It therefore would have been dangerous for McMahon as High Commissioner to have made any firm commitments to Hussein. He believed that the impatient Wingate had tried to push him into doing so. But Reginald Wingate wrote to Clayton that McMahon had misinterpreted his views, as had Lord Hardinge, the Viceroy of India:
I am afraid both the High Commissioner and Lord Hardinge are under the impression that I am a believer in the creation of a consolidated Arab Kingdom under the Sherif—Of course any such notion is altogether remote from my real views, but it has suited me, as I believe it has suited all of us, to give the leaders of the Arab movement this impression and we are quite sufficiently covered by the correspondence which has taken place to show that we are acting in good faith with the Arabs as far as we have gone.19
Gilbert Clayton, who strongly opposed defining Britain’s relations with the Arabs until the war was over, believed that the McMahon letters had succeeded in putting the matter off and in avoiding the giving of any meaningful commitment. Months later Clayton summarized what McMahon had done by writing that “Luckily we have been very careful indeed to commit ourselves to nothing whatsoever.”20
Hussein replied to McMahon that he could not accept the Aleppo-Homs-Hama-Damascus formula. He insisted on having the provinces of Aleppo and Beirut. Noting France’s claim to Lebanon, he wrote that “any concession designed to give France or any other Power possession of a single square foot of territory in those parts is quite out of the question.” So he failed to reach agreement with McMahon, but felt compelled to support the Allies nonetheless: the Young Turks were going to depose him, so he had to rebel against them whether Britain met his terms or not. In a conversation some years later with David Hogarth, of the Arab Bureau of British Intelligence in Cairo, Hussein indicated that with regard to Palestine and also with regard to Lebanon and the other lands in the Middle East, he did not regard matters as having been settled. He indicated that he regarded all matters as being subject to negotiation at the Peace Conference. According to Hogarth, “He compared ourselves and himself…to two persons about to inhabit one house, but not agreed which should take which floors or rooms.”21
In London the Foreign Office took the view that the promises would never become due for payment: that Britain had pledged herself to support Arab independence only if the Arab half of the Ottoman Empire rose against the Sultan—which (the Foreign Office believed) it would never do. Since the Arabs would not keep their side of the bargain (so ran the argument), the British would be under no obligation to keep theirs. The Foreign Office, which did not rely on Clayton, but had its own sources of information, did not believe that the Arabic-speaking world was about to change sides in the war, but the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, saw no harm in letting Kitchener and his lieutenants promise anything they wanted as an inducement to the Arabs to defect. Grey told Austen Chamberlain not to worry about the offers being made by Cairo as “the whole thing was a castle in the air which would never materialize.”22
McMahon, on the other hand, worried that the whole thing might not be a castle in the air. He came, after all, from the Government of India, whose constant anxiety was the prospect of nationalist agitation. McMahon confided to Wyndham Deedes that his fear was not that the plan for an Arab revolt would break down, but rather that it would succeed—and then would pose a danger to Britain.23
To the Viceroy of India, who claimed that India’s interests were neglected in the correspondence with Hussein, McMahon explained that “I had necessarily to be vague as on the one hand HMG disliked being committed to definite future action, and on the other hand any detailed definition of our demands would have frightened off the Arab.” He claimed that the negotiations with Hussein would neither “establish our rights…or bind our hands.”24
This explanation disturbed the Viceroy, who wrote to the Secretary of State for India about McMahon’s claim “that the negotiations are merely a matter of words and will neither establish our rights, nor bind our hands in that country. That may prove eventually to be the case, especially if the Arabs continue to help the enemy, but I did not like pledges given when there is no intention of keeping them.”25
In early 1916 Aziz al-Masri, the Arab secret society leader, wrote to Lord Kitchener approaching the argument from the other side. He wrote (in French, the language of diplomacy) that Britain could not achieve her objectives in the Arabic-speaking Middle East unless she were willing to leave its peoples free to exercise full and genuine independence. Those for whom he spoke wanted from Britain “non pas une domination ou un protectorat,” that is, they did not want British domination or a British protectorate.26 They would not accept what McMahon and Clayton called Arab independence: they demanded the real thing. They would not support Britain, he wrote, if she intended to govern them—which of course was exactly what McMahon and Clayton intended Britain to do.
Al-Masri had spotted the falseness in the British position. Kitchener and his followers badly wanted to win Arab support but were unwilling to pay the price the Emir Hussein demanded for it; so instead they were attempting to cheat, by pretending to meet Hussein’s demands when in fact they were giving him the counterfeit coin of meaningless language.
Though Clayton and his colleagues did not know it, al-Masri, al-Faruqi, and the Emir Hussein were offering Britain coin that was equally counterfeit. Hussein had no army, and the secret societies had no visible following. Their talk of rallying tens or hundreds of thousands of Arab troops to their cause, whether or not they believed it themselves, was sheer fantasy.
Al-Faruqi, who had promised an Arab revolt when he first arrived, changed his story by 15 November, when he met Sir Mark Sykes: he now said that there could be no Arab uprising until and unless Allied armies first landed in force on the Syrian coast. Hussein, too, hoping Britain would take the military lead, refused to go into action by claiming it would be premature to launch an uprising. The Arabs, in other words, would do nothing until British armies arrived on the scene. Sykes, accepting these statements at face value, concluded that it was urgent for Britain to invade Syria and Palestine.
24
MAKING PROMISES TO THE EUROPEAN ALLIES
I
In December 1915 Sykes reported to his government that in Cairo he had been told by al-Faruqi that if British Egypt were to launch an invasion of Palestine and Syria, it would trigger a revolt in which the Arabic-speaking troops and provinces of the Ottoman Empire would come over to the Allied side. The problem was that Britain needed France’s permission to divert the resources from the western front to launch such an offensive; and what Sykes told the Cabinet ministers was that they ought to seek such permission from the French immediately. (France was reluctant to allow any diversion of resources from Europe, and not without reason; early in 1916 Germany attacked Verdun in what by 1918 was to become the biggest battle in world history. Seven hundred thousand men on both sides were to be killed, wounded, gassed, or captured at Verdun in 1916, and 1,200,000 at the Somme; it was not a year in which the Allies could easily afford to send manpower elsewhere.)
At the same time, Sykes raised a related matter: the Sherif Hussein hesitated to come over to the Allied side (Sykes reported) for fear of French ambitions in the Arabic-speaking world. Negotiations with France aimed at allaying such fears were the answer, he said. If these problems with France were not resolved soon, Sykes warned, the Sherif might be deposed and killed by the Turks, and events in the Holy Places might ignite a real Holy War.1
The radical new view that Sykes had brought back with him from the Middle East was that in terms of winning the war, the Arabs were more important than the French.2 France was a modern industrial power that had mobilized eight million men to fight the war, while Hussein, without industrial, financial, military, or manpower resources, brought with him only an uncertain prospect of subverting loyalty in the Ottoman camp; in retrospect, Sykes’s new view was unbalanced, but his government nonetheless attempted to persuade France to make the concessions S
ykes believed to be necessary.
In fact, the British government already had initiated talks with France. Britain could not make promises about Syria to the Emir Hussein without France’s permission, for the Foreign Secretary, Sir Edward Grey, had recognized France’s special interest in that area. Moreover, al-Faruqi had persuaded Lord Kitchener and his followers that Hussein’s claims to Syria also had to be accommodated, at least to some extent. The Foreign Office, having authorized McMahon to make pledges to Hussein on 20 October 1915, therefore immediately requested the French government to send a delegate over to London to negotiate the future frontiers of Syria so as to define the extent to which Britain was free to deal with Hussein. Thus not only the McMahon letters, but also—and more importantly—the negotiations with France, Russia, and later Italy that ultimately resulted in the Sykes-Picot-Sazanov Agreement and subsequent Allied secret treaty understandings were among the results of Lieutenant al-Faruqi’s hoax.
II
The French representative, François Georges Picot, came over to London and commenced negotiations on 23 November 1915. The British negotiating team was at first headed by Sir Arthur Nicolson, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, and included senior representatives from the Foreign, India, and War Offices. The talks had deadlocked by the time Sykes returned to London in December; late that month the British government delegated Sykes—Kitchener’s man—to take the place of the Nicolson team in order to break the deadlock. In effect the Foreign Office turned the responsibility over to Lord Kitchener.
Sykes possessed some of the qualifications necessary to carry out his assignment. He passionately wanted to succeed in reaching an agreement with the other side. He was pro-French. As a result of early schooling abroad, he spoke French—though it is not clear how well. As a Roman Catholic himself, he was not prejudiced against France’s goal of promoting Catholic interests in Lebanon. He had lived and traveled in the East, and had met with and knew the views of Britain’s soldiers and civil servants there.
On the other hand, he had held government office for less than a year, and it was his first diplomatic assignment. He had no experience in negotiating with a foreign government, and was in a weak bargaining position because he wanted too much from the other side, too obviously.
Until 3 January 1916 Sykes went to the French embassy on a daily basis to negotiate. He reported in detail at night to FitzGerald and through him continued to receive the ghostly guidance of Kitchener.3 It is impossible to know what Sykes said or was told: Kitchener and FitzGerald kept no proper files, and none of the three men left a record of what occurred. There may have been a misunderstanding between them as to what Sykes was instructed to demand and what he was told to concede. Later, in describing his dealings with Lord Kitchener, Mark Sykes remarked that “I could never make myself understood; I could never understand what he thought, and he could never understand what I thought.”4
There is more evidence from the French side of the negotiations than from the British side as to the secret hopes and plans that were involved. Documents exist that establish what Picot and his political associates hoped to gain from the negotiations and how they hoped to achieve their goals.
Picot, the scion of a colonialist dynasty in France—his father was a founder of the Comité de l’Afrique Française, and his brother was treasurer of the Comité de l’Asie Française, of which his father was also a member—acted effectively as the advocate of the colonialist party within the Quai d’Orsay and was as dedicated a proponent of a French Syria as his government could have chosen to represent it.5 Earlier in 1915 Picot had inspired a parliamentary campaign in Paris against the ministers who were prepared to give way to Britain in the Middle East. The mixture of domestic French commercial, clerical, and political interests in support of Picot’s position proved potent. The Lyons and Marseilles Chambers of Commerce sent resolutions to the Quai d’Orsay in support of a French Syria. Proponents of a French Syria took control of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the Chamber of Deputies.6
Pierre-Etienne Flandin, leader of the French Syria movement in the Senate, issued a report on Syria and Palestine in 1915 that became the manifesto of the “Syrian Party” in French politics—the party that Picot championed. Syria and Palestine form one country, he argued, that for centuries had been shaped by France, to such an extent that it formed the France of the Near East. (His argument harked back nearly a thousand years, to the Crusades and the establishment of Latin Crusader kingdoms in Syria and Palestine.) It was incumbent upon France to continue its “mission historique” there, he wrote. The potential wealth of the country was immense, he claimed, so that for commercial reasons, as well as historic and geographic ones, it was vital for the French Empire to possess it. Then, too, according to Flandin, it was vital for strategic reasons. Paralleling Kitchener’s views about Mecca and the caliphate, Flandin claimed that Damascus was the third holiest city in Islam and was the potential center of an Arabic Islam; France dared not let another power direct it and perhaps use it against France.7 Flandin claimed that at heart Syria-Palestine was French already. Its inhabitants, according to him and his colleagues, were unanimous in desiring to be ruled by France.
The French deluded themselves. Opposition to French rule was intense among the educated classes in Syria (other than the Maronites, the Eastern-rite Roman Catholic community sponsored by France). Sykes and his friends in Cairo believed that the French were blinding themselves when they ignored this opposition. (Clayton and his colleagues did not see, however, that they were deluding themselves in the same way by thinking that the peoples of those areas ardently desired to be governed by Britain.)
Picot drafted his own negotiating instructions outlining a strategy to win the concessions that he wanted from the British. They show that he would have preferred to preserve the Ottoman Empire intact, for its “feeble condition” offered France “limitless scope” to expand her economic influence.8 Partition had become inevitable, however; it therefore was advisable to take control of Syria and Palestine, even though France would dismember the Ottoman Empire by doing so.
The French Foreign Office recognized that policing inland Syria would strain French resources; what Picot and his government most desired was to assert direct French rule only over the Mediterranean coastline and an enlarged Lebanon, and to control the rest of Syria indirectly through Arab puppet rulers. Picot’s plan was to pretend to Sykes that France insisted on obtaining direct rule over all of Syria, so that when he moderated the claim he could obtain some concession in return. What he hoped to get was an extension of the French sphere of influence eastward from Syria to Mosul (in what is now Iraq).
In secretly planning to take Mosul, Picot was unaware that Kitchener and Sykes were secretly planning to give it to him. They wanted the French sphere of influence to be extended from the Mediterranean coast on the west all the way to the east so that it paralleled and adjoined Russian-held zones; the French zone was to provide Britain with a shield against Russia. France and Russia would be balanced one against the other, so that the French Middle East, like the Great Wall of China, would protect the British Middle East from attack by the Russian barbarians to the north. This concept had appeared in the de Bunsen proceedings. It had been suggested to Kitchener, perhaps by Storrs, and it became central to his strategic plan for the postwar East. Even Britain’s claim to Mosul, with the oil riches strongly suspected to exist there, was to be sacrificed in order to place the French in the front line, at a point where the Russians might be expected one day to attack. The War Office point of view was that “From a military point of view, the principle of inserting a wedge of French territory between any British zone and the Russian Caucasus would seem in every way desirable.”9
On the British side of the negotiations Sykes also wanted France’s agreement to an Egyptian offensive; Kitchener wanted Alexandretta, and an agreement that Britain could invade the Ottoman Empire at Alexandretta; Sykes held a brief from Cairo to reserve the towns i
n Syria that were being promised to the Sherif Hussein; and nobody in the British government wanted to see any other Great Power established in the postwar world astride the road to India. It was a challenging agenda, especially for Sykes, a neophyte in diplomacy.
The British feared that Picot would not compromise on France’s claim to exercise direct rule over all of Syria, while the French feared that they would not be allowed to rule any of it, not even coastal Lebanon. Picot argued that Christian Lebanon would not tolerate even the nominal rule of the Emir of Mecca, while Paul Cambon, the French ambassador in London, warned that French rule would be necessary to avert the outbreak of a religious war: “It is enough to know the intensity of rivalries between the various rites and religions in the Orient to foresee the violence of the internal strife in Lebanon as soon as no external authority is there to curb it.”10
In the end both Sykes and Picot obtained what they wanted from one another: France was to rule a Greater Lebanon and to exert an exclusive influence over the rest of Syria. Sykes succeeded in giving, and Picot succeeded in taking, a sphere of French influence that extended to Mosul. Basra and Baghdad, the two Mesopotamian provinces, were to go to Britain.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 22