The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (65 page)

The events of the past four years had shown that Lloyd George’s government was filled with men who were convinced that they enjoyed the right, whether or not as a result of divine benevolence, to mould the future of the Middle East and its inhabitants. They exercised this right with the utmost rigour and an astounding disregard for reality. Through a mixture of big power diplomacy and force ruthlessly applied, the government implemented a policy of aggressive and acquisitive imperialism.

One of the mainsprings of this spasm of annexation and intimidation was the Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon. He was then in his sixties and for the greater part of his career had fretted about the security of India. In November 1918 his worries seemed to be at an end; Turkey and Russia were prostrate, and Britain had over a third of a million fighting men distributed across the Middle East. Mesopotamia (Iraq), Syria and Palestine were occupied; there were 10,000 men in Persia protecting oil wells and upholding British interests on the southern shores of the Caspian; a flotilla of makeshift gunboats cruised on that sea; and to the east, in Trans-Caspia, small detachments of British and Indian troops garrisoned towns, guarded railway lines, and got into scrapes with local Bolsheviks. British warships dominated the Black Sea, and Constantinople was under British control.

This unprecedented concentration of British power gave Curzon a chance to fulfil his dream. Britain now had the wherewithal to create a secure corridor stretching from the Suez Canal to the borders of India and simultaneously form a buffer zone in central Asia, which would keep the Russians away from Persia and Afghanistan. The empire would be immeasurably strengthened if these swathes of territory stayed under Britain’s direct control, since imperial communications would no longer be entirely dependent on the Suez Canal. Pioneer flights between Cairo and Bombay were undertaken early in 1919, and in November Sir Ross Smith flew a Vickers Vimy bomber from England to Australia via Egypt, India and Singapore. During the middle part of his journey he overflew southern Palestine, Iraq and Persia. In the next few years, plans were in hand for an overland motor route between Damascus and Baghdad.

Curzon’s vision of the new Middle Eastern
imperium
soon turned into a nightmare. The vast army which straddled the region in November 1918 was made up of volunteers and conscripts, who had gone to war to beat Germany and Turkey and not, as they made abundantly clear, to found a new empire. During the first six months of 1919 these soldiers were sent home, their duty done, and replacements had to be found. Moreover, the British government had somehow to find extra manpower for commitments elsewhere; during 1919 and 1920 soldiers were needed to garrison the Rhineland, superintend the plebiscite in Silesia, stiffen anti-Bolshevik armies in Russia, police Ireland, defend the North-West Frontier, and pacify large areas of northern India. Soldiers also had to be retained in Britain to meet the continual threats of large-scale industrial action by miners and railway workers. India, which was providing 180,000 men for Middle Eastern units, was also feeling the strain, and complained to London about the cost and the shortage of units for internal security. The dominions were asked to lend a hand, but only New Zealand agreed, the rest arguing that they had no direct interests in the Middle East save the Suez Canal, which was not threatened.
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Even if enough men could be found, the government did not have the money to pay them. The boom of 1919 burned itself out and was followed by a recession. Unemployment, which had been just under 3 per cent before the war, rocketed to 17 per cent by the end of 1921. A nation burdened with war debts faced a fall in revenue from taxation and a simultaneous increase in welfare payments. Retrenchment became an urgent necessity, and items such as the £30 million a year needed to underwrite Britain’s presence in Persia were held up to close and critical scrutiny by the Treasury and tax-payers. Senior army officers, particularly the hard-pressed Sir Henry Wilson, became impatient with ministers who acted as if armies could be conjured out of a hat. His deputy, General Sir Philip Chetwode, bluntly remarked in August 1921 that ‘the habit of interfering with other people’s business, and of making what is euphoniously called “peace” is like “buggery”; once you take to it you cannot stop.’
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Be that as it may, the government was already coming down to earth as it became embarrassingly obvious that its resources were being stretched to breaking point.

The penny packets of men in southern Russia were pulled out during 1920, which was just as well considering the weight of the Bolshevik offensive launched in the spring of that year. There was much grumbling about the damage inflicted on local British prestige, and there was more when the cabinet decided to evacuate units stationed in northern Persia in May 1920.
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Curzon predicted, among other catastrophes, a Bolshevik revolution in Persia, echoing the view of the local commander, Major-General Sir Edmund Ironside, who believed the country was ‘ripe for Communism’ thanks to a ‘thoroughly effete and rotten upper class’.
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In fact, Russia was in no position to interfere actively in the scramble for the Middle East, although the Communist government repeatedly denounced British imperialism and, in 1921, signed treaties of friendship with the nationalist governments of Turkey, Persia and Afghanistan. Resistance to British ambitions came from inside rather than outside the Middle East, and it was supported by a vocal and influential lobby in Britain. This group argued that the region could not be treated as Africa had been in the last century, as a backward area which could be partitioned and conquered without reference to the wishes of its people. Local nationalism, awakened during the last days of Ottoman rule, had become too strong a force to be pushed aside. Indeed, its present vigour and intensity were the direct result of wartime encouragement by Britain.

The trouble was that fostering Arab nationalism had been only one strand of Britain’s wartime policy in the Middle East. The Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 partitioned the area into future British and French spheres of influence, and the Balfour Declaration of November 1917 pledged a future Jewish ‘homeland’ in the British zone of Palestine. Matters were further confused as details of President Wilson’s fourteen points began to circulate in the Middle East, making nonsense of the Sykes-Picot arrangements, which, incidentally, were well known to Arabs. It appeared that Britain and France might abandon their imperial ambitions, an impression which was confirmed in the closing days of the war when both governments announced their intention to apply Wilsonian principles to the former Ottoman empire. It was in this knowledge that the Kurds welcomed British and Indian soldiers as liberators in the autumn of 1918. Their leader Sheik Mahmud al-Barzani kept a copy of the Anglo-French pledge in an amulet as a talisman which would transform his people into a nation. Within six months he was busy setting up a Kurdish state in northern Iraq.

An independent Kurdistan, or for that matter self-government for anyone inside Iraq, was wormwood to Colonel Sir Arnold Wilson, the country’s civil administrator. A former army boxing champion, who later in life seriously flirted with fascism, Wilson wanted Iraq as a dependency of India. It would be populated by Indian immigrants, of whom ‘the stalwart Mohammedan cultivator’ was the most desirable.
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In May 1919, Sir Arnold ordered the destruction of the embryonic Kurdish state by a column of British and Indian troops. When Kurdish guerrillas proved too hard to catch, RAF officers asked Churchill, then Secretary for War, for poison gas. He agreed, but it was not used.
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In less than a year, Britain had shed the mask of benevolence to reveal the snarling frown of the conqueror.

The metamorphosis had begun in December 1918 during private horse-trading between the French President Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Britain took northern Iraq with its oil deposits, France got a quarter share in the company set up to exploit them, and a confirmation of its rights in Syria and the Lebanon. During the winter of 1918-19 French troops began to disembark at Beirut.

Disheartened Arab nationalists pinned their hopes on the Versailles peace conference and the conscience of President Wilson. Neither yielded much; the President prevaricated and, when confronted with Egyptian nationalists, told them that their dispute with Britain was none of his business. Syria and the Lebanon were to be given to France under a League of Nations mandate, and Palestine and Iraq to Britain. Mandate was a new word, which some thought a euphemism for old-style colonialism. The relationship between the mandatory power and its territory was the same as that of a guardian to a ward with the League of Nations Mandate Commission acting as a board of trustees. Their duty was to see that the nation which held the mandate governed in the best interests of its subjects, protected them from exploitation, and accelerated their moral, physical and political development. These arrangements were settled in May 1920 by the great powers at San Remo without heeding Middle Eastern opinion.

Arab nationalists put little faith in this brand of enlightened imperialism which reduced them to minors who could not survive without a substitute parent. The Emir Faisal, the Hashemite prince who had fought alongside the Allies in the mistaken belief that his reward would be the kingdom of Syria, returned there early in 1920 and proclaimed its independence. His gesture excited Arab nationalists in Jerusalem, some of whom were veterans of Faisal’s army. There were riots in the city by Arabs who denounced the Balfour Declaration and attacked Jews and their property.
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What was, so to speak, a second Arab revolt spread to Iraq, following hard on the news of what had been agreed at San Remo. Throughout Ramadan (May) Shia and Sunni religious leaders joined forces with Hashemite agents and nationalists in a sequence of public protests against the continuation of British rule.
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Riots turned into a revolution early in June, when a British political officer arrested a prominent nationalist sheik for alleged tax evasion. Wilson’s fragile régime disintegrated swiftly, and a government strapped for cash and short of soldiers found itself dragged into a war.

Reinforcements were found after considerable exertion; in India, recently discharged Sikh soldiers were tempted back by 100-rupee (£16) bonuses.
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By September the local commander, General Sir Aylmer Haldane, was beginning to get the upper hand, although he was still desperate enough to clamour for large supplies of poison gas.
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It was not needed for, as he later admitted, air power had given his forces the edge whenever the going got tough. At the end of the year order had been restored by methods which did not bear too close examination. Viscount Peel, Under-Secretary at the War Ministry, was glad that the ‘sentimentalists’ at home had been so distracted by the brutalities of the Black and Tans in Ireland that they failed to notice what was happening in Iraq.
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The public, the press and the Commons did, however, notice that the government’s policies in the Middle East were achieving nothing more than a colossal waste of money and lives. The Indian-style administration of Colonel Wilson was in ruins, and it was obvious that Iraqis did not want to be ruled by district officers who generally behaved like arrogant public-school prefects. It proved possible, largely through the employment of superior technology, for the French to crush the Arabs in Syria and the British to do likewise in Jerusalem and Iraq, but having done so, both powers faced an uphill struggle holding down their mandates. Moreover, it was impossible to square threats of using poison gas against tribesmen with the essentially humane and benevolent ideals behind the mandate system. The only answer lay in reaching an accommodation with the Arabs which would balance Britain’s strategic needs with the aspirations of local nationalists.

This had been the line taken by T.E. Lawrence during 1920, when he had undertaken a press campaign in favour of Arab self-determination within the empire as an alternative to coercion. Might not the Iraqis become the first ‘brown dominion’? he asked. The £40 million bill for the Iraq war convinced the government that he was right. Early in 1921 he joined the staff of Churchill, who had just taken over the Colonial Office with orders to negotiate a settlement in the mandates in which the security costs were kept to a minimum. The result was the Cairo Conference of March 1921. The wartime alliance between Britain and the Hashemite family was renewed; Faisal was given the throne of Iraq and his brother, Abdullah, that of a kingdom then known as Transjordan (Jordan) which consisted, as its name suggests, of land on the eastern bank of the River Jordan. Both kings would be advised by British officials to ensure that the terms of the mandate would be adhered to. Palestine would be the responsibility of the Colonial Office with internal security in the hands of a
gendarmerie
recruited from the now redundant Black and Tans and Auxis.

The peace of Iraq and Jordan would be kept by a novel system known as ‘air control’, which had the enthusiastic backing of Churchill, Lawrence, Leo Amery and Air-Marshal Lord Trenchard, the Chief of Air Staff. Aircraft had been used in pacification operations in the Sudan, on the North-West Frontier, and most recently in Somaliland. The final defeat of the Mad Mullah in 1920 had been achieved after the bombing of his strongholds in what the Colonial Office regarded as a model campaign. Its total cost was £70,000, which made it the cheapest imperial war ever, and did much to convince waverers that air control was the thriftiest way to police the empire’s more unruly subjects.

The kings of Jordan and Iraq had at their disposal RAF bombers, supported by armoured car squadrons and detachments of locally-recruited levies under British officers. Any outbreak of truculence was handled by bombers, which first dropped warning leaflets, and then bombed property or livestock. The leaflets dropped on the Mullah’s villages had been vivid, robust pronouncements (‘the arm of the government is long … its officers fly like birds’), but afterwards their tone became almost apologetic. In December 1938, the inhabitants of Arsal Kot on the North-West Frontier were given nanny-like instructions as to what to do before the bombers appeared: