A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  Read as a whole, Bonar Law’s letter did not call into question the policy pursued until then by the government; it merely offered advice for the future. Its isolationist tone, however, and the sentence about not being the world’s policeman—which was often quoted out of context—struck a responsive chord in the ranks of those who found Lloyd George’s policies dangerous and overly ambitious. Moreover, Bonar Law’s willingness to take a public stand suggested that, with his health apparently restored, he might be persuaded to re-enter politics—which threatened to alter the delicate balance of forces within the Conservative Party and endanger the Coalition.

  Bonar Law had chosen his foreign policy issue shrewdly. Tory sentiment was traditionally pro-Turk and had been alienated by the Prime Minister’s pro-Greek crusade. “A good understanding with Turkey was our old policy and it is essential…” (original emphasis), wrote the chief of the recalcitrant Tories on 2 October.42 It was yet another instance in which rank-and-file Conservatives found that their principles and prejudices were being disregarded by the Coalition government. Coming after the concession of independence to Ireland and after the recognition of Bolshevik Russia, Lloyd George’s anti-Turkish policy threatened to be one instance too many. The Prime Minister had dissipated his credit with them. He had done so at a time when the collapse of the economy, mass unemployment, a slump in exports, scandals concerning the sales of honors and titles to political contributors, and a series of foreign policy fiascos culminating in the Chanak crisis had left him a much diminished electoral asset. The Conservatives no longer felt compelled to follow him in order to survive at the polls.

  The Prime Minister viewed matters differently. His government’s firmness at Chanak had brought Turkey’s armies to a halt; it was, in his view, a personal triumph for him and for Churchill, and he mistakenly believed that the electorate recognized it as such. On this erroneous assumption he proposed to call a snap election in the flush of victory, as he had done at the end of 1918 after the First World War had been won.

  Austen Chamberlain and Lord Birkenhead, the Conservative leaders in the government, agreed to join with Lloyd George in fighting the elections once again on a coalition basis. To defend that decision, Chamberlain, as leader of the party, summoned the Conservative members of the House of Commons and of the government to a meeting the morning of Thursday, 19 October, at the Carlton, the leading Tory club.

  Bonar Law was the person best placed to oppose Chamberlain, bring down the Coalition, and replace Lloyd George as Prime Minister. He hesitated; yet there was a strong press campaign urging him on, led by The Times and by the Beaverbrook newspapers.

  Lord Beaverbrook was Bonar Law’s most intimate political friend. He was largely responsible for having created the Lloyd George Coalition government during the war; now he acted to bring it down. On 11 October Beaverbrook wrote to an American friend that

  We are now in the throes of a political crisis. The failure of the Prime Minister’s Greek policy had resulted in a complete collapse of his prestige with the Conservatives…The immediate future will decide whether the Conservative Party is to remain intact, or whether the Prime Minister is strong enough to split it. It will have been a great achievement to have smashed two parties in one short administration. Yet that is what he can claim if he succeeds in destroying the Tories.43

  Beaverbrook succeeded in overcoming Bonar Law’s doubts and in making sure that the former Tory leader actually attended the decisive meeting at the Carlton Club. At the meeting, Law spoke against the Coalition, and though he spoke badly his intervention proved decisive. By an overwhelming vote of 187 to 87, the caucus decided to contest the coming elections on a straight party basis.

  Upon receiving the news, David Lloyd George immediately tendered his resignation to King George. Soon afterward Andrew Bonar Law took office as Prime Minister and called elections for 15 November.

  The popular vote on 15 November was close, but in the winner-take-all British parliamentary system the results were a triumph for the Conservatives, who won a majority of seats in the new House of Commons. Lloyd George was repudiated; neither he nor Asquith commanded a large enough following to qualify even as Leader of the Opposition, for Labour had beaten the Liberals to take second place.

  During the electoral campaign, the Beaverbrook press mounted a fierce attack on the Middle Eastern policy of the Coalition government, and demanded that Britain withdraw from her new acquisitions: Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan. Although Beaverbrook’s crusade was in fact launched without Bonar Law’s sanction, it seemed to implicate the new administration in a blanket condemnation of Britain’s postwar policy in the Middle East. It also called into question Britain’s commitment to continue to support Arab and Jewish aspirations there.

  As a result, during the election campaign the Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill was drawn into public controversy with Lord Curzon (who had deserted to Bonar Law) over the record of the past few years in the Middle East. Churchill charged that Curzon was “as responsible as any man alive for the promises that were given to the Jews and to the Arabs.”44 T. E. Lawrence wrote to the editor of the Daily Express in support of his former chief that “If we get out of the Middle East Mandates with credit, it will be by Winston’s bridge. The man’s as brave as six, as good-humoured, shrewd, self-confident, & considerate as a statesman can be: & several times I’ve seen him chuck the statesmanlike course & do the honest thing instead.”45

  In the general ruin of Coalition fortunes, Churchill was defeated for re-election in his constituency of Dundee. T. E. Lawrence wrote “I’m more sorry about Winston than I can say. I hope the Press Comment is not too malevolent. It’s sure to have hurt him though. What bloody shits the Dundeans must be.”46

  Alone among the Coalition Liberal leaders, David Lloyd George retained his parliamentary seat; but he never held Cabinet office again. Like Lord Kitchener and Winston Churchill at the Dardanelles, he saw his political position ruined by the Middle East. For nearly a quarter of a century after 1922 the once all-powerful minister who had presided over the destinies of the world lingered on in political impotence and isolation, feared and mistrusted by men of lesser abilities, and looked down upon by them for having conducted a morally shabby administration. In part due to his own flaws, he was denied a chance to apply his fertile genius to the political challenges of the Great Depression, the appeasement years, and the Second World War. His political deviousness and his moral and financial laxness were never forgotten. It was not sufficiently remembered that single-handed he had kept Britain from losing the First World War, and that his colleagues had once claimed that they were content to let him be Prime Minister for life. He died in 1945.

  In his later years Lloyd George devoted himself to re-fighting the old battles in his highly slanted, far from factual, but beautifully written memoirs. As he presented it, his last, lost crusade in the Middle East was intended to make the world a fundamentally better place. Of the decision reached at the Carlton Club, he wrote: “So the Government fell, and with it went first the liberation of Armenia and Asiatic Greece, and in the sequel the League of Nations and all the projects for substituting conciliation for armaments.”47*

  61

  THE SETTLEMENT OF THE MIDDLE EASTERN QUESTION

  I

  East of Suez, Lloyd George and his colleagues were the authors of a major chapter in history. The establishment of Allied control in the Middle East marked the climax of Europe’s conquest of the rest of the world. It was the last chapter in a tale of high adventure—of sailors daring to cross uncharted oceans, of explorers tracking rivers to their source, and of small bands of soldiers marching into the interior of unknown continents to do battle with the vast armies of remote empires. The venture had begun centuries before, in the wake of Columbus’s galleons, as Europeans streamed forth to subjugate and colonize the lands they had discovered in the Americas and in the waters to the east and west of them. It continued through the nineteenth century, as Britain assumed
the empire of India, and as the Great Powers divided the continent of Africa between them. By the dawn of the twentieth century, East Asia apart, the Middle East was the only native bastion that the Europeans had not yet stormed; and, at the end of the First World War, Lloyd George was able to proudly point out that his armies had finally stormed it.

  For at least a century before the 1914 war, Europeans had regarded it as axiomatic that someday the Middle East would be occupied by one or more of the Great Powers. Their great fear was that disputes about their respective shares might lead the European powers to fight ruinous wars against one another.

  For the government of Britain, therefore, the settlements arrived at by 1922 were a doubly crowning achievement. Britain had won a far larger share of the Middle East (and Britain’s rival, Russia, a much smaller one) than had seemed possible beforehand; but even more important, the powers seemed prepared to accept the territorial division that had emerged in the early 1920s without further recourse to arms.

  Thus the troubling and potentially explosive Middle Eastern Question, as it had existed in world politics since the time of Bonaparte’s Egyptian expedition, was successfully settled by the postwar arrangements arrived at by 1922. A major issue that had been at stake was where Russia’s political frontier in the Middle East would be drawn. By 1922 the question was solved: the Russian frontier was finally drawn to run with a northern tier of states that stretched from Turkey to Iran to Afghanistan—countries that maneuvered to remain independent both of Russia and the West, along a line that continued to hold firm for decades. The other great issue at stake since Napoleonic times had been what would eventually become of the Ottoman Empire—an issue that was resolved in 1922 by the termination of the Ottoman Sultanate and the partition of its Middle Eastern domains between Turkey, France, and Britain. Such was the settlement of 1922.

  II

  The settlement of 1922 was not a single act or agreement or document; rather, it was the design that emerged from many separate acts and agreements and documents that date mostly from that year.

  Russia’s territorial frontier in the Middle East was established by the draft constitution of the U.S.S.R. promulgated at the end of 1922, while her political frontier emerged from the treaties she signed with Turkey, Persia, and Afghanistan, and, to some extent, from the trade agreement she signed with Britain in 1921.

  The deposing of the Ottoman Sultan and the establishment of a Turkish national state (confined to the Turkish-speaking portion of the dissolved empire) were effected by unanimous votes of the Turkish Grand National Assembly on 1 and 2 November 1922. Turkey’s eventual frontiers in large part grew out of the armistice she signed with the Allies in the autumn of 1922, followed by a peace treaty with the Allies signed at the Swiss city of Lausanne the following year.*

  The rest of the former Ottoman domains in the Middle East were partitioned between Britain and France by such documents as France’s League of Nations Mandate to rule Syria and Lebanon (1922), Britain’s League of Nations Mandate to rule Palestine including Transjordan (1922), and the treaty of 1922 with Iraq which Britain intended to serve as an affirmation of a Mandate to rule that newly created country.

  Within her own sphere of influence in the Middle East, Britain made her dispositions in acts and documents that also, for the most part, date from 1922. She placed Fuad I on the throne of Egypt in that year, and made Egypt a nominally independent protectorate by the terms of the Allenby Declaration of 1922. She established a protectorate in Iraq by her treaty that year with that country: a country that she had created and upon whose throne she had placed her own nominee, Feisal. By the terms of the Palestine Mandate of 1922 and Churchill’s White Paper for Palestine in 1922, Transjordan was set on the road to a political existence separate from that of Palestine—Abdullah, appointed by Britain, was to permanently preside over the new entity by a decision made in 1922—while west of the Jordan, Jews were promised a National Home and non-Jews were promised full rights. Independence or autonomy for the Kurds, which had been on the agenda in 1921, somehow disappeared from the agenda in 1922, so there was to be no Kurdistan: it was a nondecision of 1922 that was, in effect, a decision. In 1922, too, Britain imposed frontier agreements upon Ibn Saud that established boundaries between Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Kuwait.

  Thus Britain—like France in her sphere of the Middle East, and Russia in hers—established states, appointed persons to govern them, and drew frontiers between them; and did so mostly in and around 1922. As they had long intended to do, the European powers had taken the political destinies of the Middle Eastern peoples in their hands—and they did so by the terms of what I have called the settlement of 1922.

  III

  Everywhere else in the world—everywhere outside of Asia—European occupation had resulted in the destruction of native political structures and their replacement by new ones of European design. The Americas, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa were no longer divided in terms of tribes; they were divided, as Europe was, into countries. Governmental administration of most of the planet was conducted in a European mode, according to European precepts, and in accordance with European concepts.

  Still, there was some reason to question whether European occupation would produce quite so deep or lasting an impression in the Middle East as it had elsewhere. It was not only that the Middle East was a region of proud and ancient civilizations, with beliefs deeply rooted in the past, but also that the changes Europe proposed to introduce were so profound that generations would have to pass before the changes could take root. These matters take time. Ancient Rome shaped Europe, and renascent Europe shaped the Americas, but in both cases it was the work of centuries; and in 1922 western Europe was in no mood—and in no condition—to embark on an undertaking of such magnitude.

  The long-expected European imperial adventure in the Middle East had therefore begun too late; Europeans could no longer pursue it either with adequate resources or with a whole heart. Europe itself, its antebellum world swept away in the cataclysm of 1914–18, was changing more rapidly in weeks or months than it had before in decades or centuries, and to a growing number of Europeans, imperialism seemed out of place in the modern age.

  In the first years of the war it had still sounded acceptable openly to avow an intention to annex new colonies; but as Wilson’s America and Lenin’s Russia, with their anti-imperialist rhetoric, challenged old Europe, minds and political vocabularies began to change. Sir Mark Sykes, ever sensitive to shifts in the current of opinion, recognized in 1917 that the imperial concepts he and Picot had employed only a year before in their Middle East pact already belonged to a bygone era.

  By the time that the war came to an end, British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be of benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue. Viewing imperialism as a costly drain on a society that needed to invest all of its remaining resources in rebuilding itself, the bulk of the British press, public, and Parliament agreed to let the government commit itself to a presence in the Arab Middle East only because Winston Churchill’s ingenious strategy made it seem possible to control the region inexpensively.

  Thus the belief, widely shared by British officials during and after the First World War, that Britain had come to the Middle East to stay—at least long enough to re-shape the region in line with European political interests, ideas, and ideals—was based on the fragile assumption that Churchill’s aircraft-and-armored-car strategy could hold local opposition at bay indefinitely. In turn, that assumption was another expression of the underestimation of the Middle East that had typified British policy all along. It had shown itself when Grey disdained the offer of an Ottoman alliance in 1911; when Asquith in 1914 regarded Ottoman entry in the war as being of no great concern; and when Kitchener, in 1915, sent his armies to their doom against an entrenched and forewarned
foe at Gallipoli in an attack the British government knew would be suicidal if the defending troops were of European quality—Kitchener’s fatal assumption being that they were not.

  In 1922 the British government had arrived at a political compromise with British society, by the terms of which Britain could assert her mastery in the Middle East so long as she could do so at little cost. To British officials who underestimated the difficulties Britain would encounter in governing the region—who, indeed, had no conception of the magnitude of what they had undertaken—that meant Britain was in the Middle East to stay. In retrospect, however, it was an early indication that Britain was likely to leave.

  IV

  From a British point of view, the settlement of 1922 had become largely out of date by the time it was effected. It embodied much of the program for the postwar Middle East that the British government had formulated (mostly through the agency of Sir Mark Sykes) between 1915 and 1917. But the British government had changed, British official thinking had changed, and in 1922 the arrangements arrived at in the Middle East did not accurately reflect what the government of the day would have wished.

  Giving France a League of Nations Mandate in 1922 to rule Syria (including Lebanon) was a case in point. In 1915 and 1916 Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey and the British negotiator Sir Mark Sykes had viewed with sympathy France’s claim to Syria—and had accepted it. But in 1922 Britain’s Prime Minister, Foreign Secretary, and officials in the field were all men who had said for years that to allow France to occupy Syria was to invite disaster.

  Even within its own sphere in the Middle East, the British government was unhappy about the dispositions it was making in 1922. In 1914, 1915, and 1916, Lord Kitchener and his lieutenants had chosen to sponsor the Hashemites—Hussein of Mecca and his sons—as leaders of the postwar Arab Middle East. By 1918 British officials had come to regard Hussein as a burden, who was involving them in a losing conflict with Ibn Saud. By 1922 British politicians and officials had come to view Hussein’s son Feisal as treacherous, and Hussein’s son Abdullah as lazy and ineffective. Yet, in Iraq and Transjordan, Feisal and Abdullah were the rulers whom Britain had installed; Britain had committed herself to the Hashemite cause.