A Peace to End all Peace (12 page)

Seen in that light, reports that Syrians considered the Germans and Turks to be Zionists and the French to be detestable meant that the Syrians must be pro-British. Summarizing a memorandum submitted by a Syrian leader who called for Arab independence, Clayton stated that “it is to England, and to England alone, that both Syrian Christians and Pan-Arabs are turning.”
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On 2 February 1915, Storrs wrote to FitzGerald/Kitchener that “There is no doubt that local Syrian feeling, both Christian and Muslim, is strongly in favor of our adding that country to the Egyptian Sultanate…”
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The question was whether actively to promote that feeling. The newly arrived High Commissioner in Cairo, McMahon, writing the same day to FitzGerald/Kitchener to seek guidance, outlined the alternatives as they had undoubtedly been described to him by Storrs and Clayton: “The Syrians want our intervention and say that unless we can give them some assurance of support they will have to turn to the French altho they would prefer us to the French.”
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Wrong-headed and professionally ambitious, Britain’s men on the spot supposed that Arabs wanted to be ruled by Europeans, and buoyed by this mistaken belief, Kitchener’s lieutenants aimed at taking control of Syria. France’s men on the spot were wrong-headed and ambitious too; and they also aimed to take Syria.

IV

During the Crusades, French knights won kingdoms and built castles in Syria; and in 1914—a millennium later—there were still Frenchmen who regarded Syria as properly part of France. France maintained close ties with one of the Christian communities along the Mount Lebanon coast of Syria, and French shipping, silk, and other interests eyed commercial possibilities in the area. Thus for religious, economic, and historical reasons, France saw herself as having a role to play in Syria’s affairs.

The moment that the Ottoman Empire entered the war, French officials in the Middle East (like their British counterparts, Wingate, Clayton, and Storrs) therefore formulated plans to annex Turkey’s Syrian provinces. France’s minister in Cairo and Consul-General in Beirut immediately joined in urging their government to invade the Lebanese coast. Their quixotic plan called for a landing of only about 2,000 French troops, who would be joined—they believed—by 30,000 local volunteers. Speed was of the essence, in their view; France would have to strike before Turkey could raise an army and before Britain could strike first.
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Their proposal could hardly have been more inopportune. It reached the French government in November 1914, when it was still in exile in Bordeaux, having fled from Paris in the face of the German advance to the Marne. While there were powerful colonialist figures in Parliament, the Foreign Ministry, and the Cabinet, November was a month in which everyone’s attention was still focused on the mortal struggle in northern France and Belgium. The proposal to dispatch troops to Syria was rejected.

The following month, however—the contending armies in Europe having settled down in their trenches, and the government having returned to Paris—the proposal to invade Syria did receive attention. A delegation of colonialist politicians secured the agreement, in principle, of Alexandre Millerand, the Minister of War, to support a Syrian expedition. Foreign Minister Theophile Delcassé, however, remained vehemently opposed: “Nothing appears less desirable than intervention in Syria,” he said.
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Delcassé was one of the many French officials who believed that annexing Syria would be of much less value to his country than preserving the Ottoman Empire would be. As of 1914 France supplied 45 percent of the foreign capital in the private sector of the Ottoman economy and 60 percent of the Ottoman public debt, and thus had an enormous stake in the empire’s continued existence and vitality.
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On 30–31 December 1914, Sir Henry McMahon, who was about to take up his duties as Kitchener’s replacement in Cairo, visited Paris. He met with officials of the Foreign Ministry and War Ministry but failed to reply coherently to their questions about Britain’s Middle Eastern policy. McMahon was notoriously dull-witted and ineffectual, but the French, who did not know him, assumed he must be clever and astute: his incompetent replies were interpreted by Millerand, the War Minister, as deliberate and subtle evasions, masking a secret British plan to invade and occupy Syria by themselves.
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Millerand immediately reported these conversations to the French Cabinet, which authorized him to create an expeditionary force to invade Syria whenever Britain did, whether invited by her to participate or not. In February 1915, Delcassé went over to London and took up the matter of Syria with Sir Edward Grey. The French Foreign Minister was reassured that Britain would not invade Syria without giving prior notice. The two foreign ministers appear to have agreed that if the Ottoman Empire were to be partitioned, Britain would not oppose France’s designs on Syria, but that it would be far preferable for the empire not to be broken up.

Thus the foreign ministers settled the differences between their two countries—temporarily. But their men on the spot in the Middle East continued to stir up trouble between Britain and France; and, misunderstanding the region, Kitchener and his lieutenants also went on to pursue other dangerous designs there.

I

The West and the Middle East have misunderstood each other throughout most of the twentieth century; and much of that misunderstanding can be traced back to Lord Kitchener’s initiatives in the early years of the First World War. The peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants in Cairo and Khartoum, and his choice of Arab politicians with whom to deal have colored the course of political events ever since.

To appreciate the novelty of Kitchener’s approach to the Middle East, it must be remembered that when the Ottoman Empire entered the First World War, Asquith, Grey, and Churchill did not intend to retaliate by seizing any of its domains for Britain. They did propose to allow Britain’s allies to make territorial gains in Europe and Asia Minor at Turkey’s expense; but Asquith’s Britain had no territorial designs of her own on Ottoman lands, either in the Middle East or elsewhere. Kitchener, however, maintained that when the war was over, it was in Britain’s vital interest to seize much of the Ottoman Empire for herself: the Arabic-speaking part. This would mean a total reversal of Britain’s traditional policy.

Kitchener, like most Britons who had lived in the East, believed that in the Moslem world religion counts for everything. But the field marshal and his colleagues in Cairo and Khartoum mistakenly seemed to believe that Mohammedanism was a centralized, authoritarian structure. They regarded Islam as a single entity: as an “it,” as an organization. They believed that it obeyed its leaders. Centuries before, Cortez had won control of Mexico by seizing the Aztec emperor; and medieval French kings had tried to control Christendom by keeping the pope captive in Avignon. In much the same spirit, Kitchener and his colleagues believed that Islam could be bought, manipulated, or captured by buying, manipulating, or capturing its religious leadership. They were intrigued by the notion that whoever controlled the person of the Caliph—Mohammed’s successor—controlled Islam.

Central to Kitchener’s analysis was the contention that the Caliph might hurl Islam against Britain. Since Sunni Moslems (who predominated in Mohammedan India) regarded the Turkish Sultan as a Caliph, Kitchener perceived this as a continuing threat. In Cairo and Khartoum it was believed that, as of 1914, the Caliph had fallen into the hands of Jews and Germans; the War Minister worried that once the world war was won, the Caliph might become a tool in the hands of Britain’s Middle East rivals, particularly Russia.

In enemy hands, the caliphate could be used (Kitchener believed) to undermine Britain’s position in India, Egypt, and the Sudan. Britain ruled over half of the world’s Moslems.
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In India alone there were almost seventy million of them, and Mohammedans constituted a disproportionately large part of the Indian Army. In Egypt and the Sudan, Britain ruled millions more, who lived alongside the Suez Canal sea road to India. Tiny British garrisons policed these tens of millions of natives, but Kitchener knew that they could not even begin to deal with a revolt.

The British imagination was haunted by the Indian Mutiny (1857–9), the mysterious uprising, incited by religion, that had brought down the rule of the East India Company. More recently the uprising in the Sudan, which Kitchener had so brilliantly avenged, was inspired by a new religious leader who called himself the Mahdi, a title Europeans translated as “Messiah.” Pan-Islamic unrest in Egypt in 1905–6 had caused Britain deep concern. For Kitchener and his entourage, the possibility of a Moslem Holy War against Britain was a recurring nightmare.

The Director of Information, John Buchan, dramatized these fears in his 1916 novel
Greenmantle
, in which Germany makes use of a Moslem prophet in a plot to destroy Britain’s empire. The prophet appears in Turkey; there are portents of his coming; there is an ancient prophecy; there is a modern revelation; and the region in which he intends to ignite a rebellion is made explicit. “There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark. And the wind is blowing towards the Indian border.”
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Kitchener believed that a call to arms by the Caliph against Britain during the 1914 war could perhaps be offset by the words or actions of other Moslem religious leaders. After Britain had won the war, however, more decisive action would be necessary. The reason was that when the war had been won, Russia was sure to take possession of Constantinople and—unless something were done about it—of the Caliph. Kitchener saw a German-controlled Caliph as merely dangerous—he would attempt to foment unrest in India to throw Britain off balance in the European war. But he saw a Russian-controlled Caliph as a mortal danger to the British Empire; for (unlike Asquith and Grey). Kitchener believed that Russia still harbored ambitions of taking India away from Britain. In Kitchener’s view, Germany was an enemy in Europe and Russia was an enemy in Asia: the paradox of the 1914 war in which Britain and Russia were allied was that by winning in Europe, Britain risked losing in Asia. The only completely satisfactory outcome of the war, from Kitchener’s point of view, was for Germany to lose it without Russia winning it—and in 1914 it was not clear how that could be accomplished. So the War Minister planned to strike first in the coming postwar struggle with Russia for control of the road to and into India.

Kitchener’s proposal was that, after the war, Britain should arrange for her own nominee to become Caliph. Mohammed had been an Arabian; Kitchener proposed to encourage the view that Mohammed’s successors as Caliph should be Arabian, too. The advantage of this was that the coastline of the Arabian peninsula could easily be controlled by the British navy; Britain would be able to insulate the Caliph from the influence of Britain’s European rivals. Once Britain could install the Caliph within her sphere of influence in Arabia, Kitchener believed she could gain control of Islam. And even before the Ottoman Empire entered the war, Kitchener’s lieutenants in Cairo reminded the War Minister that an obvious candidate to be the Arabian caliph—the ruler of Mecca—had already been in touch with him.

II

Toward the end of the summer of 1914, as the Ottoman war approached, Gilbert Clayton recalled that Abdullah, the favorite son of Hussein, the ruler of Mecca, had visited Cairo some months earlier and had suggested that Arabia might be ripe for revolt. At the time, Abdullah had been afraid that the Young Turks were about to move against his father; and Abdullah, whose indolent disposition hid a bold intelligence, looked about for possible support from abroad. But shortly afterward his father and the Porte composed their differences, so that British assistance was no longer needed.

Even now, it is not certain what Abdullah said in Cairo and what was said to him. Abdullah apparently first met Lord Kitchener there in 1912 or 1913. He met Kitchener in Cairo again in February and April 1914, and also met with Ronald Storrs. Abdullah seems to have sought assurances of British help if the Porte were to seek to depose his father. At the time, Kitchener, who inquired in detail about the difficulties in Arabia, seems to have disclaimed any interest in interfering in internal Ottoman affairs. Abdullah may have been less impressed by the disclaimer of interest than by the expression of concern.
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To Storrs, Abdullah apparently claimed—falsely—that the rival chiefs of the Arabian peninsula were prepared to follow his father in opposing the Porte’s designs. He suggested a future relationship between Arabia and Britain similar to that between Afghanistan and Britain, in which the former exercised internal self-rule and the latter administered all foreign relations. Though the idea was attractive to him, Storrs, like his chief, was unable to offer Abdullah the encouragement that he sought.
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Several Arabian emirs had indeed been in conflict for years with the Young Turk leadership in Constantinople. But Gilbert Clayton failed to appreciate the extent to which religious, dynastic, and other differences divided them. Arabic-speaking émigrés in Cairo, with whom he met, may have misled him in this connection. In fact none of the Arabian emirs was willing to accept one of the others as a leader.

Prominent among the Arabic-speaking exiles living in Cairo with whom Clayton spoke was a colorful former Ottoman army officer and C.U.P. politician named Aziz Ali al-Masri. Al-Masri, of Circassian ancestry,
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was born and brought up in Egypt; he had attended military school in the Ottoman Empire. After military service in the field, he had emerged as a leader of the Young Turkey Party. Yet he was a mere major attached to the General Staff at a time when Enver, a classmate of whom he held a low opinion, had become Minister of War. Discontented, al-Masri responded by organizing al’Ahd, a small secret society of army officers who objected to the C.U.P.’s centralizing policies and its failure to give those who spoke Arabic their fair share of high office. The officers of al-’Ahd were united in their opposition to the Turkifying policies adopted by the C.U.P. They advocated either admitting the Arabic-speaking populations to a greater share of power in the central government, or else decentralizing and allowing them greater autonomy at the local level, or perhaps both.
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Enver Pasha was responsible for having had Major al-Masri arrested and convicted on trumped-up charges in early 1914. Thus al-Masri unwillingly found himself cast in the role of an Arab revolutionary—unwillingly, because he aspired to leadership of the Ottoman Empire as a whole, not a mere section of it. Responding to opinion in Cairo, Lord Kitchener intervened on his behalf; and Djemal Pasha arranged to have him pardoned and exiled to his native Egypt. An opponent, since his childhood, of British rule in Egypt, anti-British, pro-German, a supporter of the Ottoman Empire who was opposed only to its government, a military politician who numbered a mere handful of colleagues among his supporters, al-Masri was misunderstood by the British intelligence officers who wrongly regarded him both as powerful and as a potential ally.

In early September 1914, it appears that al-Masri visited the British Agency in Cairo, and met with Clayton.
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Al-Masri knew that Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud and other Arabian leaders had in the past considered rising against the Porte. Perhaps he told Clayton so. Perhaps Clayton was reminded of Abdullah’s visit and of what he had said to Storrs and Kitchener.

After seeing al-Masri, Clayton met with Ronald Storrs and made arrangements for him to forward a secret memorandum to Lord Kitchener. The Clayton memorandum was enclosed in a letter that Storrs was to send to his old chief on the relatively innocuous subject of camels.

III

It was a common British concern in 1914 that the Ottoman Empire, if it entered the war, might launch an attack against the Suez Canal; and, like officials in the war ministries of Europe who analyzed the military potential of neighboring enemy countries in terms of railroad facilities, Ronald Storrs focused attention on the supply of camels available to the Ottoman forces. The Ottoman army, he wrote in his letter to Kitchener, would count on obtaining its animals from the camel-breeders of the western district of Arabia, the Hejaz, and what Storrs proposed was to encourage the local ruler—the Emir of Mecca—not to deliver them.

The message about camels served as his cover: with it Storrs forwarded Clayton’s secret memorandum of 6 September 1914 to Kitchener which urged him to enter into conversations with the ruler of Mecca for other purposes. One of the issues raised in Clayton’s memorandum was whether the Ottoman Sultan could be replaced as Caliph of Islam by an Arabian leader friendly to Britain. If so, the Emir of Mecca, the guardian of the Moslem Holy Places, was an obvious candidate, the more so as he was in a position to provide Britain with important assistance in the matter of pilgrimages.

In the rhythm of life in the Islamic East, no activity was more important than the mass pilgrimage each year to the Holy Places of Arabia—a pilgrimage that every Moslem able to do so is commanded to make at least once in his lifetime. The world war interfered, particularly in 1915. Even if Indian Moslems were to forgive Britain for going to war against the only significant independent Islamic power, there was a question as to whether they would forgive the disruption of the pilgrimage that played so large a role in their lives.

The Holy Places of Arabia, Mecca, and Medina are located in the Hejaz, whose ruler therefore was in a position to safeguard the right of British Moslems to continue visiting their shrines despite the war. Claiming descent from the Prophet’s family, the Emir of Mecca—in addition to being ruler of the Hejaz—was in a position to assume the mantle of the Caliph.

In his secret memorandum, Clayton made the erroneous assertion that the rival regional leaders of the Arabian peninsula—the rulers of Asir and the Yemen, as well as Ibn Saud and perhaps Ibn Rashid of Nejd—were coming together with the ruler of Mecca to work for “an Arabia for the Arabs.”
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According to Clayton’s memorandum, the movement was encouraged by the Khedive, the nominal ruler of Egypt under the Sultan, who also regarded himself as a candidate to succeed the Sultan as Caliph of Islam. It is not clear how Clayton intended to reconcile the conflicting ambitions of this diverse group.

The claim that the other rival leaders would unite behind the Emir of Mecca was one that Abdullah had advanced on his father’s behalf some five months before in conversations with Ronald Storrs. In presenting it as fresh information, Clayton may have been indicating that the information had been recently confirmed to him by al-Masri or by some other exiled Ottoman figure. The novelty of the memorandum lay in the suggestion that the Arabians could be of service to Britain during the war, and not merely afterward.

Kitchener responded immediately. He sent a cable to Cairo on 24 September 1914, in which he ordered that Storrs be told to send a trusted messenger to Abdullah to ask a question in confidence: in the event of war, would the Hejaz be for or against Britain? Before sending his cable, Kitchener cleared it with Sir Edward Grey, who was impressed by Clayton’s memorandum, which he termed “very important.”
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