America's Iraq War Unexpectedly Elevated Iran to the Middle East's Most Dominant Power
Iraq war exposed America's inability to sustain prolonged conflict or absorb casualties; Iran seized the opening to link Iraqi militias, Syria, Lebanon, the Houthis and Hamas into the ‘Six Armies Empire’, the most powerful Iran has been since the Sassanid dynasty.
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The argument · timestamps estimated from transcript position
The Ottoman Empire's Final Decades Slid Toward Proto-Fascist Ideology
The author directly contradicts the romanticized view of the Ottoman Empire as tolerant and cosmopolitan. The reality: during its decline, the empire was ruled by the Three Pashas, eugenics believers and social Darwinists who saw war as racial purification and self-improvement. They orchestrated the Armenian genocide, affecting Greeks and Maronite Christians as well. The author calls this the Ottoman Empire's ‘Twilight of the Gods’.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreCreating a Nation-State Means Expelling Those Who Don't Belong
The author makes this the book's organizing principle: once the West established the nation-state as the superior form of government in the nineteenth century, each founding was accompanied by exclusion. Those who didn't fit the new national definition, or refused to be incorporated, were cast out. Eastern Europe's new nations expelled Muslims toward the Ottoman Empire; the Ottoman Empire itself abandoned the inclusive ‘Ottomanism’ of earlier centuries, narrowing identity to Turkish speakers and Muslims, directly excluding millions of Arabs, Jews and Christians.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreTurkey Used Its Inherited Ottoman Military to Reverse Total Defeat
After World War One, the Allies planned to partition Anatolia: the east for Armenians and Kurds, the west for Greeks, leaving Turks only a small region around Ankara. But Kemal—later Atatürk—inherited an intact Ottoman army. He defeated what remained of the Armenian, Kurdish and Greek forces, forcing Britain to back down and triggering the fall of the Lloyd George government in 1922. Turkey missed out on Mosul and northern Syria, an ‘unfinished empire’ complex that drives Erdogan's ‘neo-Ottomanism’ today.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreSaudi Arabia: A Third Dynasty Carved Out by Forty Men
Saudi Arabia is not an ancient nation but a ‘conquest state’. In 1902, Ibn Saud, twenty years old and nearly two meters tall, rode into central Arabia with forty companions, captured Riyadh, and spent the next three decades conquering the peninsula. The turning point came in 1925: seizing Mecca and Medina. Control of Islam's holiest sites conferred religious authority that let Saudi Arabia supplant Egypt as the leader of the Sunni world.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreReza Khan Modernized Iran, Then Lost His Throne for Backing Neutrality
Reza Khan rose from peasant soldier through military discipline in the Persian Cossack Brigade, seized power in 1921, deposed the Qajars in 1925 and founded the Pahlavi dynasty. He built banks, railways and universities, abolished compulsory veiling. Late in his rule he grew paranoid and ruthless—he had a doctor inject a political rival with oxygen to kill him. In 1941, misjudging World War Two's outcome, he chose neutrality. Britain and Stalin deemed this unacceptable; Iran was occupied by both, and Reza Khan was forced from power.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreIsrael's Founding and Turkey's Founding Followed the Same Template
The author rebuts the claim that the Middle East holds ancient nations except for Israel, somehow uniquely invented. In fact, Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan are all new states; only Egypt and Iran count as ancient. Israel's birth—partition, ethnic war, mass refugee expulsion, and nationalism bound to religion and ethnicity—closely parallels Turkey's founding two decades earlier. Both drew on distinct historical threads, but the structural pattern is the same.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreIraq's Christians Collapsed from a Million to 115,000
Iraq's slaughter of Assyrian Christians in the early 1930s set a template. Persecution has been continuous; the Christian population fell from one million in 2000 to 115,000 today. Kurds refused to accept Turkish- or Iraqi-style national identity, sparking seven or eight decades of ethnic rebellion that killed 50,000 to 60,000 Kurdish civilians. Shias formed a thin majority but tensions between Sunni and Shia could only be suppressed by Saddam Hussein's iron rule.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreThe Iraq War Unexpectedly Made Iran the Region's Dominant Power
The 2003 Iraq War was launched on false intelligence and utopian faith in implanting democracy. A more sensible course would have been to remove Saddam's inner circle and install a military governor. The actual consequence exposed America's weakness: limited attention span, inability to absorb casualties, and an electoral system cycling power every four or five years—a ‘madness’ in statecraft. Iran exploited this, took over Iraq through militia networks, extended into Syria, Lebanon, the Houthis and Hamas, building what General Soleimani called the ‘Six Armies Empire’—Iran's moment of greatest power since 18th-century Nader Shah, or arguably since the Sassanid dynasty.
— Simon Sebag MontefioreIn their own words · checked verbatim
The great myth that you read about all the time, about the great tolerance of the Ottoman Empire and how everyone lived together in a cheerful, peaceful, charming way, spouting poetry, is rubbish really.
Simon Sebag Montefiore4:30
The creation of nationalism is always about the exclusion of people who are the other in some way or other.
Simon Sebag Montefiore6:30
Now, in 1902, at the beginning of my period, Ibn Saud, or Abdulaziz, as he is known in the Arab world, was a swaggering twenty-year-old, six foot six or something, very tall, who rode into the interior of Arabia and conquered Riyadh with forty friends and henchmen.
Simon Sebag Montefiore14:00
By 1941, in World War II, he decided that he was not sure who was going to win the war, and he would remain neutral. This was a big mistake because neither the British nor the Soviets, now under Stalin, were going to take a risk with Iran.
Simon Sebag Montefiore17:30
All of these states, starting with Turkey, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, are completely new states. Only Egypt and Iran are ancient states.
Simon Sebag Montefiore23:00
That sets the tone for the gradual persecution of the Christians of Iraq, who numbered a million people in the year 2000 and now number 115,000.
Simon Sebag Montefiore27:00
we just need to make peace. We’ve been defeated by them, and we’ll be defeated by them again. The Egyptians come first, and we need to make peace with them
Simon Sebag Montefiore31:30
They were able from that to take over Iraq, in effect, through their militias, then Syria, then Lebanon, then the Houthis, then Hamas in Gaza, and to create what General Suleimani called the Six Armies.
Simon Sebag Montefiore38:30
Figures
| Ottoman Empire's duration | over four hundred years | 3:00 |
Glossary
- Three Pashas
- A three-man military junta ruling the Ottoman Empire during World War One that orchestrated the Armenian genocide.
- Six Armies Empire
- General Soleimani's term for Iran's regional hegemony built through militia networks in Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, the Houthis, and Hamas.
- Wahhabi movement
- The Islamic revivalist movement allied with the Saudi royal family, forming the ideological foundation of the Saudi state.
- Vilayet of Mosul
- An Ottoman administrative province, now northeastern Iraq, that Turkey has long claimed should belong to it.
How to listen
Readers focused on Middle East events, the historical origins of Israel-Iran-Iraq tensions, and anyone seeking to understand how nation-states are built.
The opening remarks introducing the author and his book can be skipped.