A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  British officials of course were aware that significant numbers of Palestinian Arab Moslems, reacting against Zionist colonization, expressed violent anti-Jewish feelings; but this observation did not necessarily negate their view that Islam was controlled by Jewry. Islam, in the sense that Britons feared it, was the pull and power of the Caliph, whom they viewed as a pawn moved by Britain’s adversaries—a view that, oddly, they continued to hold even after the Sultan-Caliph became their virtual prisoner in Constantinople. As they saw it, it was evident that Arabs could not govern themselves; so that the question came down to whether the Arabic-speaking Middle East should be governed by Germans and Jews, acting through the agency of Turks, or whether it should be governed by Britain. The appeal of British government, they felt, was that it was decent and honest; the appeal of Britain’s adversaries was that Turkish government was Moslem government. Islam was thus being used, as was Bolshevism, and as were Turks and Russians, by a cabal of Jewish financiers and Prussian generals to the detriment of Britain.

  While in the clear light of history this conspiracy theory seems absurd to the point of lunacy, it was believed either in whole or in part by large numbers of otherwise sane, well-balanced, and reasonably well-informed British officials. Moreover, it could be supported by one actual piece of evidence: the career of Alexander Helphand. Helphand was a Jew who conspired to help Germany and to destroy the Russian Empire. He was closely associated with the Young Turk regime in Constantinople. He did play a significant role in selecting Lenin and in sending him into Russia to foment a Bolshevik revolt with a view to helping Germany win the war. He did continue to weave his conspiratorial webs after the war. He was what Wingate and Clayton believed a Jew to be: rich, subversive, and pro-German.

  Against this background, the trend of British Intelligence assessments in the immediate postwar years appears less irrational than would otherwise be the case. On 5 May 1919, only half a year after the armistices had brought hostilities in the First World War to an end, a British intelligence agent filed a report with the Arab Bureau based on extensive conversations with Young Turk leaders who had found safety in Switzerland. According to the Arab Bureau’s intelligence operative, the Allied victory had not brought enemy anti-British agitation to an end. On the contrary, the work of the wartime Pan-Islamic Propaganda Bureau in Berlin was being continued in India, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, and elsewhere with the goal of inciting “The Revolt of Islam.” “The Eastern enemies of Great Britain have united with avowed object of overthrowing British rule in the EAST,” he reported. “They can rely upon the support of Germany and of the Russian Bolsheviks…”1 The intermediary between the Middle Eastern rebels and the Bolsheviks, the report continued, was Alexander Helphand.

  The eruption of violence in Mesopotamia the following year elicited other intelligence reports along similar lines, notably from Major N. N. E. Bray, a special intelligence officer attached to the Political Department of the India Office. It was Bray whose chart of the alleged conspiracy was circulated to the Cabinet at the end of the summer of 1920 (see page 453). Bray argued that in Mesopotamia, “both the Nationalist and Pan-Islamist movements derive their inspiration from Berlin—through Switzerland and Moscow. The situation is further complicated with Italian, French and Bolshevist intrigues.”2

  Bray urged the government to track down the secret “comparatively small central organization” at the center of the far-reaching international conspiracy.3 Since it did not exist, it was never found. Nonetheless the preponderant opinion within the government, at least for a time, was that the rebellions breaking out in Britain’s Middle Eastern domains were the result of coordinated hostile forces from outside. Within the Foreign Office there were several officials who argued that the source of the various Middle Eastern troubles was to be located within the Middle Eastern countries themselves; but these officials represented a minority point of view.

  In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule. The shadows that accompanied the British rulers wherever they went in the Middle East were in fact their own.

  What Britain faced in the Middle East was a long and perhaps endless series of individual and often spontaneous local rebellions against her authority. The rebellions were not directed by foreigners; they were directed against foreigners. Perhaps if the British Empire had maintained its million-man army of occupation in the Middle East, the region’s inhabitants might have resigned themselves to the inevitability of British rule and to the uselessness of attempting to defy it; but once Britain had demobilized her army, the string of revolts in the Middle East became predictable. The agents of British policy in the Middle East, however, continued to blame their troubles—as Kitchener and his colleagues had blamed all their Middle Eastern failures since 1908—on the supposedly Jewish-controlled, German-influenced Young Turk leadership and its international ramifications, chief among which were Islam and now Bolshevism in a line that ran from Enver through Alexander Helphand to Lenin.

  II

  A sensationalist exposé was published in London for the first time in 1920 that purported to disclose the origins of this worldwide conspiracy. Entitled The Jewish Peril, the book was an English translation of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. A French translation was published in Paris at the same time. The Protocols purported to be a record of meetings held by Jews and Freemasons at the end of the nineteenth century in which they plotted to overthrow capitalism and Christianity and to establish a world state under their joint rule.

  The Protocols had originally appeared in Russia, in a newspaper in 1903 and in book form in 1905, and had allegedly been discovered by Sergei Nilus, a Czarist official. They attracted little attention until the Russian revolutions of 1917, when it was widely remarked that many of the Bolshevik leaders were Jews and that communist doctrine bore a certain resemblance to that described in the Protocols. Therefore there were those in London and Paris in 1920 who accepted Nilus’s revelations as genuine. As such, the Protocols explained—among other things—the mysterious revolts against Britain everywhere in the East.

  It was not until the summer of 1921—a year after they appeared in London and Paris—that the Protocols were proven to be a forgery by Philip Graves, Constantinople correspondent of The Times, who revealed that they had been concocted by the Czarist secret police. The police had not even bothered to compose the forged documents themselves; they had plagiarized them, as Graves was informed by a White Russian refugee named Michael Raslovleff (whose name was not revealed until 1978). Raslovleff, who parted with the information only because of a “very urgent need of money,” showed Graves that whole sections of the Protocols were paraphrased from a satire on Napoleon III written by a French lawyer and published in Geneva (1864) and Brussels (1865).4 It was an obscure work, of which few copies were still in existence; Raslovleff showed Graves the copy he had bought from a former Russian secret police official, and The Times in London found a copy in the British Museum. Raslovleff said that if the work had not been so rare, somebody would have recognized the Protocols as a plagiarism immediately upon their publication. (Subsequently it has been learned that passages in the Protocols were plagiarized from other books as well, including a fantasy novel published at about the same time as the French satire.)

  III

  For the important body of British opinion represented by The Times, those responsible for Britain’s setbacks in the Middle East were not foreign conspirators but British officials—British Arabophiles chief among them. Particularly alarmed by the uprisings in Iraq, a special Middle Eastern correspondent of The Times
filed a dispatch, published on 20 September 1920, in which he wrote that “My conviction, based on careful study, is that the Arab Bureau at Cairo, the G.H.Q. at Cairo, and our Occupied Enemy Territories Administrations in Palestine and last year in Syria, bear a heavy load of responsibility for the present waste of British lives and money in Mesopotamia.” He charged that “British Pan-Arab propaganda is one of the most serious existing dangers to the world’s peace.” Putting aside the few British officials who genuinely believed in Arab independence, he denounced the “extremely dangerous officials who have no great belief in the Arabs’ own capacity for government, but an intense belief in our Imperial Mission” to run Arab affairs behind a façade of nominal Arab independence. He did not mention Wingate, Clayton, or Hogarth by name, but the description fitted them; and they, in his account, and not the Bolsheviks, were the cause of the disorders throughout the Middle East.

  In a leading article the next day, The Times denounced the Arab Bureau’s long-held belief in an Arab confederation of the Middle East presided over by King Hussein: “…the delusive dream of a huge Arabian Federation should no longer be entertained in any official quarter.” A year later, on 27 September 1921, The Times rejected the Arab Bureau’s old notion of a special British mission in the Moslem world. Discerning a common theme in the many Moslem Middle Eastern revolts against European Christian rule, The Times was of the opinion that “The problem is far too big for any one European nation to cope with alone…”

  The principal danger, as The Times pictured it, lay in British overcommitment. The principal challenge to the country, in its view, was at home and was economic. Britain needed to invest her money in renewing herself economically and socially, and was threatened in her very existence by a governmental disposition to squander money instead on Middle Eastern adventures. In an editorial published on 18 July 1921 The Times denounced the government for this, saying that “while they have spent nearly £150,000,000 since the Armistice upon semi-nomads in Mesopotamia they can find only £200,000 a year for the regeneration of our slums, and have had to forbid all expenditure under the Education Act of 1918.”

  But while The Times argued that the danger to Britain came from British officialdom, much of British officialdom continued to focus on the Soviet threat to the Middle East, and on the question of how to respond to that threat.

  54

  THE SOVIET CHALLENGE IN THE MIDDLE EAST

  The heads of the three great departments of the British government charged with dealing with the Russian question in the Middle East—the Foreign Office, the War Office, and the India Office—disagreed among themselves about the nature of the Soviet challenge and about how to respond to it.

  Lord Curzon, guardian of the flame of the Great Game who became Foreign Secretary in 1919, argued for a forward British military position in the Middle East to guard against Russia. He urged the British army to take up positions defending Transcaucasia (which had broken away from Russia) and northern Persia. He and the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office, Lord Hardinge—both of them former viceroys of India—claimed that the loss of any one area in the Middle East to Russian aggression would, in turn, lead to the loss of the area behind it, in a domino reaction that might lead eventually to the loss of India.1

  The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, and the Viceroy of India, Frederic John Napier Thesiger, 3rd Baron Chelmsford, disagreed. Montagu and Chelmsford believed that Bolshevik Russia posed a political rather than a military threat to Britain’s position in the Middle East. They argued that Britain ought to be competing against Russia to win the support of nationalist forces throughout Islamic Asia. Instead, as they saw it, Britain was pursuing politics that might have been expressly designed to drive these forces into the arms of Moscow; and the presence of British armies might be expected to alienate these forces still further.

  Montagu wrote to Curzon at the beginning of 1920 that “The danger of the Bolsheviks to Persia and to India” was largely the result of the British government’s own policies, which he characterized as anti-Mohammedan. “We could have made Pan-Islamism friendly to Great Britain,” he wrote, but instead “We are making it hostile.”2 India, of course, had opposed London’s Middle Eastern policy ever since Lord Kitchener took charge of it in 1914; and what Montagu wrote in 1920 was consistent with the criticisms he had levelled all along against his government’s pro-Arab and pro-Zionist policies and against the school of Kitchener view that Islam was a force managed and directed by Britain’s enemies.

  Chelmsford, in telegrams to Montagu at the beginning of 1921, put the matter in historical perspective by pointing out that until 1914 the British had been the “champions of Islam against the Russian Ogre.”3 Now, however, the harsh Treaty of Sèvres that Lloyd George had imposed on the helpless Ottoman Empire and the one-sided treaty that Curzon had imposed on the prostrate Persian Empire appeared to Indian Moslems as examples of “Britain’s crushing of Islam.”4 In Russia, on the other hand, the war had brought into power a new regime that—at least in the Middle East—spoke the language of national independence. In the long run, according to the Viceroy, the “real defence” against Russian Bolshevik expansion in the Middle East lay not in installing forward military positions but in supporting a “nationalist spirit” among the Moslem peoples of the region whose basic religious tenets were hostile to Bolshevism and whose nationalism would lead them to oppose Russian advances.5 It would be a mistake for Britain to maintain a military presence in the Middle East, he continued, or even a merely economic one, for it might lead native leaders to conclude that the real threat to their independence came from London.

  Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, during the time he served as commander of the British troops remaining in northern Persia, strongly believed that his troops should not be there. As he saw it, the rugged terrain on the Indian northwest frontier provided so effective a defensive line that a forward defense of India was unnecessary, while the long line of communications required in order to conduct a forward defense of India from Persia rendered such a strategy impractical.6

  In the end the argument between the Foreign Office and the India Office was settled by the War Office. Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, decisively ruled against the Foreign Office on the grounds that he did not have the troops to carry out the forward policy in the Middle East that Lord Curzon advocated. In 1920 he submitted a paper to the Cabinet reporting that Britain had no reserves whatsoever with which to reinforce garrisons anywhere in the world should the need arise.7 The only feasible policy, in his view, was to husband resources and to concentrate Britain’s military forces in those areas of greatest importance and concern—and neither Persia nor the Caucasus frontier was among them.

  Winston Churchill, the War Minister and Secretary for Air, argued in early 1920 that if troops were available for Persia and the Caucasus frontier, they should be used instead in Russia—to support the Czarist generals in their bid to unseat the Bolshevik government.8 Churchill took the new rulers of the Kremlin at their word: he pictured them as internationalists and revolutionaries. He believed that most of them were not Russian at all—that they were Jews. Churchill therefore did not believe that they pursued Russian goals, whether nationalist or imperialist. He failed to explain why their objectives in the Middle East were so uncannily similar to those of the czars.

  Minutes of a 1920 conference of Cabinet ministers underlined the particular menace Churchill and some of his colleagues felt the Bolsheviks posed in Moslem Asia. “Every day they were making great strides towards the East, in the direction of Bokhara and Afghanistan. They were carrying out a regular, scientific, and comprehensive scheme of propaganda in Central Asia against the British.”9 The Chief of the Imperial General Staff warned the ministers that “the Caspian would fall into the hands of the Bolsheviks who could…create disturbance in North Persia. The unrest would spread to Afghanistan, which was already very unsettled, and also to India which was reported to be i
n a more dangerous state to-day than it had been for the last thirty years.”10 Echoing these fears, Winston Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister asking “what are we to do if the Bolsheviks overrun Caucasia and join with the Turkish Nationalists; if they obtain the command of the Caspian and invade Northern Persia; if they dominate Turkestan and join with Afghanistan in menacing India from without and endeavouring to raise up a revolution within?”11

  The British-subsidized White Russian campaign in the Russian Civil War that broke out between the Bolsheviks and their adversaries was seen by the public as Churchill’s private war, and when the White armies faltered in late 1919, and then fell apart early in 1920, it was seen as yet another of his costly failures. The Prime Minister wrote to him that “I have found your mind so obsessed by Russia that I felt I had good ground for the apprehension that your abilities, energy, and courage were not devoted to the reduction of expenditure.”12 Speaking about Churchill and Russia a few months later, the Prime Minister was less restrained; the Chief of the Imperial General Staff noted in his diary that “He thinks Winston has gone mad…”13

  As a Liberal Prime Minister dependent on a right-wing Conservative majority in the House of Commons, Lloyd George nonetheless felt obliged to allow his War Minister to support the White Russians until it was plain that they had failed. But when the Whites collapsed, the Prime Minister felt free to seek an agreement with the Reds. He did not fear their imperial ambitions in the Middle East. For that matter he had not feared those of the czars.