Mark writes regards Wilson's founding of the League of Nations:

> That's interesting.  The weekend paper printed a short timeline of the
>  history of Iraq.  A League of Nations mandate put Britain in control of 
Iraq
>  in 1920.  King Faisal was proclaimed King in 1921.  Iraq gained 
independence
>  in 1932.  The Faisal family ruled until a coup in 1958.  Two coups later,
>  the Revolutionary Command Council took over Iraq in 1968.  The
>  Vice-President of the RCC was one Saddam Hussein.

You can't blame Woodrow Wilson for the current Iraqi troubles or the 
partitioning of the Middle East. He was not only mightily opposed to 
England's, France's and Italy's demand after WWI to make Germany pay 
reparations, foreseeing the economic catastrophe that it place on Germany, he 
was outraged when he found out the secret plans that these same European 
nations had made before WWI to partition the Ottoman Emprire following its 
fall as a result of The Great War, with oil being the great prize.

[As an aside, the situation 90 years ago bears striking resemblence to that 
of today. The Bush White House is currently not-so-secretly making plans for 
a US military Governor-General administration to rule Iraq after the fall of 
Saddam, not unlike MacArthur's rule of Japan following WWII. Oil remains the 
prize. Iraq sits atop the second largest pool of proven oil reserves known; 
Saudi Arabia is the first. The US known reserves will probably be depleted in 
30 years. Iraq's -- at the current rate of consumption -- will last another 
250 years.

As a result, oil companies are lining up outside the Administration's doors, 
jockeying for position in the "newIraq" (Two years ago, the second largest 
supplier of oil field equipment and services to Iraq was Halliburton, during 
Dick Cheney's tenure as CEO. These people all know each other well and will 
clearly do business with one another when it's to their advantage.)

The Bush administration has recently made semi-secret accomodations with 
Putin and the Russian government to *not* flood the world market with cheap 
Iraqi oil delivered via the administration of American organizations. 
Although that flood would represent a significant boost to the American 
economy, it would disasterous to the Russian economy. Thus, in an effort to 
persuade the Russians to go along with a UN Security Council resolution 
allowing an attack on Iraq, the Bush White House has promised no oil glut and 
price supports at or higher than the current level.]

"Self-determination" of nations was Wilson's great goal, and it was a theme 
he repeated over and over again, but he couldn't make it a reality in the 
face of European greed, arrogance, and economic and military might. There is 
an arrogance and a stupidity that seems to accompany sole superpower status.

An analysis congruent with my understanding of the facts is found at:

     http://www.globalissues.org/Geopolitics/MiddleEast/1300/Spoils.asp

I've repeated the pertinent part of the text below:

========================================

Besides the wealth wasted internally on their outdated feudal form of 
government, foreign military might forced the signing of unequal trade 
contracts that consumed more wealth. "[E]verything in Turkey which [was] 
clean, sturdy and beautiful [was] from somewhere else." It only remained for 
the violent upheaval of World War I to dissolve the once mighty empire.

The provinces of Algeria and Tunisia were the first to break away (1830 and 
1881). Though nominally still a Turkish province and coveted by France, Egypt 
was effectively taken over by Britain in 1881. In 1911, Italy invaded Libya 
and, pressured by attacks from the Balkan states (Bulgaria, Greece, 
Montenegro, and Serbia) attacking from the West, Turkey made peace with the 
eastern invaders and lost control in Africa as it rushed to defend its 
western provinces.

Italy now took an interest in Libya while the ostracized German nation saw 
its chance to gain power vis-à-vis France, England, and Russia by becoming an 
ally of Turkey. They built the Berlin-to-Baghdad Railway and trained the 
Turkish army. In 1912, the war in the Balkans cost the Ottoman Empire almost 
all territory west of the Bosporus. It regained much of it in 1913 when the 
Balkan nations could not agree on the division of the spoils and went to war 
amongst themselves.

But it was English, French, and Russian covert efforts to destabilize 
Germany's trading partner - the Austro-Hungarian empire - that led to World 
War I. Turkey felt that "if the Allies won the war, they would cause or allow 
the Ottoman Empire to be partitioned, while if Germany won the war, no such 
partition would be allowed to occur."9 To quote Karl Polanyi again, it was 
the collapse of the balance of power that led to World War I. Before that 
alliance with the besieged Ottoman Empire Germany was reinforcing her 
position by making a hard and fast alliance with Austria-Hungary and 
Italy....In 1904, Britain made a sweeping deal with France over Morocco and 
Egypt; a couple of years later she compromised with Russia over Persia, that 
loose federation of powers was finally replaced by two hostile power 
groupings; the balance of power as a system had now come to an end....About 
the same time the symptoms of the dissolution of the existing forms of world 
economy - colonial rivalry and competition for exotic markets - became acute.
 
Just as British diplomats had long feared, "the scramble to pick up the 
pieces [of the Ottoman Empire] might lead to a major war between the European 
powers" and World War I erupted. Christopher Layne's analysis is worth 
repeating,

Backed by Czarist Russia's pan-Slavic foreign policy, Serbia attempted to 
foment unrest among Austria-Hungary's restless South Slavs, with the aim of 
splitting them away from Austria-Hungary and uniting them with Serbia in a 
greater South Slav state - the eventual Yugoslavia. The Austro-Hungarians 
knew that this ambition, if realized, would cause the breakup of the Habsburg 
empire (and in fact, did so). In Vienna, Serbia came to be regarded as a 
threat to Austria-Hungary's very existence. On July 2, 1914, the 
Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister, Count Berchtold, told Emperor Franz Josef 
that to remain a great power, Austria-Hungary had no alternative but to go to 
war against Serbia. In July 1914, Austria-Hungary believed it could survive 
only by defeating the external powers that were exploiting its internal 
difficulties....Austria-Hungary's rulers, having weighed the balance, decided 
that "the risks of peace were now greater than the risks of war."

Turkey joined on the side of the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, 
Italy), and with the defeat of that alliance, as had been secretly agreed on 
years before, the Middle East was divided among the victorious powers with 
Britain "adding nearly a million square miles to the British Empire." 

The promise of self-determination implicit in Lenin's diplomacy and President 
Wilson's "Fourteen Points" of January 1918, made it no longer possible for 
Britain and France to impose direct colonial rule over the Arab lands they 
had agreed to partition in 1916. They therefore came up with a proposal 
whereby these same areas would be ceded to them by the League of Nations as 
their "mandates" under the fiction that these territories were being prepared 
for future self rule. Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan came under British 
mandate, Lebanon and Syria under that of France....[Egypt's monarchy] was set 
up only to facilitate British control; it was overthrown by the Egyptian army 
in 1952....[Since that time,] Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, and Iraq have had to 
struggle hard to establish their legitimacy. Meanwhile, the Arabic speaking 
states of North Africa continued as colonies: Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia 
under the French, and Libya under the Italians. They became independent only 
after the Second World War. A small piece of land called Kuwait also 
continued to exist under colonial rule, as a British protectorate.
 
After World War I the borders and the leaders of virtually all Arab states 
were decided upon by Britain and France. (See footnote 2; Jordan's assigned 
monarch was not even a local; he was from Saudi Arabia.)

On April 27, 1920, at the Conference of San Remo following the collapse of 
the Ottoman Empire,

Britain and France finally concluded a secret oil bargain agreeing in effect 
to monopolize the whole future output of Middle Eastern oil between them. 
[Two years later when under pressure from their own puppet (King Feisal) for 
Iraqi independence, Britain's Prime Minister, Lloyd George commented]..."If 
we leave we may find a year or two after we departed that we handed over to 
the French and Americans some of the richest oilfields in the world."
 
Massive amounts of the wealth of the old Ottoman Empire were now claimed by 
the victors. But one must remember that the Islamic empire had tried for 
centuries to conquer Christian Europe and the power brokers deciding the fate 
of those defeated people were naturally determined that these countries 
should never be able to organize and threaten Western interests again. With 
centuries of mercantilist experience, Britain and France created small, 
unstable states whose rulers needed their support to stay in power. The 
development and trade of these states were controlled and they were meant 
never again to be a threat to the West. These external powers then made 
contracts with their puppets to buy Arab resources cheaply, making the feudal 
elite enormously wealthy while leaving most citizens in poverty.

Once small weak countries are established, it is very difficult to persuade 
their rulers to give up power and form those many dependent states into one 
economically viable nation. Conversely, it is easy for outside power brokers 
to support an exploitative faction to maintain or regain power. None of this 
can ever be openly admitted to or the neo-mercantilist world would fall 
apart. The fiction of sovereign governments, equal rights, fair trade, etc., 
must continue. To be candid is to invite immediate widespread rebellion and 
loss of control.

During World War I, President Woodrow Wilson learned about the secret 
agreements to carve up the Middle East and was determined to thwart them; 
thus his proposal for the League of Nations under which colonialism would 
eventually be dismantled. He personally assumed the role of U.S. negotiator 
for that purpose. Being head of state gave President Wilson the right to 
chair the peace conference and set the agenda. This caused great anxiety 
among the colonial powers of Europe. But Lloyd George, the British negotiator 
and designer of the Middle East partition that President Wilson found so 
offensive, was able to thwart Wilson's every move to grant those territories 
independence. With a shift in elections at home, President Wilson could not 
even obtain the consent of the United States to join and lead the League of 
Nations and his great hopes for world peace were stillborn. The suggestions 
for full rights for all the world's people described in this part are little 
more than an outline of President Wilson's dream of world peace.

When World War II consumed the wealth of the colonial governments of Europe, 
the disenfranchised world started to break free from those shackles. Some of 
the installed puppets became increasingly independent and others were 
overthrown. The last direct control in the Middle East was abandoned in the 
early 1970s when Britain "grant[ed] independence to Oman and the small 
sheikdoms that would become Bahrain, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates." 
But there was still indirect control; these small states did not have 
economic independence. That can only come with a viable nation that has the 
power to protect equality of trades with other nations.

=======================================

Wirt Atmar

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