Trump's Davos
speech exposed how US
isolationism is reaching its
final narcissistic chapter
By
Robert Fisk
January 23, 2020 "Information
Clearing House" -
The old America wanted to
bring daylight to others. Now
the US president believes his
country should be paid to
intervene militarily in the
Middle East – and then paid to
leave
By the time
Donald Trump was
condemning environmentalists
as the “perennial prophets
of doom” in
Davos, his impeachment
trial was opening in
Washington. But quite by
chance, at that very moment,
I was reading a new edition
of a book by a child
survivor of the 1915
Armenian Holocaust which,
hauntingly and poetically,
said more about America than
anything Trump – or Congress
– could ever utter.
Leon
Surmelian lost both his
parents in 1915 and, just
after the
Second World War, he
published I Ask You,
Ladies and Gentlemen with
the kind of horrific detail
that only accounts of the
Jewish Holocaust, a quarter
of a century later, normally
include. He remembered the
naked and mutilated body of
a young woman in a Turkish
river – “her long hair
floated down the current” –
and “a human arm caught in
the roots of a tree” and “a
long, long band of frothy
blood clinging to [the
river] banks”. No wonder
Israeli Jews speak today of
the Armenian “Shoah” – the
Holocaust, in Hebrew – which
first struck the Christians
of Ottoman Turkey.
But it was Surmelian’s
salvation when he travelled
later to Constantinople and
visited the US-run Robert
College, on a hill near
Istanbul’s Castle of Rome,
that caught my attention in
his book. The college, now
154 years old and still
perched between the two
Bosporus bridges,
coeducational and
independent, deeply
impressed the young Armenian
whose dream was to go to
America.
Here is what he wrote:
“The campus of Robert
College … with its modern
buildings, laboratories,
gymnasium, tennis courts,
track field, was an
impressive example of
American education. Nowhere
in the city were there such
fine school buildings, such
an exhibit of wealth and
education for the training
of youth. But to me the most
remarkable thing about it
was this: here Armenian and
Greek boys sat in the same
classroom with Turkish boys,
were … in daily contact as
members of one civilised
society, with no fights, no
racial catcalls between
them. There were also
Bulgarian, Russian, Jewish,
English, Persian students,
all living in harmony. As
America had no territorial
ambitions in our part of the
world, she enjoyed a unique
moral authority. And more
than the mechanical wonders,
the industrial progress and
power of America was this
moral authority, possessed
by no other nation on earth.
In my own mind, the concept
of America was based on
that…”
And there you have it.
Everything America was,
Trump is not. And everything
America is now did not exist
in the
Middle East at the end
of the
First World War.
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Like the American University of Beirut, the New
World was a beacon of US education and
enlightenment. Just think of Trump, and then reflect
on the ethnically mixed, diverse students — many of
their parents enemies only a few months before –
sitting together as members of the “civilised
society” which Surmelian swiftly identified as
American. The prohibition of Muslim immigrants and
Mexican border walls would have been unthinkable at
Robert College.
And what of America’s “unique moral
authority” when its current president tears up
nuclear treaties with Iran, climate change
agreements and military alliances, betrays the
Kurds, destroys Palestinian hopes of a state and
demands cash for everything his soldiers do in the
Middle East – cash to be paid for their presence and
cash to be paid if the Arabs want them to leave?
Surmelian would have understood Trump’s obsession
with “mechanical wonders” and “industrial progress”
and power. The young Armenian was himself fascinated
by these aspects of America. But, then still largely
uneducated, he understood what morals – and “moral
authority” — meant: the existence of a powerful
nation which wanted to lead the world by moral
example rather than raw power, which preferred to
offer its education to the poor rather than its
trillions of dollars worth of weapons to those who
would oppress them, which wanted to lead by example
rather than by bullying. Trump intends to “boldly
seize the day”. The old America wanted to bring
daylight to others.
Or did it? For behind every inspirational myth in
the Middle East usually lies a dark future. The same
America which Surmelian so admired after the First
World War would be offered in 1919 the League of
Nations mandate for broken Armenia and the stateless
Kurds; a mandate similar to the poisoned chalice
given the British in Palestine and Iraq and the
French in Syria. This was all part of the Woodrow
Wilson principle of “the right of self-determination
of peoples”. A US military mission, led by First
World War General James Harbord, was even sent to
the wreckage of Armenia. One of its findings
concluded that in many areas of what had been
western Armenia, the Turks now outnumbered the
Armenians — which was not surprising after the Turks
had slaughtered a million and a half Armenians,
including Surmelian’s parents, in 1915.
There was too much hatred around, Harbord
thought, for the US to take on the Armenia mandate –
which would have given to the present-day rump
Armenian state some of its historic Turkish-Ottoman
hinterland around Van and Trabzon, including access
to the Black Sea. The Americans also decided they
didn’t want to manage Kurdistan. So the Armenians –
and the Kurds – got well and truly betrayed by the
US. And this, remember, was a hundred years before
Turkey frightened the American presidency (including
Carter, Clinton, the Bushes, Obama and Trump) so
much that the US would never formally acknowledge
that the 1915 slaughter of the Armenians was a
genocide. And a hundred years before Trump handed
over the Syrian Kurds to Turkish occupation.
Perhaps isolationism reaches its final chapter in
the narcissism, greed, dishonesty and insanity of
Trumpism. He may now pose as Israel’s greatest
friend and move the US embassy to Jerusalem, but his
predecessors turned away European Jewish refugees
from the Nazis. Or perhaps the enthusiasm of a
younger America – leavened with Christian missionary
zeal – was never going to produce the “moral
authority” which Surmelian saw in the US. We should
remember that America did enter the Second World War
to fight the Nazis and the Japanese – but they did
not do so until the Japanese attacked them at Pearl
Harbour in 1941 and until Hitler declared war on
America (rather than the other way round).
There are many brave souls in the Middle East who
still believe that universal education, the
substance and quality and essence of which Surmelian
recognised in Constantinople, remains the only
viable future for the region – and for us in our
ignorance of its people. But this is water in the
desert if we continue to betray the Palestinians,
the Kurds and the millions of people who suffer
under our well-armed local dictators, whether they
be Trump’s “favourite dictator”, president el-Sisi
of Egypt – whom I noticed at Davos, did I not? – or
the ever more sinister
Mohammed bin Salman, or Assad (armed by the
Russians, of course) or the militias of Libya, Yemen
or Iraq. If Trump can mix up al-Qaeda with the Kurds
– as he once did – and point out that the Kurds (for
some strange reason) did not participate in D-Day,
then demand that the Palestinians accept cash in
return for giving up their right to statehood –
well, then the Americans probably are finished in
the Middle East. We know, of course, who is not
finished in that region.
But when, I repeat, you’ve got a US president who
believes his country should be paid to intervene
militarily in the Middle East, and then paid to
leave – hence the threat of Trump sanctions against
Iraq (whose president was briefly described in a
White House video this week as “the president of
Iran”) if it demanded an American military
withdrawal – then cash and more cash has replaced
that long forgotten moral authority.
After all, Moscow now seems to have more
“territorial ambitions” (Surmelian’s language,
again) in the Middle East than Washington.
And you should read what Surmelian thought of the
Russian Revolution and Bolshevism. But that’s
another story.
This article was
originally published by "The
Independent " -
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