Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  Those who believed that the young King had been killed by the British suspected the connivance of high-placed Iraqi officials, such as Nuri As-Said, who had been bribed for their support. Crowds began to gather in a number of cities. In Mosul, the oil centre in the north, 260 miles up the Tigris from Baghdad, anti-British feeling was strong. Early on the morning of 5 April, the day after Ghazi’s fatal accident, a large crowd gathered at the gates of the British Consulate, where the Consul, George Monck-Mason, and his wife lived. Monck-Mason, ‘a trim, clipped civil servant’ according to Time magazine, appeared on the balcony to placate the crowd. He spoke good Arabic and proceeded to explain what had happened. He said that Ghazi’s death had been an accident, which the crowd refused to believe. A group of men broke into the Consulate, wielding pickaxes. In scenes reminiscent of General Gordon’s death in Khartoum, more than fifty years previously, Monck-Mason was struck from behind as he stood on the balcony. It was an unfortunate end to a good, if unspectacular, career. Monck-Mason was described in the Iraq Times as a ‘man of quiet and studious type’. He was, his obituarist noted, ‘one of the finest linguists in the Levant consular service’. This was a period when Britons were good at languages, but, even by pre-war imperial service standards, Monck-Mason was exceptional. He was reputed to ‘speak no fewer than nine languages’, having spent ‘nearly all his life in the Near and Middle East’.16

  Monck-Mason’s linguistic skills, and his career in general, point to an interesting feature of the British imperial service. The people dispatched to administer imperial justice in the far reaches of the empire were highly motivated by a desire to be there. They invariably learned the languages and immersed themselves in the cultures of the places they lived in. This meant that, for many administrators, an entire lifetime was spent, far from home, in a strange environment. It was unsurprising that many went native.

  Throughout Iraq, the unpopularity of the British had not yet, in the late 1930s, reached the heights it would in the 1950s. Yet many Iraqis detected in British rule an arrogance and aloofness which meant that the reaction, when it came, was likely to be violent. Nubar Gulbenkian, the son of Mr Five Per Cent, had detected the ‘first rumblings of change’ in 1931 when he was in Baghdad. One small instance of the ‘covert resentment’ of the British occurred when the British Ambassador had ordered a small Arab hamlet to be removed so that he could ‘extend the gardens of the British Embassy’ in the city. Nubar remarked, with some understatement, that the ‘Ambassador had undoubtedly improved what was already a beautiful residence but he made himself less than universally popular with the Iraqis’.17

  On the whole, British civil servants and company workers were not adaptable. The businessmen kept themselves apart and socialized with each other, avoiding locals. British habits–clubs, horse racing, boar hunts –were maintained to a remarkable extent. The papers of Sir Harry Sinderson, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who was employed as physician to the Iraqi King and royal family in Baghdad between 1921 and 1946, paint a vivid picture of British life in the heart of Iraq before the Second World War. In Baghdad, Sinderson took a keen interest in the Casuals, a cricket club based in the city, which held its dinners in the Alwiyah Club; it would also play the RAF team at the Alwiyah ground. The Casuals kept up their dinners even after the outbreak of the Second World War, with its toast to the club in verse:Our cricket was terrific and we seldom lost a game

  And when we did we always had some unkind fate to blame.

  The Alwiyah Club was a large complex. It provided a cinema, a venue for dances, sport, swimming pools and good old-fashioned British gossip. It was proudly referred to as the ‘hub of Anglo-Saxon’ life in Iraq.18 There was also the Royal Society of St George which celebrated St George’s Day, the national day of England, every year on 23 April. The 1938 dinner was a memorable occasion. The event was diligently written up in the Iraq Times, an English-language publication, which referred obsequiously to ‘Dr H. C. Sinderson Pasha, this year’s President’, and declared proudly that the main course had been the ‘Roast Beef of Old England’, which had been specially imported. For dessert, the 128 guests enjoyed blackberry and apple pie with Devonshire cream. After reading a message from King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Sinderson went on to give a speech. It was entitled, inevitably enough, ‘England’.

  Sir Harry, who had represented Edinburgh University at both cricket and soccer, was a fanatical sportsman and enjoyed playing cricket in Iraq well into his fifties. The newspaper cuttings he kept refer to such events as puppy shows or the ‘first meet of the Baghdad Boar Hunt’ in the 1936 season, of which Mr D. R. de C. Macpherson was the Master. There was the Bromilow Cup for pigsticking, in which people hunted boar with spears on horseback. Pigsticking was a typical imperial sport, popular with maharajas in India and with British officers. Military authorities encouraged it, because it provided good training for cavalry officers. Against a startled or angry wild boar, the pigsticker had to ‘possess a good eye, a steady hand, a firm seat, a cool head and a courageous heart’.19

  To the extent that Ghazi had been regarded as unsympathetic to Britain’s interests, his death was convenient for British officials, despite the civil unrest which ensued.20 His successor, Faisal II, was only three years old when he came to the throne. Strict primogeniture ensured the young Faisal’s accession to the throne, but it was customary in Arab countries for respect to be shown to the eldest man of the family, so it was perfectly understandable that King Ghazi’s cousin, Abd al-Ilah, a young man of twenty-six, would be chosen as regent. In Abd al-Ilah, the British now had a safe man, a man who was viewed as being ‘one of us’. His story, perhaps, more than that of any single individual, may stand as a metaphor for the British connection with Iraq, a connection based on money-making and chronic disengagement from the actual lives led by the ordinary people of Iraq.

  Abd al-Ilah had been born in 1913, the son of Faisal I’s elder brother, Ali. He had been educated in Egypt at the elite Victoria College in Alexandria, ‘a transplanted English public school’ which had educated the sons of the Middle Eastern elite since 1902, and whose alumni would later include Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual, and Omar Sharif, the actor. This educational background had made Abd al-Ilah ‘more at home among the English than the Iraqis’. Reticent, suave and ‘more English than the English’, he became the stereotype of the Anglo-Arab pasha with his well-cut suits and his taste for cricket. He had the ‘house party charm and sophistication’ which could ‘easily be imagined living in well-heeled exile in Sunningdale or Newport, Rhode Island’. He was calculating and smooth, but not as clever as he imagined himself to be. A small, dark, fastidiously tidy moustache testified to his vanity.21 In the course of the regency, which lasted until 1953, when Faisal II turned eighteen, Abd al-Ilah succeeded in earning a bad reputation with the Iraqis. He was viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a snob, a man who had married three times and indulged in a seedy love life. He flaunted a string of mistresses, though there were rumours of sexual impotence. According to popular legend, he dined every night at the British Embassy, where he and the Ambassador supposedly ate and conversed alone. Abd al-Ilah, remarkably, indulged a passion for fox hunting by importing foxhounds from England. He cruised around Baghdad in a Rolls-Royce. A crowd of social climbers, drawn from the English, American and European community, continually sought his company. Yet much of the excess still lay in the future. In 1939 the full extent of the fragility of the monarchy had not yet been revealed.

  Contrary to expectations, the war that broke out in 1939 did not bring forth another figure like Lawrence in the military theatre of the Middle East. Many in the Arab world felt that they had supported Britain against the Ottoman Empire only to be let down at the peace conferences after the First World War, when an independent Arab state failed to emerge from the wreckage of the old Ottoman imperium. In Iraq, even though Abd al-Ilah, the Regent, and his leading minister, Nuri As-Said, backed Britain, a number of army officers were more inclined to support th
e Nazis, as was a significant portion of the Arab world. The Mufti of Jerusalem, a committed anti-Zionist who would meet Hitler himself in Berlin in 1941, and his pan-Arab circle leaned towards the Axis. On 27 August 1940, Dr Fritz Grobba, the German Minister in Baghdad, submitted a memorandum to an Arab Committee formed under the presidency of the Mufti. This bold memorandum, it was hoped, would form the basis of an Arab–German agreement.

  The memorandum directly confronted the central legacy of the post-Versailles settlement in the Middle East. It stated that Germany and Italy would not ‘abridge the independence of these Arab countries, e.g. by establishing mandates’; these were described as a ‘hypocritical device of the League of Nations and the democracies to disguise their imperialistic greed’. The mandates had indeed been somewhat hypocritical devices. People in political circles in Baghdad decided to act.22

  The machinations in Iraqi politics in 1940 and 1941 are reminiscent of a storyline from a John Buchan novel. Rashid Ali, a member of a prominent Baghdad family, had been appointed prime minister in March 1940. From the outset, he sought to make life difficult for the British, using the war to further his nationalist ambitions. His faction was opposed by the Regent, Abd al-Ilah, and Nuri As-Said, leaders of the pro-British party. Rashid Ali rejected calls from Britain that Iraq should allow British troops to cross through Iraq to get to Palestine. When Italy declared war on the Allies on 10 June 1940, the British asked Iraq to break off diplomatic relations with Rome, a request that Rashid Ali refused. That November, the British issued a virtual ultimatum to the Iraqi government to drop Rashid Ali, or lose the friendship and support of Britain. British sanctions against Iraq, coupled with military success against the Italians in North Africa, made Rashid Ali’s position difficult. He resigned at the end of January 1941, but managed to come back at the beginning of April with the full backing of the Iraqi army, which was largely pro-German. Once their government had been toppled on 10 April, Abd al-Ilah and Nuri fled the country. On this occasion, however, the British responded forcefully. Iraq’s oil was now of supreme importance for the Allied war effort, and British forces landed in Basra on 29 April. Rashid Ali sent troops to oppose them. The RAF annihilated the Iraqi air force, destroying twenty-five of its forty planes.23 The ‘Thirty Days’ War’ started on 2 May and ended with a conclusive British victory on the 31st. Fallujah fell on the 19th, and British forces pressed on to Baghdad, entering the city on the 29th. An armistice was signed two days later, which ensured that the pro-British party was reinstated. Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah and Nuri entered Baghdad in triumph on 1 June.

  The short war had cost 1,200 British lives and over 8,000 Iraqi. The attempt to detach Iraq, with its useful oilfields, from the Allied cause had failed. Yet the war had stirred a large section of the Arab world against the British. In a speech broadcast on 9 May 1941, the Mufti declared jihad against Britain and invited every able-bodied Muslim to take part in a war against the ‘greatest foe of Islam’, the British Empire.24 Meanwhile the British government had become concerned that the oil of Iraq could fall into the wrong hands. A memorandum on the subject by Major Desmond Morton for the War Cabinet, dated 4 June, argued that even though Abd al-Ilah and Nuri were back in power it might prove safer to destroy the oilfields altogether than to leave things to the hazard of an increasingly volatile political situation in Iraq. Morton found that there ‘is no known means of destroying the Iraq oil fields themselves’. Even if the fifty wells were set alight, they would ‘burn for about 10 years’. He thought it would be better ‘to start work on the destruction of the pipelines’.25 The British government did not act on this, concluding that the political situation did not warrant such drastic action.

  The return of Abd al-Ilah and Nuri As-Said completed the triumph of the British faction in Baghdad. Nuri As-Said, though not as polished an Anglophile as Abd al-Ilah, was a noted survivor in Iraqi politics and dominated the political scene for much of the thirty-year reign of the Hashemite monarchs in Iraq. Nuri had been born in 1888 to a middle-class Baghdad family and was outside the privileged ruling elite. It was his military experience that smoothed his path to power and influence. Trained by a German colonel in Constantinople, as a young Turkish army officer, in the years before 1914, he had fought under Faisal in the Arab revolt. He had got to know T. E. Lawrence at that time, who praised his ‘courage, authority and coolness’. He had first become prime minister in 1930 and would hold that office a further six times. Nuri’s methods were methodical, steady and unchanging. He had modest, some might say ascetic, tastes, rising at six in the morning, consuming grapefruit and coffee, while listening to the news on Voice of America.26

  A small man with a chubby face and bushy eyebrows, Nuri was a loyal friend who delighted in children and always acted as the ‘most perfect of hosts’. To his friends and admirers, he was a statesman in the grand manner. International strategy ‘seems to have been the breath of [his] life in much the same way as it always absorbed so much of the mind and energy of Winston Churchill’, wrote one British observer in a book published shortly after Nuri’s death.27 Unlike Churchill, however, Nuri was feared and hated by his own people.

  Nuri’s modest tastes contrasted with the extravagance and vulgar posturing of Abd al-Ilah, the Crown Prince. An incident in America in the early 1950s captures the difference between them. When out walking in Washington, the two men looked at men’s suits in a shop window, and Nuri pronounced himself impressed by the seersucker suit; the Crown Prince merely commented that such suits were appropriate for the ‘working class’. Nuri, nonetheless eager to buy one, was eventually dissuaded, but he was gratified to see President Truman wearing the same suit the next day. Despite this apparent modesty, Nuri, the strongman of Iraq, was widely viewed within Iraq as a British stooge.28

  He and Abd al-Ilah wanted to keep Britain on their side. They thought that all would be well as long as the oilwells kept on producing their liquid gold. The war, in the first instance, had not altered the position in Iraq significantly. The same people were still in power–the British still had a strong presence in the country and the Iraq Petroleum Company still presided over the oilfields. Archives relating to Iraq in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War give a striking impression of continuity. In December 1947, Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah could write to Stewart Perowne, the wartime public relations officer in the British Embassy, expressing his pleasure at seeing Perowne while visiting England that summer and stating that hunting had started up again in Baghdad, where the first meeting of the season would take place on 12 December.

  After the war was over, it was only to be a matter of time before little King Faisal reached the age of majority and took control of the government. Faisal’s education was a very British affair; like any young English boy of the upper-middle classes, he was sent to a British preparatory school, Sandroyd in Wiltshire, which the future Prime Minister Anthony Eden had enjoyed so much in the years before 1914. From Sandroyd, Faisal wrote a letter, in January 1949, thanking Perowne for the parcel of sugar he had sent him, because during the post-war austerity in England ‘one has great difficulty in finding such lovely sugar’. Faisal claimed to be enjoying school ‘very much’, though he missed ‘Baghdad and the lovely warm sun’.29

  The next term, the Lent term of 1949, Faisal entered Harrow, from where he informed Perowne that was he ‘getting on much better’ as he now had learned his ‘way around’. Faisal was a good student at the school, more successful there than his cousin Hussein, later King of Jordan, who was six months his junior. Faisal was attentive, quick and eager. He was, as a consequence of Sandroyd and Harrow, by far the most Anglicized of the three kings of Iraq; his grandfather, Faisal I, had spoken very little English, while his father had been too restless and resentful to pass himself off as a real English gentleman, even if he had wished to do so. Faisal II, by contrast, was a proud specimen of the Anglo-Arab gentleman, and had grown up, after his father’s death, in an atmosphere ‘unerringly Anglophile’. He had be
en brought up by a ‘proper English nurse maid’, as well as by ‘a proper English governess’. Young Faisal was popular at Harrow, where he cultivated the ‘gentlemanly manner’. He liked sport, art and cheerful living and spoke English ‘with an impeccable metropolitan accent. His clothes were Savile Row, and he never looked more attractive or more at his ease than when, in a bowler hat and a duffle coat, he peered at some tweedy open-air function.’ His tradition was that of the ‘Eton Maharajas’, a tradition that had produced urbane sportsmen and gentlemen, rich, smooth, genial young men who were perfectly at ease in the clubs of St James’s and Pall Mall, but who couldn’t relate, even remotely, to the people they were meant to be ruling. In Faisal II’s case, few Iraqis felt close to him. He was born ‘cruelly out of his time’.30

  While Nuri As-Said, the Crown Prince and the young King Faisal II were trying their best to keep internal order, the Iraq Petroleum Company reaped the rewards of the capital investment it had made before the war. Oil production in Iraq had increased substantially from the time of the struggles between the French, the Americans and the British in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. In 1934, Iraq exported only 600,000 tons of oil a year; in 1950 the figure hit 6.5 million tons. Oil production in the Middle East had exploded during that time, with the production figure in 1950 being nine times the total production of oil in 1934. General worldwide production did not experience anything like the same growth, increasing by only 50 per cent between 1934 and 1950.31 Oil brought riches to the oil-producing states of the Middle East and it altered the relationship between their governments and the West, while also changing the relationship between those governments and the people. Iraq’s oil revenues were boosted to a remarkable extent. From £1.5 million in 1941, the figure had reached £5.2 million by 1950, an increase of nearly 250 per cent.