The Trouble with Research

 My novel is not about the Middle East. But in researching it I came across a remarkable story that anyone who thinks about today’s Middle East should read.

Needing to improve on my high-school-level understanding of World War I and the subsequent peace conference in Paris, I bought and began consuming a library shelf or two of books about the Great War, how it began and the manner of its conclusion. I was especially interested in learning what kind of Allied reasoning had required the mutilation of Hungary. Unlike the punishment of Germany, the post-war dismemberment of Hungary seemed like nothing more than the fruit of Georges Clemenceau’s private stubbornness combined with his ignorance of eastern Europe. Unlike Germany, Hungary hadn’t eagerly prosecuted the war, though it was the Austro-Hungarian empire that launched the first attack. The Hungarian prime minister István Tisza was the only official among the Central Powers to oppose the war, arguing correctly that it would lead to a disastrous weltkrieg (world war). He appears to have been the first to use that term. But Hungary’s punishment by the Treaty of Trianon was far greater than Germany’s by the Treaty of Versailles.

The problem with pursuing such research is that it becomes so easy to go astray. Before I had resolved my Clemenceau question I happened to pick up a dog-eared, paperback copy of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence’s account of his role in organizing the Arab revolt against Ottoman rule—the same events portrayed in the movie “Lawrence of Arabia.”  While reading this, drawn in by Lawrence’s lyrical prose, I happened to hear a radio interview with an author who was saying that at the end of the first war the question of who would rule the Middle East had been decided in a five-minute conversation between the French prime minister Clemenceau and the British prime minister David Lloyd George. The book was titled Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East. What he said sounded very much like my suspicion about what happened to Hungary. So I needed to know how reliable the author Scott Anderson was and how much he knew about Clemenceau. I found his book well researched and his Clemenceau-Lloyd George anecdote confirmed by the historian Margaret MacMillan in her detailed account of the peace conference, Paris 1919.

The remarkable five-minute conversation that sealed the future of the Middle East took place secretly in a London townhouse a year and a half before the Paris peace agreements were concluded, and it broke all the British promises made to the Arabs during their revolt against the Turks, a sad conclusion to the epic tale of the Arab struggle for self-rule. The result was a map drawn to suit European needs and ignore the tribal and sectarian concerns of the Arabs. We westerners shouldn’t wonder why Islamic extremists still focus their anger on us.

The view, which I gather is widely held, that a collection of self-important but small-minded European leaders blundered into the first World War for reasons that had more to do with self aggrandizement and fear of losing their power than with the welfare of their people seems a roughly accurate if over-simplified summary of the cause. The massive human slaughter they created was followed by a peace arrangement that ensured more world-wide war and tension, up to and including the recent beheadings in the Middle East.