Certainly Lloyd George appreciated at once Lawrence’s suggestion that British policy in the Middle East should be placed in the hands of one man, and what is more knew exactly in whose hands to place it. Winston Churchill had rejoined the government as minister of munitions in 1917, after commanding an infantry battalion on the western front for several months following the inquiry into the Dardanelles campaign. Early in 1919, he became secretary of state for war and secretary of state for air, in which roles he presided, among other matters, over the British effort to crush the rebellion in Iraq. The experience left him with an interest in the Middle East and a firm belief that the RAF could control large areas at a fraction of the expense (and bloodshed) of ground troops.
Lloyd George had always treated Churchill with the respect most sensible people reserve for a fused hand grenade. They were friends and rivals, both of them fiercely ambitious for power. Of the two, Churchill was the more volatile, and at this point by far the more politically vulnerable, and Lloyd George, for all his fabled Welsh charm, did not conceal from his old friend the fact that only his personal intervention had persuaded the reluctant members of the Liberal and Conservative coalition to allow Churchill back into the government at all. Churchill was in the cabinet on suffrage, and at the pleasure of the prime minister, never a man to confuse good intentions with political self-interest. In any case, Lloyd George concluded that Churchill was the obvious man for the job—a choice which had the additional advantage that if Churchill failed, the prime minister could lay the entire responsibility on him.
Churchill was no expert on the Middle East, although he had strong opinions about it. He had “a virgin mind” on the subject, he told one of his advisers—but unlike his rivals in the cabinet, he relished the opportunity to shape the future of a vital portion of the globe. Doubts did not trouble him; nor did the vested interests of the Foreign Office, still less previous promises made to the Arabs, in which he had played no part. His partiality toward Zionism was strong and sincere, but like Lloyd George he saw his task as preserving above all vital British interests—protection of the Suez Canal, the oil fields of Iraq, and the safe air route to India across Arabia from Cairo to Baghdad—while cutting sharply the enormous expense of keeping large numbers of British troops in the Middle East. Being who he was, Churchill had, beyond these practical goals, the imagination, the courage, the vision, and the boundless self-confidence to undo what Britain had reluctantly agreed to at the Paris Peace Conference, and create a new reality in the Middle East, at least so far as the British were concerned. To make it clear that responsibility for the Middle East would no longer be shared between the Foreign Office, the Colonial Office, and the War Office, Churchill proposed to set up a “Middle East Department.” Not surprisingly, his first significant step was to persuade T. E. Lawrence to become his political adviser and his emissary to the Arabs—though Churchill may not have been aware that Lawrence was the one to recommend him to Lloyd George for the Middle East.
Oddly enough, Lawrence initially hesitated. Churchill’s omnipresent private secretary and their friend Eddie Marsh first broached the idea to Lawrence in December 1920, but Lawrence initially showed little enthusiasm, perhaps because he knew it meant returning to the role of “Colonel Lawrence.” This was, of course, to underestimate the persuasive powers of Winston Churchill. Lawrence took his first step toward joining Churchill’s team by sounding out Feisal, who was in London at the time to protest against the French occupation of Syria. Confirming Churchill’s confidence in him, Lawrence managed to get Feisal to promise a willingness to make a new start from the Arab side. Feisal agreed to put aside for the moment his objections to French rule in Lebanon and Syria, acknowledging the inability of the British government to alter French policy in the Middle East—and to settle for a Hashemite presence in Iraq and what is now Jordan, where his brother Abdulla was at present de facto ruler of the local Bedouin tribes. Though it was not appreciated at the time, the most significant concession Lawrence wrung from Feisal was that his father would give up any claim to rule Palestine. This had the advantage, from Feisal’s point of view, of leaving the explosive issue of a Jewish “national home” in the hands of the British, who would very soon come to regret the responsibility, and the promises they had made to the Zionists.
Lawrence had planned to make a journey to some of the principal sites mentioned in Seven Pillars of Wisdom with Eric Kennington, the distinguished war artist, who had caused a sensation in London with his modernist depictions of troops in the trenches. The paintings appealed to Lawrence as a contrast to the more formal portraits he planned to have painted, and he was reluctant to cancel the trip. (After Lawrence’s death Kennington carved both an effigy of Lawrence in the medieval style, and the bust of him, a copy of which is placed in the crypt of St. Paul’s Cathedral.) Lawrence was simultaneously tempted and repelled by the thought of returning to the Middle East, but he swiftly developed for Churchill the same intense mixture of affection, loyalty, and respect that he had for Allenby, and eventually he allowed himself to be won over, as Churchill had been confident he would be. Lawrence attempted to set as a prior condition that all Britain’s promises to the Arabs should be met, but Churchill refused to do this.Lawrence gave in—indeed he can hardly have expected that Churchill would agree to totally abandon the Sykes-Picot agreement, and undermine both Britain’s and France’s positions in the Middle East.
Lawrence’s success with Feisal before he had even accepted a job, and almost a month before Churchill formally took office, demonstrated just how valuable he would be. For all his occasionally erratic or emotional decisions, Churchill was an experienced politician, who wanted to be in a position to claim that he had listened to more than one opinion.Lawrence’s role as political adviser and emissary to the Arabs was vital to the success of Churchill’s mission, but he carefully balanced Lawrence’s pro-Arab views by adding to his staff Sir John Shuckburgh as assistant undersecretary; an experienced civil servant, Lawrence’s old chief Sir Gilbert Clayton, as military adviser; Hubert Young, once appointed as Lawrence’s understudy during the Arab Revolt; and Richard Meinertzhagen, who had been Lawrence’s confidant at the Hotel Continental during the Paris Peace Conference. Clayton, with his background in military intelligence and his knowledge of Egypt, was the perfect man to prevent friction between the War Office and the ebullient new secretary of state for the colonies. Young—who had clashed with Lawrence in 1917 and 1918, had been co-opted by the Foreign Office, and over time had been converted to Lawrence’s views on Middle Eastern policy—might be trusted to keep Lord Curzon from interfering. Meinertzhagen, whose fervent and uncritical enthusiasm for Zionism was almost unique among British officers, could be trusted to reach out to the Jewish communities in Palestine and to represent their point of view forcefully. Churchill would soon add to this group Gertrude Bell, whose knowledge of Iraqi politics and personalities would be of great value. Although Lawrence had irritated Gertrude Bell with his newspaper campaign in favor of Feisal and his doubts about ibn Saud, they had been friends for too long not to patch up their differences. As for Young, he and Lawrence had long since made peace; and Lawrence was under the impression that he himself and Meinertzhagen were friends. Indeed, it may not have been until much later that Meinertzhagen began to revise his diaries to represent a very different view of “little Lawrence,” remarking that Churchill’s attitude “almost amounted to hero worship,” and that Lawrence was “a most remarkable man, with a most remarkable record, but as unscrupulous as he is dangerous. His meek schoolboy expression hides the cunning of a fox and the intriguing spirit of the East…. We all know that Lawrence is a humbug, though as able as a monkey. ” He was later to change his mind again; after Lawrence’s death, he wrote, “I cherish his memory. ” But whatever Meinertzhagen really thought of Lawrence, the two of them worked together well enough under Churchill.
Lawrence became a civil servant on February 18, 1920, at a salary of £1,600 a year—about $120,000 a
year in today’s terms. He had asked for only £1,000, but Churchill dismissed this at once as too modest, and said, “We’ll make it £1,600,” enough to enable Lawrence to fund Kennington’s journey to the Middle East alone to do the drawings for Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Lawrence had decided not to spend any of his salary on himself beyond the bare necessities, since he did not think it was right to accept money for trying to invent a solution to a problem he had helped to cause. Lawrence then sat down in a room at the Colonial Office, which he shared with Young, and on their first day together, they drew up the agenda for the meeting Churchill planned to hold in Cairo. “Talk of leaving things to the man on the spot,” Lawrence wrote; “we left nothing.”
As John Mack points out in A Prince of Our Disorder, it had always been Lawrence’s habit to work through older and more powerful figures, influencing them in the direction he wanted them to go, but remaining in their shadow and carefully not seeking any personal credit. He had worked that way with Hogarth, with Clayton, and with Allenby—it was only in the desert, with Feisal, that he had stepped hesitantly into the limelight himself, tempted by the opportunity he was offered to carry out in practice his own theories about warfare, and to test his own courage and endurance in the hardest conditions imaginable. Even there, when he was in Feisal’s presence he did his best to stay in the background, as the adviser and liaison officer, not the bold guerrilla leader, always careful to suggest by indirection, until eventually he and Feisal began to think as one, and each could predict what the other would say or do. He quickly achieved the same kind of relationship with Churchill.
Lawrence and Young not only drew up the agenda for Churchill’s meeting in Cairo, but so far as possible tried to provide both the questions and the answers, to ensure that there should be no surprises or disagreements. Lawrence’s recommendation to Churchill was succinct: “You must take risks, make a native king in Iraq, and hand over defence to the RAF instead of the Army.” Lawrence’s experience working in tandem with the air force in the desert had given him a good understanding of how a comparatively small number of aircraft could produce a disproportionate effect on relatively primitive tribal forces. He saw very clearly that the object should never be to invade or occupy territory with troops—a waste of time, manpower, and money against nomadic or seminomadic people—but to threaten punishment from the air and, only when necessary, carry it out. Relatively speaking, it was even humane; aircraft could drop leaflets on the rebellious natives warning that they would return to bomb a specific target the next day, and so long as there was someone on the ground who could read, women, children, herds, and flocks could be removed to safety. Air Marshal Sir Geoffrey Salmond, KCB, KCMG, DSO, who had commanded the Royal Flying Corps in the Middle East during the war, and Air Chief Marshal Sir Hugh Trenchard, GCB, OM, GCVO, DSO, the “founder of the Royal Air Force” and its first chief of the air staff, knew Lawrence, and were in sympathy with his ideas, as well as eager to prove that a few squadrons of aircraft could “police” a whole country. The result was that from its creation in 1921 to the end of the renewed British occupation during World War II, Iraq was a proving ground for Lawrence’s visionary ideas about air power; and for several decades the principal RAF base at Habbaniya, outside Baghdad, was one of the largest military airfields in the world. Lawrence had no trouble persuading Churchill of his views, and still less in suggesting who the “native king” of Iraq should be.
In his book about Lawrence, the military historian Basil Liddell Hart wrote: “Lawrence can bear comparison with … Napoleon in that vital faculty of generalship, the power of grasping instantly the picture of the ground and situation, of relating the one to the other. He generated too the same electric current of command.” While this is high praise, coming from such a distinguished critic of strategy, what Liddell Hart did not point out was that Lawrence’s genius for diplomacy and politics was, if anything, more striking. He anticipated by more than fifty years Henry Kissinger’s “shuttle diplomacy,” using aircraft to fly from one leader to another throughout the Middle East in intensive bursts of negotiation and persuasion, restlessly pursuing consensus before second thoughts had time to sink in among his interlocutors. It was not just that he was a young man in a hurry—he was perhaps the first person to appreciate that speed, in diplomacy as in warfare, was a vital weapon, and that keeping up the pressure was the best way to produce agreement.
Lawrence worked in the Middle Eastern Department of the Colonial Office for just over a year, yet in that short time he not only managed to help create the borders of modern Iraq, and place his friend Feisal on its throne as its first king, but also managed to create a kingdom in all but name for Feisal’s brother Abdulla in what was then known as TransJordan and later became the Kingdom of Jordan. He tried and failed to make a negotiated peace between King Hussein and ibn Saud, and was instrumental in persuading the British to give a measure of independence to Egypt, while maintaining a British military presence strong enough to ensure British control of the Suez Canal until 1956.
The transformation of the warrior into the diplomat was immediate and successful, beyond even Churchill’s hopes. Lawrence even allowed himself to be described in his diplomatic credentials as “Our most trusted and well-beloved Thomas Edward Lawrence Esquire, Lieutenant-Colonel in Our Army, Companion of Our Most Honourable Order of the Bath, Companion of Our Distinguished Service Order,” exactly those honors he had refused to accept from King George V, who must have chuckled when he saw and signed the warrant. Lawrence dressed as a civilian during this period of his life in the Middle East, looking a bit ill at ease without a uniform or his robes, in a formal dark suit, often worn with dusty desert boots. In one famous photograph he is shown mounted on a camel in front of the Sphinx, looking a good deal more comfortable than Winston Churchill and Gertrude Bell on either side of him. In most group photographs he seems anxious to get as far to the edge of the picture as possible. The curious thing is that even without the flowing robe, the headdress, and the gold dagger, and despite the fact that he is almost always the shortest person in the photograph, Lawrence’s face still attracts the eye instantly. There remains something commanding about the eyes and the thrust of the powerful jaw that contradicts the meek pose and the nondescript three-piece suit, with the trousers always a few inches too short.
The velocity of his movements throughout the Middle East is astonishing even today, particularly when one keeps in mind that air travel then involved sitting in the open cockpit of a biplane and landing on the RAF’s improvised, dusty air strips in the desert. A quick glance at Lawrence’s journey is revealing. On February 16, 1921, he had a further meeting with Feisal to discuss Iraq and Trans-Jordan. On February 18, he joined the Colonial Office, and together with Young drew up the agenda for the Cairo meeting. On March 2, he left for Egypt. On March 12 the meeting began there, at the Semiramis Hotel in Cairo. The next day Churchill sought the cabinet’s approval to offer the throne of Iraq to Feisal, on terms discussed between him and Lawrence. On March 24 Lawrence cabled Feisal to leave London for Mecca, “by the quickest possible route,” then left Cairo to meet with Abdulla in Amman. On March 9 he arrived in Jerusalem. On April 21 he flew to Cairo to meet Feisal, and by May 11 he was back in London. He spent the summer and autumn going back and forth on critical diplomatic missions to King Hussein in Jidda, to Abdulla in Amman, and to the imam of Yemen.
The first difficulty Lawrence faced was not so much Feisal’s initial reluctance to exchange his claim to the throne of Syria for that of Iraq—the latter had originally been promised to his brother Abdulla—although this was a factor, but Churchill’s need to have it appear that the people of Iraq had called Feisal to the throne. Churchill’s requirement was much harder to stage-manage, particularly given the doubts of Colonel Arnold Wilson, the stiff-necked acting chief political officer in Iraq, under whose orders the Iraqi rebellion of 1920 had been brutally repressed. Wilson remained skeptical about Feisal’s appeal to the Iraqis, and about the Hashemite
family in general, and his skepticism was initially shared by Gertrude Bell. Lawrence quickly managed to convert Bell to his point of view—his cheery self-confidence usually brought that about. The problem of Wilson, a firm believer in the use of force and in the inability of the Arabs to govern an area like Iraq, was solved by knighting him, then replacing him with the more malleable Sir Percy Cox.
Gertrude Bell was assigned—among many other more important tasks, including persuading the initially reluctant Shiites and the Jews of Baghdad to accept a Sunni king—the job of devising a national flag, drawing up a code of court etiquette, and selecting a recognizable national anthem. (The last proved impossible, so the initial choice was the music of “God Save the King,” without the lyrics.) Deciding on Iraq’s borders was a more difficult question. The western border with Syria was fixed by a previous agreement with the French, the southern border was an invisible line in the sand between Iraq and the vast empty desert ibn Saud claimed, and the eastern border was that of the old Ottoman Empire with Persia; but to the north was the territory inhabited by Kurds, Arabic-speaking non-Arabs, supposedly of Indo-European descent, who passionately desired an independent Kurdistan. Unfortunately for them, the grand prize of Iraq from the British point of view was Mosul, right in the middle of the Kurdish homeland, with its rich oil deposits. Accordingly, commercial interests and realpolitik combined to create a country with a Shiite majority, a Sunni king, a disappointed Kurdish minority, and a small but wealthy and cosmopolitan class of Jewish merchants in Baghdad.
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