When my niece, who is in Iraq with the US Army, came to Panama on her vacation some months ago, I parted with a couple of my dusty old history books. They were about ancient Iraq, based largely on old Assyrian, Babylonian, Akkadian and Sumerian inscriptions. When one has read the boasts of ancient rulers like Ashurbanipal and Sargon II, then the Biblical Nebuchadnezzar seems almost like a nice guy and Saddam Hussein fits right in with local traditions.
More recently I have read a couple of books, one slightly older than most works that get reviewed in The Panama News, another a moldy oldie from well before any of us were born, and neither primarily about Iraq, but both of which discussed historical realities that are important to consider when thinking about that world hot spot.
The newer work, “Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World,” is by Toronto history professor Margaret MacMillan and was first published in 2001. I got my hands on the 2003 Random House trade paperback version, which has a foreword by former US diplomat Richard Holbrooke.
This is the tale of the peace conference after World War I, a milestone in the history of the bloody 20th century, by the great-granddaughter of one of its main protagonists, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.
That peace conference has been reviled by many historians for imposing ruinous conditions on Germany and thus prompting the rise of Adolf Hitler, for creating messes in the Balkans and the Middle East that are causing problems to this day, and for botching things in East Asia and Central Europe and creating a feeble and doomed League of Nations. The first and most serious charge, in the author’s opinion, is mostly a bum rap.
Throughout, this is a fascinating account of the leading personalities of the time, how they interacted with one another, and the knotty issues they faced.
For students of current events, that part of the book about how the British and French carved up the old Ottoman Empire is required reading.
It gets into the lobbying efforts of Zionist leader Chaim Weizmann that led to the British government’s Balfour Declaration in favor of a Jewish state in what had been the Ottoman province of Palestine, thence to the creation of the State of Israel and to the atrocious Israeli-Palestinian conflict that we know today.
MacMillan also details the almost haphazard creation of modern Iraq from three Ottoman provinces, an imperialist chess game in which France got rooked because the UK had better information about the potential (since proven) oil reserves of the mainly Kurdish province of Mosul. That game, which featured colorful figures like Lawrence of Arabia and the several Arab royal pretenders, involved multiple betrayals for which the world is still paying a price in blood.
The other book, much older, isn’t in any strict sense of the word a work of history at all. It’s Mark Twain’s classic travel account, “The Innocents Abroad.”
This is the account of one of the first ventures in tourism as a mass middle class phenomenon, when the recently famous journalist Samuel Clemens was given a ticket for an 1867 pleasure trip aboard the steamship Quaker City, bound for Europe, Asia Minor, the Levant and Egypt. At that time, Iraq, Israel and the Palestinian territories were parts of the decadent Ottoman Empire, which would collapse in just over a half-century’s time, to be partitioned as described in Dr. MacMillan’s book. Clemens, who had become a literary celebrity under the pen name Mark Twain two years before with the publication of “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,” had yet to write his brilliant “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” or its even more outstanding sequel “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.” Still, when the Quaker City set sail he was a renowned journalist and storyteller, the first of his profession to write in the American vernacular and do it famously well.
If you are a Hunter S. Thompson fan eager to find the roots of gonzo, your search is likely to bring you to “The Innocents Abroad.” Mark Twain could be completely outrageous, as he demonstrated in this book, a compilation of travel stories he wrote for San Francisco’s Daily Alta California, the New York Herald and the New York Tribune.
If the behavior of the American tourist who tries to communicate with people who don’t understand English by shouting in English and waving money seems like a relatively new social disorder to you, read this book and you will find that it’s just a variation on an old theme. Mark Twain devotes much space to the obnoxious behavior of his fellow passengers.
And if you care to know the political traditions under which what is now Iraq once lived, millennia after the time of the ancient Babylonians and Assyrians but short decades before the events described in McMillan’s book, you gain some of that information from Twain’s account of his visits to Turkey and the Holy Land. It wouldn’t give you much more reason to hope for Iraqi freedom and democracy than the inscriptions of the ancient tyrants.
Freedom of the press in the Ottoman Empire? Hah!
“Newspapers are not popular with the Sultan’s government. They do not understand journalism. The proverb says, ‘The unknown is always great.’ To the court, the newspaper is a mysterious and rascally institution. They know what a pestilence is because they have one occasionally that thins the people out at the rate of two thousand per day, and they regard a newspaper as a mild form of pestilence. When it goes astray, they suppress it --- pounce upon it without warning and throttle it. When it doesn’t go astray for a long time, they get suspicious and throttle it anyhow, because they think it is hatching deviltry. Imagine the Grand Vizier in solemn council with the magnates of the realm, spelling his way through the hated newspaper, and finally delivering his profound decision: ‘This thing means mischief --- it is too darkly, too suspiciously inoffensive --- suppress it! Warn the publisher that we cannot have this sort of thing; put the editor in prison.’”
By the time of the Spanish-American war and Panama’s separation from Colombia, Twain turned out to be one of the great American anti-imperialists. But as a younger man he got his first up-close glimpses of what he considered Oriental despotism, which led him to conclude that: “I wish Europe would let Russia annihilate Turkey a little --- not much, but enough to make it difficult to find the place again without a divining rod or a diving bell.”
But would he have bought into the current wave of racist hysteria that has swept through much of American society? Those “what if?” questions are always impossible to answer, but back then a lot of Americans considered Arabs to be some sort of a threat, and Twain had this to say: “I do not mind Bedouins --- I am not afraid of them; because neither Bedouins nor ordinary Arabs have shown any disposition to harm us --- but I do feel afraid of my own comrades.”
As Margaret MacMillan’s book should show you, in history great decisions have been made, often for petty reasons, with far-reaching and unforeseeable consequences. But Mark Twain’s travel classic should show you that certain things don’t change all that much.
Also in this section:
Halloween whodunit at the Theatre Guild
Cool Internet sites
History books
