Arabs (38 page)

A
lthough Transjordan proved the easiest to manage of Britain’s Middle East possessions, Iraq was for a time viewed as the most successful mandate. King Faysal was installed in 1921, a Constituent Assembly was elected beginning in 1924, and a treaty regulating relations between Britain and Iraq was ratified later that same year. By 1930 Iraq was a stable constitutional monarchy and Britain’s work as mandatory power was complete. A new treaty was negotiated between Britain and Iraq, paving the way to Iraq’s independence in 1932. The League of Nations recognized Iraq’s independence and admitted the new state to its ranks—the only mandate to become a full member of the league in its twenty-six-year history. Iraq was the envy of all the other Arab states left under British or French rule, and its accomplishments became the goals of nationalists across the Arab world: independence and membership in the League of Nations.

As Britain ushered the young kingdom of Iraq into statehood, behind a facade of success lay a very different reality. Many Iraqis had never accepted Britain’s position in their country. Their opposition did not end with the 1920 uprising but continued to plague the British project in Iraq to the end. Though Faysal was in many ways a popular king, his own position was undermined by his reliance on the British. Iraqi nationalists increasingly came to see Faysal as an extension of British influence and to criticize him in the same breath as they condemned their imperial masters.

 

When Faysal arrived in Iraq in June 1921, the British went to work in promoting their candidate to the Iraqi throne. A number of local contenders threw their hats in the ring but encountered stiff British resistance. An influential notable from Basra who had made a bid for the throne, Sayyid Talib al-Naqib, went for tea with the British high commissioner’s wife, Lady Cox, and found himself arrested and exiled to Ceylon on the way home. The high commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, and his staff organized an exhausting tour for Faysal to visit towns and tribes across Iraq in advance of a national referendum intended to confirm Britain’s choice for Iraq’s throne. By all accounts, Faysal played his part well, traveling around the country meeting Iraq’s diverse communities and winning their allegiance. Even without British tampering,
he probably would have won the consent of a majority of Iraqis to be their king. But the British left nothing to chance. Gertrude Bell, the Oriental secretary in Baghdad, famously remarked that she would “never engage in creating kings again; it’s too great a strain.”
²¹

Faysal was crowned king of Iraq on August 23, 1921. The ceremony was held in the early morning hours to take advantage of the coolest time of day in the prodigious heat of the Baghdad summer. Over 1,500 guests were invited to witness the coronation. Sulayman al-Faydi, a notable from Mosul, described the “great splendour” of the coronation, which was “attended by thousands of guests, the roads leading to it crowded with tens of thousands of people.”
²²
Faysal stood on a dais flanked by the British high commissioner and members of the Iraqi Council of Ministers. The secretary of the council rose to read Sir Percy’s proclamation announcing the results of the referendum. Faysal had been elected king by 96 percent of the Iraqi voters. The assembled guests and dignitaries stood and saluted King Faysal while the Iraqi flag was raised to the strains of “God Save the King”—the Iraqis had yet to compose their own national anthem.
²³
The music could only have reinforced the belief that Faysal was Britain’s choice of king—as indeed he was.

 

Faysal’s honeymoon with his new subjects proved short-lived. Most Iraqis believed Faysal to be an Arab nationalist and expected him to free their country from British rule. They were quickly disappointed. Muhammad Mahdi Kubba, a student in a Shiite theological college in Baghdad at the time of Faysal’s coronation, captured the public’s mood in his memoirs. The British, he explained, “brought Amir Faysal, and crowned him king of Iraq, and charged him with the task of implementing their policies. At first the Iraqis welcomed the installation of Faysal, and they pinned their hopes on him, that his presence at the head of the government would open a new age of independence and national sovereignty.” Indeed, some leading notables gave their allegiance to Faysal on condition that he defend Iraq’s sovereignty and independence. One such skeptic was an influential cleric named Ayatollah Mahdi al-Khalisi, the head of Kubba’s theological school in Baghdad. Kubba witnessed al-Khalisi’s pledge of allegiance before a school assembly convened to welcome King Faysal. “Khalisi said prayers for King Faysal . . . [and] took [him] by the hand saying: ‘We give you our allegiance as King of Iraq, so long as you govern with justice, that the government is constitutional and parliamentary, and that you do not entangle Iraq in any foreign commitments.’”
²⁴
King Faysal promised to do his best, saying he had only come to Iraq to serve its people. Faysal knew full well that he would not be able to rule Iraq independent of Britain. As was mandated by the League of Nations, he was condemned to rule under British tutelage until Britain saw fit to concede Iraq its independence. Moreover, he was a stranger in Iraq, with only a
handful of army officers who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and the short-lived Kingdom of Syria, for allies. Until he had established his position in Iraq, Faysal would need Britain’s support to survive. The problem for Faysal was that his dependence on Britain cost him the support of Iraqi nationalists. The irony was that it was his dependence on Britain that undermined his ability to develop the loyalty of his own countrymen—right until his death in 1933.

Faysal’s predicament became apparent in 1922 when Britain drafted a treaty to regularize its position in Iraq. The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty scarcely veiled the degree of British domination over the Hashemite Kingdom—in the economy, diplomacy, and law. “His Majesty the King of Iraq,” the treaty stipulated, “agrees to be guided by the advice of His Britannic Majesty tendered through the High Commissioner on all important matters affecting the international and financial obligations and interests of His Britannic Majesty for the whole period of this Treaty.”
²⁵
Most revealing of British intentions was the duration of the treaty—twenty years—after which the situation would be reviewed and the treaty either renewed or terminated, according to the views of the “High Contracting Parties.” This was a formula for extended British colonial rule, not Iraqi independence.

The draft treaty faced widespread condemnation in Iraq. Even King Faysal discretely encouraged opposition to the treaty, both because of the limits it imposed on his power as king and to distance himself from British imperial policy. Some ministers resigned in protest. The Council of Ministers, unwilling to bear responsibility for so controversial a document, insisted on convening an elected constituent assembly to ratify the treaty. The British agreed to elections but wanted to ensure that the resulting assembly would endorse their treaty. Nationalist politicians opposed both the treaty and the elections, recognizing that the constituent assembly would serve only to rubber stamp an agreement designed to perpetuate British control.

Inevitably, Faysal’s credibility was compromised by the treaty crisis. Ayatollah al-Khalisi addressed another assembly of the students and teachers of his theological school. “We gave our allegiance to Faysal to be king of Iraq on condition,” the ayatollah intoned, “and he failed to fulfill these conditions. Consequently, neither we nor the Iraqi people owe him any allegiance.” Al-Khalisi threw in his lot with the nationalist opposition and began to issue fatwas (Islamic legal rulings) declaring the treaty unlawful and forbidding all participation in the constituent assembly elections as “tantamount to an act against religion, as a step that assisted non-believers to rule over Muslims.”
²⁶
The clerics made common cause with secular nationalists and organized a boycott campaign against the upcoming elections.

In the end, the British had to impose their treaty by force. The British authorities prohibited all demonstrations. Al-Khalisi and other opposition leaders were arrested and exiled. The Royal Air Force was dispatched to bomb tribal insurgents in the
Middle Euphrates region who had risen in protest. With the opposition quelled, the authorities proceeded with the elections. Despite the fatwas and the nationalists’ campaigning, the elections did proceed and a constituent assembly was convened in March 1924 to debate and ratify the treaty.

The Constituent Assembly met and debated the terms of the treaty in earnest from March to October 1924. In the end, the treaty was ratified by a slim majority. It remained hugely unpopular with the Iraqi public, though it set in motion a number of important developments: the Assembly approved a constitution for the new state and passed an electoral law that lay foundations for both a constitutional monarchy and a multiparty democracy. However, the means used by the British to get the treaty passed tainted the instruments of constitutional and parliamentary government with imperial associations that would ultimately undermine democracy in Iraq. The new state was not seen by Iraqi nationalists as a government “of the people, by the people, for the people,” but as an institution implicating Iraqis in British rule over their country.

 

If the British hoped things would go smoothly after the passage of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, they were to be sorely disappointed. Indeed, British and American war planners of 2003 would have found many relevant lessons to be learned from British experiences in the 1920s.

Divisions quickly emerged between the different regions and communities of the new Iraqi state, which had been forged from three very different Ottoman provinces. The problem was immediately apparent in the formation of a national army, one of the key institutions of independent sovereign states. King Faysal was surrounded by military men who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and were keen to establish an army in Iraq that would unite Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites through national military service. The project foundered in the face of active opposition from the Shiite and Kurdish communities, however, who objected to conscription as to any government initiative they believed gave disproportionate power to the minority Sunni Arab community.

The Kurds presented a particular challenge to the integrity and identity of the Iraqi state. Unlike the Sunnis and Shiites, the Kurds are not ethnic Arabs and they resented government efforts to cast Iraq as an Arab state. They believed this denied the Kurds their distinct ethnic identity. Some in the Kurdish community did not resist Iraqi claims to Arabness but used this as a pretext to demand greater autonomy in those parts of northern Iraq in which they represented an absolute majority.

At times it seemed that the only thing uniting the people of Iraq was their opposition to the British presence. King Faysal himself despaired of his subjects. Shortly before his death in 1933, the first king of Iraq observed in a confidential memo that
“there is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.”
²⁷

For the British, the cost of maintaining order soon began to exceed the benefits of perpetuating the mandate in Iraq. By 1930 the British reassessed their position. They had secured their interests in Mesopotamian oil through the 1928 Red Line Agreement, which awarded Britain a 47.5 percent share in the Turkish (Iraq) Petroleum Company—the French and Americans had only secured 23.75 percent of the shares each. They had established a friendly and dependent government in Iraq, headed by a “reliable” king, to protect British interests. British officials in Iraq increasingly came to the view that they would better assure their strategic interests by treaty than by continued direct control.

In June 1930, the British government concluded a new agreement to replace the controversial Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922. The terms of the new pact stipulated that Britain’s ambassador would enjoy preeminence among foreign representatives in Iraq. The Royal Air Force would retain two air bases in the country, and British troops would be assured transit rights through Iraq. The Iraqi military would be reliant on Britain for its training and provision of arms and ammunition. This still was not full independence, but it was enough to secure the country’s admission to the League of Nations. It also satisfied one of the main demands of Iraqi nationalists, who hoped the treaty would prove a first step toward independence.

Upon ratification of the 1930 Treaty of Preferential Alliance, the British and Iraqis agreed to the termination of the mandate. On October 3, 1932, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as an independent, sovereign state. Yet it was an ambiguous independence in which British civil and military officials continued to exercise more influence than was compatible with true Iraqi sovereignty. Such informal British controls would undermine the legitimacy of the Hashemite monarchy until its ultimate overthrow in 1958.