Pressure on the government was maintained by an all-party group of MPs including the Conservatives Lord Robert Cecil and Aubrey Herbert, and the left-wing Labour MP Colonel Wedgwood, who had served as a RNAS seaplane pilot during operations in support of the Arabs in the Red Sea during 1916. They kept up a steady pressure on the government and the thrust of their attacks followed closely the lines laid down by Lawrence. On 15 July, Herbert enquired whether Iraq could be returned to the pre-war system which had relied on Arab officials and cost £3 million. A week later, George Lambert, a senior Liberal MP, asked about the establishment of the Arab state in Iraq which General Maude had promised when he had taken Baghdad in 1917. Lord Robert Cecil also pressed this matter when he asked for an explanation of the delays in setting up the promised Arab state. Lambert returned to the offensive on 9 August and demanded an Arab government in line with the November 1918 Declaration. Colonel Wedgwood interrupted, ‘Why not send Colonel Lawrence to Baghdad?’–which prompted a Tory backbencher to respond, ‘Why not send Colonel Wedgwood?’
Lawrence and his allies encountered some opposition. On 3 August The Times published a letter from Captain Tytler, who had served in Iraq during the previous three years. Lawrence, he argued, knew little about the region, and his proposal to place it in charge of a Sunni Muslim prince would offend the large Shiite Muslim community which had been protected from Sunnite exactions by the Turkish government. Another Iraq veteran and a Conservative MP, Colonel Freemantle, queried what local support there was in favour of a Sunni chief from Hejaz as King of Iraq.
Such objections did little harm to Lawrence and the pro-Hashemite lobby. The political tide was now flowing fast in their direction. On 22 July Lloyd George told the House that the government accepted the creation of an Arab state in Iraq and four days later he announced that the local Chief Commissioner, Sir Percy Cox, had been ordered to prepare for a transfer of power.
This was a reverse for Curzon, the India Office and the Iraqi administration. The ill-will generated during and after Lawrence’s 1916 visit to Iraq intensified. Colonel Arnold Wilson, Cox’s deputy, had been singled out by Lawrence as chiefly responsible for much that had gone wrong in the country and he never forgave Lawrence. Afterwards he never missed a chance to denigrate his adversary and his achievements. In a sour but not entirely unjustified review of Revolt in the Desert, Wilson belittled the Arabs as soldiers and administrators. Their wartime sponsor, the Arab Bureau, ‘died unregretted’ in 1920; its members, ‘amply mirrored in these pages, appear to constitute a mutual admiration society–almost a cult of which Lawrence is the chief priest and Lowell Thomas the press agent’.5
Wilson interpreted the government’s change of policy towards Iraq as the result of pressure exerted by Lawrence and his allies. In fact their success owed much to good timing. During the summer of 1920 the government’s foreign and imperial policy was looking threadbare. It had been discredited by the futile intervention in Russia, which had finally been abandoned a few months before; the situation in Ireland was worsening; the scandal of General Dyer and the Amritsar shootings spluttered on, and there was growing chaos in the Middle East. Wrong-headed policies meant extra bills which a burdened Treasury duly passed on to the taxpayer at a time of economic slump. Lawrence, catching the current political mood, pressed the point that the public purse could no longer meet the expenses of unending repressive wars which also affronted the national conscience. Rethinking was urgently needed. ‘We are big enough to admit a fault, and turn a new page,’ he wrote in the Observer, ‘and we ought to do it with a hoot of joy, because it will save us a million pounds a week.’
New thinking required new men. The central figure in the recasting of Britain’s policy in the Middle East was Winston Churchill, who moved from the War Office to become Secretary of State for the Colonies in January 1921. He was assisted in his task by a newly created Middle East Department of experts with local experience and knowledge. On 4 December, Churchill’s secretary, Eddie Marsh, approached Lawrence and asked if he would join the department to advise on Arabian affairs. Lawrence accepted and, on 7 January, Churchill met the new member of his staff. He had had to overcome considerable opposition from officials who argued that Lawrence was temperamentally unsuited to the post. Lawrence agreed, but Churchill prevailed. After the crucial interview, he told his wife that Lawrence ‘has at last consented to have a bit put in his mouth and saddle fastened to his back’.
Churchill had high ambitions for Lawrence. It has been suggested that in 1922 and in 1925, when Allenby resigned as High Commissioner in Egypt, Churchill recommended Lawrence as his successor. Lawrence certainly imagined that he was a candidate and was both flattered and amused. In September 1934, he wrote to George Lloyd, ‘My statement, when they offered me the succession to Allenby–close the residency and take a room in Shepheard’s and ride about on a bike’, and so ‘run the Government of Egypt from underneath’. These suggestions could hardly have reassured the Foreign Office, which appointed the High Commissioner, although its officials may have taken more seriously Lawrence’s recommendation of his old friend George Lloyd. At other times Churchill may have dangled various colonial governorships, including Cyprus, in front of Lawrence.6
Before 1921, the two men had been casual acquaintances even though each was aware of the other’s reputation. Friendship quickly followed and was sustained by mutual admiration. Churchill and Lawrence were very alike, not least in the violent reactions they provoked among the less talented. Both were physically brave; both believed themselves instruments of historical destiny; both were visionaries; both sought to dominate whatever circle they found themselves in; both possessed demonic energy which alternated with moods of inert despair; both enjoyed reputations for wayward brilliance and both aspired to the mastery of English prose. In 1921 Churchill had yet to enjoy the worldwide adulation which followed his wartime triumphs. Then he aroused widespread and deep suspicion among his countrymen; he had entered politics as a Tory, crossed the Commons to become a Liberal and the agent of radical reforms which enraged his former colleagues. A masterful First Lord of the Admiralty, his career had foundered on the shores of Gallipoli, for which débâcle he took much of the blame. There had been recriminations about his recent crusade against Bolshevism which had drawn British armies into Russia for no purpose and confirmed fears that Churchill was both a warmonger and an implacable enemy of the working classes.
None of this mistrust of Churchill or his ideals rubbed off on Lawrence. In so far as such a creature ever existed for him, Churchill came close to Lawrence’s ideal of a public man. On hearing of his electoral defeat at Dundee in March 1922, he sent a note of consolation. ‘In guts and power and speech you can roll over anyone bar Lloyd George,’ he wrote, and later he told Eddie Marsh, ‘What bloody shits the Dundeans must be.’ Lawrence defended him vigorously to the socialist Shaws with an explanation of his friend’s mental anatomy. Churchill, he observed, has ‘a Tory instinct; a Liberal intellect: give him time and atmosphere to think, and he takes as gently broad a view of subjects as ordinary human kind can expect.’ He had supported Irish Home Rule, and his colonial reforms ‘did more solid good to our native clients than all the good wishes of their loudest adversaries’. ‘Winston in office does a great deal,’ he concluded, ‘and he is as fond of his friends as they are of him.’ On another occasion Lawrence recalled his former chief as ‘a great man’ for whom he felt ‘not merely admiration, but a very great liking’. He had been a sensitive and sympathetic colleague who had shown himself ‘considerate as a statesman can be: and several times I’ve seen him chuck the statesmanlike course and do the honest thing instead’.7
Churchill returned Lawrence’s affection and regard. Working alongside them in the Colonial Office, Meinertzhagen noticed Churchill’s open and profound admiration for Lawrence, which no doubt made him susceptible to whatever he advised. Churchill clearly believed himself in contact not only with a very remarkable man, but with a tangible link with Bri
tain’s heroic past and a living example of the finest qualities latent within his countrymen. In 1937 he wrote:
The fury of the Great War raised the pitch of life to the Lawrence standard. The multitudes were swept forward till their pace was the same as his. In this heroic period he found himself in perfect relation both to men and events.
Maybe that harmony was never recovered in peacetime, but Churchill sensed that, for all his reservations, ‘he was a man who held himself ready for a new call’. In August 1943, his imagination stirred by reports of Brigadier Orde Wingate’s exploits behind Japanese lines in Burma, Churchill thought another Lawrence had been found. Closer acquaintance with Wingate did not confirm his hopes and he soon lost interest.8
Churchill’s hero-worship of Lawrence was coupled with a profound respect for his opinions on all aspects of Middle Eastern policy. Moreover, Lawrence enjoyed the goodwill and trust of the Hashemites, who were now destined to play a central part in British designs for the region. Churchill had taken over the Colonial Office and secured unshackled control over Iraqi, Palestinian and Arabian affairs with a mandate to establish stability and make the area what it had once been under Ottoman government, a safe buffer zone between India and Europe. All this had to be achieved at the smallest possible charge to the British taxpayer. In effect, the solutions which Lawrence had continually demanded for the past two years had become official policy. In Paris he had dissented from the government’s policy: now it accorded with his private views.
Lawrence had never been a voice crying in the wilderness. His general principle of indirect rule through pliant, dependable local princes had always enjoyed support among many soldiers, diplomats and politicians who were aware of its success in India and northern Nigeria. The application of this system to Iraq was backed by Gertrude Bell, Sir Percy Cox’s Oriental Secretary, Cornwallis (who had been Faisal’s adviser in Damascus until November 1919) and Hubert Young, another of Churchill’s recruits to the Middle Eastern Department. They recognised that Faisal was pro-British and could rule with the assistance of his former Iraqi staff such as Jafar al Askari and Nuri es Said, who were all proven anglophiles.
One of Lawrence’s first tasks in January 1922 had been to sound out Faisal about his views and intentions. He proved willing to co-operate with Britain and, on 17 January, Lawrence reported to Churchill with the encouraging news that Faisal would repudiate his father’s claims to Palestine and would ignore ‘all question of pledges and promises, fulfilled or broken’. In return he hoped that an Arab state might be established on the Jordan, wanted British help to control Ibn Saud and intended to maintain his ‘watching brief’ for Iraq.9
Discovering Faisal’s political attitudes was part of the preparations for a conference scheduled by Churchill to open in Cairo on 12 March. Its agenda embraced all the problems then facing the British government in the Middle East, and everyone involved had been invited. Churchill took with him Lawrence and Young; the RAF was represented by Air Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, the Chief of Air Staff, and the army by Lieutenant-General Sir Walter Congreve, the Commander-in-Chief in Egypt and Palestine, and General Sir Edmund Ironside, who commanded in Persia. Spokesmen for the civil administrations included Sir Herbert Samuel, the High Commissioner in Palestine, and Sir Percy Cox, who held that office in Iraq and was accompanied by Gertrude Bell. Among Lawrence’s former brothers-in-arms were Deedes, now Civil Secretary to the Palestine government, Cornwallis, Jafar al Askari, who represented Faisal, and Joyce, who had been appointed adviser to the Iraqi Ministry of Defence.
General policy lines had already been laid down in London: what the conference had to work out was how best they could be translated into action. First came Iraq, where Cox had already undertaken the business of setting up the machinery of a new, Arab-dominated administration. The government now wanted Faisal as the country’s king, but Cox had discovered that the Iraqis were far from unanimous in his favour. Abdullah, chosen a year before by nationalist exiles, was considered unsuitable. Lawrence urged Faisal as the only man who could ‘pull together the scattered elements of a backward and halfcivilized country’, and, unlike his indolent brother, he was active. Furthermore, Lawrence added, his experiences at the Paris Peace Conference had given him the necessary sophistication to sustain the dignity of his office. Cox agreed, but on the ground that Faisal was the only candidate who might secure the backing of the majority of Iraqis. The next problem was one of window-dressing, since it had to appear that Faisal had been chosen by the Iraqis rather than imposed on them by the British. This was handled by Cox; he would return to Iraq, pardon imprisoned or exiled rebels and then Faisal would cable his supporters from Mecca and announce his candidacy for the throne together with acceptance of the terms of the British mandate. He would then proceed to Iraq where, it was hoped, he would find a groundswell of popular support.
The next matter in hand concerned the troublesome Kurds of northern Iraq, who, since the war, had twice rebelled against British authority and demanded a state of their own. Lawrence, who had known the Kurds intimately when he had lived in Karkamis, had initially dismissed their claims to national identity. In September 1919 he had written that the ‘Kurds have no corporate feeling and no capacity for autonomy or nationality,’ an opinion he subsequently revised, presumably in the light of the continued resistance in Kurdistan. At Cairo he argued against the Kurds being placed under Arab rule and was supported by Major Edward Noel, a political officer with first-hand knowledge of local conditions.10 Kurdish feelings towards the Arabs were summed up in two sayings: ‘Don’t encourage an Arab or he will come and commit a nuisance on the skirt,’ and ‘The Arab is like a fly; the more you shoo him away the more insistent he becomes.’ Cox overrode Lawrence and Churchill, who was also sympathetic to the creation of a Kurdish buffer state between Iraq and Turkey. The pro-consul considered that feudridden tribesmen were not the stuff of nations and that British money would be wasted trying to make them one. For the Kurds it was a woefully mistaken decision which led to over seventy years of intermittent war and, in the 1980s, genocide.
Administrative costing dominated the thinking of every delegate. The Cabinet expected Churchill to pare spending to the bone, which meant massive cuts in the military budget. It was a matter which deeply interested Lawrence, who had become an enthusiastic apostle of Trenchard’s new creed of air control. In essence this consisted of using RAF bombers, supported by armoured-car units, as an overwhelming force with which to overawe and, when necessary, chastise tribesmen who refused to keep the peace. These methods had already been tried on isolated occasions in Iraq, Egypt, Somaliland and India, and Trenchard had been heartened by the results. The army looked askance at air control which, if officially adopted, would jeopardise its traditional role as the empire’s police force. Cox also objected to it, for he wrongly believed it would be unable to handle large-scale insurgency in such inaccessible areas as Kurdistan.
Lawrence stuck up for Trenchard during the debate over air control. His opinions carried weight for he had had first-hand experience of Turkish air raids against the Arabs in Hejaz and had later witnessed the havoc wrought by RAF bombers against Turkish units to fight back. ‘Sir Hugh is right, the rest of you wrong,’ he told the conference in his customary, quiet, emphatic manner. The RAF presence in the Middle East would be discreet, unlike conventional garrisons of troops, which would arouse nationalist fears of alien domination. Air-power, Lawrence believed, was the natural medium for controlling vast regions of waterless terrain where armies could only move slowly, shackled to vulnerable supply lines. A dozen years later, Lawrence told Liddell Hart that he had converted Churchill, although he had been convinced of the advantages of air control long before the Cairo conferences.11
But by March 1923 Lawrence had had a change of heart. He told Colonel Wavell that air-power was useless against guerrillas and that ‘Bombing tribes was ineffective.’ This may have been what Wavell, a soldier, wanted to hear and at the time Lawrence was out of love w
ith the RAF. He returned to his former opinions once he was back in the RAF and stationed at Miramshah on the North-West Frontier, where he saw air control in action. He was full of its praises and informed Bernard and Charlotte Shaw, both pacifists, that the warplanes were ‘doves’ which kept the peace among fractious tribesmen. He had no moral qualms about the system since ‘Destroying those few poor villages hurt no one’ (warning leaflets were dropped before a punitive raid) and the raj was spared the cost of a ground war. Others, including some RAF officers, were less sanguine about methods which did in fact kill many tribesmen and their families, but air control continued in the Middle East until the late 1950s. It was one of Lawrence’s lasting legacies to the region.
Air control was designed to underpin British paramountcy in the Middle East. Politically, this rested on tractable Hashemite rulers, Faisal in Iraq and Abdullah in Jordan. In March 1921 Abdullah was still a thorn in Britain’s flesh. In January he had occupied Maan with 2,000 Hejazi Beduin, advertised himself as a champion of Arab nationalism and promised to throw the French out of Syria. He also clung to his empty pretensions to be king of Iraq, which were taken seriously by his brother Faisal, who, when asked in December whether he would accept the Iraqi crown, refused on the ground of his brother’s rights. Lawrence knew Abdullah and after the Cairo conference broke up it was his job to bring him to his senses.
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