WILSON, AND THE DAMAGE DONE:

The Great War may have brought about the end of the imperial era for some, but victory has always been deafening to the victorious. While the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires were dismantled in a fervor of nationalism, Britain and France saw opportunities for imperial expansion.

They reneged on promises of freedom made to secure wartime alliances; and from Middle East, historian Elizabeth F. Thompson writes in How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, they took democracy itself. The liberal-nationalist movement and the constitutional monarchy it supported failed because of that betrayal, and the great hope for Arab democracy remains elusive.

The Ottomans ruled the Middle East for centuries but declined after the Napoleonic Wars. European nations entered the power vacuum: Britain and France wrestled over Egypt. Former vassals also rose up against Istanbul, where a nationalist revolution in the early 20th century promised revival but led to tragedies instead.

Turkey joined the Central Powers in the Great War. The opposing countries, including Britain and France, encouraged Ottoman subjects to rebel against Istanbul. An Arab rebel army joined forces with a British intelligence officer, seeding the story we know as Lawrence of Arabia.

The Arab leader of that rebel army was Prince Faisal, who was sent to the Ottoman court in Istanbul by his father but returned disillusioned by miscarriages of justice, including the genocide of Armenians led by the Turkish government.

In Arab lands, Ottoman mismanagement led to famine and executions of Arab leaders who spoke out against the rulers. Faisal orchestrated a wartime alliance with the British governor of Egypt against the Ottomans, expecting that Britain would support the Arab right to self-rule after the war.

Even before the fighting had ended, however, the Arabs, British, and French, who had established colonial interests along the Mediterranean coast, began to vie over postwar spoils. This is where Thompson begins her story: with Faisal rushing to take control of the strategic and historic city of Damascus, which was the cultural and political heart of the Arab world.

Once Faisal captured the Syrian city, a broad coalition of nationalist and Islamist leaders banded together to support a constitutional monarchy. In March 1920, they formed the Syrian Arab Congress and created a liberal democratic Arab state. The Syrian Arab Congress brought together Shia and Sunni Muslims and conceived of a pan-Arab state that stretched from the Mediterranean coast -- which became Lebanon -- to Damascus and all the way to Baghdad and Persia.

But these valiant efforts failed in the face of British betrayal, French ambition, and American ambivalence. 

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