April 17, 2015

Finest Hour 121, Winter 2003-04

Page 08

By WILLIAM C. IVES & CHRISTOPHER C. HARMON

In the Middle East, is Anyone Ever Satisfied? On the Atlantic Coast, Will the Hurricanes Ever Quit?

As Hurricane Isabel churned its way up the East Coast, Churchill Centre governors were told that their board meeting for September 19-20th would be held “come hell or high water.” Isabel brought the high water; hell was avoided, at least temporarily.

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Concurrently, nearly 125 Churchillians and at least that many George Washington University students who had planned to attend the Third Churchill Lecture and a reception celebrating the CC’s opening in Washington were confidently reminded that those events would go forward “even if only the Board of Governors appear.” Alas, that’s just about what happened. The University simply shut down. Fourteen hardy souls including three Trustees—Celia Sandys, Chris Matthews and Winston Churchill, attended the reception; the latter was able to join us for dinner later, his speaking engagement in Petersburg called off after the Governor of Virginia shut down the state! Twenty-two stalwarts heard David Fromkin’s lecture, “Churchill and the Middle East.” A CD recording is in the process of being offered for those who missed it.

The Board meeting proceeded as scheduled for a very full day and a half, but not without logistical challenges. Isabel either prevented or hindered the attendance of the Board’s two British and two Canadian members. Jim Lane’s broken hip restricted him to his home near Seattle, but he joined the board meeting via conference call at 5AM his time! Richard Langworth was with his wife Barbara in New York City at the funeral of her mother; he too joined in by telephone. In spite of these natural disasters, the Board meeting was highly productive. Many positive and necessary actions were taken (see page 5).

While coping with Isabel’s fury the Centre also had to deal with the aftermath of Hurricane Fabian’s descent on Bermuda, site of our 20th International Conference, several weeks earlier. Cochairman David Boler and conference manager Judy Kambestad made all the time-consuming adjustments necessary to ensure that this exciting Conference would proceed as planned. Looking to Winston Churchill for inspiration, we recalled that when advised that owing to the weather he should not fly to France in June 1940 to stiffen the spines of wavering Frenchmen, the PM responded: “To hell with that. This is too serious…to bother about the weather.” So it was, and so it is.

Considering the buffeting the Centre and its events have taken since the 9/11 attacks scarcely six weeks before our 2001 San Diego conference —followed by terrorist alerts three days before the event which involved the main bridge to the conference site— one must wonder whether some greater power is testing our mettle. If so, we have not been found wanting. Churchill himself provides our watchwords: “Never flinch, never weary, never despair.” We won’t. —WCI

“Churchill and the Middle East”

WASHINGTON, SEPTEMBER 18TH— David Fromkin, one of Americas foremost writers, delivered the Third Churchill Lecture under the auspices of The Churchill Centre and The George Washington University. A professor of international relations at Boston University, Fromkin is the author of a bestseller: A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

With the end of the Great War in 1918, Britain’s coalition government faced unnumbered and difficult questions of war and peace: the disappearance of the Ottoman Empire; the rise of Soviet Bolshevism; the indignation of Syria under French occupation; divisions among Arab rulers; and the challenge of assembling a state of Iraq from several diverse provinces, all in turmoil. At the same time, Britain’s great army in the region was “melting” (to use Winston Churchill’s word) and few in London had good policy ideas. Prime Minister David Lloyd George turned to Churchill, his Secretary of State for the Colonies, and said: “You deal with it,” according to Fromkin. In his view, Churchill satisfactorily resolved the issues he had been handed, “which in politics should be enough.”

But in the Middle East, is anyone ever satisfied? Even Churchill did not get all he wanted, from London or from the region, David Fromkin explained. He worked hard for a Jewish “homeland” but did not call outright for a Jewish state. Nor did he expect the “Trans-jordan” to become sovereign as it did. He considered a Kurdish state but had to settle for folding the Kurds’ Mosul province into the mix with Basra and Baghdad, yielding modern Iraq. Sherif Feisal, ejected from Syria by the French, became King of Iraq, which has proven more durable than critics of the time thought, according to Fromkin. Iraq even survived a protracted war with much-larger Iran in the 1980s.

The Master of Ceremonies, MSNBC host Chris Matthews; WSC’s grandchildren, Winston Churchill and Celia Sandys; Professor James Muller, and others followed the formal lecture with a dozen questions. Was monarchy really the solution for Iraq? What was known then about oil in the region? What effect had President Wilson on the region’s settlement? Was Whitehall too concerned about creating a barrier against the rising Soviet state?

One of the best replies went to Washington member Bob Hartland, who asked about the scholar’s critique of T. E. Lawrence. Mr. Fromkin answered that Seven Pillars of Wisdom was unreliable as history: Lawrence, he said, admitted as much, and described his book as in line with the great novels, more than the great histories. In an interview before the lecture, Fromkin complimented Finest Hour’s summer issue, which was devoted to Lawrence.

David Fromkin’s A Peace to End All Peace is a detailed and profound study of a few short years in which, truly, history was being made. Its historical narrative is draped around the imposing figure of Winston S. Churchill—then as later clutching multiple portfolios and fascinated by politics and foreign affairs. The book has appeared in four languages including Arabic, never going out of print in English since its 1989 release. Renewed interest appeared after September 11 th, 2001. Another wave comes now: a historian just back from Iraq reports that Marine Corps officers serving there often discuss the volume.

In a similar spirit of earnest conversation, Churchillians moved slowly from the GWU auditorium and into the initial rains of Hurricane Isabel, just then bearing down on Washington D.C. They had been given much to consider by a strong interchange.

Holder of a University of Chicago law degree, David Fromkin continues to teach and to write. His seventh book will appear in 2004 under the title: Europe’s Last Summer: Who Started the Great War in 1914?— CCH