Kuwait’s shrewd ruler, Emir Ahmad, had been conducting prolonged negotiations over an oil concession with both APOC and the American Gulf Oil company. But the bargaining had become desultory because the oil companies were cutting back on their investments during the world depression. Britain’s insistence on excluding non-British companies was also a stumbling-block. However, in 1932, following the precedent set in Bahrain, Britain finally succumbed to intensive US pressure to an ‘open-door’ policy for US oil companies in Kuwait. With the discovery of oil in Bahrain and the conclusion of the Saudi agreement with Standard Oil in the following year, the pace quickened. After lengthy negotiations behind the scenes, APOC and Gulf Oil agreed to bury their differences and form an alliance to negotiate jointly as equal partners for a concession. For this purpose they formed the Kuwait Oil Company (KOC) on a fifty–fifty basis. After further negotiations, in which Emir Ahmad fought successfully to limit the amount of political control which Britain insisted on maintaining over KOC through a separate agreement it reached with the company, a concession agreement for seventy-five years covering all Kuwaiti territory was signed in December 1934.
The remaining Arab shaikhdoms on the western side of the Gulf all had exclusive treaty agreements with Britain. But the British government was still alarmed at the possibility that the precedent of King Ibn Saud granting a concession to a purely American company might be followed by one of the fiercely independent rulers. A company called Petroleum Concessions Ltd, in which Anglo-Dutch, US and French companies held shares in the same proportion as in the Iraq Petroleum Company, was therefore formed to negotiate. The ruler of Qatar granted it a concession in 1935, but the rulers of the six Trucial States (so called since the 1853 truce with Britain under which they undertook to abjure sea warfare) proved more difficult. They bargained and prevaricated for better terms, and various forms of pressure – including threats to confiscate their pearling fleets, on the grounds that they were still engaging in the slave trade – had to be used until they gave in. The last to succumb – in 1939 – was the eccentric but wily ruler of Abu Dhabi, Shaikh Shakhbut, who had become something of a legend in the Gulf since, after his succession in 1928, he succeeded in restoring stability to Abu Dhabi following twenty years of fierce family strife. He was convinced that there was oil in his territory – bubbles of oil had been seen around some of Abu Dhabi’s two hundred islands – and the oil men agreed that it was the most promising of the Trucial States. He therefore drove a hard bargain for the concession. He had to wait twenty years before he was proved right, but oil was then found in enormous quantities.
In Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Qatar, oil on a commercial scale was discovered shortly before the Second World War but its development had to be postponed until after the war. However, in 1939 it was already apparent that the territories surrounding the Persian Gulf would become of enormous strategic and economic importance. In fact by the second half of the century their reserves of oil and natural gas amounted to some two-thirds of all those that had been discovered.
10. The Second World War and Its Aftermath
The Middle East was as heavily involved in the 1939–45 conflict – the culmination of what has been aptly described as Europe’s thirty-year civil war – as in that of 1914–18. The Turkish Republic was neutral. The new semi-independent nation-states which had been formed from the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire were non-belligerent, but they were under British or French occupation and therefore lay within the zone of war. Political life was largely frozen for the duration of hostilities.
As in the First World War, the retention of India was of supreme strategic and political importance to Britain. The protection of oil supplies from Iran was also a considerable secondary concern. Once again Egypt became Britain’s great Mediterranean base. With a neutral Turkey and Iran, the Middle East region seemed fairly secure. The British realized with relief that, as a result of the 1939 White Paper on Palestine, the Palestinian Arabs were not going to embarrass them while they were at war with Germany.
The situation was transformed by Italy’s entry into the war on Germany’s side in June 1940. British forces in Egypt were engaged against the Italians in Libya, and British forces in the Sudan fought the Italian garrisons in Eritrea. Italian aircraft raided Egypt, and the country expected a full-scale Italian invasion. As in 1915, reinforcements were brought in from Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Britain’s determination to keep the Axis powers out of the eastern Mediterranean caused it to divert tanks from the home front to Egypt even when the danger that Hitler would invade Britain was at its height.
The battle in Egypt’s Western Desert rolled backwards and forwards. In September 1940 the Italians entered Egypt and reached as far as Sidi Barrani; by the end of the year some spectacular British victories had driven them back into Libya. But, with German reinforcements, the Axis forces, now commanded by General Rommel, re-entered Egypt in April 1941. In the following month the Germans captured Crete, and the British hold on the eastern Mediterranean became perilous.
The danger for Britain was compounded by the situation in Syria and Iraq. Although Iraq broke off relations with Germany in September 1939, an Anglophobe nationalist group of civilians and military became increasingly dominant, encouraged by Germany’s victories over France. In March 1941 they seized power in a putsch, and Rashid Ali al-Gailani became prime minister in a government with pro-Axis leanings. The regent, Nuri al-Said and other leading politicians had to flee the country. The government’s refusal of a British request to move troops across Iraq under the terms of the Anglo-Iraqi treaty led to open, if subdued, hostilities. Iraqi troops surrounded the British base at Habbaniyah. But Iraqi opinion was divided and uncertain, and promised Axis help for the rebels was too little and too late.
A small Indian force was landed at Basra, to be joined by Arab troops from Transjordan under Glubb Pasha. The revolt collapsed after a few weeks; the Rashid Ali government fled and the regent returned. Successive Iraqi governments co-operated with the Allies for the rest of the war.
Following the fall of France in 1940, Syria and Lebanon came under the control of the Vichy government. Britain promptly declared that it would not allow a German occupation of the two Levant states, but the Vichy government – anxious to secure as many concessions as possible from Germany – instructed the high commission in Beirut to collaborate fully with the Axis. The climax came in June 1941 when German aircraft en route to help Rashid Ali in Iraq were allowed to use Syrian airfields. On 8 June 1941 a mixed force of General de Gaulle’s Free French and British troops launched a three-pronged invasion from Palestine. Despite some stiff resistance by the Vichy forces, the fighting lasted only six weeks, at the end of which an armistice agreement was signed. Vichy troops were given the choice of joining the Free French or of repatriation to France.
The Soviet Union’s entry into the war in July 1941, followed by that of the United States in December, provided reassurance that the Allies would prevail in the end. In the winter of 1941–2 the Axis forces were again pushed back into Libya. But the darkest hour for the British in the Middle East was still to come. With Japanese victories in the Far East threatening Malaya and India, it became the turn of the British forces in the Western Desert to be deprived of tanks, which were diverted eastwards. In January 1942 Rommel again began to advance towards Egypt.
Among the Egyptian people, attitudes towards the war were mixed. The great majority of the politicians were against declaring war on Germany, either because they felt it was not Egypt’s war or because they were far from certain that the Allies would win. On the other hand, Egypt more than fulfilled its obligations under the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian treaty. German nationals were interned and German property was placed under sequestration.
King Farouk had no special affection for Germany, but many of his closest circle were Italian, and Ali Maher, his favoured prime minister, was known to have pro-Axis sympathies. When Maher failed to take action against Italian nat
ionals, Britain’s ambassador Sir Miles Lampson pressed the king to dismiss him. Farouk reluctantly complied and replaced Maher with two successive prime ministers who were much more sympathetic to the Allied cause. In August 1941 Egyptian troops took over guard duties in the Suez Canal area.
However, there were many in Egypt, apart from the king, who remained so doubtful about the outcome of the war that they felt Egypt should have a more neutral government as an insurance against an Axis victory. Others went further, believing that Egypt should entirely assist such a victory – these included General Aziz al-Masri, the Egyptian chief of staff, and a young captain, Anwar al-Sadat. Sadat was caught working for the pro-German underground by British Intelligence and was interned.
The British prime minister, Churchill, had never had much patience with Egyptian nationalist feelings and had none in time of war. He complained continually that the Egyptians were taking insufficient action against enemy agents who ‘infested’ the Canal zone. As soon as Churchill became aware of the doubtful loyalty of the Egyptian army to the Allied cause, he insisted that Egyptian troops be sent back from the Western Desert to the Delta and that General Aziz al-Masri should be dismissed. Any possibility of allowing King Farouk to bring Ali Maher back to power was ruled out.
The crisis between Britain and the king reached its climax early in 1942. Under Allied pressure the government decided to break off relations with Vichy France. The king, who was absent from Cairo and not consulted, was furious and forced the prime minister to resign. To have replaced him with Ali Maher would have been too provocative, but he showed his intention of having Maher as a member of a cabinet in which he would hold the real power. Lampson, on the other hand, wanted to see a Wafdist government installed. Rommel was advancing in Cyrenaica, and the cry of ‘Long Live Rommel’ was heard in the streets of Cairo. Lampson knew that, while it still enjoyed widespread popularity, the Wafd would provide the most effective support for the Allies. He also knew that Farouk would resist the return of the Wafd he detested.
Lampson secured the support of the British government and military chiefs for the use of force. He delivered the king an ultimatum that if he refused to ask Nahas Pasha to form a government by 6 p.m. the following evening (2 February) he would have to ‘face the consequences’. When the ultimatum expired with no reply, Lampson had the Abdin Palace surrounded by British troops and armoured cars and forced his way in to see the king, bearing an instrument of abdication. After hesitation, the king capitulated at the thirteenth hour and agreed to call Nahas. Lampson was dismayed because he had hoped to be permanently rid of Farouk.
This humiliation of the monarchy was a seminal event in the modern history of Egypt. For all his faults, the king still personified Egypt, and nationalist opinion was outraged. One senior officer, General Muhammad Neguib, requested the king’s permission to resign from the Egyptian army. The 24-year-old Lieutenant Gamal Abdul Nasser, then stationed in Sudan, was one of a group of young officers who began to dream of taking action to restore Egypt’s army.
At this crucial point in the desert war, Britain was concerned only with securing the Egyptian domestic front. Rommel’s forces continued their advance, to reach within sixty miles of Alexandria. Exhausted and low in morale, some thousands of British troops deserted and hid in the Delta. As the British embassy burned its files, the British civilians in Egypt came close to panic. Women and children were sent by train to Palestine. But Nahas and his government, having thrown in their lot with Britain, kept their nerve. They interned all suspected Axis sympathizers, including Ali Maher, and refused to accept the inevitability of German occupation even when Rommel’s radio was triumphantly announcing his imminent arrival in Cairo.
In August 1942 Churchill came to Cairo and it was agreed that General Montgomery should take over the Eighth Army. On 23 October the battle of Alamein, a turning-point in the war, marked the beginning of the Axis decline in the Middle East. Within seven months the remaining German and Italian forces had evacuated North Africa. The war receded from Egypt, but the country became an even vaster war base for the Allies, with some 200,000 troops either stationed, in transit or on leave in Egypt. An American presence made itself felt, and the Anglo-American Middle East Supply Centre made Egypt the focus of the Allied war effort in the Middle East and North Africa.
Reza Shah of Iran was less fortunate than Farouk. His country was strategically as important as Egypt to the Allies, and the huge German advances after the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 raised the possibility of a German occupation of Iran and its oilfields. Since Russia and Britain had long been the aggressive imperialist powers in Iranian eyes, nationalist sentiment, especially among the ruling class and senior army officers, tended to be pro-German. The Nazi regime had begun seizing the advantage before the war. German companies played a leading role in Iranian industrialization, German propaganda was vigorous and Nazi agents were active throughout the country.
As soon as the Soviet Union entered the war, it began to demand that German agents and saboteurs should be curbed. Reza Shah appealed to the United States to support Iran’s neutrality but the United States, although still not a belligerent, was already bound by the Lend-Lease Act of 1941 to help Britain to supply the Soviet Union with arms through Iran. Washington was unsympathetic and urged Reza Shah to help the Allies ‘to stop Hitler’s ambition of world conquest’.
The crisis came to a head when the Iranian government officially rejected a joint Soviet and British request to send arms supplies across the country to the Soviet Union. On 25 August 1941 Soviet and British troops invaded Iran simultaneously from the north and south. Iraq provided a convenient base for the British invasion following the replacement of the Rashid Ali government by a pro-British regime. Iranian troops could offer little resistance, and on 16 September Reza Shah abdicated in favour of his 23-year-old son, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. In January 1942 a tripartite treaty of alliance was concluded with Britain and the Soviet Union, both of which undertook ‘to respect the territorial integrity, sovereignty and political independence of Iran’ and ‘to defend Iran by all means at their command from aggression’. Britain and the Soviet Union defined their respective zones, with the British occupying the south, centre and west and the Russians holding the three northern provinces of Azerbaijan, Gilan and Mazandaran.
The Russians claimed the right of intervention under the terms of the Persian–Soviet treaty of 1921. However, the new agreement stated that the Soviet and British forces permitted to remain on Iranian soil did not constitute an occupation and would be withdrawn not later than six months after the end of the war. In return, Iran undertook to render non-specified military assistance to the Allies. In September 1943 Iran declared war on Germany. In December, Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill, after holding their first joint meeting in Tehran, issued a declaration expressing their desire for the maintenance of the ‘independence, sovereignty, and territorial integrity’ of Iran.
The US role in Iran steadily increased during the war, and by 1945 there were 30,000 American troops in the country, although they were non-combatants employed in dispatching supplies to Russia and managing the Trans-Iranian Railway, and they operated as part of the British forces, who were responsible for law and order.
Middle East Reactions: Nationalism, Pan-Arabism and Islam
Italy’s surrender in 1943 and the removal of the threat of a German invasion of the Middle East enhanced Britain’s position in the region. However, the new situation also meant that Britain was less able to use the overriding exigencies of the war to maintain control over political developments. The minority of Middle Easterners – Arabs and Iranians – who had calculated on an Axis victory to secure their nationalist demands had been disappointed. This did not mean that the majority abandoned their aim of securing the removal of European domination.
The situation in Syria and Lebanon was unusual in that Britain had helped Charles de Gaulle’s Free French to oust the Vichy regime in 1941 on the understanding tha
t France would recognize the two countries’ independence. This was declared by General Catroux, de Gaulle’s representative, before the invasion of the Free French force and was underwritten by Britain with the somewhat ambiguous formula that Britain would recognize that France had a predominant position over the other European powers once the promises of independence had been carried out.
De Gaulle, however, did not believe that the Free French had liberated Syria and Lebanon in order to give them up. He wished to secure treaties based on the 1936 agreements which fell well short of independence. The Syrians almost unanimously rejected the idea of a treaty, hoping to bring matters to a crisis while British troops were still present.
Even in Lebanon, in spite of the traditional Maronite reliance on French protection, the desire for independence was dominant. The new mercantile classes, both Christian and Muslim, felt strong enough to stand by themselves without French protection and they disliked the mandate’s limitations on their activities. In 1943 an unwritten ‘National Pact’ was reached between certain Christian and Muslim leaders to the effect that Lebanon should remain independent within its existing frontiers but should follow an independent Arab foreign policy. Elections held in the same year led to the victory of those opposed to the mandate, and the new government proposed to remove from the constitution those clauses which safeguarded French control. The French replied by arresting the president of the republic and most of the government. Faced with popular disturbances, world-wide protests and a British ultimatum, the French gave in. The ministers were released and the constitution amended.
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