A Shattered Peace in Palestine
David A. Andelman
10/26/2007 @ 6:00AM
A Shattered Peace
This is the last in a series of excerpts from the book A Shattered Peace: Versailles 1919 and the Price We Pay Today, by David A. Andelman (Wiley, $25.95).
In the end, Versailles proved a colossal failure for Wilson, for America and for the future of a world that had hoped it might be governed by principles of freedom and self-determination–even today. Covenants of peace were not openly arrived at. Freedom of the seas was not secured. Free trade was not established in Europe. Indeed, tariff-walls wound up being erected, higher and more numerous than any yet known. National armaments were not reduced. Arab portions of the Ottoman Empire were assured neither secure boundaries nor secure sovereignty. Vast territories in Central Europe and the Balkans included millions of inhabitants who were indisputably not native Polish or Czech, Serb or Rumanian, Slovak or Slovene. The League of Nations, emasculated first by the peacemakers in Paris, then by America’s failure to join up, was never able to fulfill its vision of political independence for great and small nations alike.
There has been some debate among historians whether Woodrow Wilson, as a president, was a hit or a miss. Certainly, the document he took home with him from Paris was profoundly flawed in almost every respect. It failed to embrace any of the elevating moral vision that he had brought over with him. In his efforts to win acceptance by the Allies of his beloved League of Nations, he compromised at virtually every turn with respect to the world he and his fellow peacemakers were creating.
To the end, there remained some considerable question as to whether Woodrow Wilson ever really understood what the grand principles he so eloquently enunciated really stood for. The world that Europe’s leaders wanted to bring forth from this Peace Conference was one they could understand and continue to manipulate in the same way they or their forebears had been pulling the levers for centuries. For the first time, however, they had embraced a larger task–remaking the entire world in their image. For this, they were hopelessly ill-equipped.
Wilson came to Paris with the world at his feet. American forces and its military-industrial complex had effectively won the war for the Allies. But it was Wilson who lost the peace. Through an adroit mixture of diplomacy, political maneuvering and canny horse sense, Britain’s Lloyd George and France’s Clemenceau managed to retain their grip on their colonial empires and their global hegemony for at least another generation. It is we, today, who are still paying the price. Wilson was prescient enough to appreciate, but alas not sufficiently determined or adroit to have insisted upon a fundamental reality–that all nations ultimately return to a stasis, an equilibrium that works for each of them and their people. It might take decades, at a cost of untold bloodshed, millions of people lost or displaced. But from my personal experience, each nation ultimately winds up where it really belongs.
The states of Indochina, ignored completely by the peacemakers of Paris, set forth on a series of bitter battles with colonial powers, western democracies and communist manipulators at a cost of millions of lives, but wound up with governments that suited them perfectly–in Vietnam, what might be called an entrepreneurial communism. This is not dissimilar to the road taken by its neighbor to the north, China. Much the same has been the case in Central Europe, especially the Balkans. Yugoslavia, an artificial nation assembled out of the ruins of Austria-Hungary and remnants of the Ottoman Empire, was predestined for a bitter and bloody future.
Elsewhere, it took 80 years, but ultimately the Czech Republic and Slovakia emerged from the artificial Czechoslovak nation that Masaryk and Clemenceau cobbled together. For the various peoples of the Soviet Union, it took nearly eight decades, but eventually they, too, returned to the individual governments that suited them best. Today, Russia has a strong ruler, a latter-day czar, but one at least of their own choosing, while the various other components of the former Soviet empire have returned to their ethnic and religious origins. Would the path have been easier had the paranoid negotiators in Paris reached out a hand to seek accommodation, to welcome Russia into the community of sovereign nations allowed to find its own identity? Again, we will never know.
Finally, we come to the single most intractable problem today–Iraq and terrorism. The nations whose boundaries the peacemakers drew for the remains of the Ottoman Empire were every bit as artificial in their own way as the boundaries drawn in Central Europe and the Balkans. The peacemakers of Paris clearly had as little understanding of the differences between Shiite and Sunni, Bedouin Arabs and Palestinians as do many of our statesmen today. These are not small distinctions. They are blood feuds, cemented by centuries of frequently violent hatred and religious beliefs that date to the founding of these religions, pitting Moslem against Moslem, Jews against Arab, Arab against Christian. To create the current nations out of these profound antagonisms is to lay the foundations of the civil wars we see today.
Yet there is no reason why each of these nations and peoples cannot exist, side by side each in their own territory with their own forms of government. Palestinians in the Gaza and West Bank territories should be entitled to govern themselves in their own nation, as the Jews should be entitled to govern their people in the state of Israel. Shiites and Sunnis, each in their own territories, should be allowed their own right to a peaceful existence, all worshiping in their own way, governing themselves as their history and religion has dictated for a millennium.
Early in 2006, on a trip through the Arabian peninsula, I heard a host of thoughtful Arabs speculate that perhaps the best that could be expected from the escalating bloodshed was for the deals of the Paris Peace Conference to be undone–for Sunnis and Shiites each to find their roots in their own nation. Millions could die in the process. At the end, the Middle East would be a very different place. Iraq could wind up as three nations–a peaceful and prosperous Kurdistan in the north, a wealthy oil-rich Shiite Iraq in the south and a much-shrunken Mesopotamia surrounding a Baghdad whose river, the Tigris, divides Sunnis from whatever Shiites might remain there, and all under the protection of its wealthy Sunni neighbor, Saudi Arabia.
The Greater Mesopotamia that the Paris peacemakers turned into today’s Iraq would still be a dangerous region–dangerous to the West, that is. The Shiite crescent from Iran across Iraq and down through eastern Saudi Arabia would contain a frightening percentage of the world’s oil. It would provide an enormous diplomatic and economic challenge, but one whose resolution is feasible.
If there is a single lesson to be learned, it is that we cannot remake the world in our own image or the image we would like to have of it–politically, economically, socially or in any other fashion. The best of intentions simply don’t work with a bad plan. And if there is any question about that, we have only to look to the past to prove this point–provided we look far enough back to see where our troubles began.
