A Peace to End all Peace (50 page)

The British delegation did not go so far as to pretend to the President or to the other delegates that Feisal had liberated Damascus. General Allenby accurately informed the conferees that “Shortly after the capture of Damascus, Feisal had been allowed to occupy and administer the city.”
¹²
The British did pretend, however, that Feisal and his followers had played a substantial role in the liberation of Syria. The British contended that Feisal had therefore earned the right to serve as the ruler of a free Syria: and specifically that he should be free to reject French advice and advisers if he chose to do so. As presented by Lloyd George, this was the issue of the dispute. According to the Prime Minister the parties to the dispute were Feisal’s Syria and Clemenceau’s France. Britain, he claimed, was a friend to both parties and therefore would not take sides.

Wilson was naturally disposed to support the Syrians’ right to choose their own government and destiny. He also could not help but be favorably influenced by Feisal’s willingness to cooperate in achieving a settlement. Feisal met with Felix Frankfurter, a representative of the American Zionist leader, Louis Brandeis; and, after the meeting, Frankfurter reported to Brandeis that “The Arab question has ceased to exist as a difficulty to the realisation of our programme before the Peace Conference.”
¹³
Indeed, as Arab representative at the Peace Conference, Feisal told the conferees that he excluded Palestine from the area he claimed for Arab independence. Feisal’s apparent reasonableness in dealing with Jewish claims contrasted sharply with Clemenceau’s hard line in dealing with Arab claims to independence—claims that Clemenceau took to be a British-inspired sham.

The British said that they were ready to allow the French whatever influence over Feisal that they were able to exert. That, in the French view, was thoroughly dishonest, for Feisal, as everybody knew, refused to accept French direction or influence. It was evident that he was beholden to the British. He was on their payroll; his delegation’s expenses were paid by Britain. At the Peace Conference he went everywhere with his British liaison officer, T. E. Lawrence, who was his friend, adviser, confidant, translator, and inseparable companion.

Recognizing that to accept Feisal as Syria’s spokesman was in effect to concede Syria to Britain, the French produced Syrian leaders of their own. The most prominent of them had lived in France for many years, some of them under Quai d’Orsay sponsorship. They claimed that, despite similarities in language and religion, Syrians were not Arabs, and deserved a country of their own under French guidance.

Lloyd George counterattacked by linking British cooperation with France against Germany in Europe to resolution of the Syrian question. The German issue was of overriding importance to Clemenceau, as he had demonstrated at the end of 1918 when he conceded Palestine and Mosul to Lloyd George in order to cement the Anglo-French alliance.

Clemenceau had already gone almost to the limit of what was politically possible for him. When he accepted Feisal as leader of Syria, subject to Feisal’s meeting French terms, he went the whole way. In asking him to accept not merely Feisal but also full Arab independence, the British were asking him to go further and ruin himself politically; yet he needed Britain’s help against Germany and, in coupling the issues, Lloyd George placed him in an agonizing position. During the course of their conferences the French Prime Minister often erupted into frustrated rage. Once he was driven to such anger that he offered Lloyd George the choice of sword or pistols.
¹⁴

It was not as though he had not made his position plain. He had told one of Lloyd George’s advisers that French political opinion would not permit the abandonment of claims to Syria: “he personally was not particularly concerned with the Near East,” but France “always had played a great part there, and…French public opinion expected a settlement which was consonant with France’s position. He could not…make any settlement which did not comply with this condition.”
¹⁵
This was no exaggeration, as was demonstrated when officials of the French Foreign Ministry organized a press campaign against their own Prime Minister in
Le Temps
and
Le Journal des Débats
, alleging that he was giving away too much to the British.
¹⁶
But Lloyd George went on pushing for more concessions, and went on breaking what Clemenceau had regarded as firm British commitments to France. “I won’t give way on anything any more,” Clemenceau said, “Lloyd George is a cheat.”
¹⁷

It remains unclear why Lloyd George was so determined to exclude France from the Middle East. With respect to French claims to Syria, and to Cilicia, the adjacent area just to the north, Lloyd George’s stated position was that British troops would have to remain in occupation in order to keep the peace between the French and Feisal’s Arabs;
¹⁸
but it was a somewhat one-sided peace that Britain imposed. A small French force continued to occupy a narrow coastal area centered on Beirut. From Feisal’s area, Arab units continued to mount hit-and-run guerrilla raids against the French. The presence of Allenby’s British troops protected Feisal’s area from French retaliation.

General Allenby warned that war might break out between the Arabs and the French. President Wilson appeared to take the warning seriously, and reacted by making a proposal that took Lloyd George and Clemenceau by surprise: a commission should be sent out to the Middle East to ascertain the wishes of its inhabitants. The proposal was viewed as childish by French and British career officials, who did not believe that public opinion, in the European or American sense, existed in the Middle East. For Lloyd George the proposal was dismaying because sending out a commission would take time. Nonetheless, the British Prime Minister tried to make the best of it by attempting to get the commission to focus exclusively on the claims of France—and the resistance to those claims by the Arabs whom France sought to rule.

The British, like the French, had staked out an enormous claim in the Middle East, but Lloyd George successfully kept the British claims from being scrutinized. When President Wilson’s Commission of Inquiry went out to ascertain the wishes of the Middle Eastern peoples, it did not go to Mesopotamia, where British India had instituted direct rule. The British, who had declared Egypt a protectorate, also succeeded in securing American recognition for this extension of their rule, which had the additional effect of keeping Egypt off the agenda of the Peace Conference. In early 1919 Persia was also added to the British sphere as an informal protectorate; and that, too, was accomplished outside the Peace Conference by a Convention between the two countries signed on 19 August 1919. Britain’s control of the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms, rounded out and regularized during the war, was not discussed or contested in Paris; nor was Britain’s paramount position in Arabia, secured by alliances with Hussein and with Ibn Saud that made them her protégés. It had been agreed in advance between Lloyd George and Clemenceau that Palestine should be awarded to Britain, so that Syria was left as the only contested issue on the commission’s agenda.

As the wrangling at the Peace Conference became more embittered, Clemenceau refused to send out French participants to the Commission; and Lloyd George, suddenly worried that he might have gone too far in estranging France, decided that the British participants in that case would not be sent along either. Thus the American commissioners—Henry King, the president of Oberlin College in Ohio, and Charles Crane, a Chicago businessman and contributor to the Democratic Party—proceeded on their mission alone.

The King-Crane Commission traveled to Syria and Palestine, where British officers were often in a position to determine who should testify and who should not. The French were enraged by the British manipulation and organization of witnesses and testimony. In the end it did not matter: the report of the commission was never considered, it played no official role, and its text was not made public until more than three years later. The King-Crane inquiry increased the animosity between France and Britain, and it aroused such false hopes among various groups of Arabs that Gertrude Bell, a specialist in Middle Eastern affairs, denounced it as a criminal deception.
¹⁹
Above all, its proceedings had taken too much time—and Lloyd George was running out of time.

VI

Britain had never gone ahead with the notion of an American Mandate for Palestine but had proposed that the United States should assume the League of Nations Mandates to occupy and govern portions of Anatolia, Constantinople, the Dardanelles, Armenia, and the Caucasus. In the end these narrowed down to Constantinople, the Dardanelles, and Armenia.

There were two reasons why Britain wanted the United States to assume these Mandates: it would implicate the United States in the Middle Eastern settlement so as to insure that she would help to support its terms; and it would station the United States in the front lines if Soviet Russia were ever to attack Turkey.

Wilson and the other Americans in Paris made it clear that it would be difficult to persuade Congress to accept the Mandates. Nonetheless the President undertook to try. That proved to be Lloyd George’s undoing; long after it had become clear that Wilson was going to fail, the Prime Minister was obliged to wait for an official American response that seemed to be a long time coming.

On 29 June 1919, a bit more than six months after he had arrived in Europe for the Peace Conference, the President returned to the United States for the last time. Carrying his campaign directly to the people, Wilson collapsed from exhaustion, and went into a state of partial physical and political paralysis. In the Senate his program, including ratification of the Treaty of Versailles and American adherence to the League of Nations, went down to defeat, as the President committed one political blunder after another, driving even potential supporters to oppose him.

Wilson had lost control over the left side of his body, and his thinking, too, may well have been impaired. Despite his incapacity, he and his wife refused to turn over his authority to others. Years later—long after Wilson’s death—Lloyd George wrote of his illness that “The only faculty that remained unimpaired to the end…was his abnormal stubbornness.”
²⁰

From July to November of 1919, all Ottoman decisions were put off until it was learned what position the United States would take on assuming the Mandates for Constantinople and Armenia. But, after his partial physical recovery, President Wilson did not get around to proposing an American Mandate for Armenia until 24 May 1920. The Senate rejected his proposal the following week.

Maurice Hankey noted in his diary that “We cannot get on with the Turkish treaty until we know whether the Americans will accept a mandate in Turkey.”
²¹
In his note he suggested the possibility that an incident might occur in Anatolia unless a treaty were concluded speedily. Lloyd George complained that Wilson had placed the Allies “in an impossible position.”
²²

The breakdown of his American ally drove Lloyd George to make his peace with France and Italy; but the British Prime Minister found that he now had to contend with Allied leaders with whom it was far less easy to deal. The new Italian leaders were inclined to look for commercial rather than territorial concessions in Turkey; they therefore were disposed rather to oppose than to participate in Lloyd George’s proposed partition of Turkey, especially as the new Italian Foreign Minister (1920–1), Count Carlo Sforza, was sympathetic to Turkish nationalism.

In France, Clemenceau had failed to obtain the presidency in 1920; and had thereupon resigned the premiership and retired from politics. Lloyd George ascribed Clemenceau’s defeat in part to his willingness to make concessions to Britain in the Middle East.
²³
Alexandre Millerand, who replaced Clemenceau as Premier, was not disposed to make such concessions.

When the Allies finally met at 10 Downing Street on 12 February 1920, to start drawing up an Ottoman treaty, Lord Curzon spoke for the Prime Minister as well as himself in saying that “The delay in negotiating the Treaty was exclusively due to the Powers having to await the decision of the United States.”
²⁴
It would have been more true to say that the delay was due to Lloyd George’s attempt to play off the United States against Britain’s wartime Allies.

VII

Woodrow Wilson had predicted that the peace would not endure if its terms were not basically fair to all sides. The terms that the Allies imposed on their defeated enemies after the First World War were perceived by many at the time, and have been perceived by many since, as a failure in that respect. Felix Frankfurter later recalled that “My months at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 were probably the saddest of my life. The progressive disillusionment of the high hopes which Wilson’s noble talk had engendered was not unlike the feelings that death of near ones brings.”
²⁵
Perhaps Wilson had pitched the world’s hopes too high; when uprisings subsequently broke out in the Middle East, Maurice Hankey blamed them on Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points and his “impossible doctrine of self-determination.”
²⁶

Over and above any specific decisions there was a general sense that something was fundamentally wrong with the Peace Conference itself. In a general sense, and for the public that judged the Allies by their wartime promises and expressed principles, it was the way in which decisions were made that constituted a betrayal. Decisions, by all accounts, including those of the participants, were made with little knowledge of, or concern for, the lands and peoples about which and whom the decisions were being made. This was true even of the peace terms imposed in Europe, and was even more so of those imposed by Europeans upon the distant and unfamiliar Middle East. Arthur Balfour watched Wilson, Lloyd George, and Clemenceau in conference—relying for expertise only on Maurice Hankey (who was forty-one when the Peace Conference convened, some thirty-five years younger than Balfour)—and pictured them as “These three all-powerful, all-ignorant men, sitting there and carving up continents, with only a child to lead them.”
²⁷
An Italian diplomat wrote that “A common sight at the Peace Conference in Paris was one or other of the world’s statesmen, standing before a map and muttering to himself: ‘Where is that damn’d…?’ while he sought with extended forefinger for some town or river that he had never heard of before.”
²⁸
Lloyd George, who kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the Biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a year after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan had been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further north.