The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (93 page)

Oil and airfields had replaced the defence of India as Britain’s reason for paramountcy in the Middle East. In a sense, the old strategic and geopolitical catchwords of Disraeli and Curzon still held true. They were heard frequently during the late 1940s and early 1950s, largely from the Conservative benches and in the committee rooms of the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry. But had Britain kept its old nerve and was it, when faced with difficulties, prepared to act boldly? On paper at least, Britain was as formidable a power in the region in 1945 as it had been twenty or so years before when the young Nasser had cursed the RAF biplanes that flew over his house. In 1945, Jordan, Iraq, Iran and the sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf were still in Britain’s thrall. So too was Egypt, the sullen host to the vast Suez Canal Zone complex of barracks, storehouses and airfields which straddled the Canal. This strip, 120 miles long by 30 wide, was the largest military base in the world, and the pivot of British power in the Middle East and Africa. Radiating from the Canal Zone was a web of satellite garrisons, aerodromes and naval bases in Malta, Cyprus, Haifa, the ex-Italian colony of Libya (which Russia had briefly coveted), Jordan, Iraq, Aden and the Persian Gulf.

These scarlet specks on the War Office’s map offered little comfort to Bevin. He was aware of a new, uncompromising and anti-British mood abroad in the Middle East, and it was being encouraged by what was widely seen as Britain’s retirement in the face of Indian nationalism. Britain could be undone and, on the first day of 1947, he warned Attlee of troubles ahead. ‘You cannot read the telegrams from Egypt and the Middle East nowadays without realising that not only is India going, but Malaya, Ceylon, and the Far East are going with it, with a tremendous repercussion in the African territories.’
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Five months later, as Britain faced another financial crisis, Bevin candidly admitted to some of his staff that he would have ‘to bluff his way through’ in handling the Middle East’s affairs.
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These were presently in an appalling mess. Since the end of 1944, British forces had been vainly attempting to contain the Jewish revolt in Palestine. It was a guerrilla campaign of assassination and sabotage waged by partisans as elusive, intrepid and ruthless as the IRA. Like the Irish campaign, the Palestinian one earned Britain opprobrium abroad, particularly in America, and used up scarce treasure. The lack of funds was now dictating policy. Paupers did not make convincing dissemblers, and at the beginning of the year Bevin had had to withdraw subventions from the anti-Communist governments of Turkey and Greece, which were subsequently rescued by American subsidies. At the end of September 1947, the cabinet washed its hands of the embarrassing and costly Palestinian imbroglio. One hundred thousand servicemen had not broken the cycle of terror and counter-terror, and the province was clearly ungovernable. Britain surrendered its mandate to the United Nations with a promise of evacuation by May 1948.

This announcement was tantamount to a victory for the Jewish partisans, who were quickly embroiled in a civil war with the Palestinians. During the next eight months, the United Nations tried unsuccessfully to arrange a partition of the country between two races who were each set on the other’s extinction. It was bad enough that Britain had had to scurry out of a protectorate which it had ruled for barely thirty years, but worse followed. The last days of the mandate witnessed the massacre of 240 Arabs, including women and children, by a Jewish unit at Deir Yassim. This incident helped trigger a mass exodus of Palestinians and, by 1949, 720,000 refugees had fled either to Gaza or Jordan. Their legal statelessness and bleak camps were a reproach to Britain, and a reminder to the Arab world of her impotence and perfidy. After 1948, Britain and the infant state of Israel became symbols of alien domination and Arab powerlessness. It was left to the United States to offer the refugees financial assistance and, where possible, attempt their resettlement.

Whatever post-war official spokesmen said to the contrary about Britain’s future good intentions in the Middle East, it had not shaken off its pre-war reputation for high-handedness and Machiavellian intrigue. Lawrence of Arabia may have been a hero in his own country, but for the Arabs he was just the first in a line of imperialist tricksters who had coveted their resources and land. ‘The British position in the whole area is hopeless. They are hated and distrusted almost everywhere,’ concluded a
Time
survey which appeared at the beginning of 1952. A fortnight after, the magazine noted the ‘old game of baiting the British’ was being played with relish in Egypt and Persia; it could have added that the players were feeling more confident than ever of eventual victory.
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In April 1951, Dr Mohammed Mussadiq’s Nationalist party had won the general election in Persia, or Iran as it now called itself, having plucked a name of antique glory from the history books. The frail, elderly Mussadiq had come to power on a programme of anglophobia and national regeneration. He captivated the masses by the power of his eloquence, sometimes fainting in mid-flow, physically overcome by the emotion of his rhetoric. He saw himself as his country’s saviour, once telling an audience in New York that Iran in 1951 was doing what America had done in 1776: freeing itself from an arbitrary and rapacious overlord. In January 1952, the general assembly of the United Nations heard an extended recital of Britain’s misdeeds in Iran, Mussadiq’s favourite theme. The embarrassed British representative, Sir Gladwyn Jebb, pooh-poohed this catalogue of iniquities as ‘the profitless and indeed sterile interpretation of past events’, and asked Mussadiq to look towards the future.

No amount of bland requests to forget and presumably forgive the past could expiate Britain’s guilt in the eyes of Iranian, or for that matter Arab and Egyptian, nationalists. Memories were long and bitter; Mussadiq was old enough to recall Indian troops marching through his country during the First World War, unequal treaties, governments which rose or fell according to the whims of bureaucrats in London or Delhi, and, in 1942, the return of British forces. Iranians, like other peoples of the Middle East, had had their destinies decided for them; now, Mussadiq believed, they were about to make their own history. It was futile to explain to him and those who cheered his speeches that Britain had changed, and that it was now ready to help them in the development of their country as friendly partner, or that British companies were progressive and philanthropic employers. They may have been, but they were also the beneficiaries of past injustices, and this was how they appeared to Mussadiq and millions of other Iranians.

In May 1951, Mussadiq kept faith with those who had voted for him by nationalising the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company’s assets. This firm was a symbol of Iranian subservience and British power, a leech which had been sucking Iran’s life blood, leaving its people poor and hungry. The riches generated by the oil company had been unevenly distributed; in the year before nationalisation, Iran received £9 million in royalties, a million more than the Inland Revenue took from the company’s profits. In purely commercial terms, the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company might have saved some of its profits by adopting a 50-50 deal, which its American counterparts had recently made with Iraq and Saudi Arabia, although this would have been painful, and not to the liking of the company’s chairman and presumably his stockholders. As the crisis unfolded and details of Anglo-Iranian’s record became known, there was much muted criticism of its past selfishness in the corridors of Whitehall.
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But in public, ministers and the press presented the company as a model of commercial generosity.

More than Anglo-Iranian’s contractual rights were at stake. Iranian oil provided 31 per cent of Europe’s imports, and 85 per cent of the fuel used by the Royal Navy. Moreover, and this animated everyone on the right and quite a few on the left, Musaddiq had snapped his fingers at Britain, setting an example which, given the present temper of the whole area, might be followed elsewhere. ‘Once upon a time Asiatics would be cowed by a show of force,’ announced the
Economist,
echoing Conservatives who thought that this still ought to be the case. The trouble was that nowadays Iran would protest to the general assembly of the United Nations about British aggression, and win support from Middle Eastern, Asian and Latin American countries, and, of course, the Communist bloc.
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Nonetheless, Bevin’s successor and fellow devotee of Palmerston, Herbert Morrison, ordered the cruiser
Mauritius
to heave to off Abadan Island. In the meantime, staff officers gathered and produced two aptly-named exigency plans, ‘Buccaneer’ and ‘Midget’, one for armed intervention, the other for the evacuation of the 4,500 British technicians who ran the refinery. If they left, the installations would quickly fall into desuetude for the Iranians lacked the expertise to operate them. Like silly children who meddled with what they could not understand, the Iranians would learn a lesson. As the
Economist
disdainfully explained: ‘Nationalisation is a mid-century fashion. Even though it is demonstrably unprofitable, nationalists will want to try it.’
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There were plenty who thought a sharp rap on the knuckles was a better way of bringing the Iranians to their senses and Britain’s heel. This might prove harder than first imagined, for the Admiralty was having trouble finding the ships required for ‘Buccaneer’ since the navy was heavily committed to the Korean War.
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In the Commons, the Conservatives were restless and wanted blood. Churchill opened the Iran debate on 20 July by taunting Morrison for his cockneyfied pronunciation of ‘Euphrates’. He then bemoaned the loss of India and chided the government for its faintheartedness throughout the Middle East. Britain had only ‘to be pressed sufficiently by one method or another,’ for it meekly to forfeit its rights and interests.
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Brigadier Anthony Head followed up the attack with the charge that there had been too much ‘Socialism’ injected into Britain’s foreign policy, with the result that the Middle East’s masses had been pandered to, while Britain’s prestige languished. The view from the bar of Shepheard’s Hotel was delivered by Julian Amery, who had taken on board some of his father’s paternalist imperialism. According to the younger Amery, Britain had misjudged the true feelings of the man in the bazaar, for an Egyptian had once told him: ‘Independence good for pasha, bad for fellah. British rule good for fellah, bad for pasha.’
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Alas for those of Amery’s mind, fewer and fewer fellahin or their counterparts appeared to regard Britain as their even-handed protector. Attlee closed the debate with a pertinent history lesson, referring back to a previous war waged for the rights of British shareholders: ‘In Egypt I see they are remembering the bombardment of Alexandria. That kind of thing could be done in the Nineteenth Century: it cannot be done now, we are working under an entirely different code.’
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Churchill had been eight when the guns had roared off Alexandria in 1882, and he wanted their thunder to resound in the Persian Gulf. As he later remarked, had he been prime minister ‘a splutter of musketry’ would have been heard and felt by the Iranians.
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Attlee chose ‘Midget’ rather than ‘Buccaneer’. The latter would have dangerously stretched manpower, and an invasion of Iran could easily have driven Mussadiq to appeal to the Soviet Union for help. This was the view of the American Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, who thought that whether invited or not, the Russians would snatch at any chance to slip back into northern Persia, their old stamping ground from which they had been evicted with some difficulty five years before.

Attlee had no wish to turn Iran into a Cold War cockpit. Moreover he had, in December 1950, flown to Washington to persuade Truman to disavow General MacArthur’s proposal to use an atomic bomb against Chinese forces in Korea. A soft line on Iran was a diplomatic
quid quo pro.
On 27 September, Mussadiq took control over the Abadan refinery and its staff departed. ‘We have lost prestige on an unprecedented scale,’ complained the
Spectator,
ruefully adding that had a
coup de main
been delivered, the Communist and Arab worlds would have seen the subsequent contest as ‘a simple battle between a top-dog and an under-dog’.
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There was, however, some consolation for those fire-eaters who would have relished the sound of
Mauritius
’s guns being fired in anger; on 25 October the Conservatives won the general election with a small majority.

*   *   *

A few weeks after the evacuation of Abadan Island, Acheson stung Evelyn Shuckburgh with the remark, ‘You must live in the world as it is.’
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The events in Iran during the past few months had provided a glimpse into the future. Britain could no longer expect to do business either with deferential sheiks, grateful for a sackful of sovereigns, or conservative and compliant politicians in frock coats and tarbooshes, who could be scared by threats of battleships if they stepped out of line. Now Britain faced populists who ranted about imperialism. Mussadiq was a man in the new mould; he wore green pyjamas when he received Sir Francis Shepherd, the ambassador in Tehran. This insult, together with his habit of swooning in public, convinced Shepherd that the Iranian was mad, a diagnosis which was accepted in Whitehall and by the British press.

There was another, equally distressful implication behind Acheson’s observation. Throughout the Iranian crisis, the British government had had to seek American advice and sometimes received it unasked. Much of it had come from George McGhee, a former oil geologist who had served for three years as the State Department’s roving emissary in the Middle East. A former Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, McGhee shared his benefactor’s belief in ‘the white man’s burden’, and was therefore more sympathetic to Britain’s present predicament than many other American diplomats. Nevertheless, he was wrongly suspected of being hand-in-glove with American oil interests, and a Treasury official warned Morrison that McGhee’s youth, Texan upbringing and Irish ancestry made him a man whose judgement might be unsound when it came to British interests.
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