The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (66 page)

You should … remove all persons to a place of safety outside the danger area and keep away until further notice is given to you. Government do not wish that your women and children should be harmed.… You are also warned that it is most dangerous to handle unexploded bombs.
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This last piece of advice often went unheeded; unexploded bombs were sometimes carried to military roads, placed in culverts and surrounded with brushwood, which was then ignited! In Iraq, delayed-action fuses were placed on bombs during operations in 1930–32 to prevent villagers creeping back to their houses under cover of darkness. During this campaign, leaflets were augmented by a loud-speaker system set up in a transport aircraft from which warnings were bellowed, a sensible measure in a country where less than one in ten of the population could read.
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Air control saved cash, but it generated a bitter debate between those who represented it as an efficient method of imposing order in wild and inaccessible districts, and those who represented it as a harsh and impersonal astringent. Champions of air control stressed its quickness. Whereas in the past a considerable time had elapsed between an act of defiance and its punishment, the chastising arm now moved swiftly. Every effort was made to prevent civilian deaths, and it was repeatedly pointed out that old-style punitive expeditions had always burned crops, killed livestock and demolished houses. Opponents of air control, often soldiers whose pride was hurt by being upstaged by the technicians of an upstart service, protested that it was inhumane. Colonel Francis Humphrys, an experienced North-West Frontier political officer who had also served as a pilot during the war, feared that air control would incense rather than pacify its victims:

Much needless cruelty is necessarily inflicted, which in many cases will not cower the tribesmen, but implant in them undying hatred and a desire for revenge. The policy weakens the tribesman’s faith in British fair play.
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There was certainly no sign of ‘fair play’, whatever that may have meant in terms of punishing tribesmen, during the early application of air control in Iraq. Within a few months of the Cairo Conference, Churchill was horrified by a report that described an air raid in which men, women and children had been machine-gunned as they fled from a village.
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Care was taken to ensure that the public never learned about this incident, and it was understandably excluded from a lecture given by Air-Marshal Sir John Salmon in which he explained what had been achieved by air control in Iraq between 1921 and 1925. His talk ended on an optimistic note: thanks to air control ‘a heterogeneous collection of wild and inarticulate tribes has emerged in an ordered system of representative government by the vote.’
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As well as bringing the semblance of political stability to Iraq, Salmon’s aircraft had been decisive in the repulse of an admittedly half-hearted Turkish invasion of Mosul province during the winter of 1922–3. This attack was an uncomfortable reminder that Lloyd George’s government had failed to neuter Turkey. During 1920 and 1921 every encouragement had been given to the French, Italians and Greeks to stake claims to parts of Asia Minor, but each power had been evicted by the armies of Atatürk. It was Britain’s turn in the autumn of 1922, when the Turkish nationalist leader turned his attention to the British forces on the Asian shore of the Dardanelles. Despite some ministerial misgivings, the cabinet put on a bold face and announced its intention to remain in Turkey. Appeals for help from the dominions were rejected by all save New Zealand. At home, arguments about prestige cut no ice with the public or the press. The Conservatives deserted the coalition, Lloyd George fell from power, and, after a nail-biting confrontation at Chanak, British forces left Turkish soil.

The short era of bluster in the Middle East was over. Public disquiet, a scarcity of cash and a lack of fighting men had driven Britain to abandon belligerence in favour of compromise. From 1922 onwards, British power in the region rested on paper promises. An accord with Turkey was reached at Lausanne in February 1923, which gave Mosul to Iraq, although it was feared that Atatürk might break his word. In 1925 exigency plans were drawn up by which, if Mosul was invaded again, a seaborne force with aircraft-carriers would attack the Straits.
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What was at stake in the dispute over Mosul was not Iraq’s integrity, but oil.

Middle Eastern reserves of oil were not yet as great a factor in international affairs as they became after 1945. During the 1920s the United States and Mexico produced over four-fifths of the world’s oil, although the greater part was for American domestic consumption. The demand was rising and even before 1914 preliminary exploration work was underway in Persia and Iraq. The Persian government had granted the Anglo-Persian Oil Company a concession covering half a million square miles which expired in 1961. Drilling began in 1909 and, three years after, work started on a massive refinery on Abadan Island. Output rose from 7.5 million barrels in 1919 to 57 million in 1934. In peacetime, the safety of the wells and the uninterrupted flow of the oil depended on the Persian government’s goodwill and ability to maintain internal peace. Both were guaranteed by Reza Pahlevi, a former Cossack officer, who, with British approval, had managed a coup in 1920, and made himself Shah five years later. Supported by the army, Shah Reza was the ideal ‘strong man’ who would cooperate with foreign business interests. Iraq’s Kirkuk oilfields were opened in 1927 and run by the Turkish Oil Company, which was financed by British, French and American capital. Its security and that of the supply pipeline which stretched to the Palestinian port of Haifa depended upon the Iraqi government.

Iraq and its oil remained firmly within Britain’s unofficial empire. In 1930, Britain had relinquished its mandate and Iraq received what passed for independence. In fact, it remained a British satellite under the terms of an alliance signed the same year. Britain trained and equipped the Iraqi army, was promised extensive base and transport facilities in the event of war, and retained the RAF aerodrome and garrison at Habbaniya.

The Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was, like its Egyptian equivalent signed six years later, a focus for nationalist resentment. The two agreements and the bases they guaranteed were reminders that Britain was still the paramount power in the Middle East and that, ultimately, even those states with theoretic independence would not be permitted to act in ways which might harm British interests. Britain had not had everything its own way: insurrections in Egypt in 1919 and across the Middle East a year later had forced its government to reach an accommodation with local nationalism. But the events of this period had destroyed much, if not all of the faith which enlightened and politically conscious Arabs had had in Britain. Edward Atiyah, a Lebanese Christian and Anglophile, who had been educated at the British school at Alexandria and then at Oxford, remembered the bitterness felt by those who had once believed in British honour, integrity and sense of justice:

The record of Anglo-French diplomacy during the War and immediately after it – the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, the decisions of the San Remo Conference had shocked even the most loyal among them, and the disillusion had deepened as a result of personal contact and direct experience of Mandatory rule.
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What had also shaken Atiyah’s admiration and respect for Britain was the crass behaviour of its representatives. He was dismayed by the aloofness of his British colleagues at Gordon College in Khartoum, where he was a teacher in the mid-1920s. When the governor-general visited the college, all the non-British staff were ordered to keep out of sight, a snub which deeply distressed Atiyah and converted him to a nationalism which had at its heart a loathing of Britain. Even so, he defended what Britain had achieved in the way of administrative reform and economic and educational regeneration, but he found it impossible to refute those Sudanese (they could equally well have been Egyptians or Arabs) who complained to him about the insults they had suffered from the British. ‘Your friends are hopeless,’ one claimed, ‘they will never get rid of their racial arrogance; there is no chance of our ever becoming friends with them. They say they are taking us into partnership, treating us as equals, but it is all words. At heart they remain rulers, fond of domination, resentful of our claims to equality in practice.’
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Readers of T.E. Lawrence’s
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
will be aware that he, in common with many of his countrymen, was distinctly cool towards Arabs like Atiyah, who had absorbed a Western education, and as a consequence believed themselves the equals of Europeans. Lawrence preferred those Arabs who were untouched by outside influences and who continued to live in a traditional manner according to ancient values. The nomadic Beduin and the empty spaces they moved across had a special romantic appeal, as did their hierarchical social order and the dignified aristocracy who occupied its summit. The old, tribal world survived uncontaminated in that imperial backwater, the Persian Gulf. Here, undisturbed by the twentieth century, autocratic sheiks governed with British advisers at their sides and British subsidies in their treasuries. Britain’s friendship still counted for something in this area; when Saudi tribesmen menaced the borders of Kuwait in 1929 two cruisers hove to and aircraft flew in from Iraq. The intruders quickly departed.

Following in Lawrence’s footsteps, and often inspired by his portrayal of the Beduin and their way of life, came a generation of British officers, of whom the most celebrated were Colonel Frederick Peake and Glubb Pasha, successive commanders of the Jordanian Arab Legion. They established a rapport with the Arabs, relished the delights of remote, unpeopled places, and discreetly looked after Britain’s interests in Jordan, Oman and the small sheikdoms of the Gulf.

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Nurturing Arab goodwill became increasingly difficult after 1936. Britain’s monopoly of power in the Middle East was coming under pressure as Italy made its bid to dominate the Mediterranean and extended its power in East Africa. The appearance of Mussolini and Hitler and their successive diplomatic engagements with Britain aroused enormous excitement in the Middle East:

The masses in the Arab countries were dazzled by Hitler’s might and repeatedly successful displays of force. Like the crowd that admires the hero of a cow-boy film they admired and applauded the German dictator. Simple, ignorant people, they saw Hitler as a glorified Tom Mix, avenging wrongs done to his country – the heroine in distress – after the last war, and they admired his prowess and success. They also derived a personal satisfaction from his success. It was humbling for England, and they liked to see England humbled. She had been the mistress of the world too long, the haughty governess of the Arab countries. Her sons in their dealings with the Arabs had acquired a reputation for arrogance which made them unpopular.
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This may be exaggerated. What was important was that Mussolini’s and Hitler’s triumphs between 1936 and 1939 coincided with Britain’s attempts to suppress the Arab Revolt in Palestine. It would be hard to overestimate the effect on Arab opinion of the events in Palestine; the rebellion and Britain’s efforts to overcome it became the focus of Arab nationalist passions throughout the Middle East. Palestine symbolised Arab impotence and British indifference towards Arab sentiment; it was not surprising that the Arabs automatically considered Britain’s international rivals as their friends.

The Palestinian imbroglio alternately baffled and exasperated successive British governments. As was so often the case when Britain found itself in charge of a racially and religiously divided province, the problem was how to balance the sensitivities and interests of one faction with those of the other. Under the terms of the Balfour Declaration, Britain had pledged itself to welcome Jewish immigrants into Palestine. It had, therefore, allied itself with the international Zionist movement which had been seeking a sanctuary for Europe’s Jews. Zionism was a practical response to the state-and church-sponsored anti-semitism within the Russian empire and the rising number of pogroms there. There was also the insidious, less openly violent anti-semitism which flourished in outwardly more enlightened countries such as France and Austria. Quite simply, before 1914, large numbers of European Jews faced a precarious existence, unable to rely upon the normal protection afforded by the state to its subjects. Matters became worse during and after the war: between 1917 and 1922, there was a resurgence of pogroms in two areas where anti-semitism was most virulent, Poland and the Ukraine.

The Jewish predicament won the support of many humane and liberal-minded British statesmen such as Balfour, Churchill and Leo Amery, the latter two stalwart supporters of Zionism between the wars. But there were, from the moment that the Balfour Declaration was announced, deep misgivings among the Arabs. They naturally asked what would be the status of the Jewish refugees who entered Palestine, and how many would come.

T.E. Lawrence, who later converted to Zionism, shared Arab apprehensions and was worried about a mass influx of poorer, Eastern European Jews, although he would have welcomed educated, middle-class American or British Jews, the sort he had known at Oxford.
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His thoughts are interesting since they reflected the anti-semitism which had existed in Edwardian Britain, where the arrival of large numbers of working-class Jews from the Russian empire had led to an upsurge in hostility towards ‘aliens’. Among the upper classes there were undercurrents of prejudice against Jews who had prospered in business, and there was a thread of thinly-veiled anti-semitism running through the works of the Catholic traditionalists, Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton. Alarmist speculation about links between Jews and Communists and the ‘Protocols of Zion’ hoax of 1919 fostered anti-semitism among those on the far right. In 1920, Colonel Richard Meinertzhagen, an ardent Zionist, was convinced that most of his brother officers serving in Palestine were tainted with anti-semitism, and therefore incapable of disinterested judgements in their dealings with Jews and Arabs.
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