The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (38 page)

After the war, Britain and the United States were both wary of Communist designs on Iran, but for the British the bigger problem became Iranian nationalism. In 1951, the Iranian Parliament voted to nationalize the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, Britain's biggest foreign asset; the British withdrew in a huff, and Iranian oil production plummeted. The Truman administration was unsympathetic to British demands for action against Iran, but by 1953 the newly elected Eisenhower administration was alarmed by British reports that Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq—who was already governing under extended and dictatorial “emergency powers”—was leaning towards the Communists. The CIA agreed to cooperate with British Intelligence to remove him—and had plenty of allies in Iran, including the shah whom Prime Minister Winston Churchill advised had a duty as a constitutional monarch to act against Mossadeq's tyranny. The shah, after much nail-biting, issued a decree calling for Mossadeq's dismissal, and a royalist coup ensued, installing a new prime minister to apparent popular delight (though perhaps CIA “walking around money” helped in this regard). The shah told the American mastermind of the coup, Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore Roosevelt's grandson), “I owe my throne to God, my people, my army—and to you!” To which Roosevelt graciously noted, “He meant me
and
the two countries—Great Britain and the United States—I was representing. We were all heroes.”
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Thanks to him, Iran was a Western ally for the next quarter century.

What is now Saudi Arabia was never a British colony, but it owes its existence to the British Empire—specifically to the contest between
T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and Harry St. John Philby (father of future spy and traitor Kim Philby). Both men were British officers involved in leading the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Turks in the First World War. Lawrence was the advocate of the guardians of Mecca, the Hashemites; Philby (and the British government in India) thought the virile Wahhabi tribesmen of Ibn Saud were the better bet. In that wager Philby was right, but Philby was also something of a traitor, as he helped Saudi Arabia's oil concessions go to America rather than Britain (Standard Oil of California paid him a retainer) and he converted to Islam, apparently not from any ardent religious belief but because of the doors it might open for him in Arabia.

The Hashemites—chased out of Arabia by Ibn Saud's raiders—became British-backed monarchs in Mesopotamia and (more successfully) Transjordan, to which Britain was tied purely by bonds of sentiment, because Transjordan had little strategic value at all. The British were also bound by conflicting loyalties—they had led the Arabs in a revolt against the Ottomans and they had pledged, with the Balfour Declaration of 1917, to support the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Palestine, like Jordan, had no natural resources—though it had the strategic advantage of fronting the Mediterranean—but to Britons raised on the Bible it was freighted with mystical associations (as was Greece to classically educated English gentlemen). David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill, neither one notably religious, supported the creation of a Zionist Palestine, which became the state of Israel.

It was, however, a thankless task, as it sparked enmity from the Arabs—who were moved to enmity rather easily, and who throughout the 1930s kept Palestine in a state of turbulent, low-grade guerrilla war. The British suppressed the rebellious Arabs with the de facto assistance of the Haganah, a Jewish self-defense force, and the more radical, underground Irgun, which was not overly scrupulous about its targets. In 1939 the British government pulled back from the Balfour Declaration—over the protests of Lloyd George and Churchill—with a White Paper that proposed slapping limits on Jewish immigration to Palestine. The desired outcome, according to the White Paper, was that within ten years Palestine would become an independent, non-confessional state shared between Arabs and Jews. The spirit of British compromise was not, however, widely appreciated in this part of the world—with both Zionists and Arabs, albeit for different reasons, rejecting the White Paper. During the Second World War, the Zionists joined the British in the fight against Hitler, while the Arabs were rather more divided. If they were under British arms, they supported their British officers; but Arab sentiment, whipped up by the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, trended naturally towards National Socialism.

After the War, Palestine was a hornet's nest for the British, who were only too happy to be rid of it. They were targeted by both Arab and Zionist terrorists; the former renewing their revolt, the latter angry at restrictions on Jewish immigration.
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The day before the expiration of the British mandate
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and the partition of the country into separate Jewish and Arab states (which the Zionists accepted and the Arabs did not), Israel declared independence, only to be almost immediately attacked by its Arab neighbors. British officers serving in the Arab Legion were put in the awkward position of securing the West Bank for Jordan. Jordan, the most moderate of the Arab states, gained ground in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, and so did Israel, which won a decisive victory and secured more defensible borders. Britain officially recognized Israel as an independent state on 29 January 1949, four days after Israel's first general elections.

The British Empire in Arabia lasted longest in the Gulf States of Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the Trucial States, Oman, and Aden, all of which fell under the influence of the British East India Company by the late eighteenth century. Officially, Kuwait, Bahrain, and Qatar owed their allegiance to the Ottoman Empire (Bahrain was also claimed by Persia), but in reality they functioned more as British protectorates, where the British touch was light and the sheiks and emirs loyal.

Kuwait officially became a British protectorate after the First World War—its borders drawn by Britain—and was a valuable oil reservoir for the Allies during World War II (as was Bahrain, which declared war on
Germany as a British ally). Kuwait was granted independence in 1961, though British troops—at Kuwait's request—were swiftly dispatched to strengthen its borders against the aggressive intentions of Iraq (intentions that were repelled rather more vigorously after the Iraqi invasion that began the First Gulf War in 1990).

In 1853, a treaty between the British and nearly a dozen sheikdoms of the Gulf (including Abu Dhabi and Dubai) formed what became known as the Trucial States, which were placed under British protection. In 1968, after Britain declared it intended to relinquish its commitments east of Suez by 1971, the Trucial States tried to form the United Arab Emirates (the UAE) with Qatar and Bahrain. The UAE survived, but with Qatar and Bahrain opting for independence.

The Trucial States were sometimes known as Trucial Oman, as they fronted the coast of the Gulf of Oman, but Oman proper, to the south, had been an empire of its own, including Zanzibar, parts of the East African coast, and even a port on the Arabian Sea (Gwadar, which it held until 1958, is now part of Pakistan). Since the slave trade was a pillar of the Omani empire, it collapsed in the wake of the Royal Navy's anti-slavery mission. Zanzibar, the center of the trade, became a British protectorate and scene of the shortest war in history, the forty-minute Anglo-Zanzibar War of 1896, fought to make a British-favored candidate sultan and abolish slavery on the island. Zanzibar was granted independence in 1963 (which turned out to be a very bad thing for Arab and Indian Zanzibaris who were slaughtered by the majority African population); Zanzibar then merged with Tanganyika, now Tanzania. Oman was recognized as independent in 1951, though the sultan kept on British forces to help him put down a variety of insurgencies. Oman has remained a British ally and its army retains bagpipers.

The port of Aden was acquired by Britain in 1839, both for the protection of the route to India and as a naval base against the slave trade. British influence spread until the area that is now essentially Yemen came under
the British Protectorate of Aden. By the 1950s Aden had become one of the world's leading ports, but Arab nationalism, stoked by Nasser, reached ignition point in 1963 when an Arab insurgency began against the British. The war ended with British withdrawal in 1967, and Aden, a linchpin of the Empire, an Arabian outpost where British law, not sharia law, held sway, was surrendered to what is today the much less attractive state of Yemen. But even here, in the final days, there was a touch of glory, as Lieutenant-Colonel Colin “Mad Mitch” Mitchell led his Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, bagpipes skirling, to retake the terrorist-infested district of Aden known as “the Crater,” which had been sealed off after mutinous Arab police had joined the insurgents and murdered British soldiers. Not a single man was lost in the operation, Mitchell recovered Aden's gold reserves, and he kept peace in what had been a dangerous and violent place by intimidating the terrorists with “Argyll Law”
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: “They know that if they start trouble we'll blow their bloody heads off.”
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Even in the Empire's retreat, the British army still knew how to do things right.

“Starting in a hollowed log of wood—some thousand miles up a river, with only an infinitesimal prospect of returning! I ask myself ‘Why?' and the only echo is ‘damned fool . . . the Devil drives!'”

 

I
f the Empire had a Byronic hero, it was Burton. As with Byron, many considered him mad, bad, and dangerous to know. But the dark, powerfully built adventurer and
soi-disant
scholar was an extraordinary man of many talents—and unlike Byron, conservative politics. He was a Crown-and-Empire man, socially conservative in the sense of sharing the class prejudices of a high Tory and believing in the English cult of the gentleman (especially its more aggressive, honor-bound aspects). He also had a bad boy's delight to shock; an anthropologist's interest in cataloguing native customs, beliefs, and practices, especially those that were outré to Victorian sensibilities; and an amazing ability to penetrate the inner mysteries of several religions while believing in none, preferring to take the Devil's (when not the Muslim's) part. As the Earl of Dunraven noted, Burton “prided himself on looking like Satan—as indeed, he did.”
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