A Peace to End all Peace (63 page)

But Lawrence’s indirect influence on policy was considerable, for his account of the Arab uprising was believed by Churchill, who lacked personal knowledge of the matter, not having been involved in Middle Eastern affairs during the war after 1916. Unaware of the extent to which Lawrence and Lloyd George’s staff had exaggerated the role of Feisal’s Arabs in winning the war, Churchill was prepared to accept Lawrence’s thesis that Britain owed a great deal to Feisal and his followers.

IV

Since 1918 many of Britain’s leaders had entirely reversed their views about the Middle East. In the heady days when the war was being brought to a triumphant conclusion, it had seemed important to seize and to hold on to every corner of the Middle East that offered strategic advantage; but, after 1919, Parliament and the press clamored for withdrawal from these remote positions that cost so much to maintain.
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Churchill responded to the changed political mood from the day that he took over the War and Air Ministries at the beginning of 1919;
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and when he moved to the Colonial Office at the beginning of 1921, he once more made cost cutting his top priority. As Colonial Secretary, Churchill announced “that everything else that happens in the Middle East is secondary to the reduction in expense”
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he tested all proposals and programs against that one overriding criterion. The final figures provide the measure of his success: by September 1922, Churchill had eliminated 75 percent of Britain’s Middle Eastern expenditures, reducing them from forty-five million pounds to eleven million pounds per annum.
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Churchill favored conciliating France—in order to save the money it would cost to oppose her—and he inclined toward installing Feisal and his brothers—the Sherifians, or Hashemites—as local rulers of much of the Arab world because to do so would provide Britain with an economical strategy: it would enable “His Majesty’s Government to bring pressure to bear on one Arab sphere in order to obtain their own ends in another.”
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By applying pressure on just one member of the family, he believed, Britain could extract concessions from all of them; if each member of the family ruled a kingdom, Britain would need to threaten only one kingdom in order to bring all the Arab kingdoms back into line.

From time to time he considered partial or complete withdrawal from the Middle East and, on 8 January 1921, he cabled the British High Commissioner in Mesopotamia that unless the country could be governed more cheaply Britain would have to withdraw from it to a coastal enclave.
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At another point, taking up what he believed to be a suggestion of Lloyd George’s, he proposed to abandon Palestine and Mesopotamia altogether by giving them to the United States.
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When he accepted appointment to the Colonial Office, Churchill wrote to the Prime Minister that “I feel some misgivings about the political consequences to myself of taking on my shoulders the burden & the odium of the Mesopotamia entanglement…”
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He was wary of being blamed, as he had been over the Dardanelles expedition, for the failure of a policy that had been initiated by others. On the other hand, it ran counter to his nature to order a retreat under fire; his inclination was to remain in Palestine and Mesopotamia because to do otherwise would be to default on commitments that, wisely or unwisely, Britain had already made.

Churchill, when he took office as Colonial Secretary, brought with him a broad strategic concept of how to hold down the Middle East inexpensively. While he was still Secretary of Air and War, Churchill had proposed to cut Middle East costs by governing Mesopotamia by means of airplanes
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and armored cars. A few well-protected air bases (he wrote at the time) would enable the Royal Air Force “to operate in every part of the protectorate and to enforce control, now here, now there, without the need of maintaining long lines of communications eating up troops and money.”
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Churchill recognized that this strategy would not defend Mesopotamia against invasion; its sole purpose was “maintaining internal security.”
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Churchill’s diagnosis of Britain’s troubles in the Middle East therefore must have been that the disturbances were caused locally. In proposing to adopt a military posture that would be of little use against Russians, resurgent Germans, or Turks, he implicitly acknowledged that the threat to Britain in Mesopotamia did not come from them.
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Churchill’s strategy implied an old-fashioned concept of empire much at variance with the idealistic vision of Smuts, Amery, Hogarth, and T. E. Lawrence that in part had inspired wartime Britain to seek control of Arab Asia. Lawrence still clung to the vision of a free Arab Middle Eastern Dominion voluntarily joining the British Commonwealth as an equal partner. In a much-quoted phrase, he wrote in 1919 that “My own ambition is that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony.”
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Churchill’s strategy, which was aimed at putting down native revolt, suggested that Britain would rule her Arab subjects by coercion rather than consent. It harked back to his experiences in Kitchener’s Sudan campaign, and the ease with which modern European weapons could subdue natives armed only with traditional weapons.

In imposing his strategy, he was guided by a more recent experience: the catastrophe at the Dardanelles, where his policies had been undermined by his departmental subordinates in London and by his officers in the field. It led Churchill to go to considerable trouble to make his chief officials feel that his program originated with them—a precaution all the more prudent given the strong opposition from the War Office and the High Commissioner in Mesopotamia to the replacement of troops by airplanes.

To Sir Percy Cox, British High Commissioner in Mesopotamia, Churchill cabled on 7 February 1921 that “The questions at issue cannot be settled by interchange of telegrams. I cannot…find time to visit Mesopotamia. I propose therefore a conference in Egypt beginning during first or second week of March…Conference would take a week…I shall be accompanied by principal officers of new Middle Eastern Department of Colonial Office.”
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Churchill then summoned his field officers from Palestine and the Persian Gulf to attend him at the conference. On 18 February 1921 he sent his own notes on Mesopotamia to John Shuckburgh, and entrusted him with the pivotal responsibility for establishing a conference agenda for Mesopotamia and for Palestine.

V

Egypt, which Churchill chose as the meeting place, was geographically convenient but inconvenient politically: the Egyptians knew that Churchill felt that Egypt should not be granted independence. On 21 February 1921 he wrote to his wife that “The people in Egypt are getting rather excited at my coming, as they seem to think it has something to do with them. This is, of course, all wrong. I have no mission to Egypt and have no authority to deal with any Egyptian question. I shall have to make this quite clear or we shall be pestered with demonstrations and delegations.”
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Allenby, now British High Commissioner in Egypt, issued an official denial that Churchill was coming to consult about Egyptian affairs. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, wrote Churchill a confidential letter on 24 February urging him to transfer the venue of the conference to Jerusalem. Curzon claimed that Churchill’s presence in Cairo might compromise the efforts of Allenby and the Egyptian government to reach agreement at a critical moment.
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Churchill, however, declined to alter his arrangements.

Thus the Cairo Conference went forward as planned, but its location brought into sharp contrast the policies pursued by Churchill and those advocated by Allenby: Churchill was planning to hold the line against Arab nationalism and Allenby was not. Against the weight of Cabinet opinion, against the wishes of the Prime Minister and of Churchill, Allenby—in line with the recommendations made earlier by Lord Milner—persisted in his efforts to give Egypt a measure of independence by bringing the British protectorate in Egypt to an end.

By the threat of resignation he eventually prevailed and, on 28 February 1922, the British government unilaterally issued the so-called Allenby Declaration conceding formal independence to Egypt (subject to far-reaching reservations which, among other things, enabled Britain to supervise Egyptian foreign policy and to make unrestricted use of Egyptian territory for military movements). Allenby would have preferred a treaty to a unilateral declaration, but no Egyptian government would agree to sign a document that reserved so many powers to Britain.

Churchill apparently feared that Allenby’s concession of even nominal Egyptian independence would undercut his own policy, in other Arabic-speaking countries, of continuing to withhold it. By an accident of geography, in 1921, both Allenby’s and Churchill’s contrary policies were elaborated in the city of Cairo; and in fact there was a substantive similarity between them, for both represented unilateral British decisions about how the Arab world should be run—and Arab leaders did not agree to either one of them.

VI

The Cairo Conference formally convened at the Semiramis Hotel on the morning of Saturday, 12 March 1921. During the following days some forty or fifty sessions were held. According to one count there were forty officials in attendance; “Everybody Middle East is here…,” wrote T. E. Lawrence to his oldest brother.
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The initial—and principal—conference topic was how to cut the costs of occupying Mesopotamia. Two committees, one political and one military, were established to consider the matter. Both committees worked on the basis of agendas that Churchill and his staff had drafted on board ship on their way over. The committees devoted their first four days to arriving at a plan for Mesopotamia.

Churchill and his staff had skillfully anticipated the advice that might be tendered by officers in the field. Gertrude Bell, who came in from Baghdad with her chief, Sir Percy Cox, wrote afterward that “Mr. Churchill was admirable, most ready to meet everyone half-way and masterly alike in guiding a big political meeting and in conducting the small committees in which we broke up. Not the least favourable circumstance was that Sir Percy and I, coming out with a definite programme, found when we came to open our packet that it coincided exactly” with what Churchill proposed.
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On the evening of 15 March Churchill dispatched a telegram, which arrived in London the following day, reporting to the Prime Minister that “All authorities…have reached agreement on all the points, both political and military.”
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In itself this was a considerable achievement.

Essentially there were four elements in the Cairo Conference plan. Feisal was to be offered the throne of Mesopotamia, but every effort would be made to make it appear that the offer came from the indigenous population rather than from Britain. In maintaining a British presence in the country, the military would shift to Churchill’s airforce-based strategy; but—as the head of the Royal Air Force, Sir Hugh Trenchard, estimated that the strategy would require about a year to implement—Britain would have to rely all the more heavily on Feisal to keep the country quiet in the interim. Although British experts disagreed intensely among themselves as to whether the Kurdish
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areas in the northwest should be absorbed into the new state of Iraq, or instead should become an independent Kurdistan, it was agreed that for the time being they should continue to form a separate entity within the jurisdiction of the British High Commissioner in Mesopotamia. In addition to the Kurds, there were other groups whose identity was distinct and whose needs posed problems. In the northwest particularly there were small groups with no place to go, among them the Assyrian (or Nestorian) Christian refugees, driven from their homes in Turkey during the war because of their pro-Allied sympathies; and about these homeless groups, struggling for survival, the Cairo conferees felt that there was little that could be done.

Having opted for a Hashemite solution in Iraq, the conference did the same—though on a temporary basis—for Transjordan. Disorder was endemic in that territory, and the Chief of the Imperial General Staff was of the view that Britain could not hold onto it without sending in two more battalions “which of course we have not got.”
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Even as the conference was taking place in Cairo, alarming news was received that Feisal’s brother Abdullah, accompanied by 30 officers and 200 Bedouins, had arrived in the Transjordan city of Amman, apparently
en route
to Syria to attack Damascus. Abdullah claimed that he had come to Amman for a change of air in order to regain his health after an attack of jaundice. Nobody believed his explanation.

Churchill’s solution was, in effect, to buy off Abdullah: to offer him a position in Transjordan if he would refrain from attacking French Syria. (It will be recalled that Britain feared that if Arabs from the territory of British Palestine were to attack the French in Syria, France would retaliate by invading British Palestine.) The position Churchill thought of offering Abdullah was temporary governor, charged with restoring order. In proposing to make use of Abdullah to restore order east of the Jordan, Churchill hoped to accomplish other objectives too. Churchill brought with him to the Cairo Conference a memorandum that his staff had prepared at the end of February that dealt with the claims of Arabs and Jews to Palestine. The memorandum, prepared by Shuckburgh, Young, and Lawrence, construed the geographical terms employed in the McMahon—Hussein correspondence of 1915 as meaning that the area of Arab independence was to stretch no further west than the Jordan river. Since the Balfour Declaration contained no geographical definition, Churchill’s advisers concluded that Britain could fully reconcile and fulfill her wartime pledges
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by establishing a Jewish National Home in Palestine west of the Jordan and a separate Arab entity in Palestine east of the Jordan.
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Abdullah, if installed in authority in Transjordan, could preside over the creation of such an Arab entity.