A Peace to End all Peace (32 page)

Point Twelve expressed the view, shared by Wilson and House, that the Middle East should not be divided among the belligerent powers; that peoples hitherto ruled by the Turks should become autonomous.
¹⁴
Only a year before, however, Wilson and House had agreed that it would be unwise for the President to discuss in public his plans for displacing the Ottoman regime because his words might endanger the American missionary colleges in Beirut and outside Constantinople.
¹⁵

A month later, on 11 February 1918, Wilson spoke to Congress and defined in a general way the Four Principles upon which the peace settlement should be made. The second and third principles were:

In a speech on 4 July 1918, Wilson defined the Four Ends for which the United States and its associates were fighting as including

Wilson’s peace proposals were received with ardent enthusiasm, but, revealingly, not by the Allied governments. As Walter Lippmann’s biographer has written,

Indeed they represented a challenge to the Allied as well as to the enemy governments.

IV

Point Twelve was not only unilateral but also anomalous: the President was proposing to dismember the Ottoman Empire, with which the United States was not at war. It also seemed an anomaly that the United States should have declared war against Germany and later against Austria-Hungary without also declaring war against their allies.

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee appeared to be in favor of issuing the additional declarations of war. Its chairman asked Secretary of State Lansing for a fuller explanation of the Administration’s reasons for not doing so. In a lengthy memorandum submitted by Lansing in reply, the Secretary of State cited a number of reasons.
¹⁷
At the time, the United States held no significant trade, economic, or political stakes in the Middle East other than two Protestant missionary-supported colleges—Robert College and the Syrian Protestant College—with which Wilson’s friend and chief financial supporter, Cleveland Dodge, was intimately concerned. But Lansing argued that safeguarding these institutions in itself was of sufficient importance to justify the Administration’s policy. He indicated that these institutions were worth millions of dollars and might be confiscated in the event of war. He also warned that, in the event of war, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire might become the victims of new massacres. Lansing saw no particular advantage to be gained by declaring war, and pointed out that Turkey had not attacked the United States.

Despite the many reasons cited by Lansing for the Administration’s decision, Congress remained unconvinced, and a resolution was introduced in the Senate in 1918 calling for the additional declarations of war. Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lansing said that the decision was essentially one for Congress to make. At the request of the committee, he agreed to sound out the Allies as to whether they believed the additional declarations of war would help or hinder the war effort.

In May, Lansing reported to the President that the Allies were of the opinion that it would be helpful if the United States were to issue the additional declarations of war. Lansing pointed out to the President, however, that more than a million dollars a month was being sent to American missionaries in the Ottoman Empire to feed and care for Syrians and Armenians, and that this aid would be cut off in the event of war.
¹⁸

The President reaffirmed his decision not to declare war. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee was so informed and reluctantly accepted his decision. Thus the United States remained at peace with the Ottoman Empire while the President continued to formulate his plans for breaking it up.

V

At the President’s request, Colonel House, by-passing the State Department, began in early September 1917 to assemble a group of assistants to help him formulate America’s plans for the postwar world. It was to be an independent group to which no publicity was to be given: it was code-named “the Inquiry.” It met at first in the New York Public Library. At Wilson’s suggestion, House drew participants principally from the academic world, beginning with names recommended by the president of Harvard University and by the editor of the
New Republic
. President Wilson personally chose Walter Lippmann. At its peak, the group assembled by House numbered 126. The vast majority of its members had received their final academic degrees from one of four élite universities—Chicago, Columbia, Harvard, and Yale—and many were recruited directly from the faculties of those or similar institutions.
¹⁹

Yet the Inquiry—apart from its professionally drawn maps—
²⁰
was conducted amateurishly. The Middle Eastern group, composed of ten scholars operating out of Princeton University, did not include any specialists in the contemporary Middle East; its chairman was a student of the Crusades. The chairman’s son, also a member, was a specialist in Latin American studies. Among other members were an expert on the American Indian, an engineer, and two professors who specialized in ancient Persian languages and literature.
²¹

The choice of the New York Public Library as its first headquarters symbolized the approach adopted by the Inquiry: having raised all the political questions that divide the human race, the Inquiry proceeded to look them up. Many of the researchers did no more than summarize the information that they found in an encyclopaedia. Many delved into questions of literature and architecture that could have no conceivable bearing on the terms of an eventual peace treaty. Few of the reports had any bearing on the question of American national interests.
²²

It was typical that even in the economic section of the Middle Eastern group’s report, there was no mention of the possibility that significant deposits of petroleum might be found in that part of the world. Yet in 1918, in waging a twentieth-century war in which tanks and airplanes made their appearance, the United States discovered (as did France that same year, and as Winston Churchill had done in Britain before the war) that the vast quantities of petroleum required in modern warfare had rendered the potential oil resources which were suspected to exist in the Middle East of considerable importance. That the Inquiry’s reports on the Middle East ignored the oil issue was an indication of the unworldliness of the President’s men that boded ill for the future Peace Conference.
²³

VI

While the President’s peace program was in some respects quixotic, the extraordinary response that it evoked throughout the world showed that it expressed a widespread yearning to understand why the war was being fought. Britain’s Foreign Secretary, Balfour, said that the war “was perhaps the biggest event in history” but that, beyond that, his mind would not go: “Coming generations might find it possible to see the thing as it really existed,” but he and his generation could not.
²⁴
The war, by 1917, had grown so much larger than the events that caused it that its causes seemed almost absurdly insignificant by comparison.

The day after Woodrow Wilson delivered his speech to Congress asking for a declaration of war, Walter Lippmann wrote to him (in words that were to appear in the
New Republic
later in the week): “Only a statesman who will be called great could have made America’s intervention mean so much to the generous forces of the world, could have lifted the inevitable horror of war into a deed so full of meaning.”
²⁵
Lippmann, as he so often did, had found the word for it: the President, by adopting the goals that he did, had given the war a
meaning
.

Years later, in off-the-record comments aboard ship
en route
to the peace conferences in 1919, Wilson told his associates that “I am convinced that if this peace is not made on the highest principles of justice, it will be swept away by the peoples of the world in less than a generation. If it is any other sort of peace then I shall want to run away and hide…for there will follow not mere conflict but cataclysm.”
²⁶

However, neither Wilson nor those who took part in his Inquiry had formulated concrete programs that would translate promises into realities: the President’s program was vague and bound to arouse millennial expectations—which made it practically certain that any agreement achieved by politicians would disappoint.

I

As human beings, no two men could have been less alike than the austere American President and the charming but morally lax British Prime Minister. As politicians, though, they were similar: loners who had won power through the fluke of a party split. Each carried on a personal foreign policy, by-passing the Department of State and the Foreign Office. Both Wilson and Lloyd George had been reluctant to let their countries enter the war and, after opting for war, had found it difficult to keep their pacifist and anti-war supporters in line. Both men were of the political left; but there the similarities came to an end, for while Wilson was moving in an ever more progressive and idealistic direction, Lloyd George was doing just the opposite.

Had his political past been a guide to his future performance, Lloyd George could have been expected to share the United States’ aversion to imperialist designs on the Middle East. In his Radical youth he had opposed British imperialism and it would have been in character for him, on becoming Prime Minister, to have overturned the Asquith Cabinet’s agreement with the Allies to expand their empires—but he did not do so.

Lloyd George felt much the same need to reformulate war goals that Wilson did, but arrived at different conclusions. Wilson proclaimed that the enormity of the war required peace without annexations. Lloyd George took the other view: the enormity of the war required indemnities and annexations on an enormous scale.

Both Wilson and Lloyd George promised the peoples of the Ottoman Empire a better life, but where Wilson held out the hope of self-government, Lloyd George, while employing the rhetoric of national liberation, proposed to give the Middle East better government than it could give itself. In this the Prime Minister’s goals coincided with those of Kitchener’s lieutenants who exercised day-today control of British Cairo’s Middle Eastern policy; thus the chances that his policy would actually be carried out were improved.

Taking office as 1916 turned into 1917, the new Prime Minister brought old-fashioned Radical fervor to such emerging war goals as the destruction of the reactionary Ottoman Empire—goals that harked back to the glorious days of nineteenth-century Liberalism. One of Lloyd George’s first actions on becoming Prime Minister was to order his armies in Egypt onto the offensive. One of the others was to order John Buchan, whom he installed at Milner’s suggestion as Director of Information, to launch a propaganda campaign portraying the destruction of the Ottoman Empire as a major purpose of the war. The campaign captured the imagination of the public: “The Turk Must Go!” proved to be an effective slogan.
¹
Like Wilson’s proclaimed points and principles, it also proved, at least in the short run, good politics.

Lloyd George’s program of sending troops to fight in the East brought him into immediate conflict with his generals; they continued to demand supreme control over military decisions, and in this were supported by King George. Their strategy, as always, was to concentrate all resources on the western front, and they complained that their professional judgment was being defied by the new Prime Minister. Their newspaper friends on Fleet Street took up the cause. In early January the press lord, Lord Northcliffe, in a heated conversation threatened “to break” Lloyd George unless he called off his eastern strategy.
²
Northcliffe gave himself the credit for having overthrown Asquith in December, and appeared confident that he could bring down Lloyd George in January if he chose.

At about the same time, the War Office asked someone close to Lloyd George to warn him that the generals were going to fight him and that he “
might not
get the best of it [original emphasis].”
³
In Germany the General Staff was in the process of sweeping aside the civilian Chancellor. With the King, the leaders of his own Liberal Party, the press, and the generals against him, the Prime Minister could not be certain that the British Imperial General Staff would not attempt something similar. It was one of those times in world politics when anything, even the previously unimaginable, seemed possible.

Yet he stood as firm as he could on his eastern strategy, scornful of his military advisers. Long afterward, he wrote that “nothing and nobody could have saved the Turk from complete collapse in 1915 and 1916 except our General Staff.”
⁴
According to Lloyd George, a victory over the Ottoman Empire before the end of 1916, when Bulgaria entered the war, would “have produced a decisive effect on the fortunes of the War.”
⁵
It would have been easy to beat Turkey at any time, he said: “the resolute façade the Turks presented to the Allies…had nothing behind it. It was part of the War Office game to pretend that the Turks had formidable forces with ample reserves. They may have believed it, but if so, either their information was defective, or they were easily taken in.”
⁶

From the beginning of the war, Lloyd George had argued that Germany could be beaten by an attack through the Balkans. Defeating Turkey would open up the Balkans to such an attack. Writing long afterward, he was able to support his position by quoting von Hindenburg, the chief of the German General Staff: “If ever there was a prospect of a brilliant strategic feat, it was here…Why did England never make use of her opportunity?…Some day history will perhaps clear up this question…”
⁷

Lloyd George wanted to do it, but his problem was that he lacked the political strength to face down the generals and to commandeer troops and equipment in sufficient quantity to do the job. Throughout 1917 and well into 1918, he and Britain’s military leaders fought a war of maneuver and intrigue against each other. Lloyd George’s position was precarious; he had no depth of support in Parliament, where he was sustained for the time being by former enemies and distrusted by former friends. The most dangerous politician to attack the government was his one-time protégé Winston Churchill. “His tone was rather bitter in speaking of Lloyd George whom he had evidently come to consider as his detested antagonist,” noted a friend of the two men.
⁸
Churchill had cause to be bitter; Lloyd George had excluded him from the Cabinet. “He brought Turkey into the War,” the Prime Minister said. “Such men are too dangerous for high office.”
⁹

In speeches and newspaper articles, Churchill brought to bear his vast knowledge of military affairs and his grasp of detail in criticizing the conduct of the war. As Lloyd George knew well, there was much to criticize; he was powerless to impose his own views on the Allied commanders, yet as Prime Minister he was responsible to Parliament for their continuing costly failures. Keeping his lines of communication open, Churchill sent a private warning to the Prime Minister that, dissatisfied with the conduct of the war, the disparate opposition groups in the Commons might unite to bring him down.

On 10 May 1917 Churchill and Lloyd George happened to meet after a session of the House of Commons, and the Prime Minister spoke of his desire to have Churchill in the Cabinet. Though he still thought Churchill had “spoilt himself by reading about Napoleon,” Lloyd George confided to Frances Stevenson, his secretary and mistress, that he needed Churchill to cheer him up and encourage him at a time when he was surrounded by colleagues with gloomy faces.
¹⁰

As always, it was a question of whether it was a greater risk to leave Churchill out or to bring him in. In mid-July he appointed Churchill Minister of Munitions; and, even though the post did not carry with it membership in the War Cabinet, the appointment immediately aroused such opposition that for a time it endangered the government’s existence.
^*

Churchill’s aunt, writing to congratulate him on becoming Minister of Munitions, added “My advice is stick to munitions & don’t try & run the government!”
¹²
The new appointment prompted
The Times
to warn that the country “is in no mood to tolerate even a forlorn attempt to resuscitate amateur strategy.”
¹³
Churchill’s family and friends, who were worried for him, and his legions of enemies and detractors, who were worried for the country, would have been dismayed but not surprised to learn that, within a week of his appointment, he had approached the Secretary of the War Cabinet with a revived plan to invade the Middle East. He proposed to land British armies at the port of Alexandretta to invade northern Syria and cut across the lines of transportation and communication of the Ottoman Empire.
¹⁴
The War Cabinet ignored his proposal, and it came to nothing.

II

Within months of taking office, Lloyd George was engaged in secret negotiations with the Young Turk leader, Enver Pasha. The Prime Minister’s agent in the negotiations was Vincent Caillard, financial director of the giant armaments firm Vickers, who had spent many years in Constantinople as president of the council of administration of the Ottoman Public Debt. Caillard, in turn, acted through his close business associate, Basil Zaharoff, who had risen from the underworld of Smyrna to become the world’s most notorious arms salesman, known in the popular press as the “merchant of death.” Zaharoff journeyed to Geneva in 1917 and 1918 and reported that he was able to conduct negotiations there with Enver Pasha, at first through a go-between and then face-to-face.
¹⁵

Through his emissary, the Prime Minister offered bribes—large bank accounts—to Enver and his associates to leave the war on Britain’s terms, which were: Arabia to be independent; Armenia and Syria to enjoy local autonomy within the Ottoman Empire; Mesopotamia and Palestine to become
de facto
British protectorates, like Egypt before the war, though under formal Ottoman suzerainty; and freedom of navigation through the Dardanelles to be secured. In return, Lloyd George offered to pledge that the Capitulations (the treaties giving preferential treatment to Europeans) would remain abolished, and that generous financial treatment would be given to Turkey to aid her economic recovery. The terms offered by Lloyd George differed in two important ways from those envisaged by the prior Asquith government: France, Italy, and Russia were to get nothing; and Britain was to take Palestine as well as Mesopotamia.

Zaharoff’s reports—the veracity of which it is difficult to judge—indicate that Enver, after mercurial changes of mind and mood, did not accept Lloyd George’s offer. It does not sound as though he ever seriously intended to do so. But the instructions that Zaharoff received reveal Lloyd George’s intentions with regard to the Middle East.

III

In a secret session of the House of Commons on 10 May 1917, the Prime Minister surprised even a close collaborator by saying unequivocally that Britain was not going to give back the German colonies in Africa captured during the war, and that Turkey would not be allowed to keep Palestine or Mesopotamia.
¹⁶
Though Lloyd George had definite ideas about the future of the liberated Ottoman lands, few of his colleagues were aware of them. He avoided official channels and made his ideas known in detail only in the course of the secret negotiations with Enver Pasha; hence the importance of what they revealed.

The Prime Minister intended to deny France the position that Sir Mark Sykes had promised her in the postwar Middle East, and took the view that the Sykes-Picot Agreement was unimportant; that physical possession was all that mattered. Regarding Palestine, he told the British ambassador to France in April 1917 that the French would be obliged to accept a
fait accompli
: “We shall be there by conquest and shall remain.”
¹⁷

Lloyd George was the only man in his government who had always wanted to acquire Palestine for Britain. He also wanted to encourage the development of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His colleagues failed to understand how strongly he held these views.

There was a background to Lloyd George’s beliefs of which his colleagues were largely ignorant. He was not, like Asquith and the other members of the Cabinet, educated in an exclusive public school that stressed the Greek and Latin classics; he was brought up on the Bible. Repeatedly he remarked that the Biblical place names were better known to him than were those of the battles and the disputed frontiers that figured in the European war. He expressed himself about these places with fervor. In his later memoirs he wrote that he had objected to the division of Palestine in the Sykes-Picot Agreement (most of it going to France or into an international zone) on the grounds that it mutilated the country. He said it was not worth winning the Holy Land only to “hew it in pieces before the Lord.”
¹⁸
He asserted that “Palestine, if recaptured, must be one and indivisible to renew its greatness as a living entity.”
¹⁹

IV

Unlike his colleagues he was keenly aware that there were centuries-old tendencies in British Nonconformist and Evangelical thought toward taking the lead in restoring the Jews to Zion. Indeed they formed the background of his own Nonconformist faith. He was only the latest in a long line of Christian Zionists in Britain that stretched back to the Puritans and the era in which the
Mayflower
set sail for the New World. Promised lands were still much thought about in those days, whether in the United States or in Palestine.

In the mid-seventeenth century, two English Puritans residing in Holland—Joanna and Ebenezer Cartwright—petitioned their government “That this Nation of England, with the inhabitants of the Netherlands, shall be the first and the readiest to transport Izraell’s sons and daughters in their ships to the Land promised by their forefathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob for an everlasting Inheritance.”
²⁰
Guided by the Scriptures, the Puritans believed that the advent of the Messiah would occur once the people of Judaea were restored to their native land.