Enemy on the Euphrates (18 page)

However, in exactly the same way that Anglo-Persian represented an opaque conflation of private and public interests, so too did these committees – especially the Petroleum Executive, one of whose members was the redoubtable capitalist Lord Inchcape.
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At the Foreign Office, such a mixture was regarded with some distaste. ‘The Petroleum Executive’, observed George Kidston, a senior official, ‘is largely composed of persons who have a direct personal interest in oil enterprises,’ and he and other Foreign Office officials were particularly concerned that the personnel of government departments like his own might be tempted into speculation and the private purchase of oil shares. ‘What can one expect,’ Kidston asked, ‘when private and public interests are inextricably mixed up in a Government body of control?’
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However, the line of influence could flow in the other direction. Not only might
government officials become tainted by commercial motivations but business interests could just as easily come to determine public policy.

So it was that the attention of Maurice Hankey, secretary of the War Cabinet, was ‘privately’ drawn to the question of Mosul by ‘people with knowledge of oil production’. Who they were, Hankey doesn’t say, but there are very few individuals to choose from: a reasonable guess would be that they were Charles Greenway, chairman of Anglo-Persian since 1914, and Lord Inchcape.

Meanwhile, with Hankey’s support once again, Sykes had recently moved from the War Cabinet Secretariat to the Foreign Office as ‘Assistant Adviser on Arabian and Palestine affairs’, from where he was bombarding Lord Nathaniel Curzon’s newly established Middle East Committee with all kinds of schemes for maintaining British control over the Middle East when the war ended. In January 1918 he sent the committee a long memorandum entitled ‘Our position in Mesopotamia in relation to the Spirit of the Age’. In it he argued that ‘If America had not come into the war (and) if the Russian revolution had not taken place’, then the ‘Spirit of the Age’ would still be that of the world of 1887, a world of ‘Imperialism, annexation, military triumph, prestige, White Man’s Burden etc.’ But in the changed political circumstances, ‘If Britishers are to run Mesopotamia we must find up-to-date reasons for doing so.’ Sykes’s specific recommendations for achieving this objective included prompting the Christians and Jews of Iraq ‘to demand a perpetuation of our administration’, providing subsidies to the ‘greater Badawi chiefs of the desert’, and even subsidising ‘an Arab press on Nationalist lines’.

The same memo was also sent to Hirtzel at the India Office, in which Sykes added that the first of a list of reasons why Britain should nevertheless ‘run’ Iraq – albeit by indirect methods – was that Iraq was a ‘storehouse’ of oil and agricultural potential.
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His principal recommendation, therefore, was that Britain should get the United States ‘to propose that we should, provided the people of Mesopotamia desire it, assume … a provisional regime in Mesopotamia … with the object of setting up a self-governing and independent state in Mesopotamia at the
end of twenty-five years.’ Sykes seems to have thought that offering Iraq independence after a wait of twenty-five years would be something its inhabitants would accept with alacrity.

If the ‘Spirit of the Age’ required a less overt pursuit of colonial riches, Sykes’s principal adversary on this score was Lord Inchcape. Indeed, at a session of the Middle East Committee in February convened,
inter alia
, to discuss Inchcape’s demands to re-establish his shipping monopoly on the Tigris and Euphrates (the project had been aborted by the outbreak of war with the Turks), Sykes openly attacked the arch-imperialist peer:

If we play our cards well and in accordance with the underlying political principles now current in the world, we should have a good chance of remaining in control of Mesopotamia after the war, but should we be charged with encouraging profiteering or establishing monopolies we should run the grave risk of seeing Mesopotamia pass out of our control at the Peace Conference. The proposal before the Committee is equivalent to handing over the future of Mesopotamia and its inhabitants to Lord Inchcape.
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Meanwhile, British understanding of the potential oil wealth of its newly acquired territory in the Middle East was improving considerably. Until the consolidation of the former vilayets of Baghdad and Basra into the British zone of occupation, knowledge of Iraq’s oil resources had barely progressed beyond the information acquired by Sykes in 1905. However, in early 1918 one of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s senior geologists, Mr G.W. Halse, based at Ahwaz, was – in his own words – ‘summoned from Persia by GHQ in order to investigate the prospects of discovering oil in the occupied part of Mesopotamia’.
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Although restricted, for the time being, to the two vilayets in question, Halse’s survey, the preliminary report of which was presented to GHQ in March 1918, was very encouraging.

Halse had studied two areas, Naft Khana, on the Persian frontier, about eighty miles north-east of Baghdad, and the Ramadi-Hit district on the Upper Euphrates, approximately eighty miles west-north-west of the capital. With regard to the former region, Halse concluded that it ‘so
nearly approaches ideal conditions that it must be regarded as an area of the greatest promise’, and on the Upper Euphrates, the dome structure identified was similar to those in the USA from which substantial oil production had been obtained. Moreover, Halse’s report added that in this region ‘the gas pressure and large extent of the seepages … must be taken as exceedingly favourable evidence’. And although, in general, on the Euphrates ‘the conditions are less determinant’ than at Naft Khana, nevertheless Halse considered that since ‘the indications of petroleum are on so large a scale’, a ‘practical test’ (i.e. exploration drilling) should be carried out.

On the basis of this and other preliminary reports, Wilson telegrammed the Foreign Office, India Office and Sir Percy Cox, underlining its main conclusions and adding – almost incoherent with enthusiasm – his own observation: ‘There is not one single item that militates against prospects. It cannot be doubted that oil will be struck. The magnitude of seepages, the gas pressure (especially) at most almost ideal structure render good productions eminently reasonable.’
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By the time Halse had completed his final report on the two regions in August 1918, he remained cautiously optimistic about Hit, but even more confident about the prospectivity of Naft Khana, where ‘conditions … are of such an extremely favourable nature that the striking of oil would seem a certainty.’
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As knowledge of these geological findings percolated through government departments, Maurice Hankey decided to act. Three years earlier he had been a member of the De Bunsen Committee, and one of its conclusions had been that if outright partitioning of the Ottoman Empire was the option – and in the changed circumstances since 1915, that now seemed inevitable – then it would be desirable for Britain ‘to carry our control to Mosul, in the vicinity of which place there are valuable (oil) wells, possession of which by another power would be prejudicial to our interests’.

On 30 July 1918, in the knowledge that the previous day Admiral Slade had submitted a final report on the future petroleum requirements of the British Empire to Sir Eric Geddes, First Lord of the Admiralty,
Hankey wrote to Geddes requesting information on the oil situation. Directly on cue, the following day Geddes sent him Slade’s report. Slade, with Geddes’s wholehearted agreement, argued that, given the expected shortfall in British oil supplies after the war, Britain should,

encourage and assist British companies to obtain control of as many oil-producing areas in foreign countries as possible, with the stipulation (in order to prevent control being obtained by foreign interests) that the oil produced should only be sold to or through British oil-distributing companies. These oil-producing areas could be developed to assist in providing our requirements in times of peace whilst our own resources in British territory can be conserved for war.
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Furthermore, Britain’s war aims should include preventing the enemy from in any way endangering the Persian oilfields, to push forward as soon as possible the development of the Persian and Iraqi oilfields as purely British interests, to encourage and assist the colonies to obtain control of oil-bearing lands, but only sell through British companies, and to exclude all foreign interests from British oil businesses. Hankey immediately wrote back to the First Lord, ‘The retention of the oil-bearing regions of Mesopotamia and Persia in British hands, as well as a proper strategic boundary to cover them, would appear to be a first class British war aim … we should obtain possession of all the oil-bearing regions in Mesopotamia and Southern Persia.’
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Since Slade’s report of 29 July had not specifically referred to the oilfields around Mosul, Hankey immediately asked Slade for further information on this subject, to which Slade quickly responded, showing Hankey a map on which the potential oilfields were marked. Hankey then asked Slade to send him a further short memorandum and a copy of the map indicating precisely which oilfields still lay north of the line currently being held by General Marshall’s forces. Since there was a cabinet meeting the next day, Hankey did not wait for this supplementary information to arrive but wrote immediately to the foreign secretary, Balfour, and the prime minister, Lloyd George. To Balfour, Hankey wrote:

As I understand the matter, oil in the next war will occupy the place of coal in the present war, or at least a place parallel with coal. The only big potential supply that we can get under British control is the Persian and Mesopotamian supply. The point where you come in is that the control over these oil supplies becomes a first class British war aim. I write to urge that in your statement to the Imperial War Cabinet you should rub this in.
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And to Lloyd George, having commented on the general staff’s current belief that there was little military advantage in any further advance northwards in Iraq, Hankey argued that Admiral Slade’s report had suggested to him that ‘there may be reasons other than purely military for pushing on in Mesopotamia where the British have an enormous preponderance of force’, adding, ‘would it not be an advantage, before the end of the war, to secure the valuable oil wells in Mesopotamia?’

The Imperial War Cabinet was due to discuss a final statement on war aims on 13 August. But on 3 August Balfour told Hankey that he considered acquisition of the oil-bearing regions of Iraq ‘a purely imperialist war aim’. An infuriated Hankey confided to his diary that evening: ‘Fancy allowing such humbug to stand in the way of our vital national interests!’
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However, Hankey was not defeated yet. He well knew that Balfour was more concerned with appearance than reality and he soon hit on a means of allowing Balfour to salve his apparently troubled conscience. The day before the war aims statement was to be discussed by cabinet, he wrote again to Balfour.

It appears to me … that it is almost unavoidable that we should acquire the Northern regions of Mesopotamia … neither President Wilson nor any one else will wish to place the vast regions of Mesopotamia bordering the Tigris and Euphrates under Turkish control … The question I ask, therefore is as to whether it is not of great importance to push forward at least as far as the Lesser Zab, or as far as is necessary to secure a proper supply of water. Incidentally this would give us most of the oil-bearing regions.
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Balfour presented his views on Britain’s war aims to the Imperial War Cabinet on 13 August. Admiral Slade’s recommendations were not
included, nor was there any explicit reference to Mosul, but Balfour made two significant points. Firstly, the Sykes–Picot Agreement (which had allocated Mosul to the French sphere of influence), was pronounced ‘historically out of date’; and secondly, Balfour emphasised that there was a ‘vital necessity for the British Empire to secure an (Iraq) settlement which would not endanger our facilities for obtaining oil from this region’. It was as far as Balfour was willing to go, but it was sufficient. From then on, irrespective of whether the acquisition of Mosul and its oil was officially designated as a war aim, the cabinet effectively committed itself to pursuing a policy of acquiring
all
the oil-bearing territories in Iraq; and although there was no official endorsement of the Admiralty’s ‘oil imperialism’, the policies pursued by the government from then on
in practice
took a shape little different from those supported by Hankey, the Admiralty, Inchcape and the other directors of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
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On 15 September 1918, Enver Pasha’s Army of Islam, now swelled to 60,000 men by thousands of Azerbaijani irregulars, finally captured the oil city of Baku. A tiny force of British troops commanded by General Dunsterville (the so-called ‘Dunsterforce’) had tried, unsuccessfully, to organise the local Armenian and Russian population into an effective defensive force but had been compelled to flee the city by sea. However, for Enver Pasha it was all too late. On 29 September Bulgaria asked for an armistice, its withdrawal from the war isolating Turkey from its two European allies. The following day Australian cavalry followed by Arab irregulars accompanied by Lawrence entered Damascus. The remnants of the CUP government in Istanbul now began to put out peace-feelers.

The clock was ticking: unless General Marshall acted quickly, a peace agreement with Turkey would leave Mosul in Ottoman hands. Consequently, the War Office sent dispatches to Marshall informing him of the Bulgarian collapse and the victories in Palestine and Syria which might, at any moment, lead to a request for a cessation of hostilities. ‘It is advisable in these circumstances’, Marshall was told, ‘that as much ground as possible should be gained up the Tigris. Such action is important not only for political reasons but also to occupy as large a portion of the oil-bearing regions as possible.’
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