

Sudan’s civil war continued with little international attention. Mass killing, ethnic cleansing, famine, and displacement unfolded slowly and relentlessly. This was genocide without spectacle. No clear narrative. No sustained outrage. It showed how mass atrocity can now occur not in secrecy, but in plain sight – and still be ignored.

see The most nihilistic war ever …Sudan’s waking nightmare

America: a country divided against itself

The United States spent 2025 deeply divided, with no sign of healing. Pew Research polling showed that seven out of ten republicans think that the opposite side is immoral while six of ten democrats thinks the same of their rivals.

Trump’s return to power sharpened those divisions. His administration governed aggressively: mass deportations, punitive tariffs, the dismantling of foreign aid, political retribution, and pressure on democratic institutions. The country looked inward and outward at the same time – less cooperative, more transactional, more openly nationalist. Democratic norms eroded not overnight, but through constant stress and disregard. With three years still to run and the tell-tale midterms approaching, allies and cronies are adjusting, bickering rivals are taking notes, and uncertainty has become the defining feature of American leadership. Meanwhile, #47 is slapping his name on everything he can christen, from bitcoins to battleships.

See, for light relief, Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer 

Monroe Redux: the return of “the Ugly American”

US foreign policy took on a blunt, old-fashioned tone. Pressure on Canada and Mexico increased. Talk of annexing Greenland resurfaced. Venezuela, caught in the maw of Yanqui bullying and bluster, waits nervously for Washington’s next move. The administration promised imminent land operations – and then bombed Nigeria! The revival of the old Monroe Doctrine felt, as baseball wizz Yogi Berra once remarked, like déjà vu all over again, not as strategy, but as instinct. Influence asserted, consultation discarded. The “ugly American” was back, and unapologetic.

See Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?

Europe at a inflection point

Europe in 2025 didn’t collapse, as many pundits suggested it might, but it shifted. Far-right ideas gained ground even where far-right parties didn’t win and remained, for now, on the fringes albeit closer to electoral success. Borders tightened; policies hardened; street protests proliferated – against immigration and against Israel, Support for Ukraine continued, but cautiously. The continent stood at a crossroads: still committed to liberal values in theory, but increasingly selective in practice.

Uncle Sam’s  cold-shoulder

Rumbling away in the background throughout year was the quiet but  cumulative alienation of America’s allies. Not with a single rupture, but through a thousand small slights. transactional diplomacy dressed up as realism, alliances treated as invoices rather than covenants, multilateralism dismissed as weakness. Europe learned that security guarantees come with a mood swing; the Middle East heard policy announced via spectacle; Asia watched reassurance coexist uneasily with unpredictability.

The new dispensation was illustrated by the Trump National Security Strategy. It is at once candid and contradictory: it outlines a narrower, realist vision of American interests, emphasising sovereignty, burden-sharing, industrial renewal, and strategic clarity, yet it is riddled with silences, evasions, and tensions between rhetoric and likely action. Allies are scolded for weakness while the document avoids naming Russia’s aggression, underplays China, and projects American cultural anxieties onto Europe. These contradictions expose both strategic incoherence and the limits of paper doctrine against presidential temperament, leaving Europe facing an irreversible rupture in trust and revealing a strategy as much about America’s insecurities as its actual global posture.

The post-WW2 order has not so much been dismantled as shrugged at, and indeed, shrugged off. Trust eroded not because the United States has withdrawn from the world, but because it has remained present without being reliable, and presumed itself to be in charge. Power, exercised loudly but inconsistently, has discovered an old truth: allies can endure disagreement, but they struggle with contempt.

Australia in 2025 … high flight and crash landing

Though beset by a multitude of crises – the cost of living, housing, health and education services – the Albanese Labor government was returned comfortably in May, helped by a divided, incoherent, and seemingly out of touch opposition. For the rest the year, federal politics felt strangely frictionless with policy drift passing for stability. The Coalition remained locked in internal conflict, unable to present a credible alternative. The Greens, chastened by electoral defeat and in many formerly friendly quarters, ideological disillusionment, treaded water.

But beneath the surface, social cohesion frayed. Immigration debates sharpened. Antisemitism rose noticeably, no longer something Australians could pretend belonged elsewhere. Attacks on Jewish Australians forced a reckoning many had avoided and hoped would resolve once the tremors of the war in Gaza had ameliorated. Until 6.47pm on 7th December, a beautiful evening on Sydney’s iconic Bondi Beach. Sudden, brutal and in our summer playground, sectarian violence shattered the sense of distance Australians often feel from global disorder. At that moment, politics stopped feeling abstract. The world, with all its instability, barged in and brought the country down to earth.

See This Is What It Looks Like

Lifesavers on Bondi Beach, 20 December 2025. Edwina Pickles

Featured photograph and above:

A handful of bodies on Bondi Beach, and behind them, the howling infinite of expectation, obligation, and the careful rationing of human empathy. The smallness of the beach against the vastness of consequences. On December 20, 2025, Bondi’s iconic lifesavers formed a line stretching the entire length of the beach -silent, solemn, a nation visibly in mourning. Similar tributes unfolded from Perth to Byron Bay, gestures of unity in the face of a shock that touched the whole country.

The Year of the Chatbot: Promise, Power, and Risk

And now, a break from the doom and gloom …

2025 was the year when artificial intelligence became part of daily life. Chatbots ceased to be experimental and became integral, transforming from novelty to utility seemingly overnight. People used it to write, research, translate, plan, argue, comfort, and persuade; institutions and individuals adopted it instinctively. Setting tone as much as content, the ‘bots have lowered barriers to knowledge, sharpened thinking, and helped people articulate ideas they might otherwise struggle to express. Used well, they amplified curiosity rather than replace it.

The opportunities are obvious – but so are the risks. Systems that can clarify complexity can also flatten it. Chatbots sound confident even when wrong, smooth over disagreement, and made language cleaner, calmer, and more persuasive – but not necessarily truer. They reinforce confirmation bias, outrage, and tribal certainty, generating arguments instantly and flooding the zone with plausible-sounding text. As information has became faster, cheaper, and less reliable, Certainty has spread more easily than truth, so truth has to work much harder.

Dependence is subtler but real. Outsourcing thinking – summaries instead of reading, answers instead of wrestling – did not make humans stupid, but less patient. Nuance, doubt, and slow understanding became harder to justify in a world optimised for speed. Yet conversely, man people still seek context, history, and complexity. Used deliberately, AI could slow the pace, map contradictions, and hold multiple truths at once.

By the end of 2025, the question was no longer whether AI would shape public life – it already had. The real question is whether humans would use it as a shortcut, or as a discipline. The technology is neutral. The danger – and the promise – lies in how much thinking we are willing to give up, and how much responsibility we are prepared to keep.

See The promise and the peril of ChatGPT 

Algorithm and blues

Alongside the chatbot sat a quieter, more insidious force: the algorithm itself. By 2025 it no longer simply organised information – it governed attention. What people saw, felt, and argued about was shaped less by importance than by engagement. To borrow from 20th century philosopher and communication theorist and educator Marshall McLuhan, the meme had become the message. Complex realities were compressed into images, slogans, clips, and talking points designed not to inform but to travel. The algorithm rewarded speed over reflection, certainty over doubt, heat over light. Politics, war, and grief were all flattened into content, stripped of context, and ranked by performance. What mattered most was not what was true or necessary, but what disseminated.

Passion without Wisdom

I wrote during the year that we seemed “full of passionate intensity” – Yeats’ phrase still apt in the twenty first century- but increasingly short on wisdom and insight. 2025 confirmed it. Anger was everywhere, empathy highly selective, certainty worn like armour. People felt deeply but thought narrowly. Moral energy surged but rarely slowed into understanding. The problem was not indifference; it was excess – too much feeling, too little reflection. In that environment, nuance looked like weakness and patience like complicity. What was missing was not information, but judgement – the harder work of holding contradiction, of resisting instant conclusions, of allowing complexity to temper conviction. Passion was abundant. Insight, increasingly rare.

Looking Toward 2026

Looking back on 2025, it seems that there  were no endings, neither happy or sad. Just a promise, it seems, of more of the same. The year didn’t solve anything. It clarified things. And if it clarified anything, it was that the world has grown adept at managing, ignoring, or absorbing what it cannot fix. It revealed a world adjusting to permanent instability. In this year of echoes, refrains, and unfinished sentences.

Passion, intensity, and outrage were abundant, but patience, wisdom, and insight remained scarce. Democracies strained under internal and external pressures. Wars lingered unresolved. Technology reshaped thought and attention.

Some argue that hope springs eternal, that yet, even amid the drift and the fractures, glimpses of understanding and resistance persisted, that although the world has settled into its chaos, we can be riders on the storm. But, I fear, 2026 arrives not as break, a failsafe, a safety valve, but as continuation. It looms as a test of endurance rather than transformation.  In my somnolent frame of mind, I’ve reached again for my Yeats. “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed …”

After the chaos of 2024 and the hardening of 2025, the question is no longer what might go wrong. It’s what we’re prepared to live with.

And so we come to what In That Howling Infinite wrote in 2025.

What we wrote in 2025

It was a year that refused neat endings.

It began in a wasteland – Gaza as moral ground zero – and moved, restlessly, through revolutions real and imagined: Trump as symptom and accelerant, Putin as a man racing his own shadow, Syria forever at the crossroads where history idles and then accelerates without warning. Gaza returned, again and again, sunrise and false dawn, as spectacle and strategy; Sudan burned in near silence; Venezuela re-entered the frame as empire’s backyard as the US disinterred its Monrovian legacy. In That Howling Infinite featured pieces on each of these – several in many cases , twenty in all, plus a few of relevance to them, including an overview of journalist Robert Fisk’s last book (The Night of Power – Robert Fisk’s bitter epilogue). A broadranging historical piece written in the previous year and deferred, Modern history is built upon exodus and displacement, provided a corrective of sorts to the distorted narratives that have emerged in recent years due to a dearth of historical knowledge and the partisan weaponisation of words. 

It was almost as light relief that we turned to other subjects. Of particular interest was AI. Approaching remorselessly yet almost unrecognised in recent years, it banged a loud gong and crept from curiosity to condition, from tool to weather system, quietly rewriting the newsroom, the internet, and the idea of authorship. ChatGPT and other chatbots appeared not as saviours but as promise and peril in equal measure. By year end, we were fretting about using ChatGPT too much and regarding it as something to moderate like alcohol or fatty foods. We published three pieces on the subject in what seemed like rapid succession, and then pestered out – sucked into the machinery, I fear.

What with so much else attracting our attention, we nevertheless managed to find time for some history – including a  particularly enthralling and indeed iconoclastic book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire; the story of an Anzac brigade lost in Greece in 1942; “the Lucky Country” revisited after half a century;  and a piece long in the pipeline on the iconic singer and activist Paul Robeson.

In August, as on a whim, for light relief, we summoned up a nostalgic old Seekers’ song from the mid-sixties, a time when the world was on fire with war and rage much as it is today, but for us young folk back in the day, a time of hope and hedonism. For us, the carnival, clearly, is not over. The machinery is still whirring, the music still loud, and the lights still on. History is insisting on one more turn of the wheel, and the dawn, so often promised, so frequently invoked, has not yet broken.

January
The Gaza War … there are no winners in a wasteland
The way we were … reevaluating the Lucky Country

February
Let’s turn Gaza into Mar e Largo
Trump’s Second Coming … the new American Revolution
Cold Wind in Damascus … Syria at the crossroads

March
Trumps Revolution… he can destroy but he cannot create
Where have all the big books gone?
Putin’s War … an ageing autocrat seeks his place in history

April
The Trump Revolution … I run the country and the world
The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye
Let Stalk Strine .. a lexicon of Australian as it was spoken (maybe)

May
The phantom of liberty … the paradoxes of conservativism
Shadows in search of a name … requiem for a war
The continuing battle for Australia’s history

July
A mighty voice … the odyssey of Paul Robeson

August
109 years of Mein Kampf … the book that ravaged a continent
High above the dawn is breaking … the unlikely origin of a poo song

September
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Trump’s peace plan
Gaza sunrise or false dawn? Spectacle or Strategy
Will there ever be a Palestinian state?
Why Osana bin lost the battle but won the war
The Night of Power … Robert Fisks bitter epilogue
The promise and peril of ChatGPT
Who wrote this? The newsroom’s AI dilemma

October
AI and the future of the internet
Danger Angel … the ballad of Laura Loomer

November
A forgotten Anzac story in Greece’s bloody history
The most nihilistic war ever … Sudan’s waking nightmare
Answering the call … National Service in Britain 1945-1963
Tales of Yankee Power … at play in Americas backyard

December
Delo Kirova – the Kirov Case … a Soviet murder mystery
Between heaven and hell … Syria at the crossroads
This Is What It Looks Like
Tales of Yankee power … Why Venezuela, and why now?
Marco Rubio’s Venezuelan bargain

Read out reviews of prior years:

That was the year that was – retrospectives

A song for 2026: Lost love at world’s end …

It is our custom to conclude our annual wrap with a particular song that caught our attention during the year. Last year, we chose Tears for Fears’ Mad World.  It would be quite appropriate for 2025. But no repeats! so here is something very different. An outwardly melancholy song that is, in the most ineffable way quite uplifting. that’s what we reckon, anyway …

The Ticket Taker is on the surface a love song for the apocalypse; and it’s it’s one of the prettiest, most lyrically interesting songs I’ve heard in a long while. I could almost hear late-period Leonard Cohen and his choir of angels.

The apocalypse is both backdrop and metaphor. We’re not sure which. Is it really about a world ending, or just about the private ruin of a man left behind by love and fortune. The lyrics are opaque enough to evade final meaning, but resonant enough to keep circling back, like the ferry itself, between hope and futility. A love song, yes, but also a confession of entrapment: the gambler’s hope, the ark one cannot board.

The “Ticket Taker” song was written by Ben Miller and Jeff Prystowsky and is featured on The Low Anthem’s album Oh My God, Charlie Darwin. It features on Robert Plant’s latest foray into roots music – this time with English band Saving Grace. This flawless duet with Suzi Dian is mesmerising and magical.

Jeff will tell you that the song is “pure fiction,” that Ben “just made it up one day” – but fiction, as we know, has a way of smuggling deeper truths than fact dares admit.

Tonight’s the night when the waters rise
You’re groping in the dark
The ticket takers count the men who can afford the ark
The ticket takers will not board, for the ticket takers are tied
For five and change an hour, they will count the passers-by

They say the sky’s the limit, but the sky’s about to fall
Down come all them record books, cradle and all
They say before he bit it that the boxer felt no pain
But somewhere there’s a gambling man with a ticket in the rain

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Many years have passed in this river town, I’ve sailed through many traps
I keep a stock of weapons should society collapse
I keep a stock of ammo, one of oil, and one of gold
I keep a place for Mary Anne, soon she will come home

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark, we will float above the storm

Mary Anne, I know I’m a long shot
But Mary Anne, what else have you got?
I am a ticket taker, many tickets have I torn
And I will be your ark

The fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Türkiye

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments

Preface

The featured image of this post is a profile in crystal of Kemal Atatürk that sits on my bookshelf as a reminder of my late friend and academic colleague Mehmet Naim Turfan. Naim, like millions of his compatriots, harboured a deep affection and respect for the legacy of Atatürk, the founder of modern Türkiye and its first president. It was gifted to me by His wife soon after his passing by his wife Barbara. His doctoral thesis was published posthumously in 2000 as Rise of the Young Turks: Politics, the Miliary and Ottoman Collapse. He is cited several times in the book that is the subject of this article. I thought of Naim often while reading the book and writing what follows.

Enver Pasha, soldier, politician and member of the troika that ruled the Ottoman Empire before and during WW1

Ottoman Endgame

Many believe that prior to the outbreak of World War 1 in August 1914, Europe had been at peace. In matter of fact, brutal and bloody little wars had raged in Eastern Europe three years prior, whilst Italy fought the Ottoman Empire for Tripoli and Cyrenaica, both now modern Libya and yet also presently two warring parts of a fractured whole and now being triggered by the aftermath of equally nasty little wars in the same lands in the last quarter of the Nineteenth Century. The Ottoman Empire’s entry into alliance with the Central Powers in 1915 against the Entente of Britain, France and Russia was the direct outcome of what we know refer to generically as The Balkan Wars – which aided and abetted by Russia, saw the emergence of Serbia, Romania and Bulgaria. In retrospect, with the benefit of hindsight, they were the beginning of what we might now refer to as The Wars of the Ottoman Succession. They are not over.

The empire’s entry into the war on the side of the Central Powers against the Entente of Britain France and Russia was a devious, drawn-out business as it sought to take advantage of its potential allies in recovering why it lost in the preceding Balkan Wars that had deprived it of its European provinces,

Few have told the story of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of modern Türkiye as well as English historian Sean McMeekin in his geographically sprawling and historically enthralling book The Ottoman Endgame. He juxtaposes military operations in the empire with those on Europe’s eastern and western fronts, demonstrating how, in the shifting fortunes of war in Europe, each impacted the other from the first offensives in France and on the eastern front to the Russian Revolutions of 1917.

Author and journalist Christopher de Bellaigue sets the scene well in a brief but compelling review (published in full below with some excellent pictures, along with a article by the author himself):

”For the historian of the first world war, the Ottoman theatre is a blur of movement compared to the attrition of the western front. Its leading commanders might race off to contest Baku and entirely miss the significance of events in the Balkans, while the diffuse nature of operations tended to encourage initiative, not groupthink. The war of the Ottoman succession, as Sean McMeekin calls it, was furthermore of real consequence, breaking up an empire that had stifled community hatreds, and whose absence the millions who have fled sectarian conflict in our age may rue …

For the Ottomans, the “great war” of western historiography was part of a much longer period of conflict and revolution, and arguably not even its climax. The process started with the collapse of the Ottomans’ Balkan empire – encouraged by Russia, moderated by Britain – and it brought to power the militaristic regime of the Committee of Union and Progress, or CUP. When Turkey entered the European war on 10 November 1914, Ottoman innocence was long gone, the army fully mobilised, the people benumbed by loss and refugees and the empire hanging in the balance. And yet, for the CUP and its triumvirate of leading pashas, the Young Turk troika of Enver, Talat and Djemal, the moment was as fraught with opportunity as it was with danger. On the opportunity side of the ledger was the prospect of riding Germany’s coat tails to victory, overturning the Balkan reverses and winning back provinces in the east from the old enemy, Russia. Enver, the CUP’s diminutive generalissimo, even spoke of appealing to Muslim sentiment and marching all the way to India.

For the Russians, the game was about winning Constantinople (or Tsargrad, as they presumptuously called it) and with it unimpeded access to the Mediterranean through the Bosphorus; it was with “complete serenity”, Tsar Nicholas II informed his subjects, that Russia took on “this ancient oppressor of the Christian faith and of all Slavic nations”

The European war on the eastern and western fronts was characterized by attrition and stalemate, but that waged by the Ottomans and the Russians, and soon, the British and French, was in contrast, highly mobile and constantly shifting, with the exception perhaps of the allied assault on the Gallipoli Peninsula which very soon resembled the trench warfare and brutal but futile offensives that characterized the Western Front. It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the war fought in the Middle East in terms of its territorial extent. From Baghdad to Baku, Gallipoli to Gaza, the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aqaba and the Caspian Sea. It was waged across European and Asian Ottoman lands including present day Greece, Bulgaria and Romania in the west, in the Caucasus in the east, in present day Armenia, Georgia and Azerbaijan and Iran, and in the south in present day Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Israel and Palestine.

Though the Sultan departed, and with him, the Islamic Caliphate, and most of the empire’s non-Turkish lands – were lost, under the leadership of former Ottoman commander and war hero Mustafa Kemal Pasha, the Anatolian heartland resisted and ultimately repelled invading foreign armies, and the Turkish state he created endures today as an influential participant in world affairs.

Casting new light on old narratives

McMeekin, writes de Bellaigue, is an old-fashioned researcher who draws his conclusions on the basis of the documentary record. In the case of a conflict between Ottoman Turkey and Germany on one side, and Russia, Britain and France on the other, and involving Arabs, Armenians and Greeks, this necessitates linguistic talent and historical nous of a high order. McMeekin is at home in the archives of all major parties to the conflict and his accounts of some of the more contested episodes carry a ring of finality. Access to previously closed Russian and Turkish archives has provided new and potentially controversial insights into accepted narratives regarding the last years of the Ottoman Empire. Challenging long accepted narratives, he addresses three of the most enduring shibboleths of the First World War.

He jumps right in even before he begins his wide-ranging story, leaves hanging in the air like a predator drone until he returns to it in chronologically due course. The Sykes Picot Agreement of 1916 – the bête noir of most progressive narratives of the modern Middle East, and to many ill-informed partisans, the causus bello of the intractable Arab Israeli conflict – was not the brainchild of perfidious Albion and duplicitous France, but rather a plan for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire concocted by the foreign minister of Imperial Russia. France’s Monsieur François-George Picot and Britain’s Sir Mark Sykes played second and third violin to the “third man” Sergei Sazonov. Both Russia and France had for decades sought to establish their political, strategic and economic interests at the expense of the so-called “sick man of Europe”, an ostensibly terminal invalid who throughout the nineteenth century, had experienced many deathbed recoveries. Czar Nicholas II, in common with his Russian Orthodox predecessors, dreamt of bringing Istanbul, formerly Constantinople, the heart of the orthodox patriarchate, or Tsargrad into the empire. It was no coincidence that the infamous Sykes Picot pact was outed by Russia’s Bolshevik regime after the collapse of the Czarist regime to discombobulate the revolution’s foremost European enemies. 

The second icon of “received history” in McMeekin’s sights, is one Australia’s foundation stories – the ill-starred Dardanelles Campaign of 1915 and particularly, the the ANZAC’s Gallipoli legend. It was, from McMeekin’s perspective, a misconceived, poorly planned endeavour to capture the Ottoman capital, to relieve pressure on Russian forces engaged in bitter fighting in Eastern Anatolia, and potentially, to knock the Ottomans out of the war. Contrary to popular conceptions, the British were not exactly enthused by the idea. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s preference was for an assault on the “soft underbelly” of the empire – the port of Alexandretta in Ottoman Syria (now Turkish Antakya), with its strategic and logistic proximity to the Hijaz railway and the hinterland of the Levant. One indisputable fact about Gallipoli is that it assured the ascent Mustafa Kemal, a key commander who had already distinguished himself in the Balkan Wars, who would go on to conduct a fighting retreat of Ottoman Armies through what is now present-day Palestine and Syria, lead Turkish forces to victory in the war of liberation that followed, and, as Kemal Atatürk, would become the founder of modern Türkiye.

The third widely held narrative concerns the Armenian Genocide. Unlike the rulers of modern Türkiye, McMeekin does not deny its occurrence. Nor does he downplay or even ignore it, as does Israel for the idiosyncratic reason that it potentially minimises the horrors of the Shoah. Rather, he places it in the context of events in the empire’s Anatolian heartland. Two predominantly Armenian provinces in Eastern Anatolia were home to active nationalist independence movements, and these gave tacit and actual support to the Russian forces encroaching on the empire from the Caucasus and the Caspian Sea (in present day Azerbaijan and Georgia). Armenian militias fought alongside Russian forces on the Caucasian front whilst partisans operated behind ottoman lines, and cities, town and villages were actually “liberated”, fostering fears in the Istanbul government of an treasonous” fifth column”. McMeekin acknowledges the death toll of what we now recognise the systematic destruction of the Armenian people and identity which was spearheaded by the ruling Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and implemented primarily through the mass deportation and murder of around one million Armenians during death marches to the Syrian Desert and the forced Islamization of others, primarily women and children. Whilst most probably died of inhumane treatment, exposure, privation and starvation, unknown numbers were murdered.

Kemal Pasha and Ottoman offices at Gallipoli

Parallels

Reading The Ottoman Endgame, I was reminded often of his compatriot Anthony Beevor’s harrowing tale of the Russian Revolution (reviewed in In That Howling Infinite’s Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war. That Revolution and the end of the Ottoman Empire converged. McMeekin notes that with regard to the war in Anatolia and the Caucasus, the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the war between Czarist Russia and the Central Powers, was poisoned chalice for both Russia and Turkey and as significant as any of the treaties that followed the end of the war.

I found it fascinating that many individuals who were to play a significant part in the Russian Civil war also feature in Ottoman Endgame. Admiral Alexander Kolchak, commander of the imperial Black Sea fleet and General Anton Deniken, commander of Russian forces on the Caucasian front, became leaders of the Tsarist cause and were to command the counter-revolutionary White forces against the Red Army with the Siberian People’s Army and the Volunteer Army in Ukraine.

None were more prominent or as controversial in western narratives, however, as Winston Churchill. As noted above, McMeekin lays to rest the notion that the Dardanelles campaign and Gallipoli were Churchill’s sole doing and his folly – though he did blame himself later on and has been pilloried for it ever since. Ironically, once disgraced, and having volunteered to serve on the Western Front, at the end of the war, he was brought back into Lloyd George’s cabinet as Secretary of State for War. There, he advised against military intervention against Kemal’s nationalist forces and indeed mused about the option of dumping the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot dispensation imposed on the moribund empire’s Arab provinces after the armistice and of restoring the prewar territorial status quo, a kind of circumscribed Ottoman Redux. And yet, as civil war broke out and spread in the nascent Soviet Union, he was alone of his cabinet colleagues in advocating for a full-on allied intervention. Critics claimed that he dreamt, – though some believed that he fantasized – about of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers, and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats. It is not without reason that admirers and critics alike would agree that Winston had more positions than the Karma Sutra.

The Russian Revolutions – there were two, in February and October 1917 – and the Civil War that followed it, the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire followed by foreign intervention, the war of liberation, and the creation and endurance of Türkiye can be said to have defined the contours of modern Middle Eastern geopolitics, setting the stage for many if not most of the conflicts that have inflicted the region since, including three Gulf wars, the rise and fall of the Islamic State, the Lebanese, Iraqi and Syrian civil wars, and the Arab-Israel conflict, arguably the most intractable conflict of modern times. Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war.

In the wake of the fall of the Russian Empire, the Twentieth Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”. Nor was it kind to the heirs and successors of the Ottoman Empire. Though the tyranny and oppression and the death and destruction wrought by rulers and outsiders upon the lands and peoples of the Middle East has been significantly less than that endured by the people of Eastern Europe and Russia, the region would fit Snyder’s sombre soubriquet.

© Paul Hemphill 2025. All rights reserved

Also in In That Howling Infinite, see Ottoman Redux – an alternative history and Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war

For more on the Middle East, see A Middle East Miscellany

TE Lawrence, General Allenby, Kemal Ataturk, and Ben Gurion

Clone of Russia returns to a Middle East it never really left

Sykes and Picot have taken the blame but actually it was a Russian who drew the map of the Middle East, writes Sean McMeekin

The World Today, 7 December 2018

To judge from press coverage, the emergence of Islamic State has brought about a cartographic revolution in the Middle East. With the borders of Syria and Iraq in flux, journalists have resurrected the legend of Sykes-Picot, wherein Britain and France are said to have divided up the Ottoman empire between them in an agreement signed 100 years ago, in May 1916. Russia’s intervention in Syria, by upstaging the United States and her allies, seems in this view to be completing the rout of western influence in the Middle East, putting the final nail in the coffin of ‘Sykes-Picot’.

Rarely has history been more thoroughly abused. In reality, none of the contentious post-Ottoman borders of the Middle East was settled by Sykes and Picot in 1916: not the Iraq-Kuwait frontier notoriously crossed by Saddam’s armies in 1990, not those separating the Palestinian mandate from (Trans) Jordan and Syria, not the highly contested and still-in-flux Israeli/Palestinian partition of 1948, nor, in the most relevant example from today, those separating Syria from Iraq.

To take an obvious example from recent headlines, Mosul, the Iraqi city whose capture in June 2014 led Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of Islamic State to proclaim himself Caliph Ibrahim, was actually assigned to French Syria in the 1916 agreement.

Journalists are even more spectacularly wrong in describing the Ottoman partition agreement as exclusively (or even primarily) a British-French affair, omitting the driving role played by Tsarist Russia and her Foreign Minister, Sergei Sazonov.

The final terms of what should more accurately be called the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement were actually hashed out in the Russian capital of Petrograd in the spring of 1916, against the backdrop of crushing Russian victories over the Turks at Erzurum, Erzincan, Batum, and Trabzon (the British were reeling, having been humiliated at Gallipoli and in Iraq, where an expeditionary force would shortly surrender).

The conquest of northeastern Turkey in 1916 left Russia, unlike her grasping allies, in possession of most of the Ottoman territory she was claiming – barring only Constantinople (called ‘Tsargrad’ by the Russians), which still needed to be taken.

At the dawn of 1917, Tsarist Russia was poised to inherit the crown jewels of the Ottoman empire, including Constantinople, the Straits, Armenia, and Kurdistan, all promised to her in the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement. Along the Black Sea coast, Russian engineers were building a rail line from Batum to Trabzon, with the latter city a supply base for the Caucasian Army, poised for a spring assault on Sivas and Ankara. With Russia enjoying virtually uncontested naval control of the Black Sea, preparations were underway for an amphibious strike at the Bosphorus, spearheaded by a specially created ‘Tsargradskii Regiment’.

After watching her allies try, and fail, to seize the Ottoman capital during the Dardanelles/Gallipoli campaign of 1915 (when Sazonov had first put forward Russia’s sovereign claim on Constantinople and the Straits), Russia was now poised to seize the prize for herself – weather permitting, in June or July 1917.

Of course, it did not turn out that way. After the February Revolution of 1917, mutinies spread through the Russian army and navy, including the Black Sea fleet, just as it was poised to strike.

In a remarkable and little-known coincidence, on the very day the Foreign Minister of the Provisional Government, Pavel Milyukov, first aroused the anger of the Petrograd Soviet and the Bolsheviks by refusing to renounce Russia’s territorial claims on the Ottoman empire – April 4, 1917 – a Russian naval squadron approached the Bosphorus in ‘grand style’, including destroyers, battle cruisers, and three converted ocean liner-carriers which launched seaplanes to inspect Constantinople’s defences from the air. The amphibious plans were not abandoned until fleet commander Admiral AV Kolchak threw his sword overboard on June 21 during a mutiny. Even after ‘revolutionary sailors’ had taken control of the Black Sea fleet, a Russian amphibious strike force landed on the Turkish coastline as late as August 23, 1917, in one last sting by the old Tsargrad beast.

After the Bolsheviks took power, Russia collapsed into civil war, which left her prostrate, at Germany’s mercy. By signing a ‘separate peace’ with the Central Powers at Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, Russia forfeited her treaty claims to Armenia, Kurdistan, Constantinople, and the Straits, throwing the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 into chaos, even as new claimants were appearing on the scene, such as Italy and Greece – not to mention local actors: Jewish, Arab, and Armenian troops were attached as national ‘Legions’ to General Allenby’s mostly British army as it rolled up Palestine and Syria. These forces, along with French, Italian, and Greek expeditionary forces sent after the war, and the Turkish nationalists who regrouped under Mustafa Kemal in Ankara to oppose them, would determine the final post-Ottoman borders in a series of small wars between 1918 and 1922, with scarcely a nod to the Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement.

While Russia’s forfeiture of her claims in 1918 was welcome, in a selfish sense, to the other players vying for Ottoman territory, it was not necessarily a positive one for the region. In the absence of Russian occupying troops to police the settlement, the

Allies, in 1919, offered Russia’s territorial share, now defined (in deference to Woodrow Wilson) as mandates, to the United States – only for the Senate to vote down the Versailles Treaty, rendering the arrangement moot. Lacking Russian or American troops as ‘muscle’, the Allies leaned on weaker proxies such as the Italians and, more explosively, local Greeks and Armenians, which aroused the anger of the Muslim masses and spurred the Turkish resistance led by Kemal (the future Atatürk). Armenians, Greeks and Kurds, too, could only lament the vacuum left behind by the departing Russians, which left them to face Turkish wrath alone.

Soviet Russia re-emerged as a player in the Middle East fairly quickly, not least as Mustafa Kemal’s key diplomatic partner during his wars against the West and its proxies from 1920-22. In a reminder of the enduring prerogatives of Russian foreign policy, the Cold War kicked into high gear when Stalin made a play for Kars, Ardahan, and the Ottoman Straits in 1946: these moves, along with the British withdrawal from Greece, Turkey, and Palestine, inspired the Truman doctrine.

In an eerily similar replay of the history of 1917-18, the collapse of Soviet power in 1991 led Moscow to turn inward, withdrawing from the Middle East and inaugurating a period of US and western hegemony in the region, which turned out no less well than the Middle Eastern free-for-all of 1918-22. A prostrate and impoverished Russia put up no objection during the First Gulf War of 1991, and did little more than sputter during the Iraq War of 2003. Russia’s recovery of strength and morale in the Putin years led, almost inevitably, to her return in force to the Middle East – from which, in reality, she never truly left.

The Russian return to the region, along with Turkey’s increasingly overt hostility over her Syrian intervention, resurrects historical patterns far, far older than Sykes-Picot. For centuries, the Ottoman empire was the primary arena of imperial ambition for the Tsars, even as Russians were the most feared enemies of the Turks. In many ways, the Crimean War of 1853-56, which saw western powers (Britain, France, and an opportunistic Piedmont-Sardinia) unleash an Ottoman holy war against the Tsar to frustrate Russian ambitions in the Middle East, is a far more relevant analogy to the present crisis in Syria than the pseudo-historical myths of 1916. It is time we put the Sykes-Picot legend in the dustbin where it belongs.

Diplomatic carve-up: the third man

In David Lean’s 1962 film, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a cynical British official explains how the carcass of the Ottoman Empire was to be divided at the end of the First World War under the Sykes-Picot Agreement.

‘Mr Sykes is an English civil servant. Monsieur Picot is a French civil servant. Mr Sykes and Monsieur Picot met and they agreed that after the war, France and England would share the Turkish Empire, including Arabia. They signed an agreement, not a treaty, sir. An agreement to that effect.’

This summary of wartime diplomacy has proved long-lived. It encapsulates the less than honest dealings of the British government with the Arabs – who wanted independence after being liberated from Turkish domination, rather than rule by the European colonial powers – but it leaves out the key figure in the deliberations, Sergei Sazonov, Russian foreign minister, 1910-1916.

Sazonov was one of the most significant diplomats both before and during the Great War. It was thanks to his adroit manipulation that Britain and its allies came to accept that Russia would gain the Ottoman capital Constantinople, in the event of an Allied victory, an outcome that Britain had tried for decades to prevent.

At the talks in the Russian capital Petrograd in 1916, the British and French emissaries were far lesser agents of empire than their host.

Sir Mark Sykes was a gifted linguist, travel writer and Conservative politician, but no top-flight diplomat. As for François Georges-Picot, he was an experienced diplomat and lawyer and noted advocate for a greater Syria under French rule.

But with France having no troops in the eastern theatre of war, he had to accept Russia’s demand to swallow up large parts of what is now eastern Turkey, but which Paris had set out to claim.

Sykes died of influenza in 1919 at the Paris Peace Conference, where Sazanov represented the White Russians. He died in Nice in 1927

The Ottoman Endgame: War, Revolution, and the Making of the Modern Middle East, 1908-1923” by Sean McMeekin

Legal Legacy, WordPress August 6, 2016 by rhapsodyinbooks

Czar Nicolas I of Russia is sometimes credited with coining the phrase “Sick Man of Europe” to describe the decrepit Ottoman Empire of the mid-nineteenth century. By the early 20th century, there could be little doubt that the disparaging sobriquet applied in spades. The Ottoman Empire was soundly defeated in two Balkan wars in 1912 and 1913 by the comparatively pipsqueak countries of Bulgaria, Greece, Montenegro and Serbia. One result of the wars was that the Empire lost all of its European territories to the west of the River Maritsa, which now forms the western boundary of modern Turkey. Then, when World War I broke out, the Ottomans made the disastrous decision to side with the Central Powers against the Triple Entente, ending up on the losing side of that cataclysm.

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A popular theory is that the carving up of the Ottoman lands after the war, pursuant to the Sykes-Picot Agreement between France and Britain, is the source of many of the problems of the current Middle East. In The Ottoman Endgame, Sean McMeekin concedes that it is not wrong to look to the aftermath of the war for the roots of many of today’s Middle Eastern problems, but the “real historical record is richer and far more dramatic than the myth.” For example, the notorious Sykes-Picot Agreement was sponsored primarily by Russia, whose foreign secretary, Alexander Samsonov, was the principal architect of the agreement. McMeekin’s retelling of the demise of the Ottoman Empire and its recrudescence as modern Turkey is a fascinating and complicated narrative.

Among the interesting facts McMeekin points out is that according to an 1893 census only 72% of the Ottoman citizens were Muslim, and that in the middle of the 19th century the majority of the population of Constantinople may have been Christian. The Balkan Wars started a trend, exacerbated by World War I, toward ethnic cleansing, with hundreds of thousands of Christians leaving the Empire and similar numbers of Muslims moving from territory lost by the Empire to areas it still controlled.

We in the West tend to think of World War I as a static slugfest conducted in the trenches of northern France. But the war in the East, particularly as it applied to the Ottoman Empire, was a much more mobile affair. In fact, the Ottomans ended up fighting the war on six different fronts, as the Entente Powers invaded them from many different angles.

Winston Churchill in 1914

Winston Churchill in 1914

At the outbreak of WWI, the Ottomans allied themselves with Germany out of fear of Russia, which had coveted control over the straits connecting the Black and Mediterranean seas for centuries. In 1914 the Russians invaded Eastern Anatolia and met with initial success. However, Russia feared its early success was quite precarious, and so it inveigled its ally, Britain, to launch a diversionary assault on the Gallipoli peninsula. The “diversion” became one of the most deadly killing grounds of the war, as the British poured hundreds of thousands of men into the battle in hopes of breaking the stalemate on the Western Front. The author credits Russian prodding more than Winston Churchill’s stubbornness for the extent of the British commitment. The Ottomans, led by Mustapha Kemal (later to be known as Ataturk, the “father of modern Turkey”), prevailed in this hecatomb, showing that there was still plenty of fight left in the “Sick Man.”

Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, center, at Gallipoli, 1915

Turkish General Mustafa Kemal, Gallipoli, 1915

The Ottomans also soundly defeated the British in Mesopotamia (modern Iraq) in late 1915, but they were less successful against the Russians, who invaded across the Caucasus and held much of eastern Anatolia until the Bolshevik revolution in 1917 caused them to withdraw voluntarily. The British ultimately prevailed against the Ottomans in 1918 by invading from Egypt through Palestine, with a little help from the Arabs of Arabia.

The Treaty of Versailles, which ended the war in Europe in 1919, did not end the war for the Ottomans. The victorious Allies were ready to carve up much of the Empire for themselves. The Ottoman armies were to disband; England was to keep Egypt and to get Palestine and Mesopotamia; France was to get Syria, Lebanon, and parts of modern Turkey; and Greece was to get a large swath of western Turkey. All might have gone according to that plan, but Mustapha Kemal (Attaturk) was still in charge of a small but effective fighting force in central Anatolia. Attaturk husbanded his forces and fought only when he had an advantage. In a war that lasted until 1923, he was able to expel the Greeks from Anatolia and to establish the boundaries of modern Turkey.

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McMeekin deftly handles this complexity with a lucid pen. His descriptions of the various military campaigns are riveting. This is not to say that he shortchanges the political machinations taking place. He gives more than adequate coverage to the “Young Turks,” a triumvirate that ruled the Empire from 1909 until they eventually brought it to its ruin in 1919. He also covers the Armenian massacres as objectively as possible, given the enormity of the events described.

Evaluation: This is a very satisfying book and an excellent addition to the enormous corpus of World War I literature. The book includes good maps and photos.

Published by Penguin Press, an imprint of Penguin Random House, 2015

Song of the Road (2) – The Accidental Traveller

Paul Hemphill 3 Comments

In a highway service station
Over the month of June
Was a photograph of the earth
Taken coming back from the moon
And you couldn’t see a city
On that marbled bowling ball
Or a forest or a highway
Or me here least of all
You couldn’t see these cold water restrooms
Or this baggage overload
Westbound and rolling taking refuge in the roads
From Joni Mitchell’s Hejira

When the Beatles and their partners, with Donovan and Mia Farrow in tow, travelled to India to sit at the well-kissed feet of the Maharishi, they would’ve travelled by BOAC jetliner. But hundreds if not thousands of young people from Europe and North America were already making their own own way, by boats, trains, trucks and automobiles, motorbikes and bicycles, and in extremis, shank’s pony, some ten thousand kilometres and more  to the end of the line, be this Kathmandu, Kolkata (where I ended up), South East Asia (Tim Page, a recently departed friend, ended up there as a war photographer in America’s “crazy Asian war) or Australia (that’s where my uni pals washed up – see below). Other adventurers set out in the opposite direction from conservative Australia and New Zealand-Aotearoa heading for Britain, the “old country” and a wider world. The numbers would swell during the seventies and the “overland” as it was then called became the well-travelled “Hippie Trail” – until the Iranian Revolution and the Afghan wars effectively blocked it to all but a resolute and crazy-brave few.

The Beatles in India

I’d never intended to hit the hippie trail back in the day. In the northern summer of 1971, I didn’t even know it existed.

I’d just finished my final exams, graduating with a good degree, but after three exciting and formative years, it was as if everything had suddenly ground to a halt. Uni was over; a romantic relationship was on the rocks; I was footloose and free, floating and feeling the urge to escape elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere. I’d no idea at all what I would do next, other than an inchoate plan to undertake post-graduate study – guided by my tutor and mentor exiled Hungarian academic Tibor Szamuely, my academic interest was Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but that was to be down the track.

When the finals results came out, I spent the evening at the student union with friends, unwinding and getting pissed; and the very next day, I walked into the Student Travel office and booked a one-way air ticket to Athens (only my second time on an aeroplane), passage by steamer from Piraeus, Athen’s port, to Alexandria, Egytpt, via Limassol, Cyprus, and back from Egypt to Piraeus and thence to Tel Aviv, Israel, with no bookings for onward travel.

Seized by the idea of visiting the two principal antagonists of the almost recent Six Day War, I’d a naive and uninformed notion to view both sides of the Arab-Israeli puzzle (and we’re no nearer a solution today, and I’ve spent half a century since watching and waiting – but that is another story). Within a few weeks, I’d bought a second-hand rucksack and sleeping bag, converted my savings to traveler’s cheques – there were still currency restrictions in the UK on how much cash you could take out of the country – packed a few things, and in the words of Cat Stevens, I was “on the road to find out”.

That road took me through the Middle East, and on and on, until I reached Kolkata in Bengal. What was planned as but a two month holiday to “clear my mind out”, to quote that Cat song again, extended to over six months as the appetite grew with the eating.

I traveled through lands of which I knew very little, picking up fragments of history and heritage, parables and politics as eastwards I roamed, through the lands of antiquity and of empire: Greece and Cyprus; Egypt and Israel; the Levant (old French for the lands of the rising sun – Lebanon, Syria, and Jordan); Iraq before Saddam, and Iran under the Shah; Pakistan and India, who went to war with each other as I crossed their frontiers (a story for another time); and then back to Britain by way of Turkey and the fabled Pudding Shop.

I stood beside the great rivers of ancient stories – the Nile and the Jordan, the Orontes and the Yarmouk, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Indus and the Ganges. I traveled though deserts and mountains, the Himalayas and the Hindu Kush. I climbed through the Kyber Pass, immortalised by imperial endeavour and hubris, and the valley of Kashmir, a betrayed and battered paradise. I crossed Lake Van, in the shadow of Mount Ararat, and the Bosphorus, from into Europe. I stood atop ancient stones in Memphis and Masada, Baalbek and Babylon, Jalalabad and Jerusalem.

On my return, my plan to specialize in Soviet Studies evaporated as I resolved to learn more about these lands, their peoples, and their histories, and this I did. The Middle East has long-since captivated and colonized much of my intellectual life, imbuing it with a passion that has found expression in my persona, my politics, my prose, my poetry, and my songs.

See: East – an anthology and Song of the Road (1)  – my hitchhiking days

Broken statues, empty tombs.
Ghosts of commoners and kings
Walk the walls and catacombs,
The castles and the shrines,
Marking lives and story lines,
Lie the ruins and the bones,
The ruins and the bones,
Ruins and bones.

Through the desert to the beyond … 

I was at the end of the beginning. Having travelled through Egypt and Israel, I’d decided, for many reasons, that I wasn’t ready to return to England as planned, and recalling the advice of a fellow traveler I’d met in Cairo, I resolved to head east …

In early 1972, I wrote in an empty1962 diary: “Friday 20th August 1971, a fateful day indeed, when manifold and manifest destinies unfolded, when plans were forgotten and begotten, when the past was shelved and the future postponed. To the desert. Through the desert. To the beyond. To see. To decide. To move forever onwards with no direction home. With no grip of time to defeat me or dictate to me …”

Less prosaically, my actual travel diary recorded on that day:

“Arriving in Nicosia from Tel Aviv at 15.15 after a neglectful and body-shaking El Al flight, I headed straight into town from.an almost deserted airport. How much Anglo, how much Greek, how empty. Hot and boring in my mobile mood. Bought a ticket to Beirut and headed straight out again on the six o’clock Air Liban Boeing 707. A highly hospitable fifty five minute flight and by seven o’clock I was passing through Lebanese customs … “

The following day, I wrote:

Saturday, 21st August 1971, Beirut
“Now for a calculation space … I have £55 in travelers’ cheques and £25 in cash. Eighty quid in all. How far will that go? Syria? Iraq? Jordan? Afghanistan, Iran? Then home? Visas, maybe five quid? Amman to Baghdad, four? Damascus Amman Two? Amman to Baghdad, Teheran, Kabul 10 quid? That’s £21 all up. Kabul to Istanbul, £13, so £34 in all. £3 max in each for contingencies? £15 or £49. Leaving about 30 quid by Istanbul. Cutting Jordan, could save four. India? There is time, but little money … Even if the three quid were cut and Jordan too, that would leave £19 from Kabul to Delhi – but I must eat, I must eat somewhere – hence, no India…this time … “

But the appetite grew with the eating and the road led on and on …

Life on the road …

People will tell you where they’ve gone
They’ll tell you where to go
But till you get there yourself you never really know
Where some have found their paradise
Others just come to harm
Amelia, it was just a false alarm
Joni Mitchell, Amelia

Traveling was sooo different back then in the days before ubiquitous air travel, the Internet and mobile phones. On the road, our destinations were set, but these were fluid in their timeline and attainment. Much of our information came by word of mouth from other travellers on the road. You’d head to places other people had recommended, without having seen pictures and read descriptions on the internet. You couldn’t book a hotel room in advance so we often never knew where we’d sleep. You’d find a bed for the night once we’d arrived in a city, town or village or if you were in the information loop, you’d rock up at well-frequented hostelries like Amir Kabir in central Teheran, Mrs Dunkeley’s Guest House in the heart of New Delhi, and the famed houseboats on Dal Lake in Kashmir. Often, you slept on floors, in railway station waiting rooms, in constant fear of robbery, or beneath the stars. You’d spend long hours waiting in the post office to place a call home, and sometimes the operator didn’t know where that was. Letters would take an age to reach their destination. I wrote letters to England from Amir Kabir, and picked up the replies on my return journey months later. You’d work out how to deal with banks and money changers to convert travelers cheques to the local currency – and  keep a close count of every cent because these were limited, and you were constantly worried about being ripped off.

Hotel Amir Kabir, Teheran

Like many on the road, I travelled on the cheap, crowded onto local buses, struggling to grab a third class seat on packed trains, eating street food. watched every dinar and dollar, rial and rupee. To supplement my diminishing funds, I washed dishes – and sold blood twice, to the Red Crescent in Jerusalem’s Old City (risky) and In New Delhi (in hindsight, potentially suicidal).

I’d only intended to be out of the country for about a month, but had cleaned out my bank account. I’d worked on building sites in Birmingham during the summer breaks from University, and had earned enough to keep me in books and records and other “luxuries” and also for travel. And I got to India and back to Istanbul before I ran out of cash and had to get my folks to wire me enough for a ticket home. My university pals who took The Overland a year later washed up in Darwin stoney broke and had to work their way all the way south to Bondi Beach, where they’d resolved to rent a flat overlooking the Pacific Ocean. Of the five who roved out, three returned to England, but two remained, establishing careers, marrying “sheilas” and raising children and grandchildren – by happy circumstance, I too settled in Australia six years later, and John (RIP) and Christian became my oldest friends in Australia.

Most of us travelled without cameras and so relied on travel diaries and memories. I had a dinky old Kodak and couldn’t afford a lot of film – I sold some for extra cash somewhere along the way – so I had had just a few pictures on a couple of rolls. And I had to wait until my return to England to take them to Boots Chemist for processing. And looking back, perhaps it was easier and also most adventurous in those days to be present, to live in the moment, and to be surprised over things you hadn’t seen before, not even in books and photographs. So many everyday things are now very practical with ATMs and mobile phones and travel advisories to hand, whilst our mobile phones and tablets absorb so much of our attention. In some ways these take away much of the vicarious risks and also, magic. I’m sure glad to have experienced travelling in the old-fashioned way.

If you never go, you’ll never grow 

I’ll conclude this story by observing in the present how in all my journeying, I never came to harm, whether by mishap or misadventure, malice or malignancy.

The accidental journey was driven by a combination of whim, thrift, expedience, and necessity, but also, by a sense of romantic adventure – buoyed by what seems in retrospect, a naive feeling of dare-devil invulnerability.

Passers-by, and local people I’d meet would often ask where I was going and why I traveled thus. They’d tell me it was dangerous, that there were men out there who would rob me or do me harm. When I returned home, folk would ask if I faced danger and if I was  afraid. Yet, we who traveled the world before jumbo jets and cruise ships understood that bad things could happen and that they sometimes did whether you journeyed by thumb, van, bus or train. In hotels and hostels from Beirut to Baghdad, Kabul to Kolkata, you’d pick up word-of-mouth “travel advisories”, warnings and “war stories”. In India, I’d been told of a chap who’d been robbed and stranded in Afghanistan, and I actually met him when I bunked down in a backpackers’ in Sultanahmet, Istanbul, on my way back to Britain.

As I journeyed “there and back again”, I took risks on rickety buses and in reckless cars. I’d walk alone through slums and shanty towns and eat food sold on the streets. I risked typhoid and cholera outbreaks, caught “Cairo belly”, sold blood in “third world” clinics, and ran from thrown stones and the sound of gunfire. I was arrested for spying on the Aswan Dam in upper Egypt (though released soon afterwards) and handcuffed as a “joke” in a Beirut police station. I’d crossed a battle-scarred landscape between Syria and Jordan on foot, and watched the military buildup in Kashmir as the Indo-Pakistan war was breaking out.

So yes, there always was a risk; but if you think too much about it, you’d never go, and if you never go, you’ll never grow.

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way
Where many paths and errands meet.
And whither then? I cannot say.
Walking Song, JRR Tolkien

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

My road in pictures

The brown fedora, Giza 1971

By the rivers of Babylon, August 1971

Srinegar, October 1971

Luxor, Egypt 1971

Me and the gang, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 1971

Layers, Damascus 2009

Salah ad Din al Ayubi, Damascus 2009

Sun al Hamadiyya, Damascus 2006

Bakdash ice cream parlour, Damascus 2009

Cruising the Golden Horn, Istanbul 2014

The Sulaymaniya Mosque, Istanbul 2014

Jerusalem the Golden

Bondi or Bust

The morning after the night before …
In late summer 1972 we housemates threw an all-night farewell party before going our separate ways. Christian, Brendan, John, Mike and Eric embarked on the hippie trail across Asia and ended up in God’s Own Country. Having recently returned from that same odyssey, I remained in London, but destiny saw me washed up DownUnder five years later. The first picture portrays the laid-back lethargy of that morning in East Finchley. Chris is in the shot so Brendan must’ve taken the photograph. The second is taken when we got it all together for a more formal tableau with Chris behind the camera.


Shortly thereafter, the five pioneers set off for Dover and the East. Many years later, Christian revealed these pictures from their journey. The first is of John and Chris soon after landing in northern Australia. The others are pictures of Chris’ tote bag. He still has it.

Tel as Sabi’ – Tarkeeth’s Anzac Story

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

The 25th April is Anzac Day, Australia’s national day of remembrance, honouring Aussies and Kiwis who perished in foreign wars from South Africa to Afghanistan. It takes its name from the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign – on this day in the spring time of 1915, Australian and New Zealand soldiers landed under heavy fire from Ottoman forces entrenched in the heights above what was later to be called Anzac Cove on Turkey’s Gallipoli peninsula. 

The Anzacs were just part of a wider campaign devised by British Secretary of the Navy Winston Churchill to knock The Ottoman Empire out of the war with one decisive blow by seizing the strategic Dardanelles Strait and occupying Istanbul, the capital. It do not go well. The Ottoman soldiers commanded by Mustafa Kamal Pasha, the future founder of modern Turkey, Kamal Atatürk, held the high ground and fought stubbornly and bravely, and ultimately, victoriously. 

The bloodshed ended in stalemate. The Allies withdrew eight months later leaving behind over eight thousand dead Australians and nearly three thousand New Zealanders (along with over thirty thousand English, Irish, and Frenchmen, Indians and North Africans, and close on ninety thousand Ottoman soldiers, Turks and Arabs, Muslims and Christians), without, historians say, having had any decisive influence on the course of the First World War. 

The rest, as we say, is our history. 

The Anzac Trail

Whenever we visit Israel, our friend and guide Shmuel of Israel Tours drives us all over tiny beautiful and vibrant country (travelling through the West Bank, we use Palestinian guides). During the pandemic year, most Israelis had been locked down three times and like in many countries, the all-important tourist trade barely has registered a pulse. When permitted to travel beyond his home in Jerusalem, Shmuel has spent the year exploring and learning, visiting places he has never guided to before. He believes that he has exited the plague year a better guide, and we are already making plans for our next Israel adventure, including recently excavated Herodian palaces and further travel in the Negev Desert. 

Shmuel recently told me that he had visited Tel Sheva, Tel as Sabi’ in Arabic, in the Negev, five kilometres east of the city of Beer Sheva, a site inhabited since the fourth   millennium BC. The ancient fortified town dates from the early Israelite period, around the tenth century BC. The walls, homes, storage warehouses and water reservoir system have been excavated and opened to the public. Today, Tel as Sabi’ s also known as the first of seven Bedouin townships established in the Negev as part of the Israeli government’s policy to plant the once-nomadic Bedouin permanent settlements. 

It was from the foot of this stark desert hill that the Light Horse Brigade launched its famous charge towards the Ottoman lines at the strategic rail-head and wells of Beersheva on October 31st 2017. 

Today, it is the ninth (not seventh) stop on The Anzac Trail which traces the route of the Light Horse Brigade from Gaza on the Mediterranean coast to Beer Sheva. For obvious reasons, it begins beyond Gaza’s wire and concrete encirclement and trail culminates at the Anzac Memorial Centre In Beer Sheva, inaugurated on the 100th anniversary of the battle. 

The Charge at Beersheba” by Sir Ivor Hele 1973

Tel as Sabi’ to Tarkeeth 

As we commemorate Anzac Day this Sunday, few folk in Bellingen Shire would know that there is a link between that hill in the heart of the Negev and Tarkeeth on the north bank of the Kalang River just six kilometres west of Urunga as the crow flies.  

In A Tale of Twin Pines, the first of our Small Stories, I wrote of how researching the history of the Urunga area where we live, I came across Lloyd Fell’s story of the Fell Family Farm. This was located close to the present Twin Pines Trail, just east of Fells Road on South Arm Road, and west of the Uncle Tom Kelly motorway bridge over the Kalang River. Click here to access TwinPinesStory.pdf

Lloyd tells the story of how in 1926, New Zealand farmer, solo-yachtsman, and returned ANZAC Chris Fell first saw the land that became the family farm, purchasing it from a deceased estate for a thousand pounds. Chris was impressed by the two mature hoop pines that stood on either side of the track leading to a rough timber house that already stood there – and these gave the farm its name. He cleared the bush, felling and hauling timber until he had sufficient land and capital to run cattle. In time, he built up a prosperous dairy business and cattle stud where he and his wife Laura, a Sydneysider from a well-to-do Vaucluse family, raised their three children. The house has long gone, but the two magnificent pines are still there. 

On October 31st 1917, Chris Fell and his comrades in the New Zealand Mounted Infantry fought on Tel as Sabi’. 

Tel as Sabi 1917, showing Ottoman trenches (AWM)

Chris Fell and the battle of Beer Sheva

As told in Short Stories – a tale of Twin Pines:

in his ebook The Twin Pines Story, Lloyd Fell tells how his father served as a mounted machine gunner with the New Zealand forces in the Gaza campaign of late 1917. His war record reports that he was one of the machine gunners who fought through the day before the famous charge to knock out the Turkish machine guns on the strategic Tel al Saba, east of the strategic desert town Beersheba.

The strong position the Ottomans had established on the hill was a key obstacle to the conquest of the town and the ANZACs had to seize it before storming Beersheva itself. The Ottoman soldiers fought valiantly, and it was only at around 3 p.m. that the fighters of the New Zealand Brigade, primarily the Auckland regiment, succeeded in capturing the hill in a face-to-face battle. Had these fortifications not been overrun, the Light Horse would have been prevented from advancing on the wells. Afterwards, the machine gunners and their Kiwi mates took part in a bayonet charge against the enemy.

As Jean Bou wrote in The Weekend Australian:

“The New Zealand brigade was sent against Tel el Saba’, but this steep-sided hill with terraced entrenchments was formidable. The dismounted horsemen, with the limited fire support of their machine-gunners and the attached horse artillery batteries, had to slowly suppress the enemy defences and edge their way forward. Chauvel sent light horse to assist, but as the afternoon crawled on, success remained elusive. Eventually the weight of fire kept the defenders’ heads down enough that the New Zealanders were able to make a final assault. The hill was taken and the eastern approach to Beersheba opened, but nightfall was approaching”

Major-General Harry Chauvel, the ANZAC commander faced a dilemma. The light was fading and there wasn’t enough time to properly regroup to assault the town. An unsuccessful attack would mean withdrawing far to the south, whilst delaying ng the attack until morning would deny him the element of surprise and and also give the Turks time to destroy the town’s vital wells. He decided to attack, and assigning the  the mission to the Australian 4th Light Horse Brigade. 

Epilogue

The 31 light horsemen who fell are buried in the Beersheba War Cemetery along with 116 British and New Zealand soldiers who perished in the Beersheba battle. There are 1,241 graves in the military cemetery, soldiers being brought in from other Great War Middle East battlefields. We visited it in May 2016.  It is a tranquil, poignant, and beautiful place in the Negev Desert, where the bodies of young men from Australia and New Zealand and from the shires of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales were laid to rest. “Lest we forget”

See also, : The Taking of Tel el Saba

In In that Howling Infinite, see also, Tall Tales, Small Stories, Obituaries and Epiphanies,  The Watchers of the Water, and Loosing Earth – Tarkeeth and other matters environmental

Read in In That Howling Infinite more stories about Israel, Palestine and the Middle East: A Middle East Miscellany

 

Tangled 2 – Libya’s bloody circus rolls on

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UN-sponsored talks have produced a new interim government for Libya aimed at resolving a decade of chaos, division and violence by holding national elections later this year. But with myriad factions loathe to surrender influence they already hold, and with foreign powers invested in local allies, the new government may rapidly come under pressure. The appointment of a new government may also do little to change the balance of military power on the ground, where armed groups rule the streets and factions remain split between east and west along a fortified front-line.  

Some Libyans have been critical of a process which they view as being managed from abroad and which they fear will allow existing power-brokers to cling to their influence. “It’s just a painkiller to portray Libya as stable for a while. But war and tension will certainly come back sooner or later so long as militias have power,” said Abdulatif al-Zorgani, a 45-year-old state employee in Tripoli.

“Déjà vu all over again”

A year ago, In That Howling Infinite published Tangled – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East Back then, Libya held poll position for its multitude of active players and, to use that Shakespearean script note, “voices off”. A year on, borrowing again from the Bard, there are continuing “alarums and excursions”. 

Libya has long been a jigsaw puzzle of competing interests –  tribal versus urban, Islamist versus secularist, revolutionary versus old-regime, localist and regional players, Middle Eastern and European – all prepared to tear the country apart for in pursuit of their own political and economic interests – which include, as is often the case, oil and gas. Their contortions get more and more torturous. 

It was reported year last year that that more than 1400 Russian mercenaries had been were deployed in 2019 by the Wagner company, a Russian military outfit headed by a confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin, had deployed in Libya to assist warlord Khalifa Haftar’s self-styled Libyan National Army in its push against Libya ostensibly internationally recognized government. It was joining troops hired by Haftar’s backers, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates, and included mercenaries from Sudan’s brutal Jamjaweed militia – aided and abetted by several EU members and French, Italian and sundry other arms suppliers. 

Wagner’s sell-swords included a good number of Syrians – sundry rebels and jihadis left high, dry and unemployed by the Syrian regime’s ongoing ‘reconquista’ – which is, as we know, bolstered by the Russian military – including Wagner’s fighting men, who include in their number many Muslim Chechens from Russia’s subservient neighbour. 

When Haftar’s offensive stalled outside Tripoli, Libya’s capitol, last June, it was reported that more than a thousand of the Russian and Syrian mercenaries had been  pulled back from the front lines and taken planes to who knows where. This “retreat” was precipitated by a Turkish military intervention that has helped block an assault on the capital. 

The Turkish contingent is comprised of numerous specialists and advisers, artillery and aircraft, and a contingent of, surprise surprise, hirelings drawn from the same battered battlefields of northern Syria. Those same jihadis and rebels in Wagner’s pay. 

Many Syrians sell their services because it is the only way they can feed their families in the war-battered economy of the regime’s Syria, and the besieged enclaves of the disparate rebel forces. It reported that these mercenaries, zealous and reluctant alike, have also been deployed in the disputed enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh during the recent brief but bloody war between Russian-backed Armenia and Turkish-supported Azerbaijan. Recruits on both sides in both conflicts are reportedly complaining that they are not being paid what they were promised nor on time. 

Haftar spend time late last year in Egypt conferring with his patron and mentor, Egyptian president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, over possible next moves. There is speculation now that whilst Haftar’s backers are becoming increasingly disillusioned with his martial abilities, they are reluctant to relinquish their influence in this politically and economically strategically area leaving the field to an ambitious Erdogan. They may, indeed, be surreptitiously looking around for a new dance-partner. 

As COVID-19 infections continued to rise, and as Turkey and Russia vied for influence in this strategically important corner of the Mediterranean, there were incoherent mumblings that the that the USA might be about to throw its MAGA cap into the crowded ring, This did not however eventuate, and there are indications that the new administration may be reluctant to involve itself in torturous proxy wars involving disreputable Arab and other despots. 

Nevertheless, Libya’s nightmare continues. As American baseball wizz Yogi Berra once said, “It feels like déjà vu all over again”.

In That Howling Infinite, see also; Tangled – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East and A Middle East Miscellany

Here is a good  analysis of this unwinnable civil war:  The citizens of Libya are suffering – All sides have to take the blame for this bloody stalemate

© Paul Hemphill 2021.  All rights reserved

Tangled! – a cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

The paradox of piety observes no disconnect
Nor registers anxiety
As the ship of fools is wrecked
So leaders urge with eloquence
And martyrs die in consequence
We talk in last and present sense
As greed and fear persist
E Lucevan Le Stelle, Paul Hemphill

At a recent conference in Berlin, Germany’s prime minister Angela Merkel and and UN Special Representative Ghassan Salamé managed, at least on paper, to cajole the external actors guilty of super-charging Libya’s misery to sign onto a unified agenda. Russia’s Vladimir Putin, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, France’s Emmanuel Macron, Britain’s Boris Johnson, and Egypt’s pharaoh (and Donald Trump’s “favourite dictator”) Abdel Fatah el-Sisi,  joined a dozen or so others (with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo representing the United States) in declaring an intention to end foreign interference in Libya’s internal affairs: “We commit to refraining from interference in the armed conflict or in the internal affairs of Libya and urge all international actors to do the same,” states the communiqué, in language one hopes all participants endorsed in (what would be uncharacteristic, for some) good faith.

This corroboree of hypocrites acknowledged that the increasingly violent and globally tangled Libyan civil war could only be ended if outside powers backed off and ended their meddling. They made altruistic and totally disingenuous declarations about a conflict  that they themselves have incited, exacerbated and perpetuated for nine years. And yet, explicitly excluded Libyan participation, contradicting the 2012 UN Guidance for Effective Mediation and its insistence on “inclusivity” and “national ownership” as fundamental elements for peaceful conflict resolution. It’s focus at this point was on the on the external, rather than the Libyan, actors and for reviving the world’s attention on the Libyan conflict.

A follow-up conference in Munich was convened in mid-February to renew its pledges to quit meddling. Stephanie Williams, the UN deputy special envoy for Libya reported zero progress and declared the agreed-upon arms embargo to be a joke. A sick joke, indeed – plane after plane land in Benghazi loaded with weapons from the UAE and other arms-suppliers destined for self-anointed warlord Khalifa Haftar‘s self-styled Libyan National Army.

Unfortunate Libya is neither the first nor the last pawn to be used and abused by outsiders in the new Great Game as the following guide demonstrates.

But first, there’s this letter to a British daily from Aubrey Bailey of Fleet, Hampshire (where hurricanes hardly happen):

Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East? Let me explain.

We (she’s talking if Britain and us generic “good guys”) support the Iraqi government in the fight against Islamic State. We don’t like IS but IS is supported by Saudi Arabia, whom we do like. We don’t like President Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but not IS, which is also fighting against him. We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government against IS.

So, some of our friends support our enemies and some of our enemies are our friends, and some of our enemies are fighting against our other enemies, whom we want to lose, but we don’t want our enemies who are fighting our enemies to win. If the people we want to defeat are are defeated, they might be replaced by people we like even less. 

And this was started by us invading a country to drive out terrorists who weren’t actually there until we went in to drive them out. Do you understand now? Clear as mud! 

It casts new light on that thorny old aphorism “the enemy of my enemy is my friend”!

A cynic’s guide to alliances in the Middle East

Libya

We begin with  Libya, the “beneficiary” of the Berlin talk-fests.

On the side of the internationally recognized government in Tripoli, Libya’s capital there’s: Not many … Italy (former colonial oppressor, in it for the oil, who’d just love to see an end to those refugee boats that wash up on its shores); Turkey (former Ottoman oppressor now ruled by a wannabe Ottoman sultan Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, and eager for offshore oil and gas leases); and potentially, Qatar (who fell out with Egypt, Saudi and the United Arab Emirates over its tepid support for the Sunni grand alliance against Shia Iran).  Turkish soldiers fly the government’s drones whilst Turkey’s Syrian jihadi mercenaries provide military muscle – Turkey would like to move them out of Kurdish Syria on account of their murderous behavior).  

On the side of the self-anointed warlord Khalifa Haftar, based in Benghazi in the east, whose sharp uniform is festooned in medals for this and that act of service and heroism), there’s: Egypt, (the US’ impecunious, brutal “partner in Freedom” – strange bedfellows in this amoral “new Middle East” that is just like the old Middle East); Saudi Arabia, and the UAE (see above, re. Qatar, whom they blockaded for several years); Jordan (perennially cash-strapped and dependent on rich Arab relatives), France and Russia (arms, oil, and influence); plus Russian mercenaries (plausibly deniable, capable and reliable, and familiar with the Middle East – see below); and Sudan’s murderous Janjaweed Arab militias (broke Sudan seeks Saudi favour).

And on the sidelines, a disinterested and divided UN, the UK and the US – although Britain, with France, helped wreck the joint by ousting longtime dictator Gaddafi; arguably, the US, although Donald Trump has confused matters by phoning Haftar and then saying that he’s a great bloke (he has a thing for dictators actual and potential, including Putin, Erdogan, Al Sisi, and the thuggish Saudi crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman); and in the middle, and against all of the above, the ever-opportunistic and troublesome Da’ish and al Qa’ida.. 

As American baseball wizz Yogi Berra once said, “It feels like déjà vu all over again”.

Syria

On the side of the internationally recognized government in Damascus headed up by Bashar al Assad, there’s: The Islamic Republic of Iran (Iran’s Shia Muslims are related to Syria’s heterodox Alawi minority, whose elite happen to have rule the country for half a century, and Iran is consolidating it’s Shia axis across the Middle East); Russia (oil, pipelines, and restoring Soviet greatness); Lebanese Shia Hezbollah (de facto ruler of Lebanon) and its soldiers; the Iranian Quds brigade (the expeditionary arm of the Revolutionary Guard, a military-industrial complex that virtually runs Iran); sundry Iraqi and Afghan Shia militias beholden to Iran for cash, weapons, training and ideology); Russian and Chechen mercenaries (see above – deniable, reliable and capable); and, quite surreptitiously, Turkey (former Ottoman oppressor) which is ostensibly opposed to Assad, but needing Russian pipeline deals, runs with the hares and hunts with the hounds – but see below, and also, above with respect to Libya. As the song goes, “I’m so dizzy, my head is turning” already! 

On the side of “the other side”, which is not really a “side’ at all, but a grab bag of sundry rebels who were once supported by the US and are predominantly Islamist, with some indeed linked to al Qa’ida, which, of course, we all love to hate (Twin Towers, Osama bin Laden and all that), there’s: the US, Britain and France (why do they persevere so in what Donald Trump has called these forever, endless wars?); Saudi Arabia (Salafi Central and banker for all the bad guys) and the United Arab Emirates (also a financier for the foe); Israel (of course – mortal foe of Iran and of Hezbollah (“the enemy of my enemy” fair-weather friend – anything that distracts its perennial enemies is good for Israel); Hamas, the Islamists who rule the Palestinian enclave of Gaza, and oppose the Alawi oppressor of Sunni Muslims and of Palestinian refugees in Syria; and Turkey (see above –  hares and hounds, on the outer with Saudi and the UAE and pals with outcast Qatar, and engaged in an ongoing blood feud with Syrian Kurds ostensibly allied with Turkey’s outlawed separatist Kurds), and as we write, ominously trading blows with the Syrian Army and its Russian allies; and Turkey’s Syrian jihadi mercenaries – erstwhile former rebels and al Qa’ida and Da’ish fighters who are in it for the money, for vengeance against the Kurds and the Assad regime, and, for many, good old blood-lust. 

And stuck in the middle: Those Syrian Kurds, of formerly autonomous Syrian enclaves Afrin and Rojava (betrayed by America, invaded by Turkey, and forever abandoned by the rest of the world, they have been forced to come to terms with the Assad regime which has discriminated against them forever; sundry Bedouin tribes who work to a code of patronage and payback; the scattered remnants of Da’ish which was at the height of its power a veritable “internationale” of fighters from all over the world, including Europeans, Australians, Chechens, Afghans, Uighurs, Indonesians and Filipinos – the remnants of whom are still in the field and hitting back; and sundry die-hard jihadis from constantly splintering factions. Da’ish and the jihadis have been dubiously aided and abetted by money and material from allegedly unknown patrons in the Gulf autocracies, as evidenced by those long convoys of spanking new Toyota Hi Lux “technicals” – which have now curiously reappeared in Haftar’s Libyan National Army (see Libya, above).

Yemen 

On the side of the internationally-recognized government of Yemen, there’s: Saudi Arabia, the US, and Britain; plus sundry mercenary outfits from Australia and Brazil; and Sudan (its militias paid by Saudi, as in Libya). The UAE was formerly on this side, but now supports a breakaway would-be Yemeni government Opposed to the present one. On the side of Houthis, a rebel Shia tribe in the north of the country, there’s: Iran and ostensibly its Iraqi and Lebanese auxiliaries – see above, the Shia ‘Arc” of Iranian influence. And in the middle, and against all of the above, the ever-opportunistic and troublesome Da’ish and al Qa’ida.

Afghanistan

Its America’s longest ever war – ours too …

On the side of the UN recognized government there’s: NATO, including the US, Canada, Britain, Germany, Denmark and Norway; and also, Australia and New Zealand – though why antipodeans want to get involved in the faraway Afghan quagmire beats me … Oh yes, the US alliance, and our innate empathy for the poor and downtrodden.

On the other side, there’s: The ever-patient, ever-resilient Taliban, aided and abetted by duplicitous Pakistan (an ally of the US – yes!), and al Qa’ida and Da’ish, both dubiously aided and abetted by money and material from Gulf despots. 

And on the sidelines,  miscellaneous corrupt and well-armed Afghani warlords who take advantage of the ongoing turmoil and grow rich on bribes, option and smuggling; and the rest of the world, really, which has long ago zoned out of those “forever, endless wars”. 

So, what now? 

More of the same, alas. Great Power politics and proxy wars are taxing intellectual and actual imaginations. It is business as usual in the scattered killing grounds as a bewildering array of outsiders continue to wage their proxy wars in Syria, Libya and Yemen. Bombs still explode in Afghanistan and Somalia, and whilst Islamists terrorise the countries of the Sahel, and even distant Mozambique, warlords rape and pillage in Congo. As usual in these proxy conflicts the poor people are stuck in the middle being killed in their thousands courtesy of weapons supplied by the US, European, Israeli, Russian and Chinese arms industries.

As outsiders butt each other for dominance, and the Masters of War ply their untrammelled trade, we are condemned, as Bob Dylan sang in another time and another war, to “sit back and watch as the death count gets higher’. I am reminded of WH Auden’s September 1, 1939, a contemplation on a world descending into an abyss: “Defenseless under the night, our word in stupor lies’. All is, as Kent lamented in King Lear, “cheerless, dark and deadly”.

 © Paul Hemphill 2020.  All rights reserved

In That Howling Infinite, see also; A Middle East Miscellany

A postscript  from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

‘What I was going to say,’ said the Dodo in an offended tone, ‘was, that the best thing to get us dry would be a Caucus–race.’

‘What IS a Caucus–race?’ said Alice; not that she wanted much to know, but the Dodo had paused as if it thought that SOMEBODY ought to speak, and no one else seemed inclined to say anything.

‘Why,’ said the Dodo, ‘the best way to explain it is to do it.’ (And, as you might like to try the thing yourself, some winter day, I will tell you how the Dodo managed it.)

First it marked out a race–course, in a sort of circle, (‘the exact shape doesn’t matter,’ it said,) and then all the party were placed along the course, here and there. There was no ‘One, two, three, and away,’ but they began running when they liked, and left off when they liked, so that it was not easy to know when the race was over. However, when they had been running half an hour or so, and were quite dry again, the Dodo suddenly called out ‘The race is over!’ and they all crowded round it, panting, and asking, ‘But who has won?’ This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time with one finger pressed upon its forehead (the position in which you usually see Shakespeare, in the pictures of him), while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said, ‘EVERYBODY has won, and all must have prizes.’

Sanctioning Saudi – 1973 revisited?

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

In October 1973, Gulf states led by Saudi Arabia cut off oil sales to western states in retaliation for their support of Israel during the Yom Kippur War. It was one of the most significant economic shocks to the global economy since the end of the Second World War.

The Saudi embargo quadrupled world oil prices, pushed consumer inflation into double digits and tipped the US and states across Europe into painful recessions. Some argue that it even helped wreck the credibility of centre-left governments in the 1970s, ushering in the neoliberal revolution of the following decade.

The extrajudicial murder of exiled Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi by perpetrators allegedly linked to the Saudi ruling family, and particularly the ambitious and overweening crown prince Muhammad bin Salman, has introduced discussion of possible sanctions against Saudi Arabia – a scenario that Saudi’s brutal war in Yemen has not to date precipitated. I empathize “discussion” because there is a many a slip twixt the cup and the lip – Saudi’s western allies have long been complacent about and at times complicit in the kingdom’s many misdeeds in the interests of intelligence, security, and contracts; and also, in opposition to their  mutual Iranian enemy, and the ambivalent, and in practical terms, tepid support for the US’ quixotic ‘war on terror” (in conflicts that Saudi Arabia has in many instances fermented with its export and funding of fundamentalist Islam and its support for Islamist groups worldwide.

The kingdom has threatened retaliation in the (unlikely) prospect that sanctions are indeed implemented – the USA and its western allies are reluctant to take such a big stick to this strategically important ‘partner in freedom”.

Predictably, commentators, and presumably policy-makers, are asking whether therefore we’ll see repeat of 1973. Many observers of a certain age recall the pain of what was to become a great economic and political re-calibration – of kowtowing to Gulf tyrants, and of  endeavours to reduce dependence upon the old producers of the Middle East.  But few tend to focus on the gains to economies and corporate bottom lines during the years that followed.

The massive increase in oil revenues flowing into Gulf coffers kick-started a veritable “gold rush” as westerners beat a congested path to the open doors and chequebooks of the kings and emirs who now sought to “modernize” their medieval backwaters with industrial plants, high rises and condos, conspicuous consumption of luxury goods, and more weapons than countries of their size and population could ever require or use.

For over four decades, it was party-time for consultants, fixers and arms manufacturers as democratic governments turned a blind eye to the repression, intolerance and inequity that prevailed among these valued customers. As was said about Catherine the Great and the partition of Poland, they weep as they take.

Visitors and expats sing the praises of these “miracles in the desert”, with their highways and shopping malls, but the kingdoms and emirates are still governed by medieval mindsets in which autocracy, patronage, patriarchy and misogyny, and religious intolerance and obscurantism contradict the values of the western nations who regard them as indispensable allies in their quixotic defense of democracy and freedom.

So, how much economic and political disruption would a Saudi oil embargo actually do today?

The global energy market has evolved significantly over the past half century. Western countries have strategic reserves of oil and a wider range of suppliers. Recent years have highlighted the market’s resilience in the face of handbrake supply and demand turns. The “West” is not as dependent on Gulf oil as it was in the ‘seventies. A surge in domestic and non-Mid East sourced oil and gas, and in renewables has reduced Saudi Arabia’s economic clout.

Meanwhile, the autocratic kingdom is feeling the pinch of diminishing revenues, royal drones, growing populations, youth unemployment, and economic recession. An act of economic warfare as hinted by Saudi insiders, like an extreme oil production cut, would have but a limited impact upon the global economy, and  would destroy Mohammed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” economic reforms. His signature $500 billion dream of a high-tech city in the desert will never materialize without tapping western expertise and materièl, implying a free flow of knowledge, people and investment. And Saudi will not become a tourist destination, as the current leadership fervently hopes, if relations with the west utterly disintegrate. Saudi Arabia itself has the most to lose economically, politically and diplomatically in any standoff.

For other articles on the Middle East in Into That Howling Infinite, see: A Middle East Miscellany

The West should be careful over sanctioning Saudi Arabia – but not because of fears over oil prices

The 1973 Saudi embargo quadrupled world oil prices, pushed consumer inflation into double digits and caused painful recessions, but the global energy market has evolved significantly over the past half century, writes Ben Chu in The Independent, 29 October 2018

How important is the kingdom of Saudi Arabia to the global economy? Does Riyadh hold the world’s economic destiny in its hands?

These questions are not academic given the profound uncertainty over how the Jamal Khashoggi case will play out in the coming days and over how western governments could respond if credible evidence emerges that the dissident Saudi journalist’s killing was not a “mistake” made by “rogue” operatives but was, in fact, explicitly ordered by the all-powerful crown prince Mohammed bin Salman himself.

Donald Trump has threatened “very severe” consequences under those circumstances. And, for their part, the Saudi government also last week made it clear they would not passively soak up western sanctions or other forms of punishment.

“The kingdom emphasises that it will respond to any measure against it with an even stronger measure,” its Foreign Ministry said in a defiant statement. “The kingdom’s economy has an influential and vital role in the global economy.”
Khashoggi’s not the first Saudi critic I’ve known who’s ‘disappeared’

Oil was not specifically mentioned. But then it doesn’t really need to be.

The Saudi-led oil embargo of 1973, when Gulf states stopped sales to the likes of the US, the UK, Canada and Japan in retaliation for western support of Israel, was one of the most significant economic shocks to the global economy since the end of the Second World War.

It is branded in the memory of politicians and civil servants of a certain age, but also on the inherited folk memory of the current generation. The Saudi embargo quadrupled world oil prices, pushed consumer inflation into double digits and tipped the US and states across Europe into painful recessions. Some argue that it even helped wreck the credibility of centre-left governments in the 1970s, clearing the way for the neoliberal revolution of the following decade.

So would we be going back to the 1970s? How much economic and political disruption would a Saudi oil embargo actually do today?

It would certainly be painful, but far less so than in the past, is the best guess.

The global energy market has evolved significantly over the past half century.Western countries have strategic reserves of oil and a wider range of suppliers. Recent years have highlighted the market’s resilience in the face of handbrake supply and demand turns.

The recent spike in oil prices in 2010, when prices hit $125 a barrel, stimulated the domestic US shale oil and gas production sector. The industry grew so fast that domestic energy production today is almost 90 per cent of US consumption. A decade ago the US had net daily imports of 10 million barrels of oil and petroleum products. In 1973 it was 6.4 million. Today that is down to just 2.3 million.

Indeed, the US this year, thanks to shale, overtook Saudi Arabia as the world’s largest daily crude oil producer.

It’s true that the UK and western Europe are still heavily reliant on imported energy and therefore appear particularly vulnerable to a sudden jump in global oil prices. But the European share of renewables as a source of final energy consumption has also been rising rapidly, hitting 17 per cent in 2016. A spike in oil prices would be likely to accelerate this switch away from fossil fuels (just as the 1973 embargo encouraged western energy conservation measures such as the Nixon administration’s 50mph US highway speed limit). Again, while this could actually be beneficial in the medium term for the west, it would hardly be in the Saudi economic interest.

The oil price has been rising since the middle of last year and is now close to a four-year high at $80. One Saudi newspaper columnist has suggested that, if faced with severe western sanctions, Riyadh could slash its roughly 10-million-barrel-a-day production by two-thirds, sending the global price back to $100, or perhaps even on to a record $400 a barrel.

Yet there was little of that kind of sabre waving at the Saudi “Davos in the Desert” business investment event in Riyadh last week. The Saudi business folk to whom I spoke were, instead, keen to see western alliances preserved and almost desperate for the present crisis to dissipate.

It’s clear why. An act of economic warfare like an extreme oil production cut would destroy Mohammed bin Salman’s “Vision 2030” economic reforms. The crown prince’s $500bn dream of a high-tech city in the desert will never materialize without tapping western expertise, implying a free flow of knowledge, people and investment. And Saudi will not become a tourist destination, as the current leadership fervently hopes, if relations with the west utterly disintegrate. Saudi Arabia itself has the most to lose economically in any standoff.

There are certainly reasons why the west should tread carefully with Saudi Arabia, from state-to-state co-operation on terror intelligence, to considerations of geopolitical stability. But fears of a repeat of the 1970s oil embargo should not, whatever folk memory holds, be high on the list.

The man with the plan

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment
All that was old is new again with the potential re-emergence of the US’ Cold War strategy of “offshore balancing”
Commentator and counterinsurgency expert David Kilcullen is always worth reading. Here is his latest piece  for The Australian on this subject.
It is a well-tried and well-documented strategy whereby an offshore power counters a rival by backing opposing coalitions in a region of ­strategic competition, supporting local allies indirectly (with weapons, money, advisers intelligence or diplomatic cover), and using proxy military muscle, regular and irregular, to prevent any one rival dominating the region.

Maritime powers (including Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the US for much of its history until 1945) historically used offshore balancing to counter land-based rivals while lowering their own costs and avoiding ­decisive commitment. To succeed, the offshore power does not need to control a region itself, merely to prevent a rival doing so. As such, this is a low-cost approach — something military planners call an “economy of effort” strategy — that reduces exposure and preserves freedom of action.

This comes in the wake of hugely expensive and largely unsuccessful efforts by the US to dominate a region directly through direct military intervention – and subsequent entanglement that left it ‘neck deep in the big muddy’ to quote political activist and balladeer Pete Seeger. It was a maximalist approach that had ad­verse consequences in terms of lives lost, funds wasted, credibility eroded and loss of freedom of ­action (particularly after 9/11, as the US became bogged down in self-inflicted wars of ­occupation).

But, offshore balancing requires a cool nerves, a steady hand and deft footwork.

Bad timing and miscalculation can increase the risk of wars that the US neither wants or is prepared for. And in inexperienced, needful, and impetuous hands, it could render the US vulnerable to being played by its partners. Kilcullen notes that a body of opinion in the US intelligence community,  and also, within Israeli intelligence,  holds that the threat from Iran has been overstated, that Iran’s ability to dominate the so-called “land bridge” from Afghanistan to the Golan Heights is overblown, and that no regime in Tehran would be suicidal enough to consider a nuclear strike on Israel, Saudi Arabia or any of its other regional rivals.

But it would appear that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi crown prince Muhammed bib Salem have successfully sold Donald Trump on their expansive vision of the Iranian threat, creating the possibility that Washington may be manipulated into decisions that run counter to its own wider interests.

Moreover, with regard to US foreign policy generally, one size does not necessarily fit all. Taking a strategy like offshore balancing, however successful it might prove to be in the Middle East, and blindly applying it on the Korean peninsula, to Russia or China  where conditions are dramatically different, would be full of risk.

Read on…

Donald Trump: The man with the plan

David Kilcullen, Contributing Editor for Military Affairs, The Australian, May

Donald Trump welcomes home three Americans released by North Korea. Picture: AFP
         Donald Trump welcomes home three Americans released by North Korea. Picture: AFP

    This week, as Donald Trump announced his decision to withdraw from the Iran nuclear deal and start reimposing sanctions on ­Teh­ran, a chorus of condemnation broke out on both sides of the Atlantic. European politicians condemned the decision and began working on ways to keep Iran in the deal, while in the US former secretary of state John Kerry engaged in last-minute direct negotiations with Iranian leaders.

    Fred Kaplan of Slate penned a piece that was typical of the mainstream media reaction, arguing that Trump withdrew “because of spite, ignorance, or both”.

    There is no doubt that the US President’s decision reflected animus toward his predecessor’s signature achievement in foreign policy. It also highlighted president Barack Obama’s self-­inflicted vulnerability over the deal, which he approved personally as an executive agreement rather than submitting it to the US Senate for formal ratification as a treaty. His administration also voted for a UN resolution lifting sanctions on Iran before congress had properly begun its review of the agreement. These ­decisions, over near-un­animous Republican opposition, made the deal a bone of partisan contention from the outset, a pro­blem Obama’s staff exacerbated through a manipulative media campaign that drew harsh criticism when disclosed in 2016. All this made it easier for Trump to leave the deal with just a stroke of the pen.

    Yet there’s reason to believe Trump may be acting from more than political spite. Indeed, it’s possible we might be witnessing the early signs of a new approach with the potential to transform America’s overseas military posture, though also carrying enhanced risk of war and other unintended consequences. The new approach may signal the re-emergence of Washington’s former strategy of working through regional coalitions to counter rivals in the ­Middle East, thereby enabling US military disengagement from the post-9/11 wars.

    The decision to dump the deal is far from the only indicator. Other recent signs include statements by Trump to the effect that he seeks to withdraw from Syria while sponsoring an Arab coalition to prevent the re-emergence of Islamic State. Under this scheme, Washington would support allies (including, potentially, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, as well as a coalition of local Kurdish militias) but end combat troop deployments.

    Last month’s coalition strike on Syria sent a similar message in that it avoided targeting the Assad regime’s leadership or Russian and Iranian assets in Syria. It was also accompanied by clear statements that the US did not seek regime change — effectively acquiescing in Bashar al-Assad’s victory, moving away from Obama’s goal of regime change and further disen­gaging from involvement in the Syrian conflict.

    Iranians burn US flags and makeshift Israeli flags in Tehran. Picture: AFP
                         Iranians burn US flags and makeshift Israeli flags in Tehran. Picture: AFP

    Alongside an Arab coalition, ­Israel seems ready to step into any gap created by US withdrawal, while cheering Trump’s decision to exit the Iran deal. Indeed, an undeclared low-level air battle has been going on between Israel, Hezbollah and Iranian forces in Syria since February. Israel decided to retain its advanced fighter aircraft in-country rather than send them to a scheduled exercise in Alaska last month and this week it raised military forces to their highest alert level, called up air defence and intelligence reservists, and opened air-raid and missile shelters for Israelis living within range of the Syrian border. If anything, Israel’s willingness to directly engage Iranian and Iranian-backed forces in Syria has only increased after since Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal.

    At the same time, statements by Saudi Arabia and the UAE indicate that the Sunni monarchies and their Gulf allies would consider participating in an Arab stabilisation force in Syria. Saudi leaders also have expressed a willingness to participate in strikes within Syria (making Saudi Arabia a de facto coalition partner with Israel, a tricky political position for Saudi leaders).

    Overtures by the US towards Egypt suggest Washington also is seeking ­Egyptian support for the same Arab coalition.

    All this may be evidence of an emerging post-deal strategy, whereby the US works through ­Israel and Arab partners in the region to weaken and contain Iran. For political reasons, Israeli and Arab components would operate separately, but Washington would co-ordinate with each and support both to prevent the re-emergence of Islamic State while containing and undermining Iran, ­Hezbollah and Russia (with the emphasis very much on Iran).

    As part of this strategy, US ­forces may launch periodic operations (missile and drone strikes, air raids or special forces operations) to preserve their preferred balance but would avoid protracted commitments, and troop numbers in Iraq and Syria would be drawn down. Washington would operate with allied support where possible, but strike unilaterally if needed.

    Provided Turkey can agree on a ­demarcation line with US-backed Kurdish groups — probably somewhere near the present line of control along the Euphrates river — the US also might support Turkey’s buffer zone in northern Syria. In that case Turkey, too, would play a role in containing Iran and preventing the re-­emergence of Islamic State — the two paramount US objectives.

    This approach, if it does emerge, would be a classic instance of offshore balancing, where an offshore power counters a rival by backing opposing coalitions in a region of ­stra­tegic competition, supporting local allies indirectly (with weapons, money, advisers intelligence or diplomatic cover) to prevent any one rival dominating the region.

    Maritime powers (including Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries, and the US for much of its history until 1945) historically used offshore balancing to counter land-based rivals while lowering their own costs and avoiding ­decisive commitment. To succeed, the offshore power does not need to control a region itself, merely to prevent a rival doing so. As such, this is a low-cost approach — something military planners call an “economy of effort” strategy — that reduces exposure and preserves freedom of action.

    One of the strategy’s key attractions would be that it might restore a critical strategic distinc­tion: the difference between hugely expensive (and largely unsuccessful) efforts to dominate a region directly, and the far cheaper and more achievable goal of merely preventing a rival doing so.

    In the post-Cold War era of liberal and neo-conservative interventionism, US leaders often con­flated the two, as if preventing a hostile power from dominating a region necessarily implied dominating it themselves.

    This maximalist approach had obvious ad­verse consequences in terms of lives lost, funds wasted, credibility eroded and loss of freedom of ­action (particularly after 9/11, as the US became bogged down in self-inflicted wars of ­occupation).

    Trump has been railing against these overseas commitments for years. Indeed, one of his themes on the campaign trail was the need to get out of overseas commitments, bring troops home, force allies to commit their own resources to their defence, cease putting American lives at risk to provide security guarantees for countries (in Europe, Asia or the Middle East) that were unwilling to pay their fair share, and stop spending money on nation-building that would be better used at home.

    An offshore-balancing strategy offers a way to do this while still acting tough and reserving the right to intervene unilaterally (another key Trump theme).

    Offshore balancing does not preclude periodic interventions to restore a favourable balance of power in a given region, but it does tend to rule out long-term occupation or decisive commitments of the post-9/11 kind. It also implies holding military power back, over the horizon or outside the region, rather than establishing permanent bases.

    As such, naval forces (including warships, expeditionary marine units, carrier-based aircraft and submarines) are the key assets needed for such a strategy — and for now, at least, the US leads the world in these capabilities, giving it a comparative advantage.

    The strategy’s other key benefit is its low cost and ability to preserve (or, in this case, restore) strategic freedom of action. Its disadvantage is that interventions, when they do occur, can be extremely costly.

    Britain’s approach to Europe from the 1680s to 1945 — periodic interventions to prevent any one power dominating the continent but reluctance to create permanent alliances or bases — is one ­example of offshore balancing. Another was the US strategy for the Middle East from just before the end of World War II (when Washington first became concerned about the strategic centrality of the region) until the Gulf war in 1991.

    From 1944 to 1992, despite periodic interventions (a CIA-backed coup in Iran in 1953, brief engagements in Lebanon in 1958 and 1983, bombing Libya in 1986) the US generally kept its military out of the region, preferring to counter Soviet influence through partners such as Israel, Turkey, the Arab monarchies, the Afghan mujaheddin in the 1980s and, until 1979, the shah of Iran.

    After 1991, everything changed: permanent US bases in Saudi Arabia (plus no-fly zones over Iraq, and the Clinton administration’s policy of “dual containment” towards Iraq and Iran) committed the US directly to the Middle East. US bases in Saudi Arabia, in particular, created intense grievances that led in part to the 9/11 attacks. After 2003, the Iraq war mired Americans in a full-scale military occupation. Successive presidents have sought to extricate themselves, but to little avail, proving what advocates of offshore balancing long have argued: hard though it is to avoid being dragged into permanent commitments, it’s far harder to ­extract yourself once committed.

    It’s unclear whether Trump knows any of this history; Harvard international relations professor Stephen Walt argued last month on Foreign Policy’s website that he probably does not.

    This may not matter, though, since offshore ­balancing so closely aligns with Trump’s instinctive preferences. Despite his surface volatility, Trump consistently follows certain patterns of strategic behaviour. His two main (and apparently contradictory) urges — the desire to appear strong, while disengaging from post-9/11 commitments in the Middle East and lopsided (“unfair”) treaty arrangements in Europe and Asia — would be well served by an offshore-balancing strategy, so he may consistently follow it, consciously or otherwise.

    A more serious criticism, from the few analysts who have yet commented on the emerging strategy, is that Trump is too mercurial and strategically illiterate, and his administration too incoherent, to enact this kind of strategy. These criticisms, too, are overblown. The sacking of secretary of state Rex Tillerson and national security adviser HR McMaster in March has removed competing power centres in US foreign policy, while former CIA director Mike Pompeo (Tillerson’s replacement as Secretary of State), and Defence Secretary James Mattis appear more than capable of executing an offshore balancing strategy.

    New national security adviser John Bolton is from the neo-conservative tradition that led directly to the post-9/11 wars of occupation and to the invasion of Iraq, and he will have to modify his views to be able to support this kind of strategy. Likewise, independent-minded UN ambassador Nikki Haley will need to collaborate more closely with the State Department and the White House than she has done to date.

    But neither Bolton nor Haley are likely to oppose the strategy if it appears to be succeeding.

    If it does succeed — a big if — offshore balancing may become a de facto Trump doctrine to be applied elsewhere. Opportunities to apply it include the Korean peninsula, where Trump seems willing to agree to partial US withdrawal and a permanent peace treaty in return for North Korean denuclearisation and enhanced sponsorship of Japan and South Korea to balance China.

    Another possible opportunity is eastern Europe, where Washington may continue arming Ukraine, and support the Baltics and Scandinavia to balance Russia while stepping back from permanent NATO commitments (or making them more conditional on European ­defence spending.)

    Africa, where efforts to work through regional coalitions against terrorists are already well advanced, naturally lends itself to this strategy, which could be further enhanced through France and its G5 Sahel regional coalition, which is already operating against Islamic State in northwest Africa.

    Likewise, in Southeast Asia, enhanced support for Vietnam and The Philippines may combine with existing US relationships with Australia, India and Japan to balance China.

    Whatever its possibilities, offshore balancing does carry significant risks. The most important is proxy conflict, which can spiral out of control when more than one external power backs local actors, drawing them into confrontation. This risk is severe in the Middle East, where Iran and Russia are sponsoring their own proxies. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are already fighting a proxy war against Iran and its Houthi allies in Yemen, from where conflict is spilling into the Horn of Africa and bringing missile strikes to the heart of Saudi Arabia (most recently, this past week after the nuclear deal announcement).

    Internal conflict in Saudi Arabia is also a risk: a recent incident where a drone flew into the royal compound in Riyadh triggered a coup scare and highlighted nervousness within the Saudi royal family about opposition towards Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s reforms. Co-operation between Saudi and Israeli forces (even tacit) would be highly controversial within Saudi Arabia and could prompt sharply increased internal unrest.

    For its part, given this week’s series of strikes and the ongoing air campaign, Israel appears to be posturing for imminent war against Hezbollah and Iranian-backed forces in Syria, and possibly Lebanon too. This could draw Israel into more direct conflict with Iran — indeed, one possibility here is that Israel is deliberately escalating conflict with Iran in order to increase its leverage in post-nuclear-deal Washington.

    In the same region, a US exit from Syria (a key element of a balancing approach) would remove deterrents on Turkey’s ability to attack Kurdish groups, heightening conflict risk between Ankara and the Kurds.

    Besides enhanced war risk, the other important concern of an ­offshore-balancing strategy is that it leaves Washington vulnerable to being played by its partners. A body of opinion in the US intelligence community (and also, ironically, within Israeli intelligence) holds that the threat from Iran has been overstated, Iran’s ability to dominate the so-called “land bridge” from Afghanistan to the Golan Heights is overblown, and no regime in Tehran would be suicidal enough to consider a nuclear strike on Israel, Saudi Arabia or any of its other regional rivals.

    But Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Saudi crown prince seem to have successfully sold Trump on their expansive vision of the Iranian threat, creating the possibility that Washington may be manipulated into decisions that run counter to its own wider interests.

    Likewise, taking a strategy such as offshore balancing, however successful it might prove to be in the Middle East, and blindly applying it on the Korean peninsula or in Europe, where conditions are dramatically different, would be full of risk.

    Still, despite the ongoing condemnation from the policy establishment and allies alike, Trump’s decision to exit the Iran deal may indicate something deeper than mere ill-informed petulance — and if a strategy of offshore balancing does emerge, it just may point the way to disengagement from the post-9/11 wars, a goal that every president since 2001 (including George W. Bush himself, since about five minutes after his “mission accomplished” speech in May 2003) has sought but failed to achieve.