by A. N. Wilson
The twenty-first-century world is that which was carved out by the diplomats and politicians after the First World War, and nowhere is this truer than in the Middle East. We are still, nearly a hundred years after its demise, living with the consequences of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The British saw themselves as the natural successors of the Ottomans in the Middle East. It was there that their natural imperial instincts were most clearly shown, and the essential precariousness and illogicality of the British imperial idea was demonstrated. The indigenous populations of the region had been offered self-determination when the war was over, but this generous dispensation was made by men who had no authority to make the offer, on behalf of governments who had other ideas. The big powers who took part in the Paris Peace Conference were committed to the idea of self-determination so long as it did not interfere with their own imperialism; and most Europeans felt uneasy about the idea of anyone with a brown face being left in charge of his own country or destiny. That was the one inherent contradiction in the post-Versailles thinking of the British: they supported a self-determining Hungary or Czechoslovakia, but were much less certain that an Arab or a Punjabi was really capable of managing his own affairs without the patronage of the white man. Attempts by such people to become self-governing were nearly always described by the British at this date as ‘rebellions’. This is true in the newly established kingdom of Iraq. Glubb Pasha, a sympathetic and pro-Arab British soldier, for example, writes in his book Britain and the Arabs: ‘In May 1920, the British government announced its acceptance of a mandate for Iraq, as decided’ … not of course by the Iraqis, but ‘by the San Remo conference’ (which was composed entirely of Europeans). ‘In June 1920, the Iraq tribes rose in revolt.’13 You could as well speak of the Poles rising in ‘revolt’ when the Germans invaded in 1939. Throughout his exciting book, War in the Desert, about the part played by the RAF in establishing the kingdom of Iraq, Glubb talks about the Iraqis who fought against the British as ‘rebels’.
As well as the political problems being stored up for the Empire, there was the economic contradiction of British imperialist dreams. The Empire which was begun for commercial reasons in the eighteenth century was becoming by the 1920s a drain on resources; but for that very reason it was seen by some imperialists as a duty which the British needed to continue. The very fact that it made no economic sense any more to have an Indian Empire, for example, was one of the reasons some of the British went on wishing to keep it. The fact that it was losing money seemed to demonstrate that the true motives for staying there were British altruism, and a desire to share with the Indians the superior administrative skills of the British.
If today the world has problems in Israel–Palestine, in Iran, in Iraq, these stem directly from decisions which the British did or did not make in the crucial period of the early 1920s. So many different factors come into play when describing the origins of Iraq that it would require book-length treatment to make sense of it. Crucial as it is to the world’s concerns in the twenty-first century, we can see perhaps more clearly than we would have done a few years ago that Iraq was pivotal, not just for us today, but for them at the time. The British need to dominate and control this area, important in itself, was an early demonstration of so many factors which would colour the rest of the twentieth-century story, among them the British obsession with India, and dependency upon having an Indian Empire; the British need for oil; and the emerging importance of air power. In all these things, domination of the area now known as Iraq was vital. The population of the region was in some ways a secondary consideration as far as the British were concerned. Asquith’s question in the House of Commons on 15 December 1920, when they were discussing the necessity of hanging Arab ‘rebels’ in Iraq, goes to the heart of the Middle Eastern question: ‘Why are Arabs rebels? To whom traitors?’14 Successive generations of imperialists or quasi-imperialists in the Middle East have failed to ask themselves that question, or to answer it satisfactorily. In the French Senate one senator got up one day in 1920 and asked: ‘Why does not England take the mandate for Armenia since the U.S. have refused it?’ Another replied: ‘Because there are no oil wells there.’15
The Berlin–Baghdad Railway had been a major preoccupation of the British in the years before the First World War. The very existence of the railway prompted a British fear that Germany would block or dominate the route to India. Once the world’s navies went over to fuelling themselves with oil, the oil-producing regions of the world, and especially Mesopotamia, or what we today call Iraq, assumed a consummate importance. After the First World War, the British would see it as crucial that they dominated the Middle East. Churchill was Colonial Secretary in the postwar Lloyd George administration. The ending of the war had left formidable problems all over the world, with many trouble-spots now requiring, either directly or indirectly, the attention of that office. Apart from the all-consuming problem of Ireland, there were troubles to be considered in the Middle East and India. In May 1920, Anglo-Indian troops were rushed to the shores of the Caspian after Russians seized Enzeli in support of the Persian nationalists who resisted British attempts to impose a new treaty on them. America and France resisted vigorously any attempts by Britain to dominate Persia. Apart from having to help provide garrisons in the Rhineland, British forces were waging war in the North West Frontier, suppressing an uprising in the Punjab. The British were also ‘policing’ Syria. Although the Anglo-Indian army there was due to evacuate whenever the French took up their mandate, in the years following the First World War, Syria alone was costing the British £9 million a year. In April 1920, Jerusalem was disturbed by violent riots protesting against Jewish immigration. Crowds brandished pictures of Faisal, yelling: ‘Long live Faisal, our king!’ Administering a reluctant Egypt was also ruinously expensive to the British.
The establishment of a kingdom of Iraq could satisfy almost every requirement of the self-contradictory imperialist dream. For such as T. E. Lawrence it could appear that the old adventures of 1917 in the desert might have a happy ending. Faisal could be rewarded, and the Arabs be offered ‘self-determination’ under the protection of the Crown. For the more hard-bitten mercantile realists, however, there was the fact that control of Iraq was of supreme tactical and economic advantage. By the establishment of a protected ‘Jewish homeland’, as opposed to Jewish state, in Palestine, a presence in Transjordan, as well as occupying and controlling Iraq, Britain could achieve its goal of keeping a land-bridge between the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf, and guarding the shortest overland routes to India. In addition to this, Britain could build a pipeline to Haifa for the English-owned Iraq Petroleum Company.16
The situation in Iraq at the end of the First World War was a bloody mess. In July 1920 a young American diplomat, W. H. Gallaher, described in a letter sent care of the American consul the situation near Basra where 10,000 Arabs, instructed by German-trained Turkish officers, cut the railway line and blew up bridges. Gallaher foresaw the British losing Mosul, and possibly being driven out of Iraq before they established a presence there.
In my opinion the trouble all started from the bullheadedness of the British, first in persisting in the belief that the trouble out here is mainly religious whereas it is entirely political, and secondly in persisting in the belief that they can scare the Arab into submission. The average Englishman seems hurt and surprised, he can hardly believe that others do not like him, so he puts Arabian antipathy down to religion.17
It speaks volumes about the British mandate in Iraq that in 1940, despite the fact that the Iraqi Prime Minister General Nuri was broadly pro-British, the overwhelming majority of Iraqi public opinion supported either neutrality in the war, or open alliance with Nazi Germany. Herr Grobba, the German minister in Baghdad, was extremely popular among the ordinary Iraqis; German, Italian and Japanese investment in Iraq during the interwar years increased anti-British feeling. You find no explanation for this in Glubb Pasha’s Britain and the Arabs, beyond a gene
ralized suggestion that the Germans, Italians and Japanese, notoriously devious in their dealings, had mysteriously turned the Arabs against their natural friends. Glubb, a rather amiable soldier who had many friends in the Arab world and spent many years commanding the Jordanian army, gives a censored account of British involvement in Iraq from 1920 onwards, avoiding mention of the fact that, like the Anglo-American appointee and later enemy Saddam Hussein, in a subsequent generation, the British wished to subdue the rebellious population by dropping bombs of poison gas.
Churchill advocated the use of asphyxiating gases which would cause ‘discomfort or illness but not death’ in the dissident tribesmen. They were not in the event used in Iraq, since they were volatile and unpredictable in desert conditions. The so-called non-lethal gases, however, could ‘even kill children and sickly persons, more especially as the people against whom we intend to use it have no medical knowledge with which to supply antidotes’.18
Churchill, at forty-six, chubby, loud, overconfident, treated the Cairo Conference at which the kingdom of Iraq was established as something of a holiday. He sailed on the French steamship Sphinx from Marseille to Alexandria, a six-day journey, in early March 1921. Having visited Aboukir Bay, scene of Nelson’s victory over the French in 1798, he accompanied his wife by train to Cairo, where they motored to the Semiramis Hotel. Huge noisy aircraft circled ominously overhead, Bristol fighters and Handley Page bombers darkening the sky like metallic pterodactyls, while demonstrators gathered outside Shepheard’s shouting: ‘Down with Churchill.’ The group assembled by the Colonial Secretary to decide the fate of Iraq did not contain a single Arab. The only Arabs at the Cairo Conference were serving Churchill with his drinks while he daubed at his canvases. The other members of the delegation were Sir Hugh Trenchard (1873–1956); Sir John Salmond (1881–1968), another air officer, who had been commander of the Royal Flying Corps in France at the end of the war; Sir Percy Cox (1864–1937), a veteran of the Indian army, acting minister in Teheran and due to become high commissioner in Mesopotamia; and Colonel T. E. Lawrence. Jessie Raven, wife of the civil servant who was accompanying Churchill, J. B. Crosland, noted that: ‘When things were boring in the Hotel everyone would cheer up when Winston came in, followed by an Arab carrying a pail and a bottle of wine … he was unpopular with the Egyptians – many carriages had notices à bas Churchill – but he didn’t care. He took his easel out and sat in the road painting – he also talked so loudly in the street that the generals got quite nervous … He didn’t like the Arabs coming into the hotel, not even into the garden.’19 While the Colonial Secretary painted and got blotto, the officers agreed to give Amir Faisal the newly created kingdom of Iraq, and make his brother the king of Jordan.
It was highly significant that the Cairo Conference contained two such senior Air Force officers, for it was here that a decision was made of profound consequence, not only in Mesopotamia but throughout the world in the twentieth century. The military on the spot in Iraq were constantly telling the government in London that they needed more troops. ‘Whether we are to go or stay more troops are required’ was the repeated message, sent in cypher from the civil commissioner in Baghdad to the secretary of state for India in London. The Colonial Secretary had other plans. Air power had been used in the First War, sometimes with great effect. But it was in the postwar situation of Iraq that Churchill was able to experiment with the use of air power to police an entire country.
The comparative cheapness of air power, versus manpower, had been demonstrated first in Somaliland, then in Afghanistan. In Somaliland, Mullah Mohammed bin Abdullah Hassan, inspired by memories of the Mahdi’s holy war with the British in the times of General Gordon, excited a huge following. He claimed magical powers. His followers believed that he could push whole towns into the sea with his feet. No fewer than four British expeditions were mounted against him between 1904 and 1918, killing thousands of the mullah’s men and expensively engaging thousands of British troops. On 21 January 1920 the first RAF bombing raid was sent against him at Medishe. A mere 36 officers of the RAF’s Z Unit, with 189 enlisted men and one flight of six DH9 bombers, visited the mullah’s fort twice daily. Within a month, the mullah had escaped to Abyssinia and the RAF men were back in Britain. The total of British casualties was two native soldiers. Churchill told the House of Commons that it would have cost £6 million to mount a conventional land assault on the mullah; the RAF campaign had cost £70,ooo.20
The emir of Afghanistan was the next to be subjected to RAF bombing raids. In 1919 he had declared jihad against British troops in the North West Frontier of India. The RAF shipped one Handley Page V/1500 bomber to Kabul, where it dropped four 112-pound and sixteen 20-pound bombs. ‘Napoleon’s presence was said to be worth an army corps, but this aeroplane seems to have achieved more than 60,000 men did,’ wrote Basil Liddell Hart.21
Fired by the success of the RAF in Somaliland and Afghanistan, it was decided at the Cairo Conference that the defence of the new kingdom of Iraq would be conducted with air power.
In any case, as General Sir Aylmer Haldane (1862–1950) – he had been Churchill’s fellow prisoner in Pretoria during the South African War – reported from Basra in 1922, when the temperature had reached 128 degrees Fahrenheit: ‘This is not a white man’s country and it is absurd to pretend it is. The British troops hate it and naturally so.’ Churchill himself had noted in 1920 that keeping ground troops in Mesopotamia would have meant maintaining an enormous garrison simply in order to police ‘a score of mud villages, sandwiched in between a swampy river and a blistering desert, inhabited by a few hundred half-starved native families, usually starving’.22 By October 1922, all financial control from the War Office over Iraq ceased, and it was administered from the Colonial Office, saving millions of pounds. Iraq was to be administered by about 2,000 air force men.23
Faisal was installed as king, but Churchill made clear to Sir Percy Cox: ‘You shd explain to Faisal that while we have to pay the piper we expect to be consulted about the tune whether under Mandatory or Treaty arrangements. If he wishes to be a sovereign with plenary powers, he must show that he is capable of maintaining peace and order in Iraq unaided.’ He added: ‘I am quite sure that if Faisal plays us false, & policy founded on him breaks down, Br[itain] will leave him to his fate & withdraw immediately all aid and military force.’24 Churchill became edgy when his department was attacked in the press for wasting public money in Iraq. He was furious in the course of the year that there were still 21,632 Indian followers of the army in Iraq, and he wanted them all dispatched back to India.
The estimate was that £9 million would be required to finance Iraq in the coming year of 1922. ‘Not one farthing more than 7 will be asked by me.’ When he was asked for £150,000 to build a hospital in Baghdad, he refused. ‘There is no military need.’ Asked by Colonel Meinertzhagen (1878–1967), his Middle Eastern adviser, of Danish origin, mistakenly supposed by some to be Jewish, whether he realized that the air force was planning to use lethal gas bombs, which could damage eyesight or kill children and sick persons, Churchill replied: ‘I am ready to authorize the construction of such bombs at once.’25
One RAF officer explained the strategy:
One objective must be selected – preferably the most inaccessible village of the most prominent tribe which it is desired to punish … The attack with bombs and machine-guns must be relentless and unremitting and carried on continuously by day and night, on houses, inhabitants, crops and cattle. No news travels like bad news. The news of the punishment will spread like wildfire … This sounds brutal, I know, but it must be made brutal to start with. The threat alone in the future will prove efficacious if the lesson is once properly learnt.26
Not everyone was convinced by the policy of, in the words of Field Marshal Henry Wilson, ‘appearing from God knows where, dropping their bombs on God knows what, and going off again God knows where’,27 but the senior RAF officers in Iraq felt they had learnt valuable lessons, most notably Arthu
r Harris and Charles Portal, who would each head Bomber Command during the Second World War, and Edward Ellington, chief of Air Staff just before that war.28
In February 1922 the Prime Minister, Lloyd George, asked the cabinet ‘warmly to congratulate’ Churchill for having created a nation out of ‘a mere collection of tribes’.29 In July, Lawrence resigned from his advisory job at the Colonial Office, believing that he had done all he could to establish Faisal in his kingdom. In fact, very few of the optimistic predictions of the Cairo Conference came to pass. Because of the threat of Turkish invasion in the north, the British did in fact maintain ground troops in Mosul all the year round. Lloyd George complained that little had been done to exploit the oil. Churchill, after all his initial enthusiasm, was scared by all the bad publicity he was getting in the Press, and decided he would rather Britain withdrew from Iraq altogether. It was another of his bungles. ‘We are paying eight millions a year for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having,’ he wrote. ‘If we leave,’ Lloyd George complained, ‘we may find a year or two after we have departed we have handed over to the French and the Americans some of the richest oilfields in the world.’30 So Britain stayed until the 1950s, and must bear a heavy burden of responsibility for having created the ‘kingdom of Iraq’ in the first place, and then administered it so badly.