These doubts were intensified by spectacular uprisings in Iraq at about the same time, that drained Britain’s resources, and which—coming after the riots in Egypt, the war in Afghanistan, the religious war in Arabia, the nationalist rebellion in Turkey, and the troubles with French Syria—suggested to many Englishmen that Britain should withdraw from the Middle East entirely.
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MESOPOTAMIA (IRAQ): 1920
In the first heady days of Arab nationalism in Damascus after the war, it became apparent that one of the important regional differences between the various Arab activists was that those from the Mesopotamian provinces—the eastern half of the Arabic-speaking world—were for the most part military men. Although the Mesopotamian soldiers claimed to act in the name of Feisal and his brothers, most of them were former Ottoman officers who had remained loyal to the Sultan and the Young Turks until the very end of the war. Battlefield professionals and dedicated opponents of Britain, they could have been expected to constitute a more serious potential threat to British plans than did the politicians and orators of Damascus or Jerusalem.
At first the British administration in the Mesopotamian provinces did not see it that way. Tensions between the diverse populations of the area seemed to pose greater problems, and the lawlessness of groups such as the Kurds and the Bedouin tribes seemed to pose greater threats. Incoherence, communal strife, and habitual disorder—rather than organized nationalism—were perceived as the challenge. The talk of national self-government came mostly (according to the local British authorities) from ambitious intriguers of shady character who would subside into insignificance if only the Allied leaders would cease their unsettling Wilsonian propaganda.
At the close of the war, the temporary administration of the provinces was in the hands of Captain (later Colonel) Arnold Wilson of British India, who became civil commissioner. His famous assistant was Gertrude Bell, at that time the best-known British writer about Arab countries. She tended toward protectorate, he, toward direct rule, but in 1918 they were enough in agreement for him to forward with approval her memorandum arguing that the talk of self-determination before and at the Peace Conference was detrimental. She had previously written that “the people of Mesopotamia, having witnessed the successful termination of the war, had taken it for granted that the country would remain under British control and were as a whole content to accept the decision of arms.” The declarations in favor of national self-determination at the Peace Conference by Woodrow Wilson and others “opened up other possibilities which were regarded almost universally with anxiety, but gave opportunity for political intrigue to the less stable and more fanatical elements.”1
When, in line with the American principles being adopted—or at least affected—in London, the Cabinet instructed Arnold Wilson to ask the peoples of Mesopotamia what states or governments they would like to see established in their area, Wilson’s reply was that there was no way of ascertaining public opinion.2
While he was prepared to administer the provinces of Basra and Baghdad, and also the province of Mosul (which, with Clemenceau’s consent, Lloyd George had detached from the French sphere and intended to withhold from Turkey), he did not believe that they formed a coherent entity. Iraq (an Arab term that the British used increasingly to denote the Mesopotamian lands) seemed to him too splintered for that to be possible. Mosul’s strategic importance made it seem a necessary addition to Iraq, and the strong probability that it contained valuable oilfields made it a desirable one, but it was part of what was supposed to have been Kurdistan; and Arnold Wilson argued that the warlike Kurds who had been brought under his administration “numbering half a million will never accept an Arab ruler.”3
A fundamental problem, as Wilson saw it, was that the almost two million Shi’ite Moslems in Mesopotamia would not accept domination by the minority Sunni Moslem community, yet “no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination.”4 The bitterness between the two communities was highlighted when each produced a rival Arab nationalist society.5 Also to be considered was the large Jewish community, which dominated the commercial life of Baghdad, and the substantial Christian community that included the Nestorian-Chaldaean refugees from Turkey who had gathered in the area of Mosul.
Seventy-five percent of the population of Iraq was tribal, Wilson told London, “with no previous tradition of obedience to any government.”6 Along the same lines, Gertrude Bell wrote to her father that “The provincial magnates are going strongly against an Arab Amir, I think, and even against an Arab Govt. They say they don’t want to be rid of one tyranny in order to fall into the clutches of another.”7
Unlike Arab nationalists, who were thinking in terms of political unity on a large scale,* there were those who questioned whether even attempting to unite the Mesopotamian provinces might not be too ambitious to be practical. Gertrude Bell, working on her own plans for a unified Iraq, was cautioned by an American missionary that she was ignoring rooted historical realities in doing so. “You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity! Assyria always looked to the west and east and north, and Babylonia to the south. They have never been an independent unit. You’ve got to take time to get them integrated, it must be done gradually. They have no conception of nationhood yet.”9
A leading Arab political figure in Baghdad cautioned her along different lines. Speaking to her on 12 June 1920, he reproached her with the fact that, more than three years after occupying Baghdad in the war, Britain continued to talk about establishing an independent government but still did nothing about it. He contrasted this with the situation in Damascus, where the British had set up Feisal’s independent administration as soon as they had arrived. Well aware that she was one of the British officials who were making plans for his government, he reminded her that “You said in your declaration that you would set up a native government drawing its authority from the initiative and free choice of the people concerned, yet you proceed to draw up a scheme without consulting anyone. It would have been easy for you to take one or two leading men in your councils and this would have removed the reproach which is levelled against your scheme…”10
Gertrude Bell discounted the danger of a native uprising. Her chief, Arnold Wilson (against whom she intrigued), did not. He warned London that demobilization had left his armed forces dangerously undermanned. The military deployed only a tiny force of mobile troops to patrol an area of 170,000 square miles.11 He pointed to the danger posed by Feisal’s adherents; although Nuri el-Sa’id and other top Mesopotamian officers who had served in the Hejaz forces with Lawrence and the Allies had been forbidden to return home, as suspected potential troublemakers, a number of activists—many of whom had served with the enemy during the war—had slipped back into the country after the Damascus proclamations calling for Mesopotamian independence. There was also talk of agents sent by Kemalist Turkey.12
British nerves were on edge as vague rumors, constant unrest, and repeated killings took their toll. In the summer of 1919 three young British captains were murdered in Kurdistan. The Government of India sent out an experienced official to take their place in October 1919; a month later he, too, was killed.
At Christmas that year, Arnold Wilson sent to London to enlist the aid of Colonel Gerald Leachman, an officer whose feats of travel, adventure, and war in the eastern deserts had become legendary. Leachman arrived back in Mesopotamia, before the spring of 1920, to find that six British officers had been killed in the ten days before his return.13 More was to come: the next month Leachman was able to rescue a party of British officers attacked by a raiding party in the desert but, in the early summer, he was unable to save two of his political officers who were abducted as hostages and later murdered. The desert was alive with Arab raiding parties and, in Leachman’s opinion, the only way to deal with the disaffected tribes was “wholesale slaughter.”14
In June the tribes sudd
enly rose in full revolt—a revolt that seems to have been triggered by the government’s efforts to levy taxes. By 14 June the formerly complacent Gertrude Bell, going from one extreme to another, claimed to be living through a nationalist reign of terror.15 She exaggerated, but in the Middle Euphrates, posts were indeed overrun, British officers killed, and communications cut.16 For one reason or another—the revolts had a number of causes and the various rebels pursued different goals—virtually the whole area rose against Britain, and revolt then spread to the Lower Euphrates as well. A Holy War was proclaimed against Britain in the Shi’ite Moslem holy city of Karbalah.17 On the northwestern frontier, Arab cavalry, initially led by one of Feisal’s ex-officers, swept down on British outposts and massacred their defenders.
There was more bad news: Leachman, who left Baghdad on 11 August to attend a meeting with tribal allies at a station on the Euphrates, was tricked into sending away his armed escort—and then was shot in the back and killed by order of the tribal sheikh who was his host. “Arab Treachery” was the headline of the Reuters’ report of the assassination; “Bad To Worse In Mesopotamia” was the headline of The Times.18 The news of Leachman’s killing led to further tribal uprisings against the British along the Euphrates. Fresh uprisings occurred north and west of Baghdad. By mid-August a group of insurgents felt confident enough to declare a provisional Arab government.19
In a leading article on 7 August 1920, The Times demanded to know “how much longer are valuable lives to be sacrificed in the vain endeavour to impose upon the Arab population an elaborate and expensive administration which they never asked for and do not want?” In a similar article on 10 August, The Times said that “We are spending sums in Mesopotamia and in Persia which may well reach a hundred million pounds this year” in support of what it termed “the foolish policy of the Government in the Middle East.”
The Government of India poured in reinforcements of men and supplies to restore order. The main population centers quickly were secured, but regaining control of the countryside took time. It was not until October that many of the cut-off Euphrates towns were relieved and not until February of 1921 that order was restored more or less completely. Before putting down the revolt Britain suffered nearly 2,000 casualties, including 450 dead.20
The British were confused as to the origins of the revolt. Arnold Wilson submitted a list of thirteen contributing factors, stressing, above all, the involvement of Feisal’s supporters and Kemal’s Turkey, perhaps supported, he claimed, by American Standard Oil interests.21 An intelligence officer attached to the India Office produced a chart outlining the conspiracy, implicating Feisal but, even more so, the Turks, who (he asserted) continued to take orders via Moscow and Switzerland from Berlin.22 His chart was circulated among Cabinet members in London.
The mysterious uprisings in Iraq threw the normally poised British Indian administration off balance. Sir Arnold Wilson told the Cabinet at the end of 1920 that “there was no real desire in Mesopotamia for an Arab government, that the Arabs would appreciate British rule.”23 If that were so, then the explosion in Mesopotamia could not be explained as an Arab independence movement. “What we are up against,” said Wilson, “is anarchy plus fanaticism. There is little or no Nationalism.”24 The tribesmen, he said, were “out against all government as such” and had no notion what they were fighting for.25 In mid-August he said that the “revolutionary movement has for some time past ceased to have any political aspect and has become entirely anarchic.”26
It was not a satisfactory explanation, coming—as the Iraqi uprisings did—on top of troubles everywhere else in the Middle East. Why were the despised Turks, under Kemal’s leadership, successfully continuing to defy the Allies? Why was Britain’s protégé, King Hussein, losing the struggle for mastery in Arabia? Why did the Egyptians continue to refuse to negotiate—on any basis—for Britain’s forces to remain in their country? Why were the Afghans conspiring with the Russians? Why did Feisal lose out to France and then allow his followers to strike out at Britain? Why did Arabs riot in Palestine and rebel in Iraq—all at a time when Britain’s economy had collapsed and when the government’s time, energy, and resources were needed to revive it?
In London there was no agreement about what had happened in the Middle East, but there was a strikingly large body of opinion that held that what had occurred was caused by outsiders, and that the disorders through the East were somehow linked with one another. Certain names continued to recur in the course of British speculations as to the origins of the disorders: Enver Pasha, Mustapha Kemal, Feisal, Pan-Islam, the Germans, Standard Oil, the Jews, and the Bolsheviks.
With respect to the Bolsheviks, British suspicions in fact proved to be well founded. The Russians, looking for a chance to undermine the British position in Asia, decided that, by bringing pressure to bear on Britain elsewhere, they might enable the insurgency in Iraq to succeed. The area of British vulnerability they chose to exploit was in Persia, the political battlefield on which Britain and Russia had clashed so often in the course of the Great Game.
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PERSIA (IRAN): 1920
When the First World War came to an end, the British Prime Minister’s attention was too much occupied elsewhere for him to pay much attention to Persia, the Ottoman Empire’s eastern neighbor, which was not, in any event, an area of the world in which he took much interest. By default the way was left open for George Curzon, chairman of the Eastern Committee of the Cabinet and, from 1919 onward, Foreign Minister, to take charge. Lord Curzon cared about Persia more than he cared about practically anywhere else.
Curzon’s tendency was to exaggerate the importance of areas in which he was expert and there was no question that he was an expert on Persia. His journey in 1889 to that then little-known land was famous; and his book Persia and the Persian Question was judged to be the standard authority on the subject in the English language. His view, correspondingly, was that the magnitude of British interests in that country was immense.
From the nineteenth century, Lord Curzon brought with him a strategy of creating “a Moslem nexus of states” in the Middle East as a shield to ward off Russian expansion.1 Russian expansionist designs had figured prominently in his expressed thoughts and in his writings when he explored Central Asia in the late nineteenth century, and had figured prominently in his politics when he became Viceroy of India early in the twentieth century. When the Bolshevik Revolution brought about Russia’s withdrawal from her forward positions, Curzon proposed to take advantage of the situation by putting his British-sponsored Moslem nexus of states into place. In the nineteenth century the nexus would have been a line across the Middle East from the Ottoman Empire through the Persian Empire to the khanates and emirates of Central Asia and Afghanistan; but Curzon was in no position to reconstruct a line that long.
Driven to withdraw by Winston Churchill and his policy of radical retrenchment, British forces almost everywhere in Asia were being evacuated from positions that Lord Curzon wished to see maintained. Of the nexus, only Persia remained—but there Curzon retained his solitary dominance of British policy. Edwin Montagu, a member of the Cabinet’s Eastern Committee, observed that the draft minutes of a meeting of the committee, from which all members but Curzon were absent, recorded that “the Committee agreed with the Chairman.” “Surely you will not allow this to stand?” Montagu wrote to Curzon; “the Committee consisted of the Chairman: and the Chairman, of course, not unnaturally, agreed with the Chairman.”2 Insofar as Persia was concerned, that was the manner in which he proceeded, taking policy entirely into his own hands and ignoring the reluctance of his Cabinet colleagues to follow where he led.
“The integrity of Persia,” he had written two decades earlier, “must be registered as a cardinal precept of our Imperial creed.”3 Safeguarding that integrity against future Russian encroachments remained the principal object of his policy. The means at his disposal, however, were few and slender.
The end of the world war found
Britain (and British India) with small forces in four areas of Persia. In the northeast and the northwest, there were the tiny military missions of Generals Malleson and Dunsterville, whose adventures in Russia were followed earlier (see Chapter 38). On the Gulf coast there were a few garrisons of Indian troops. In the south there was a native force recruited during the war and led by British officers, called the South Persia Rifles; but mutinies and desertions, triggered before the armistice by a tribal revolt against British rule, had brought its effectiveness into question.
These forces were insufficient to Lord Curzon’s purposes, even had there not been pressure from the War Office and from India to make further reductions in troops and subsidies. Curzon therefore concentrated his energies on the organization of a new British-supervised regime in Persia that could transform the sprawling, anarchic, much-divided territory into an efficient, effective country able to support and defend itself, and thus dispense with British subsidies and troops.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 53