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    THE BERLIN-BAGHDAD EXPRESS:
    George Walden

    The Observer
    Sunday 18 July 2010

    The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for World Power, 1898-1918 by
    Sean McMeekinThe roots of conflict in the Middle East go back to the
    'half-mad imperial enterprise' of Germany's last Kaiser Wilhelm II,
    finds George Walden

    In 2002, a commentator in the Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar wrote of
    Hitler and the Holocaust in terms that Iran's President Ahmadinejad
    might envy: "If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really
    happened, so that the world could sigh in relief!" Sean McMeekin's
    book helps us understand how such a pearl of murderous mendacity
    could ever have been uttered. Islamic ties to National Socialism can
    be traced back as far as Kaiser "Hajji" Wilhelm II (German emperor
    from 1888-1918) who, for not especially religious reasons, became
    infatuated with the Muslim world.

    The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for
    World Power, 1898-1918 by Sean McMeekin 496pp, Allen Lane, £25.00 Buy
    The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany's Bid for
    World Power, 1898-1918 at the Guardian bookshop It was Wilhelm who
    persuaded Turkey into joining the first world war with a mixture
    of gold, blandishments and promises. These included not just the
    recovery of territory and the championing of Constantinople against
    its religious rival, Mecca, but a jihad to liberate all Muslims under
    British domination. The result would be a world where Islamism and
    a German empire would peaceably blend.

    "A half-mad imperial enterprise of fin-de-siècle Europe," is McMeekin's
    description. The Rasputin of the piece was Baron von Oppenheim, a man
    of protean hatreds, not only towards the entente powers (the British,
    French and Russians), but most notably towards himself. A self-loathing
    Jew of pathological proportions, every word of his title was a lie:
    he was neither a baron, a "von", nor in the dynastic or religious
    sense an Oppenheim. The wealthy grandson of Salomon Oppenheim,
    founder of the great bank, he lived as a harem-keeping Arab and
    filled the emperor's ear with anti-British and antisemitic bile,
    and chaotic dreams of empire.

    After his attempts to goad Muslims into massacring the infidel came to
    not very much, Oppenheim was, by the 1930s, on the Nazis' payroll,
    introducing his fanatically Jew-hating friend Amin al-Husseini,
    Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (appointed by the British) to Hitler. It
    was Husseini who helped Heinrich Himmler form Muslim SS units in the
    Balkans; they proceeded to murder 12,600 of Bosnia's 14,000 Jews.

    Third in a book rich in antiheroes is Abdul Hamid II, Ottoman Sultan
    from 1876 to 1909 and paranoid reactionary, eventually dethroned and
    imprisoned by the Young Turks revolt in 1909. McMeekin suggests that
    it was in part the failure of the British to support the reformists
    that kept Turkish ties with Germany in place after Hamid's fall.

    McMeekin is scathing about British blindness. A more imaginative
    approach to the Young Turks could have changed this aspect of the war:
    Germany's ties with Turkey were predominantly with the reactionaries
    and our influence with the forces for change could have weakened
    Berlin's position. The reasons we failed to see the future were
    culpably stupid: a distrust of the Young Turks based on crazy rumours
    about their supposedly Jewish connections.

    The Berlin-Baghdad railway runs like a thread through the whole
    calamitous tale. Strategically, its aim was to bind Turkey and the
    Germans together, while sabotaging Britain's links with India by
    threatening Suez, and providing Germany with its own shortcut to the
    east through Basra.Its construction, begun in 1903, was repeatedly
    delayed for financial and technical reasons: 27 tunnels were required,
    many of them kilometres long through the Taurus mountains. The only
    concern the Germans manifested about their Turkish allies' infamous
    massacre and deportation of Armenians in 1915 was that it delayed
    construction further. Despite massive injections of German cash,
    the railway was only completed in 1940.

    McMeekin talks of this aspect of the first world war as the new
    great game, and its ironies and anomalies were endless, especially
    from today's viewpoint. To ingratiate themselves with the Arabs,
    at one point the Germans and the British were competing to subsidise
    the purest strain of Islam. Then there is the idea of Catholic and
    Protestant Germany issuing vicious propaganda inciting Muslims to
    massacre their Christian brothers. And though they failed to stir up
    holy war, the Germans had better luck in dispatching Lenin back home
    to cripple Russia's war effort. Unfortunately for Berlin it was this,
    together with Germany's success in bringing Turkey into the war,
    that hastened the downfall of the Romanovs and the onset of the
    Bolshevik era.

    McMeekin's book is also rich in farce. The Bedouins Oppenheim was
    keen to recruit for his jihad were unreliable holy warriors, given
    to shouting "Allahu Akbar" so loudly before battle they gave away
    their position. Muslim recruits to the SS taught about the closeness
    of Nazi and Muslim ideals responded so well that some began to see
    the Fuhrer as the second prophet.

    The biggest winners in this theatre, the author believes, were the
    Bolsheviks and the Turks, who regained lost territories as well
    as their independence. For Britain, there was little more than
    the poisoned inheritance of Mesopotamia and Palestine. McMeekin is
    hard on everyone involved, but especially the Germans. To encourage
    reactionary Islam, squandering a fortune in bribes in the process,
    and help the Bolshevik revolution succeed while losing the war,
    does not say much for the abilities of the Kaiser and his lieutenants.

    The roots of current catastrophes in the Middle East, he writes,
    are conventionally attributed to the postwar cynicism of the entente
    powers. There are reasons for this, but McMeekin wonders why Germany's
    responsibility is missing. To me, it appears as another example of
    Anglo-American puritan guilt-grabbing, a perverted form of spiritual
    pride illustrated by our tendency to beat our breasts louder than
    anyone else.

    McMeekin has written a powerful, overdue book that for many will open
    up a whole new side to the first world war, while forcing us to be
    less reticent in confronting indelicate matters, such as the origins
    of Nazi-Islamist links.




    From: A. Papazian
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