Quotes from David Fromkin

Decisions, by all accounts, including those of the participants, were made with little knowledge of, or concern for, the lands and peoples about which and whom the decisions were being made.

By the time that the war came to an end, British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be of benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue.

Baedeker, Karl, Palestine and Syria: With Routes through Mesopotamia and Babylon and the Island of Cyprus: Handbook For Travellers, 5th edn, remodelled and augmented (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1912).

For at least a century before the 1914 war, Europeans had regarded it as axiomatic that someday the Middle East would be occupied by one or more of the Great Powers. Their great fear was that disputes about their respective shares might lead the European powers to fight ruinous wars against one another.

population. By the end of 1915 the Allies found the situation so menacing that the Russians, supported by the 8,000-strong Russian-officered Persian Cossacks, occupied the north of the country, taking over the capital city of Teheran and, with it, the weak, recently crowned young Shah. The most pro-German of the politicians fled, initially to the holy city of Qum, and later to Kermanshah, near the Ottoman frontier, where a German puppet government was established, backed by Ottoman troops.

Reginald Wingate… wrote that "Moslems in general have hitherto regarded the Hejaz revolt, and our share in it, with suspicion or dislike"; an that it was important to make Hussein look as though he had not been a failure in order to keep Britain from looking bad.

but President Harding told Secretary of State Hughes, "Frankly, it is difficult for me to be consistently patient with our good friends of the Church who are properly and earnestly zealous in promoting peace until it comes to making warfare on someone of the contending religion…"23

But to see the ovens into which humans were fed was enough to implicate the high culture of Europe; its value was drawn into question once it was suspected that such a culture had culminated in Dachau and Auschwitz. (Page 451)

It has been estimated that the total of military and civilian casualties in all of Europe's domestic and international conflicts in the 100 years between 1815 and 1915 was no greater than a single day's combat losses in any of the great battles of 1916.

Fear of Russian expansionism was at the heart of the Porte's policy. The Turkish ambassador told Deedes 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. That was why the Porte had become pro-German… (Enver did not mention that, in addition, Germany had given a written guarantee to protect Ottoman territory…)

The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today.

The railroad network of the German Empire made the Kaiser's realm the most advanced military power in the world, and Britain's precarious naval supremacy began to seem less relevant than it had been.

Those Greeks and Romans," he protested, "they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me."3

Those Greeks and Romans," he protested, "they are so overrated. They only said everything first. I've said just as good things myself. But they got in before me.

It is the Jews and not us that everyone is against," he wrote. "If the Jews would keep their silly mouths shut they could buy up the whole country.

Blinded by the prize, they did not see that there was a contest.

T]he sheer magnitude of Britain's commitment and loss at Gallipoli made it seem vital years later that she should play a major role in the postwar Middle East to give some sort of meaning to so great a sacrifice.

By the end of 1915 the Allies found the situation so menacing that the Russians, supported by the 8,000-strong Russian-officered Persian Cossacks, occupied the north of the country, taking over the capital city of Teheran and, with it, the weak, recently crowned young Shah. The most pro-German of the politicians fled, initially to the holy city of Qum, and later to Kermanshah, near the Ottoman frontier, where a German puppet government was established, backed by Ottoman troops.

A Peace to End All Peace.