Ghosts of Empire

by Kwasi Kwarteng

  The government of Iraq always had a thorny relationship with the Iraq Petroleum Company. The IPC’s annual report of 1936 referred to ‘certain difficulties which had arisen between the Government and the Company’ in respect of ‘lands acquired by the Company’. The same report shows just how wily the company could be in its dealings with the Iraqi government. It entered a deal in 1936 which allowed it to pay rent on government-owned property until 1941 at ‘rates in force in 1931’. The years 1931 and 1932 had been the hardest of the global economic slump, as prices and rents reached all-time lows, so fixing rents at 1931 levels was a particularly shrewd move on the part of the company’s directors. Towards the end of the war, in the 1943 annual report published in May 1944, the company looked forward to the ‘final Victory’ which, it believed, was ‘somewhere round the corner’. This victory would allow a ‘further expansion of the company’s activities’ and would make the need for plans to ‘meet demands for increased production’ more urgent.

  The 1952 annual report showed that the days when the company could do what it liked were coming to an end, the IPC proudly declaring that a ‘number of Iraqi doctors were recruited during the year’ while the ‘training of Iraqi girls as nurses continued’. This kind of extracurricular pursuit was hardly the sort of thing of which Mr Gulbenkian would have approved. By the early 1950s, Gulbenkian himself was living in the Aviz, a luxury hotel in Lisbon, enjoying his £5,000,000 yearly dividend. Meanwhile, the IPC had to deal with realities on the ground in Iraq. People were on the streets protesting; increased revenues from oil production only accentuated the difference between the middle class, who could enjoy the country’s increasing prosperity, and the vast urban poor, who had no share in that wealth. In the meantime, the Iraqi government was successfully lobbying for a greater share in the growing revenues derived from oil production. The 1952 annual report indicated how far things had changed. In February that year a new profit-sharing agreement was ratified by the Iraqi parliament which meant that Iraq now received nearly £29 million from the operations of the company, nearly six times the £5 million earned in 1950, only two years before.32 The company had to go further in appeasing the Iraqi people.

  During the debate on the new profit-sharing agreement in the Iraqi parliament, Nuri is said to have invited any members of parliament who thought they could have negotiated better terms to take his place. There was popular discontent over the arrangement. The IPC still shrouded many of its operations in mystery. Certainly, its accounts from the 1930s through to the 1960s do not accord with more modern ideas of corporate governance. No annual sales figure is provided, and only the amount sold, with the resulting royalty, is revealed. Nothing like an ordinary profit and loss account, or balance sheet, or any of the normal paraphernalia of modern corporate accounting is presented. There were other accusations relating to the company’s accounting in these years. Exploration and drilling costs were put under operating costs rather than capital expenditures. This sounds technical, but it had the very practical result that the company’s annual profit was shown to be lower than a fair valuation would have ensured.33 The cost of running the head office in London was also listed under operating costs, further depressing the profits from which the Iraqi government would be paid.

  In the 1950s, as oil was beginning to bring tangible wealth to Iraq, large cities were founded, for instance at Kirkuk in the north of the country, while further south Baghdad itself was being filled with grand new buildings; expensive suburbs sprang up; air-conditioned hotels arose, as if by magic, from the desert. Yet the urban masses remained much as they were before, impoverished and illiterate. Even in 1958 only one in seven of the population was literate. By 1950, in a country with a population of nearly 5 million, there were still only 121 secondary schools, with barely 22,000 students enrolled.34 Iraq remained highly dependent on oil, which provided 65 per cent of the state’s total revenue in 1954.35 The price of Iraqi crude, however, in those pre-OPEC days, was determined by the few firms which dominated the international oil industry, not by market forces.

  Meanwhile Nuri was desperately trying to cling on to power. Time magazine, in a feature entitled ‘The Pasha’, described him as looking like a ‘grizzled old bear’ with his ‘big ears and jet-black bushy brows’. He was, in the view of the magazine’s correspondent, a ‘dictator’ who ruled Iraqis with ‘an indifference to their opinion that verges on contempt’. He needed to be resourceful and he continued to be what Gertrude Bell had called him all those years before, a ‘supple force’. But, for all his suppleness and guile, Nuri had now become cynical and more intolerant. There were new rumours that spoke of his growing partiality to whisky. In 1954, he banned political parties, after elections didn’t go as planned; he had become increasingly autocratic.

  The decline of British prestige in the Middle East in the course of the 1950s undermined the position of Nuri and his Hashemite masters. The sureness of touch that had characterized British diplomacy in the region had, it seemed to many observers, disappeared. The Hashemites and their Anglo-Arab friends, with their Savile Row suits and Bertie Wooster manners, looked out of date and irrelevant when compared to politicians like Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Arab nationalist, who had taken power in Egypt in 1952. Under Nuri and Faisal II, Iraq remained isolated from the mainstream of Arab nationalism, although on the streets of Baghdad Arab nationalism was a growing and more conspicuous force.

  Nuri had the good sense to create an Iraqi Development Board that would channel 70 per cent of the Iraqi state’s oil revenue into infrastructure spending. But this money was directed towards large development projects, dams, bridges and the like, when schools and hospitals were increasingly demanded by the Iraqi people. While the Iraqi Development Board built sixteen dams, the population of Baghdad had doubled to 1 million in the five years from 1952 to 1957. Most of these people lived in shanty towns, while the earth-floored mud hut continued to be a characteristic feature of the Iraqi countryside. The Development Board was a great boon to the economists, planners, architects and engineers who thronged Baghdad from the West. It was said that there were at least a hundred American officials associated with it, whose salaries were paid directly by agencies of the US government. One English economist observed that the Development Board ‘in discharging its responsibility has made a skilful use of foreign experience, notably through the employment of consulting firms’. Yet in the 1954 budget the amount of public expenditure committed to the police force was 50 per cent greater than the money spent on education.36 The consultants and their wives were enjoying themselves. Many thousands of people had come from Britain, Europe and America to gorge themselves, so it appeared to many Iraqis, on funds supplied by the Iraqi taxpayer.

  Nuri, despite his political skill, was losing his touch too. He had become even more secretive and suspicious. He was by now nearly seventy years old. He confided in fewer and fewer associates; he never used documents; no records were taken of his meetings. He relied more than ever on his extraordinary memory and kept a revolver close at hand. The conclusion of the Baghdad Pact, or the Pact of Mutual Co-operation between Iraq and Turkey, signed on 24 February 1955, was a watershed. Pakistan, Iran and Great Britain later joined the Pact. Egypt objected, and across the Cairo airwaves radio announcers appealed to the Arab masses ‘in the name of millions of Arabs’ to save ‘Arabs from the menace of military alliances’.37 The 1956 Suez debacle, the year after the Baghdad Pact was signed, embarrassed the British and further damaged the reputation of Nuri As-Said.

  When Suez broke, the Iraqi ruling order seemed to be decadent and obsolete. There was a general feeling that the Hashemites were passing slowly but decisively from the Iraqi scene. It had been only in 1953 that young Faisal II had taken over his kingdom, and the Iraqi Cabinet, resplendent in evening tails, had greeted the young King at the end of his oath-taking ceremony. That year he had been given a pair of silver candelabra from the Duke of Gloucester on behalf of the young Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britai
n.38 By 1957, this all seemed like a distant memory, as restless and volatile crowds gathered menacingly in the streets of Baghdad.

  There had been uprisings in the Iraqi capital before. In 1948 and 1952, there had been demonstrations, with protesters complaining about increased living costs and poor wages. These had been quelled, although hundreds had been killed. In 1956, a further uprising had been sparked by the attack on Egypt by Britain, France and Israel in October that year, an external event, which had provoked a large proportion of urban opinion. On 1 November 1956, martial law was declared in Baghdad, and there had been serious riots in Najaf and Mosul, as well as in the capital itself. Nuri now controlled the police, the army and the press. His paranoia was such that he was wary of giving the army the ammunition it needed. He resorted to ‘a judicious distribution of ammunition’ in order to ‘hold the army in check’.39

  The revolution that eventually broke out in Iraq in July 1958 has been aptly described as a ‘landmark in the history of the Middle East’.40 In May, civil war erupted in Lebanon which Hussein, King of Jordan, Faisal II’s cousin and Harrow contemporary, feared would spread to his kingdom. Hussein requested that Iraqi troops be sent to Jordan to protect its borders. Nuri and Faisal II agreed to send two brigades, and these were promptly ordered to begin their march west to that country. Nuri, perhaps reluctantly, agreed to issue the brigades with the ammunition which would be needed to fulfil King Hussein’s request. The relevant army units, based in barracks seventy miles to the north of Baghdad, were ordered to march southwards to the trans-desert road. One brigade was under the command of Brigadier Abdul Karim al-Qasim, an austere, non-smoking bachelor. The other was under Colonel Abdul Salam Arif. The two brigades marched south and converged on Baghdad in the early hours of 14 July.41

  The night of 13 July was a leisurely affair at the Qasr al-Rihab, the Royal Palace in Baghdad. The King and his court were watching a private performance of the musical The Pajama Game, a silly romance, set in a pyjama factory, which enjoyed wide popularity in the 1950s. At about five o’clock in the morning, Colonel Arif’s tanks arrived at the palace. Behind them, a crowd of young men started to congregate. The palace was surrounded, but for a while the guards resisted. On hearing gunfire, the King, the Crown Prince and other family members and servants came down into the courtyard to face their enemies. The barber who went daily to the palace to shave the King and the Crown Prince had been admitted at a side door as usual, but escaped as soon as he saw the King and Crown Prince talking in the courtyard to a semicircle of officers on the other side. It was now about 7.45 in the morning. As the royal entourage chattered, a captain of Arif’s brigade emerged from the front entrance with a submachine gun in his hand and fired a volley of shots. This prompted a ‘burst of bullets from every direction’. The King, the Crown Prince and two servants fell, mortally wounded, to the ground. Two of the revolutionary officers also fell.42

  The events of 14 July stirred the Baghdad crowds to new heights of fury. One witness recalled how the ‘mob arrived at the palace in buses, on lorries, on anything they could lay their hands on’; their anti-British sentiments were all too obvious: all that was required to incite them to more acts of violence was a ‘few hysterically screamed words about filthy Imperialistic British’.43 One group of enraged youths seized the Crown Prince’s body and dragged it for miles. By the time it reached King Faisal Circle, the body was in shreds. What was left of it was mutilated, cut into pieces and hung from a telephone pole in front of the Ministry of Defence.44 But where was Nuri As-Said? When news of the revolution first broke, he had immediately gone into hiding. For a day and a night he took refuge with a friend and then, on the morning of the 15th, he left the house in a car, dressed as a woman, in a black chador. The driver was heading for another friendly house but was delayed in congested traffic. At this point, Nuri rashly decided to run for safety. He got out of the car, only to trip in the street, whereupon–as if in grim echo of The Pajama Game –a boy of about fifteen glimpsed his pyjamas under the chador. No Iraqi woman would wear pyjamas beneath her chador, and the boy, in amused surprise, half jokingly cried, ‘There goes Nuri.’ Nuri was immediately shot dead. The mob went wild, and the Prime Minister’s body was mutilated and dragged through the streets. Thousands of Iraqis saw the headless, armless, legless trunk of a body being pulled behind a lorry. The body was believed to be Nuri’s.45 The royal palace was pillaged and burned, as was Nuri’s home. The British Embassy was attacked by marauding groups of young boys, ranging in age from twelve to twenty. For two days, these gangs, reinforced by older men, roamed wildly through Baghdad, without any restraint from the civil authorities.46

  Throughout July British families left Iraq, as they no longer felt safe. The British, perhaps dazzled by Lawrence of Arabia and late Victorian romanticism, had been steadfast in their support for the royal family they had established, but Iraq had moved on. The world of the Anglo-Arab Hashemites–their well-cut suits, their Harrow School accents, their easy, urbane charm–had been brutally destroyed by a violent Baghdad mob, who knew nothing of that world. Iraq was now a republic.

  4

  Saddam Hussein and Beyond

  A traditional Anglican service commemorating the life and legacy of the Hashemite rulers of Iraq was held on 30 July 1958 in the Queen’s Chapel of the Savoy, just off the Strand. The congregation sang Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing’. The priest quoted Ecclesiasticus: ‘Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.’ The Knights Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order gathered to mourn their fallen comrades. King Faisal, Crown Prince Abdullah and General Nuri As-Said had all been honorary Knights of the Order.

  In London there was a stunned reaction to the demise of the Hashemites in Iraq. In a letter addressed at the end of August to Stewart Perowne, the friend of the Iraqi royal family, the seventy-five-year-old Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, who had been ambassador to Baghdad in the crucial years 1941–5, spoke of a ‘conspiracy of silence as to what [had] happened’ in Iraq. London was adapting itself to the new situation. Sir Kinahan, known as Ken, detected ‘a strong tendency to decry the old regime and to give them no credit at all in what they did’. He went on to suggest that the ‘Royal Family and Nuri and many others [had] served their country devotedly’ and added, less controversially, that ‘they [had] stuck to us in bad times as well as good’. The old Ambassador recognized that London had ‘to get along with the new regime on account of oil and business and politics’, but that was no reason for ‘showing ingratitude’ to the old regime. Such coldness ‘disgusted’ him.1

  Other British commentators were less sentimental about the fall of the Hashemite regime. To the writer James Morris, later Jan Morris, who wrote one of his best books on the Hashemite kings, the Iraqi monarchy had been a ‘parasitical fake’. Its collapse was just a sign that the empire too was doomed. The Hashemites provoked the young journalist’s scorn and inspired some of his most impassioned prose. The Anglo-Arab monarchies, he wrote, ‘were born into the swirl of a dying Empire, in the last decades of the Viceroys and the ironclads, and they remained for forty years the friends, allies, wards, clients, pensioners or embarrassments of Great Britain. When she was powerful, they were secure; when she slid into impotence, they crumbled or lost their meaning.’2 The special connection between Britain and the Iraqi leadership had been broken. The subsequent history of Iraq, with its instability, massacres and wars, shows how completely the attempt to establish a stable regime had failed.3

  It was only a matter of time before pressure would be applied to the Iraq Petroleum Company, the economic instrument and symbol of Britain’s dominance over the country. Although the Iraqi government had, since the 1940s, enjoyed large oil revenues, it had not been allowed to acquire a stake in the IPC. This was a major grievance of the nationalists and the Iraqi people generally. The IPC had been intransigent when the government had asked it to build refineries in Iraq. By 1951, only one small refinery had been built, and th
at had been completed in 1927. The issue had been important to the Iraqi government. Refineries would increase the country’s income, because refined oil could sell for a higher margin than the crude product. All professionals in the oil industry confirmed that it was in the marketing and refining of the product that bigger profits could be realized. Refineries would also provide employment for more workers, and would enable the Iraqis to learn the techniques necessary in the advanced stages of oil production. By the end of 1947, the IPC employed fewer than 15,000 workers, in a population of nearly 5 million. The increase in production of crude oil in Iraq had been impressive, though not as spectacular as in Saudi Arabia or Iran. Events in the Middle East in the early 1950s had altered the climate in which the IPC operated. Early in 1951, the Saudis had reached an agreement with Aramco (the state-owned national oil company of Saudi Arabia) which replaced the existing royalty payment with a 50–50 profit-sharing arrangement. This formed the basis of Iraq’s own agreement with the IPC in 1952.4