ABSTRACT
Many in the Middle East were encouraged by Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points speech of January 1918. This address cast the conflict in a moral light, envisioning a postwar peace in this same vein. During the summer of 1919, as the British prepared to leave Damascus, they tried to broker an agreement between Faisal and the French. The parliament’s open acceptance of Mustafa Kemal’s nationalist program deeply angered the British occupying force in Istanbul. The conclusion of the Turkish War of Independence allowed the international focus to shift to the Arab Middle East, where Britain and France now finalized how the region would be configured. The stabilization of Iraq was considerably more complicated, since it brought together the three Ottoman provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. The British established a “Supreme Muslim Council” to administer waqfs and appoint religious judges and local muftis: functions always performed in Ottoman times by officials in Istanbul.
