A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  In this fatherly way, Clayton served as mentor to the adventurous young archaeologists and orientalists who flocked to Cairo to serve in the intelligence services during the war. He must have had outstanding human qualities, for his young men, though diverse in other regards, all liked and respected him. They saw him as shrewd, sober, sensible, and steady. He was about ten years older than most of them and, whether or not they took it, they listened to his advice. For them he was the incarnation of the old hand.

  III

  Although the Foreign Office and the India Office often disputed the views or proposals that Wingate and Clayton espoused, nobody during the war questioned their professional ability or their expert knowledge based on long experience in the Middle East. It was not until years after the war had ended that David Lloyd George, using information that became available from the German side, made a case for the proposition that they were dangerously incompetent.

  According to Lloyd George, the British authorities in Cairo were blind to what was happening behind enemy lines. In particular, he wrote, there was a point in 1916 when the Ottoman Empire was too exhausted to continue fighting. If the British forces in Egypt had launched an attack on Sinai and Palestine then—or even in 1915—little effort would have been needed, according to Lloyd George, to “have crumpled…up” the Turks, which in turn would have allowed Britain to move through the Balkans to defeat Germany.5 The opportunity was missed, according to him, because the intelligence services either did not know, or failed to report, what was going on inside the Ottoman Empire. As a result, he claimed, the British government failed to win the war during the years when the war still could have been won on British terms.

  A more easily proved failing of Cairo Intelligence was that it was unaware of the extent to which the Egyptian government had been infiltrated by enemy agents. It was not until that expert on Ottoman affairs, Wyndham Deedes, went to work in Cairo in 1916, and discovered that the Egyptian police forces were honeycombed with spies, that the Turkish network was smashed.

  An early sign of the inadequacy of Cairo’s intelligence apparatus that ought to have sent up a warning signal, but did not, appeared in the autumn of 1914, about a month before the Ottoman war began, when the local British army commander, General Maxwell, wrote from Egypt to Lord Kitchener that “It is very difficult to put a true value on all the reports from Constantinople, Asia Minor and Syria…I can get no information direct as the Turks guard the frontier very closely—our agents cannot get through—those we had on the other side have been bagged.” He added a disquieting note about the intelligence imbalance: “The East is full of German spies and they get fairly good information.”6

  At least Maxwell was aware that he did not know what was going on in Constantinople. Wingate and Clayton fell into the trap of believing that they did. They accepted Gerald FitzMaurice’s mistaken theory that the Ottoman government was in the hands of a group of pro-German Jews. At the end of 1914 General Wingate blamed the war on “a syndicate of Jews, financiers, and low-born intriguers” in Constantinople.7

  He and his colleagues compounded the error by linking it to misleading information about the state of Moslem opinion. Just after the war began, Storrs sent Maxwell a report of remarks made by a Syrian informant about public opinion behind enemy lines. According to the informant, the inhabitants of Syria were filled with hatred of the Ottoman government because they believed it would support Zionism. “These Zionists are closely connected with Berlin and Constantinople and are the most important factor in the policy of Palestine,” the informant stated.8 The false rumor that Berlin and Constantinople were about to back Zionism echoed back and forth through the years, and later in the war misled the British Cabinet into believing that it had to issue a pro-Zionist Declaration immediately.

  Storrs wrote to Kitchener (which is to say, to his personal military secretary, Lieutenant-Colonel Oswald FitzGerald) at the end of the year. He commented on plans for the postwar Middle East, and claimed that Moslems would oppose a Jewish Palestine because they blamed Jews for the war. “Again would not Islam be extremely indignant at the idea of handing over our conquests to a people which has taken no part as a nation in the war, and a section of which has undoubtedly helped to thrust the Turks over the precipice.”9 In fact, as Foreign Office and Arab Bureau reports later were to show, Moslem opinion, even in non-Turkish areas, generally supported the Ottoman Empire and its alliance with Germany. Storrs was wrong, too, in supposing that Moslems were opposed to a Jewish Palestine because of the war; Moslem opposition to a Jewish Palestine had arisen long before the war, in the wake of Zionist colonization at the end of the nineteenth century.

  A characteristic flaw in the information-gathering conducted by Clayton and Storrs was that they frequently accepted information supplied by a single informant without testing and checking it. Instead they seemingly relied on the sort of intuitive ability that Steevens had ascribed to Wingate: the gift of being able to divine the extent to which any native is telling the truth. John Buchan, who later became wartime Director of Information in London, wrote in the second chapter of his adventure novel Greenmantle that “the truth is that we are the only race on earth that can produce men capable of getting inside the skin of remote peoples. Perhaps the Scots are better than the English, but we’re all a thousand percent better than anybody else.” Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs acted as though they understood the natives of the Ottoman Empire as well as did the Scots hero of Buchan’s novel. As it transpired, their ability to understand the natives was quite limited.

  In evaluating reports that there was dissatisfaction with Ottoman rule in some sections of the empire, British Cairo particularly misunderstood one of the salient characteristics of the Moslem Middle East: to the extent that it was politically conscious, it was not willing to be ruled by non-Moslems. Behind enemy lines there were Moslems who were dissatisfied with the Young Turk government, but they proposed to replace it with a different Turkish government, or at any rate a different Islamic government. They regarded rule by a Christian European power, such as Britain, as intolerable.

  Storrs apparently believed that he could get around that by pretending that it was Egyptian rule that would be substituted for Turkish rule. He proposed to create what would appear to be a new Egyptian empire to replace the Ottoman Empire in the Arabic-speaking Middle East; it was behind that façade that Lord Kitchener would rule as Britain’s viceroy. Storrs derived particular satisfaction from reports that Ottoman rule had become unpopular in Syria; he believed that he could offer the Syrians a popular alternative. Accurate reports, received with some frequency, indicated that—other than the Maronites, a Christian sect with ties to the French—most Syrians who held political views objected to the prospect of being ruled in the postwar world by France, and since Storrs and his colleagues took it for granted that the Arabic-speaking peoples could not govern themselves, the only possibility left was the one advocated by Storrs: the incorporation of Syria into British Egypt.

  Seen in that light, reports that Syrians considered the Germans and Turks to be Zionists and the French to be detestable meant that the Syrians must be pro-British. Summarizing a memorandum submitted by a Syrian leader who called for Arab independence, Clayton stated that “it is to England, and to England alone, that both Syrian Christians and Pan-Arabs are turning.”10 On 2 February 1915, Storrs wrote to FitzGerald/Kitchener that “There is no doubt that local Syrian feeling, both Christian and Muslim, is strongly in favor of our adding that country to the Egyptian Sultanate…”11 The question was whether actively to promote that feeling. The newly arrived High Commissioner in Cairo, McMahon, writing the same day to FitzGerald/Kitchener to seek guidance, outlined the alternatives as they had undoubtedly been described to him by Storrs and Clayton: “The Syrians want our intervention and say that unless we can give them some assurance of support they will have to turn to the French altho they would prefer us to the French.”12

  Wrong-headed and professionally ambitious,
Britain’s men on the spot supposed that Arabs wanted to be ruled by Europeans, and buoyed by this mistaken belief, Kitchener’s lieutenants aimed at taking control of Syria. France’s men on the spot were wrong-headed and ambitious too; and they also aimed to take Syria.

  IV

  During the Crusades, French knights won kingdoms and built castles in Syria; and in 1914—a millennium later—there were still Frenchmen who regarded Syria as properly part of France. France maintained close ties with one of the Christian communities along the Mount Lebanon coast of Syria, and French shipping, silk, and other interests eyed commercial possibilities in the area. Thus for religious, economic, and historical reasons, France saw herself as having a role to play in Syria’s affairs.

  The moment that the Ottoman Empire entered the war, French officials in the Middle East (like their British counterparts, Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs) therefore formulated plans to annex Turkey’s Syrian provinces. France’s minister in Cairo and Consul-General in Beirut immediately joined in urging their government to invade the Lebanese coast. Their quixotic plan called for a landing of only about 2,000 French troops, who would be joined—they believed—by 30,000 local volunteers. Speed was of the essence, in their view; France would have to strike before Turkey could raise an army and before Britain could strike first.13

  Their proposal could hardly have been more inopportune. It reached the French government in November 1914, when it was still in exile in Bordeaux, having fled from Paris in the face of the German advance to the Marne. While there were powerful colonialist figures in Parliament, the Foreign Ministry, and the Cabinet, November was a month in which everyone’s attention was still focused on the mortal struggle in northern France and Belgium. The proposal to dispatch troops to Syria was rejected.

  The following month, however—the contending armies in Europe having settled down in their trenches, and the government having returned to Paris—the proposal to invade Syria did receive attention. A delegation of colonialist politicians secured the agreement, in principle, of Alexandre Millerand, the Minister of War, to support a Syrian expedition. Foreign Minister Theophile Delcassé, however, remained vehemently opposed: “Nothing appears less desirable than intervention in Syria,” he said.14 Delcassé was one of the many French officials who believed that annexing Syria would be of much less value to his country than preserving the Ottoman Empire would be. As of 1914 France supplied 45 percent of the foreign capital in the private sector of the Ottoman economy and 60 percent of the Ottoman public debt, and thus had an enormous stake in the empire’s continued existence and vitality.15

  On 30–31 December 1914, Sir Henry McMahon, who was about to take up his duties as Kitchener’s replacement in Cairo, visited Paris. He met with officials of the Foreign Ministry and War Ministry but failed to reply coherently to their questions about Britain’s Middle Eastern policy. McMahon was notoriously dull-witted and ineffectual, but the French, who did not know him, assumed he must be clever and astute: his incompetent replies were interpreted by Millerand, the War Minister, as deliberate and subtle evasions, masking a secret British plan to invade and occupy Syria by themselves.16

  Millerand immediately reported these conversations to the French Cabinet, which authorized him to create an expeditionary force to invade Syria whenever Britain did, whether invited by her to participate or not. In February 1915, Delcassé went over to London and took up the matter of Syria with Sir Edward Grey. The French Foreign Minister was reassured that Britain would not invade Syria without giving prior notice. The two foreign ministers appear to have agreed that if the Ottoman Empire were to be partitioned, Britain would not oppose France’s designs on Syria, but that it would be far preferable for the empire not to be broken up.

  Thus the foreign ministers settled the differences between their two countries—temporarily. But their men on the spot in the Middle East continued to stir up trouble between Britain and France; and, misunderstanding the region, Kitchener and his lieutenants also went on to pursue other dangerous designs there.

  10

  KITCHENER SETS OUT TO CAPTURE ISLAM

  I

  The West and the Middle East have misunderstood each other throughout most of the twentieth century; and much of that misunderstanding can be traced back to Lord Kitchener’s initiatives in the early years of the First World War. The peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants in Cairo and Khartoum, and his choice of Arab politicians with whom to deal have colored the course of political events ever since.

  To appreciate the novelty of Kitchener’s approach to the Middle East, it must be remembered that when the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, Asquith, Grey, and Churchill did not intend to retaliate by seizing any of its domains for Britain. They did propose to allow Britain’s allies to make territorial gains in Europe and Asia Minor at Turkey’s expense; but Asquith’s Britain had no territorial designs of her own on Ottoman lands, either in the Middle East or elsewhere. Kitchener, however, maintained that when the war was over, it was in Britain’s vital interest to seize much of the Ottoman Empire for herself: the Arabic-speaking part. This would mean a total reversal of Britain’s traditional policy.

  Kitchener, like most Britons who had lived in the East, believed that in the Moslem world religion counts for everything. But the field marshal and his colleagues in Cairo and Khartoum mistakenly seemed to believe that Mohammedanism was a centralized, authoritarian structure. They regarded Islam as a single entity: as an “it,” as an organization. They believed that it obeyed its leaders. Centuries before, Cortez had won control of Mexico by seizing the Aztec emperor; and medieval French kings had tried to control Christendom by keeping the pope captive in Avignon. In much the same spirit, Kitchener and his colleagues believed that Islam could be bought, manipulated, or captured by buying, manipulating, or capturing its religious leadership. They were intrigued by the notion that whoever controlled the person of the Caliph—Mohammed’s successor—controlled Islam.

  Central to Kitchener’s analysis was the contention that the Caliph might hurl Islam against Britain. Since Sunni Moslems (who predominated in Mohammedan India) regarded the Turkish Sultan as a Caliph, Kitchener perceived this as a continuing threat. In Cairo and Khartoum it was believed that, as of 1914, the Caliph had fallen into the hands of Jews and Germans; the War Minister worried that once the world war was won, the Caliph might become a tool in the hands of Britain’s Middle East rivals, particularly Russia.

  In enemy hands, the caliphate could be used (Kitchener believed) to undermine Britain’s position in India, Egypt, and the Sudan. Britain ruled over half of the world’s Moslems.1 In India alone there were almost seventy million of them, and Mohammedans constituted a disproportionately large part of the Indian Army. In Egypt and the Sudan, Britain ruled millions more, who lived alongside the Suez Canal sea road to India. Tiny British garrisons policed these tens of millions of natives, but Kitchener knew that they could not even begin to deal with a revolt.

  The British imagination was haunted by the Indian Mutiny (1857–9), the mysterious uprising, incited by religion, that had brought down the rule of the East India Company. More recently the uprising in the Sudan, which Kitchener had so brilliantly avenged, was inspired by a new religious leader who called himself the Mahdi, a title Europeans translated as “Messiah.” Pan-Islamic unrest in Egypt in 1905–6 had caused Britain deep concern. For Kitchener and his entourage, the possibility of a Moslem Holy War against Britain was a recurring nightmare.

  The Director of Information, John Buchan, dramatized these fears in his 1916 novel Greenmantle, in which Germany makes use of a Moslem prophet in a plot to destroy Britain’s empire. The prophet appears in Turkey; there are portents of his coming; there is an ancient prophecy; there is a modern revelation; and the region in which he intends to ignite a rebellion is made explicit. “There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parc
hed grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border.”2

  Kitchener believed that a call to arms by the Caliph against Britain during the 1914 war could perhaps be offset by the words or actions of other Moslem religious leaders. After Britain had won the war, however, more decisive action would be necessary. The reason was that when the war had been won, Russia was sure to take possession of Constantinople and—unless something were done about it—of the Caliph. Kitchener saw a German-controlled Caliph as merely dangerous—he would attempt to foment unrest in India to throw Britain off balance in the European war. But he saw a Russian-controlled Caliph as a mortal danger to the British Empire; for (unlike Asquith and Grey). Kitchener believed that Russia still harbored ambitions of taking India away from Britain. In Kitchener’s view, Germany was an enemy in Europe and Russia was an enemy in Asia: the paradox of the 1914 war in which Britain and Russia were allied was that by winning in Europe, Britain risked losing in Asia. The only completely satisfactory outcome of the war, from Kitchener’s point of view, was for Germany to lose it without Russia winning it—and in 1914 it was not clear how that could be accomplished. So the War Minister planned to strike first in the coming postwar struggle with Russia for control of the road to and into India.

  Kitchener’s proposal was that, after the war, Britain should arrange for her own nominee to become Caliph. Mohammed had been an Arabian; Kitchener proposed to encourage the view that Mohammed’s successors as Caliph should be Arabian, too. The advantage of this was that the coastline of the Arabian peninsula could easily be controlled by the British navy; Britain would be able to insulate the Caliph from the influence of Britain’s European rivals. Once Britain could install the Caliph within her sphere of influence in Arabia, Kitchener believed she could gain control of Islam. And even before the Ottoman Empire entered the war, Kitchener’s lieutenants in Cairo reminded the War Minister that an obvious candidate to be the Arabian caliph—the ruler of Mecca—had already been in touch with him.