Enemy on the Euphrates (32 page)

But the biggest problem facing General Haldane was the way in which Wilson had scattered his POs all over the country, trying to control the most recalcitrant elements among the natives in every distant corner of his vast domain. Haldane would later record his scathing criticism of this practice:

The political officer, I have noticed on many occasions, and I refer to the soldier qua-political, seems to lose all sense of military principles soon after he joins the civil administration … If permitted, he would like to scatter broadcast the forces, often small in number, which are available for the maintenance of order. In fact he sees no harm in being weak everywhere and strong nowhere.
²⁹

Haldane agreed that control of some kind was essential. Indeed, his philosophy was that ‘coloured races in general … had to be dominated’ and that ‘it was absurd to regard them as being on the same level as European nations.’ The problem was that, including Northern Persia, the total length of communications along which travelled supplies and other requirements and which had to be guarded by his troops, amounted to 2,622 miles, of which 910 were by road, 856 by rail and a similar number by river. This huge dispersal of forces worried Haldane because it left him with only a tiny mobile reserve with which to meet any serious threat that might suddenly emerge at any distant point on this huge area of operations. However, his initial suggestions that some isolated detachments might be withdrawn from peripheral areas were immediately rebuffed by Wilson. In response, when Wilson asked for the dispatch of one company of regulars to support the Arab levies protecting the APO in one of his most distant outposts, Tel ‘Afar, about thirty-five miles west of Mosul on the edge of the great western desert, Haldane ignored the request.
³⁰
From that point on, the relationship between the two most senior British officials in Iraq – the one in charge
of the military, the other heading the Civil Administration – began to break down.

And then, there was the damnable heat. It was still early in the year and would obviously get much worse. The general had never experienced anything like it. His health demanded some respite from this inferno. Fortunately, there was a solution. As soon as possible he would leave Iraq and ascend into the cooler climes of Persia, where he could spend the summer examining the military situation there – plus a little rest and recuperation, of course.

Long before news that Britain had awarded itself the mandate for Iraq reached Baghdad there had been serious disturbances on the long, straggling frontiers of Colonel Wilson’s vast domain. To the north-east of Baghdad, Kurdistan, a vaguely delineated mountainous territory, considered a region separate from the currently occupied Iraq, but under British control, had exploded into resistance in May 1919 under the leadership of one of the leading Kurdish chiefs, Sheikh Mahmud of Sulaymaniyya. It had taken a substantial force of British-commanded Indian troops to crush his small army the following month and capture the wounded Kurdish leader. Sheikh Mahmud was tried by a military court-martial, found guilty of rebellion and sentenced to death. Wilson had wanted him hanged but in the end the decision was taken by General MacMunn, the current GOC-in-chief, to commute the sentence to a long term of imprisonment.

However, it was the ill-defined frontier with Faysal’s semi-independent Arab state of Syria which had given Wilson the greatest cause for concern. Particularly galling to Wilson was the knowledge that certain British officers ostensibly ‘advising’ Faysal were exhibiting considerable sympathy for the largely Iraqi-born military officers of al-‘Ahd and were turning a blind eye to their efforts to undermine Wilson’s ‘Indian’ regime. First and foremost among those whom Wilson now considered his enemies was Colonel T.E. Lawrence.

In January 1919 a number of Iraqi officers attached to Faysal’s Syrian regime had petitioned the British military authorities to return home.
Wilson was violently opposed to the idea, seeing it as being promoted by Lawrence. In this opinion Wilson was not without support from the India Office, which also took a dim view of Lawrence’s increasingly cavalier attitude to official British policy. Even Sir Arthur Hirtzel, head of the Political and Secret Department at the India Office, himself a critic of Wilson’s increasingly high-handed behaviour in Iraq, agreed that Lawrence was a ‘problem’. Writing to Lord Curzon, the foreign secretary, on 24 June 1919, he attacked ‘the propaganda (which) originated with Faysal and Lawrence’, adding that ‘there will be no peace in the Middle East until Lawrence’s malign influence is withdrawn.’ According to Hirtzel, Lawrence was now actively advocating that Iraq should be ruled by an Arab emir, ‘roaming about Europe on his own sweet will, playing one party off against another. Is it not possible to control him?’ he pleaded. But Lawrence would not be controlled and in a minute to the Foreign Office from Paris in July, he complained bitterly about the continuing ban on the Iraqi officers returning to their country of birth because of unfounded allegations that they might be ‘spreaders of undesirable propaganda’.

One month later, the transformation of a little-known junior British officer into a matinée idol commenced with a series of public lectures held at Covent Garden by the American journalist Lowell Thomas, who had met Lawrence at Aqaba in 1917. The lectures, which were originally entitled ‘With Allenby in Palestine and the Conquest of Holy Arabia’, were soon re-titled ‘With Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia’. They were a tremendous success. They played to the desire of the British public to indulge in a romantic fantasy about a theatre of war far removed from the horrendous conditions on the Western Front – one where ‘noble Arabs’ were led into battle by an intrepid Englishman in Rudyard Kipling mode who gained the trust of the ‘natives’ by becoming, or rather appearing to become, ‘one of them’.

This sudden national – and international – fame gave Lawrence further licence to engage in the political struggle to salvage something of the wartime British–Hashemite alliance with its vague promises of an independent Arab state throughout the Middle East. On 8 September 1919 he sent a letter to
The Times
in which he described at
some length the various wartime agreements concerning the region’s future administration, including both the McMahon–Husayn ‘promise’ of October 1915 and the Sykes–Picot Agreement of 1916. The latter Lawrence pronounced ‘unworkable’, adding that ‘the necessary revision of this agreement is a delicate matter, and can hardly be done satisfactorily by England and France without giving weight and expression also to the opinion of the third interest – the Arabs – which it created.’
¹

What the readers of
The Times
never saw was a further passage – suppressed by the editor – in which Lawrence added that he had originally been led to believe that the British government meant to live up to its promises to the Arabs, and that was why he had encouraged them to fight against the Turks. However, he now wished to inform the Arabs that he regretted what had been done because the government evidently had no intention of living up to the promises it had authorised him to make to them.

However, the following day, Lawrence drafted a second, and very strange, letter to Lloyd George (it was never sent) in which he appears to have suddenly changed his mind and decided that, as far as Syria was concerned, the prime minister intended to keep ‘all our promises’ to the Arabs and that his ‘relief at getting out of the affair with clean hands is very great’. Moreover, as a ‘sign of grace’ to the PM, Lawrence promised that he would ‘obey the F.O. and the W.O. and not see Faysal again’. Thereafter, Lawrence fired off various recommendations as to a prospective ‘Arab state’ to the Foreign Office and to Lord Curzon himself, recommendations which clearly illustrate the degree to which Lawrence was willing to accept a minimalist interpretation of ‘Arab state’ but which expressed his celebrated desire that ‘the Arabs should be our first brown dominion and not our last brown colony’.
²

However, the first of these letters also contained two very prescient statements about developments in Iraq. ‘I regard the situation in Mesopotamia as disquieting,’ Lawrence warned, ‘and if we do not mend our ways will expect revolt there about March next.’ To this he added the observation that, at present, ‘the dissatisfaction against us in Mesopotamia is mostly in the towns: and will become active when the
notables care enough to go out and make agreement with the country people.’
³
Unknown to the British – and even to Lawrence himself – that day was now fast approaching.

Lawrence was not alone in his view that men like Nuri al-Sa’id and Ja‘far al-‘Askari, who had changed sides during the war and led the Sharif of Mecca’s small contingent of regular troops, should be allowed to return to Iraq to form the nucleus of an Arab government – albeit one which would remain friendly to British interests. In November 1919 Gertrude Bell had returned to Baghdad after a lengthy tour of the Middle East during which she had been introduced to Iraqi members of al-‘Ahd in Damascus and concluded that some were considerably more moderate and pro-British than she had been led to believe and that more rapid progress towards independence for Iraq was warranted. In a report presented to Wilson called ‘Syria in October’ she expounded her new conviction that unless ‘moderate’ public opinion in Iraq was rewarded by some clear indications that the current pro-consular regime was to be phased out – sooner rather than later – there would be serious disturbances.

Wilson was furious. Although he forwarded her report to the India Office on 15 November, he added a covering letter stating that he entirely disagreed with its contents. Thereafter he was to consider Bell an enemy, although it was some time before she became aware of Wilson’s antipathy towards her. But Wilson’s stubborn refusal to consider even the slightest degree of Arab participation in ‘his’ regime was increasingly bringing him into conflict with his own masters in the India Office. On 16 July 1919 Sir Arthur Hirtzel told Wilson frankly, ‘You are going to have an Arab state whether you like it or not … otherwise we shall have another Egypt on our hands,’ adding that he ‘had hoped you would have realized … that the idea of Mesopotamia as the model of an efficiently administered British dependency or protectorate is dead’. Precisely what Hirtzel did have in mind was clearly expressed in a further communication to Wilson on 2 February 1920:

What we want is some kind of modicum of Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves, something which won’t cost very much, something that Labour can swallow consistently
with their principles [Hirtzel was anticipating a future Labour government] but in which our influence and political and economic interests will be secure.
⁴

With regard to frontiers, Wilson was firmly of the opinion that a British-controlled Iraq should encompass the whole of the former vilayet of Mosul including the Kurdish areas, and in a debate in the House of Commons on 25 March 1920, Lloyd George came out strongly in favour of Wilson’s position. ‘You might abandon the country altogether,’ Lloyd George hypothesised, ‘but I cannot understand withdrawing merely from Mosul, which is the most promising and important part of the country. Mosul has rich oil deposits.’
⁵

However, majority public opinion in Britain continued to be doggedly opposed to the whole Mesopotamian involvement – with or without Mosul and Kurdistan. Not that this had much to do with anti-colonialism. It was simply a matter of expense.
The Times
continued to rage against what it claimed was a huge waste of taxpayers’ money and Parliament repeatedly made it clear that it would not consent to incur liabilities with respect to Iraq for more than a very limited period. Nevertheless, even those who, reluctantly or otherwise, now accepted a reduction in the level of British involvement and the inevitability of some kind of Arab-led administration in Iraq, foresaw the danger that excessive parsimony would result in too rapid a run-down in the Iraq garrison. For example, in April 1920, Hirtzel complained, ‘What the High Authorities should be brought to realize is that, if what they are avowedly out for is oil and other commodities, they cannot have them without public security, and they cannot have public security under an Arab or any other Government without paying for it.’
⁶

At this juncture it is perhaps worth breaking off our narrative briefly to consider the implications of this quotation from a very senior British civil servant. When Hirtzel remarks ‘if what they are avowedly out for is oil …’ this is certainly not a hypothetical ‘if’: Hirtzel is not ruminating on the possibility that the ‘High Authorities’
might
be ‘out for oil’. Quite the contrary: he apparently knows it to be a well-established fact. What he is saying could just as well be paraphrased as ‘
Given that
the High Authorities are out for oil …’ Nor does the addition of ‘other commodities’ weaken the significance of Hirtzel’s casual admittance that the economic objective first articulated in the proceedings of the De Bunsen Committee, five years earlier, remained as cogent as ever.
⁷

‘Avowedly out for oil’ the High Authorities may have been, but Hirtzel himself seems to have been unaware that one of those ‘High Authorities’ at the War Office was already planning a substantial diminution in the manpower responsible for ‘public security’ in Iraq in spite of the fact that the preceding six months had witnessed some serious fighting with Arab nationalist bands on the ill-defined frontier with Emir Faysal’s semi-independent state of Syria, including a withdrawal of British troops which, as we shall see, had all the appearance – to both Arabs and British – of a defeat.

On 13 September 1919 Lloyd George and Clemenceau had concluded an agreement whereby British troops would start to evacuate Syria, the withdrawal to be completed by 1 November. The British withdrawal took place on schedule, and in the zone which had been controlled by British troops the major inland cities of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo were handed over to the Arab authorities. Unaware that this brief experiment in Arab independence was doomed and that the French general Henri Gouraud, appointed chef de l’armée du Levant on 9 October, was already drawing up his plans for a full-scale invasion of Syria, some of the former Ottoman army officers of Iraqi origin belonging to al-‘Ahd believed they now had an opportunity to compel the British occupiers of their own homeland to leave.