Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Amery, no doubt reflecting the distaste felt by the British in Baghdad for Stuart Morgan, stated that the French government had now ‘definitely won’ him to ‘their side’. The French were equally suspicious of the British. Their representative on the board of directors of the Turkish Petroleum Company believed that the Iraqi government backed Haifa owing to the influence of the British. For their part, the British were sure that the Iraqis backed Haifa because they had no confidence in the French. Writing from the comfort of the East India Club in St James’s Square in February 1929, Dobbs told Shuckburgh, the Colonial Office official, that the Iraqis ‘who knew anything about it are rabidly in favour of Haifa’. This was ‘partly because they dislike the French and the prospect of French control of the terminus’, but also because they thought that the pipeline and railway ‘if brought south’ would prevent Ibn Saud in the Gulf from expanding northwards.

  Meanwhile, from the Foreign Office, Chamberlain rebuked Amery gently, saying that he preferred ‘methods of conciliation’ as opposed to ‘rigid insistence on a line of action which has no guarantee of success’. Chamberlain did not share Amery’s view ‘that a serious dispute with the French Government over this question is sooner or later inevitable’.35 Gulbenkian, sitting in Cannes, eagerly followed the dispute and felt that he had to become involved in order to safeguard his interests. It was assumed that, if a pipeline was constructed, a railway would also be built along the same route. The Iraqis believed that the oil company would pay for this development. Gulbenkian was furious. He now fired off a letter, dated 12 February, to Sir Adam Ritchie, the general manager of the company in London. It would be wrong, Gulbenkian argued, for the Iraqis to be under the impression that ‘they can later on impose upon us the building of the railway’. He was all for capitalism and a narrow focus on business. He despised what a modern commentator might call development projects. Gulbenkian believed that ‘we should make a success of oil exploration’; it was no concern of the company ‘to be mixed up in politics’. But the one thing the 1920s should have taught him was that oil was inextricably ‘mixed up’ with politics. As one contemporary analyst put it, ‘cherchez le pétrole [look for the oil] has become as universal an explanation of the tragedies and comedies of international relations as cherchez la femme [look for the woman] is of human relations’.36

  The Admiralty also contributed its opinions about the preferred port for the pipeline. Its officials felt that the Foreign Office showed a ‘strange lack of vision’. The railway and pipeline at Haifa would realize ‘advantages of every kind’. What these advantages were they were less specific about. On the other hand, the Admiralty argued, there would be a ‘corresponding loss’ if the railway and pipeline reached ‘a Syrian port’. This would be a ‘weak surrender to French interests’. There was only one problem with all this bombast. It was a problem which the Admiralty itself acknowledged. ‘The weak spot is that, on purely economic grounds, there is nothing to be said for the Haifa project’; the company ‘if left to itself, must opt for Syria ’. 37 The French were only too aware of this. Marcellin Berthelot, the French Foreign Minister, was in communication with the Foreign Office right up to the 1929 general election. On the very day of the election, he wrote to the British government that the French wanted to see a pipeline in Tripoli and that it would be ‘unjustifiable’ for its route to be determined by ‘political reasons’ (‘des raisons politiques’).38

  The dispute over the route of the pipeline rumbled on through 1929 and 1930; it was now being handled by the new Labour administration, which showed itself just as wary of French claims as the Conservatives had been. The company’s chairman, Sir John Cadman, a technocrat who, perhaps unusually for the time, had an engineering degree, was worried about the effect the dispute would have on his own position. In a meeting of the Cabinet Oil Committee on 27 May 1930, chaired by Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party’s new Foreign Secretary, Cadman told of his nervousness that ‘the documents and minutes’ on the subject were being ‘broadcast round the departments’. The fact that he was ‘having consultations with His Majesty’s Government’ about the pipeline would make his position ‘very difficult’ with the American and French directors of the company.39 By February 1931, the dispute still remained unresolved. J. H. Thomas, the Labour Secretary of State for the Dominions, complained about the general direction of British policy since the end of the war. He said Britain had ‘been giving in all along the line. We allowed the French to take over the German share in the I.P.C. and then let the Americans in.’ Thomas’s summation of what had happened was largely accurate.40 The Cabinet Committee was candid enough to admit that the southern route was ‘uneconomical’. The Kirkuk-to-Haifa route was, at 640 miles, 111 miles longer than the route to Tripoli; besides, the countryside in Palestine was ‘difficult’, in terms of terrain and of its political circumstances.

  The Iraqis were adamant that the route had to go to Haifa, and some kind of route remained absolutely necessary. An ‘Economic Report’ from the Colonial Office, dated July 1929, had noticed that ‘leading oil groups’ now realized that it was simply not ‘a commercial proposition to carry American oil to India and Burma’ or to take ‘Persian or Burman oil to France and Northern European Ports’. Each market had to be supplied ‘with oil from the nearest or most convenient or cheapest source of supply’.41 But King Faisal was still unprepared to compromise with the French. He was furious with them and, in an interview with Sir Francis Humphrys, the new High Commissioner in Baghdad, in October 1930, he had to be ‘calmed down’. The King screamed that the ‘Government of Iraq would prefer that the oil should remain permanently under ground [sic] rather than it should be carried to the Mediterranean via Syria’.42 In the background, Gulbenkian was still stirring. Always the shrewd businessman, he just wanted the cheapest alternative. The French view, in his opinion, was the more practical option. Gulbenkian was clever enough not to identify himself unequivocally with one view or the other. He simply spread the rumour that the French had completely ‘won over the Americans and the Dutch to the “Tripoli Alignment” and that Sir John Cadman and the Anglo-Persian Oil Company were therefore isolated’.

  The pipeline dispute involved the King of Iraq, the British and the French in a battle of wills. The Americans were spectators and were, by now, more concerned with developing the riches of their new field of oil interest, the Ibn Saud kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Britain and France continued to play a role in Iraqi affairs. In 1935 the pipeline was built and, as a concession to both those imperial powers, the pipeline bifurcated at Haditha, on the Euphrates, in Iraq, with one branch going to Haifa and the other to Tripoli.

  Despite nominal Iraqi independence in 1932, the year the mandate expired, the British continued to be a dominant presence. The British had set up King Faisal, and they continued to support his family. Faisal sent his son, Ghazi, to Harrow, the school that had educated Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill and Jawaharlal Nehru, among other prominent figures in the 1920s and 1930s. John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932, the year the British mandate over Iraq expired, had even been a classmate there in the 1880s of Stanley Baldwin, the ex-British Prime Minister. In the 1920s and 1930s, Harrow was probably at the height of its reputation and prestige. The fact that this was the school patronized by the Iraqi royal family clearly demonstrated the closeness of their relationship with the British establishment. It was this relationship that would eventually doom them and lead to prolonged instability in Iraq.

  3

  Monarchy and Revolution

  The crowd was on the ‘point of hysteria’. Hundreds of British and foreign mourners joined in the solemn march through the streets of Baghdad. King Faisal was dead. At the end of the march there was the ‘booming of 99 guns’. The crowd, although almost hysterical, behaved ‘very well indeed’.1 The procession took place in November 1933, a delay of two months, because the King’s body had to be brought back from Switzerland. Earlier that summe
r, Faisal, along with three of his ministers, had come to London in order to speak directly with government officials at the heart of the British Empire. The British monarch, King George V, had personally greeted him on his arrival at Victoria Station. As the two kings were driven in their cars the short distance from the railway station to Buckingham Palace, they were cheered by crowds thronging the streets.

  During King Faisal’s stay, all points of diplomatic etiquette and formality had been observed. Soon after his arrival, Faisal laid a wreath of poppies on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier at Westminster Abbey. He and his ministers were then entertained at a dinner at the Guildhall on 21 June, the day after they had landed in Britain. King George V himself gave the address. He extolled the ‘brilliant advance made by Iraq under Your Majesty’s enlightened rule’. Iraq was now nominally independent. The mandate had ended in 1932, so King George only gently alluded to the ‘progress’ which had been ‘sustained and assisted during the last twelve years by the friendly co-operation of our respective Governments’. The British monarch expressed his ‘earnest hope’ that these ‘close and fruitful relations’ would be ‘sustained’ in the future. After these polite words, the official part of Faisal’s visit soon ended, but the King lingered, enjoying the luxuries of London for a few more weeks, and returned to Baghdad only on 2 August. He left Iraq on Saturday 2 September to go to Switzerland. He was feeling unwell. He died in Berne, the Swiss capital, in the early hours of Friday morning, 8 September. He was barely fifty years old.2

  King Faisal had been a romantic, even dashing figure. At the peace conference in Paris in 1919, he had charmed the British and Americans alike. To them he exuded all the exoticism and mystery of the East. Robert Lansing, the US Secretary of State, had said of him that he ‘suggested the calmness and peace of the desert’. During the First World War, T. E. Lawrence had identified him as the leader and figurehead of the Arab revolt and later recounted their first meeting in a famous passage in his account of the revolt, The Seven Pillars of Wisdom: ‘I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek.’3 Later he would describe Faisal as his ‘very great pride’, in a letter to Charlotte Shaw. Lawrence even viewed it as a ‘privilege to have helped him [Faisal] to his supremacy, out there’. Even better, in his view, was the fact that Faisal was now a ‘person for the English-speaking races’.4 Whatever else Faisal was, he was staunchly pro-British, ‘one of us’. He had been rejected by the French as king of Syria and spent the intervening time polishing his gold daggers and draping himself in silks in a villa on the shores of Lake Maggiore in Italy.5

  The influence of his friends, such as T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell, enabled Faisal to find another kingdom, Iraq. He had involved himself in the politics of oil, opposing the French insistence on Tripoli as the port for the Iraqi oil pipeline. With Bell and his other English friends about him, he had indulged in the finer things in life. In March 1923, Bell was asking her father to send ‘a selection of catalogues or drawings from some of the best London shops by next airmail’ because the King was ‘in perplexity as to how to furnish a big room in the little palace that has just been built’. Bell, that fearless explorer of the desert, had now, it seemed, become an expert interior designer. She hoped ‘we could get chairs and tables’ out of the catalogues too. Her father dutifully sent the requisite catalogues. On 10 April, Bell was thanking her father ‘a thousand times for all the trouble you took about the King’s furniture’.6

  The taste and style of the Hashemites were distinctly British. This was partly determined by the company they kept. In December 1924, Gertrude Bell described how she had entertained ‘little Amir Ghazi’, Faisal’s son, who was then thirteen years old, at tea with his tutor and governess. ‘The train soldiers I had ordered for him from Harrods had arrived last mail and were presented with great success.’7 More formal relations with the British had been established in treaties signed in 1922 and 1930. These treaties had provided Britain with necessary safeguards, ensuring that it remained the dominant external power in Iraqi affairs. The 1930 treaty had left Britain with ‘considerable latitude in matters of defence and administration’. Two airbases were allowed the RAF on Iraqi soil. The end of the mandate, in October 1932, had left a tight clique of Sunni officials and soldiers gathered around King Faisal, but the ‘British authorities still retained supreme power, and the vast majority of the population had no power at all’.8

  Still less did the ‘vast majority’ have any power over their oil. The Iraqi state under Faisal was chronically short of money and, as a consequence, the country remained underdeveloped in both economic and social terms. In 1920 there had been just three secondary schools in the whole of Iraq, while the population stood at 3 million. By 1930, this figure had gone up to nineteen secondary schools, attended by only 2,100 students. It is not surprising, therefore, that the illiteracy rate before 1950 reached more than 90 per cent.9 The oil revenues only really started to affect the country’s income in the 1930s and, even then, a fixed sum of just £400,000 in gold would be granted to the government by the newly named Iraq Petroleum Company. This sum was fixed in 1931 and remained the same until 1952, when a more favourable profit-sharing scheme was negotiated by the Iraqis. The Iraqi state effectively supported itself by receiving small sums of money from the mainly foreign-owned oil company and, to an even greater degree, by borrowing directly from the British government. Money would be loaned, using Iraq’s oil reserves as security, for building railways and equipping the army. In 1939 nearly £4 million was made available at moderate interest rates and repayment was spread over seventeen years.10 This figure was ten times the amount Iraq received for its oil in a year.

  The country itself was largely feudal. It was a place where the scriptural injunction ‘an eye for an eye’ was still the rule; murder had to be the price of murder. It would be committed by a near relative of the first victim on some member of the aggressor tribe. All that was required of women was to ‘produce sons . . . to milk, bake, make butter and cheese and weave mats and clothing’.11 It would be a mistake to describe the landscape as rural, as this conjures up images of rolling fields. The heat in Iraq was its most conspicuous feature. A writer in the 1930s described dust storms as ‘frequent’. The ‘least breath of wind sets the desert sand in motion’, people commonly said. The extreme heat, where temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Centigrade) were common in summer, meant that it was a harsh environment for people who had just arrived from Europe. Under those sort of climatic conditions, ‘a man will leave his bath, dry himself’ and find himself, the next moment, ‘as wet with perspiration as when in the bath’.12

  The country was poor. What wealth existed was concentrated in very few hands. During the time of the Hashemite monarchy, only twenty-three banking and manufacturing families possessed between 50 and 65 per cent of the entire private capital of the country.13 In economic terms, Iraqi society was a narrow oligarchy. In politics, the country was more or less an absolute monarchy. As we have seen, Faisal came from the Hashemite family, whose main distinction was its descent from the Prophet Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima. This connection made them ‘lord of lords’ and the ‘grandest family of Islam’, although they had been compelled to yield to the caliphs in Constantinople before the caliphate itself was abolished in 1924. Despite the undoubted prestige the Hashemite family enjoyed within the Islamic world, their interests and manners were more Western than Muslim.

  Faisal’s son Ghazi, who succeeded to the Iraqi throne aged twenty-one in 1933, was hardly a paragon of Islamic virtue. Obsessed with speed and glamour, he was a rather raffish Harrovian with an air of ‘reckless and unconventional independence’. As a child, he rode Arab racing stallions. At Harrow, he learned how to dismantle a high-compression engine, even before he learned to speak good English. The Iraq Times would comment on his new polo ponies, as he was an excellent horseman who played polo three times a week. New things fascinated him. In Iraq, after his expensive education in England
, he bought one ‘flashy car after another’, a Mercedes in phosphorescent paint being especially noteworthy. His craving for speed took him to the air, and in March 1939 he accepted delivery of a British plane which could fly at 200 miles an hour. The Prince enjoyed cars, planes, motorcycles, girls and well-cut clothes, in no particular order.

  On 4 April 1939, the twenty-seven-year-old King, after having a few drinks, got into his car to drive to the Harthiya Palace, a few miles from Baghdad. He was driving an open-top sports car with two companions in the back. As he sped past a crossing, he lost control of the car, shot off the road and crashed into a lamp-post. His two companions were killed instantly. His own skull was crushed and he died within an hour.14 The King’s sudden death made the political situation difficult for the British. Despite his education at Harrow and his taste for Savile Row suits, Ghazi was the most anti-British of his family. His independent spirit railed against the control that London had imposed on his country. It was widely believed by Iraqi nationalists that his death was not accidental but had been orchestrated by the wicked British colonial power. The King had flirted with European fascism, but his anti-British actions amounted to nothing more than an openly expressed desire to annex Kuwait, which remained a British protectorate under the ruling Al-Sabah family, and to assert Iraqi military independence. Kuwait’s sovereignty had been guaranteed in 1899 by Britain in an agreement with Sheikh Mubarak bin Sabah al-Sabah which also bound the Sheikh, his heirs and successors not to ‘cede, sell, lease, mortgage or give for occupation or any other purpose any portion of his territory to the Government or subjects of any other power’ without the previous consent of the British government.15