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  • Book: 'The Fall Of The Ottomans,' By Eugene Rogan

    'THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS,' BY EUGENE ROGAN

    New York Times
    April 16 2015

    By BRUCE CLARKAPRIL 16, 2015

    In November 1914, the world's only great Muslim empire was drawn into
    a life-or-death struggle against three historically Christian powers
    -- Britain, France and Russia. All parties made frantic calculations
    about the likely intertwining of religion and strategy. The playing
    out, and surprise overturning, of these calculations informs every
    page of Eugene Rogan's intricately worked but very readable account
    of the Ottoman theocracy's demise.

    As Rogan explains in "The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the
    Middle East," the Christian nations of the Triple Entente had millions
    of Muslim subjects, who might in their view be open to seduction by
    the Ottoman sultan, especially if he seemed to be prevailing in the
    war. The Ottomans, for their part, were in alliance with two other
    European Christian powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary. Paradoxically,
    the Teutons urged the sultan to use his role as caliph and proclaim an
    Islamic holy war. One factor was that, as a newcomer to the imperial
    game, Germany had relatively few Muslim subjects and less to lose if
    the card of jihad were played. The Ottomans, meanwhile, feared the
    influence of foes, especially Russia, over their own Christian subjects
    -- including the Greeks and Armenians, who formed a substantial and
    economically important minority in both the empire's capital and the
    Anatolian heartland.

    In the end, nothing went as expected, because global conflict overturns
    all predictions. But the very existence of those religion-based
    calculations had consequences, many of them tragic.

    Rogan's narrative shifts from the Aegean to the Caucasus to Arabia
    as he traces those consequences, and shows how they led, ultimately,
    to the Ottoman Empire's defeat and collapse.

    Defeat and collapse are not the same thing, and Rogan, a history
    lecturer at Oxford University and the author of "The Arabs," carefully
    distinguishes them. The defeat that the empire suffered in 1918
    was not total, and left some of the sultan's -forces intact. One of
    his adversaries, Russia, was by then engulfed by revolution and had
    bowed out of the war, letting Turkish forces recoup lost ground. The
    final collapse of the Ottoman order was -neither an instant result of
    the 1918 armistice, nor, on Rogan's reading, an inevitable one. But
    for a power whose strong point was military excellence rather than
    commercial or technological prowess, the defeat was painful enough.

    Continue reading the main story

    In the Ottomans' confrontation with Britain, there were several
    early -surprises. Instead of the sultan winning over London's Muslim
    subjects, it was the British who profited by breaking the Turks' hold
    over certain Muslims, especially the descendants of the Prophet who
    controlled Arabia. With fair success, and some spectacular setbacks,
    Britain also managed to deploy its own colonial troops, whether Hindu
    or Muslim, against the Ottomans in Mesopotamia.

    But when the Ottomans defended their Anatolian heartland, they showed
    an iron will that the British underestimated. In the disastrous
    British-led assault on the Dardanelles straits, and the subsequent
    landing at Gallipoli, it was not the Ottoman imperium that began
    crumbling but the British one, as Australian, New Zealand and Irish
    soldiers became embittered by the incompetence of the power they
    served.

    Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story

    Using personal histories to leaven what might otherwise have been a
    heavy diet of places, names and dates, Rogan neatly links the Turks'
    costly success at the Dardanelles with the dreadful events that
    unfolded about 1,000 miles away, on the eastern edge of present-day
    Turkey. In this, the centenary year of the horrors suffered by the
    Ottoman Armenians, many readers will turn immediately to those events
    to see how Rogan negotiates the contesting versions.

    It is not in question that from April 1915 onward, Armenian subjects
    of the Ottoman Empire died horribly in enormous numbers. The American
    administration, which for diplomatic reasons still balks at using
    the word genocide, accepts that as many as 1.5 million perished. It
    is on record that in May 1915, a law was passed calling for the
    "relocation" of the entire Armenian population of eastern Anatolia;
    nor does anybody seriously question that this became a death march
    whose victims were killed by their guards, attacked by others or
    perished from exhaustion and starvation.

    But there is a more contentious charge, and in a few succinct lines,
    Rogan affirms it. He agrees that in addition to ordering a vast,
    brutal internal deportation, the Committee of Union of Progress,
    the shadowy institution that was directing the Ottoman war effort,
    issued unwritten orders for the mass murder of the deportees.

    Secret, oral orders are hard to prove or disprove, but Rogan accepts
    the case for their existence made by the Turkish scholar Taner Akcam.

    This book uses words like "annihilation" and "massacre" more often than
    "genocide" but does not avoid the g-word. As he explains in a footnote,
    Rogan employs the term genocide in support of the "courageous efforts"
    of Turkish historians and writers to "force an honest reckoning with
    Turkey's past."

    At the same time, the book makes many of the arguments that qualified
    defenders of the Ottoman record point to: for example, that in winter
    1914 and spring 1915, there was fierce fighting in eastern Anatolia
    between Turks and Armenians; sometimes the Armenians fought alone,
    and sometimes with Russian help. In Istanbul, at the same time,
    Turkish officialdom's fear of an "enemy within" was running high
    because local Armenians were suspected of favoring Britain's plans
    to advance on the city.

    All that provides some psychological background to the drive against
    the Armenian population. So too does the huge Turkish loss of life,
    from cold and disease as well as bullets, during and after the Russian
    victory at Sarakamis in December 1914. But Rogan does not for a moment
    suggest that this amounts to a moral justification of the horrors the
    Armenians endured. To stress, as some Turkish versions of the story
    do, that this was a period involving tragic suffering on all sides
    is valid as far as it goes, but it is not an adequate statement. It
    is to Rogan's credit that he acknowledges this.

    Still, a moral assessment of the treatment of the Armenians is not the
    main purpose of this book, which promises a more Ottoman-centric vision
    of a conflict that is often described through the eyes of British
    generals and strategists. That promise is only partly fulfilled. In
    what is a manageably sized book, Rogan feels he must spend several
    pages on the motives of the Ottomans' adversaries, especially Britain;
    that limits the space he can devote to bringing the Ottoman side of
    the story to life.

    Some gripping sections describe the -British-led advance on
    Jerusalem in late 1917, leading to the holy city's capture in time
    for Christmas. This is an extraordinary tale and Rogan recounts it
    well, making clear both the stiffness of the Turkish defense and the
    ingenuity of Britain's -tactics.

    The book explains how, with the experience of an imperial power at
    its height, the British used dynastic rivalries to rally the Muslims
    of Arabia and the Levant against their Turkish overlords. In doing so
    they established the principle that in the 20th century, ethnicity
    and nationalism (in this case, Arab nationalism) would often trump
    religious bonds, even in lands where faith was zealous. Only in the
    early 21st century is that trend being reversed, as competing versions
    of Islamism vow to tear down the borders that were drawn a century ago.

    THE FALL OF THE OTTOMANS

    The Great War in the Middle East

    By Eugene Rogan

    Illustrated. 485 pp. Basic Books. $32.

    Bruce Clark, who writes about religion, history and society for
    The Economist, is the author of "Twice a Stranger," a study of the
    Turkish-Greek population exchange.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/19/books/review/19bkr-clark.t.html?_r=0




    From: A. Papazian
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