With typical casualness in such matters, Lawrence announced that he had demobilised himself from the army, somewhat to the astonishment of War Office staff who discovered that he had ignored all the relevant formalities. Meanwhile, the equally exasperated Foreign Office still believed he was a member of the Paris delegation and due to return to assist Balfour when the Syrian question came up for review.18 It was a prospect which dismayed nearly all his colleagues, who hoped that this reckless amateur would never return to Paris as a member of their profession.
II
Kingmaker, 1919-1922
Throughout the Paris conference, Lawrence miscalculated his own powers of persuasion and the British government’s willingness to jeopardise its friendship with France on behalf of Faisal. His prickly manner, francophobia and unpredictability irritated colleagues, leaving him without influential allies. His only asset was an ability to sway Faisal, but fears that he would use this talent to hinder rather than advance British interests led to his exclusion from policy-making and negotiations after September 1919. From then until December 1920, when Churchill invited him to join the Colonial Office’s new Middle Eastern Department, Lawrence held no official post.
During this period he was a spectator who stood on the touchline, alternately shouting encouragement and abuse to those playing the diplomatic game. As their efforts faltered, his clamour and his audience grew. Lowell Thomas had made his name a household word so that what he had to say about the Middle East commanded the attention of the public, newspaper editors and politicians. His finger remained on the pulse of Middle Eastern affairs: former colleagues made information available to him and, by May 1920, when the government’s policies in the region were clearly foundering, he was able to entice old friends such as Aubrey Herbert and Philby into an influential lobby.
New factors were shaping events during this period. Lloyd George, in order to fulfil pledges made in 1917, actively encouraged a Greek invasion of the Turkish mainland which began with landings in Smyrna (Izmir) in May 1919. Soon after, Italian forces landed near Adana and the French pressed into Cilicia, where they hoped to sponsor an Armenian state. These threefold incursions drove the Turks into the arms of Kemal Atatürk, who, backed by the former Turkish army of the Caucasus, was rallying the nationalists. By July 1920 his forces menaced Aleppo and in October 1921 they finally forced the French to withdraw from Cilicia. On the Greek front, Atatürk, with Soviet assistance, began to make headway during the summer and autumn of 1920. As Lawrence had predicted, Ottoman defeat had released the forces of Turkish nationalism, which were given dynamism by Atatürk’s leadership and ill-judged Anglo-French efforts to partition Turkey by force.
British policies of meddle and muddle were running into trouble elsewhere in the Middle East. In May 1920 Anglo-Indian troops were rushed to the shores of the Caspian after the Russians had seized Enzeli in support of Persian nationalists who were resisting Britain’s efforts to impose a new treaty on their country. Turkey and Persia were peripheral to Lawrence’s interests, which centred on Syria, Iraq and Palestine, but events there supported his thesis that it was foolhardy for Britain to rush into headlong collision with popular national movements. ‘You cannot make war on a rebellion,’ he remarked, with reference to Ireland, where the British government was trying to do just that in its efforts to keep the lid on popular nationalism.1
The Cabinet was also coming to the same conclusion but for different reasons. From the summer of 1919 onwards, ministers were increasingly alarmed by the spiralling costs of foreign and imperial commitments. British forces underpinned anti-Bolshevik regimes in northern and southern Russia and provided garrisons for the Rhineland, Constantinople, Syria, Iraq and Persia. They were also waging a war on India’s North-West Frontier and suppressing insurgency in the Punjab, Egypt and Ireland. Manpower was stretched to breaking point and matters were made worse by the unwillingness of many conscripts and volunteers, men who had joined up to fight Germany, to stay in the forces and defend the empire. A few weeks before Lawrence’s visit to Egypt in June 1919 there had been a number of serious mutinies by British troops in support of swift demobilisation.
Entrenchment was the Cabinet’s first response to these problems. Expenses had to be pruned and inessential commitments terminated. At the beginning of September, Lloyd George took the first step with the announcement that the Anglo-Indian army of occupation in Syria would commence evacuation on 1 November. It was costing £9 million annually and served no useful purpose, since Britain would never accept the Syrian mandate, earmarked for France. Faisal would be left the isolated ruler of the inland districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo. Faisal, already on his way to London, was stunned by the news, although he hoped he might still wriggle out of accepting French supervision by an appeal to British and American sympathy.
Lawrence, fearing that Faisal was about to be left in the lurch, attempted to remind the British public that they were under a moral obligation to him. He did this through a contrived leak in a letter to The Times of 11 September in which he outlined the details of the hitherto obscure wartime negotiations between Britain and the Arabs. He summarised four vital documents which he claimed to have read while serving on Faisal’s staff. One was the Sykes–Picot agreement (of which he had claimed ignorance a year before in Damascus); the other three were McMahon’s letter to Hussain of 24 October 1915 with its offer of Arab independence south of latitude 37°, saving Basra, Baghdad and regions where French interests predominated, and the declarations of 11 June and 8 November 1918. The last two were interpreted by Lawrence as charters for Arab self- determination in Iraq and Syria with loose British and French surveillance. As for Sykes–Picot, it was no longer workable and Arab representatives should be allowed to share in its revision. Whatever the result of this, Faisal had full rights to rule Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo, where he now governed in co-operation with political officers of Allenby’s army of occupation, as well as Mosul, which unknown to Lawrence was now attached to Iraq.
The rest of Lawrence’s letter was censored by Wickham Steed, the editor of The Times. He cut out Lawrence’s repudiation of his own role in the Arab campaign in which he claimed to have been the innocent agent of a deceitful government whose untruths he had passed on to the Arabs. This bitter statement, which would be expanded in the Seven Pillars, was soon known in official circles where it caused consternation and confirmed opinions about the author’s utter unreliability. On 1 October, William Yale heard from Colonel Walter Gribbon of the General Staff that ‘all unofficial statements made to the Arabs by British officers would be disregarded or denied’. Such disavowals were unnecessary since no Arab spokesman then or later ever mentioned pledges specifically made by Lawrence or any other officer during the war. Nevertheless, Lawrence had started a hare which has run ever since. It was chased first by Aubrey Herbert, who on 20 October 1920 asked for a Commons statement about promises made by the government to Faisal. Andrew Bonar Law replied in the Prime Minister’s absence to say that none existed. Lawrence had successfully sown suspicions about gross British duplicity towards the Arabs.
But his letter proved a damp squib. The government never wavered in its policy towards Faisal. His protests about past promises were brushed aside and instead he was given a lesson in the stark realities of international power broking. When he met Lloyd George and members of his Cabinet on 19 and 23 September he was firmly told that Britain had no further interest in Syrian affairs and he was advised to go to Paris and get the best terms he could from Clemenceau.
Lawrence did what he could in an attempt to salvage something for his friend. In a memo to the Foreign Office of 15 September he warned that Faisal’s abandonment to the French would generate waves of nationalist agitation which would rebound on Britain. In a letter written twelve days later to Curzon, he pleaded with him to keep Faisal in Britain’s orbit by procuring concessions from the French, including a free port on the Mediterranean coast, vital for his landlocked principality. He ev
en offered to return to Syria and arrange the transfer of Faisal’s government from Damascus to Dera, which lay within Britain’s sphere. Curzon was unmoved and refused to consider any course which might imperil Anglo-French co-operation.
In putting his case for Faisal, Lawrence showed a commanding grasp of current developments in the Middle East and some of his evidence, including references to possible Russian involvement, suggests that he was in unofficial contact with former military and diplomatic colleagues who shared his anxieties about government policy. Chief of these was the fear that Faisal, who was now regarded as a champion of Arab nationalism throughout the Middle East, might turn his back on Britain and seek allies elsewhere. During the Paris Peace Conference, his Druze adherent Shakib Arslan had secretly extended feelers to the former Turkish Vizier, Talaat Bey, to explore the possibilities of Russian backing for a Turco-Arab alliance.2 This must have been in Lawrence’s mind when he warned the Foreign Office of the mischief which might follow a pact between Faisal and Atatürk or Russian penetration of the region. In both instances he was correct. Cast adrift by Britain and forced to bargain with France, Faisal fruitlessly sought a common front with Turkish, Kurdish and Egyptian nationalists.3
Unable to alter the course of the government’s Middle Eastern policy, Lawrence turned his attention away from public affairs. During the winter of 1919–20 he concentrated on his own writing and plans for the republication of Charles Doughty’s lengthy and previously obscure Arabia Deserta, which he profoundly admired. Meanwhile events in the Middle East followed a course which he had predicted and by the spring of 1920 circumstances favoured a fresh assault on government policy there.
Faisal had been forced to bow to French pressure and acknowledge France as the mandatory power for the whole of Syria. French plans for Syria’s future rested upon the creation of a network of small administrative units which followed the racial and religious divisions of the region and entailed close co-operation with local notables. Ultimate authority would rest with French officials, as Faisal quickly learned when he returned to Beirut in January 1920. General Gouraud reminded him that he would have to give formal justification of his claims as ruler of Damascus, Homs, Hama and Aleppo and ordered him to suppress the brigandage endemic in these districts and punish the corruption of his officials.
In Damascus, Faisal found that extreme nationalists had taken control of the Syrian National Assembly, which had rejected the French mandate and branded him a turncoat for accepting it. To reassert his authority, he threw in his lot with the nationalists. On 9 March he redeemed himself and his nationalist credentials by a public repudiation of the French mandate and was duly elected king. This gave the French the excuse they had been looking for. On the pretext of imposing stability, which was ardently sought by the Syrian upper classes and non-Muslim minorities (there had been an Armenian massacre in Aleppo in March 1919), Gouraud marched on Damascus. Arab forces were beaten at Maysalun and after a four-day war Damascus was occupied on 26 July. Faisal fled from his crumbling kingdom and sought sanctuary in British Palestine.
The Franco-Syrian war of July 1920 was one of a series of violent upheavals in the Middle East. In April there had been a murderous riot in Jerusalem in protest against Jewish immigration. Rioters, who included veterans of Faisal’s army, held his picture aloft and shouted, ‘Long live our King–King Faisal! In the name of our King we urge you to fight the Jews!’ There were also calls for the immediate amalgamation of Palestine and Syria. Further south, the news of Faisal’s expulsion from Damascus provoked his brother Abdullah to collect an army of Hejazi Beduin and move northwards. By January 1921 he had occupied Maan in the British zone and declared that he would soon reconquer Syria.
The most serious trouble was in Iraq, where the announcement that the country was to receive a British mandate sparked off a general Arab revolt in May. Shortly before, Iraqi nationalist exiles in Damascus had elected Abdullah as their king. This new Arab revolt was the result of uncertainty and disappointment throughout the Middle East: the collapse of the Turkish empire in October 1918 and the public statements of the Allies had raised the hopes of local nationalists to a peak. But the eagerly anticipated new era was stillborn thanks to Anglo-French plans to partition the region. As Lawrence wrote in a letter to The Times of 22 July:
The Arabs rebelled against the Turks during the war not because the Turk government was notably bad, but because they wanted independence. They did not risk their lives in battle to change masters, to become British subjects or French citizens, but to win a show of their own.
This had been denied them and now former allies were enemies and liberators had become oppressors.
This letter marked Lawrence’s return to the political arena. He entered it as the champion of both Arab nationalism and liberal imperialism. The two were compatible. ‘My own ambition,’ he told Curzon in September 1919, ‘is that the Arabs should be our first brown Dominion, and not our last brown colony.’ The idea was radical for its time, but not novel since the government had just announced plans for the gradual introduction of self-government in India. Taking this as his cue, Lawrence concluded his Times letter, ‘I shall be told that the idea of brown Dominions in the British Empire is grotesque,’ but India was already on such a course. Furthermore, Lawrence was sure that ‘Arabs in these conditions would be as loyal as anyone in the Empire.’ Sympathetically handled, Arab national sentiment could be harnessed by Britain to produce a stable and tractable Middle East.
At this moment the Middle East was volatile and the Arabs considered Britain to be their foe thanks to the ineptitude of Lloyd George’s coalition. Through a series of newspaper articles and letters published between May and August 1920, Lawrence excoriated the government’s policies, suggested cheap and effective alternatives and publicised the good sense and moderation of Faisal.
In two pieces for the Conservative Daily Express on 22 and 23 May, he showed how muddled policies were the consequence of having given responsibility for Middle Eastern affairs to three, often conflicting departments of state, the Foreign, India and War Offices. Armed repression was a brittle basis for imperial government in Asia since ‘Asiatics have fought in the war, not for us, but for their own interests.’ Again, in a Sunday Times article on 30 May, he contended ‘that brown peoples who had chosen to fight beside the Allies would receive their meed of friendship in the work of peace, that new age of freedom of which victory was the dawn’. What followed was bitter alienation created by the fumbling, out-of-date imperial policies of annexation and coercion.
As baleful news of the Iraqi uprising and its suppression appeared in the press, Lawrence concentrated his attack on official policy there. In the Observer of 8 August and the Sunday Times of a fortnight later, he rebuked the Indian administration in Iraq for its misjudgements, arrogance and short-sightedness, all of which had been exposed by the Arab Revolt. Since 1914, the soldiers and civil servants imported from India to govern the province had been guided by the principle that the Arabs were unfitted for responsibility and needed generations of firm but enlightened rule. The administration was provided by a cadre of ex-officers who acted as district commissioners under the direction of Colonel Arnold Wilson, who hoped to encourage the eventual colonisation of Iraq by what he called ‘stalwart Muhammadan cultivators’. To Lawrence this had seemed a recipe for calamity and the events of 1920 had proved him right. There was an irony, he noted, in British officials hanging Arabs ‘for political offences, which they call rebellion’ even though those executed were still nominally Turkish subjects. This point was taken up on 15 December by the ex-Prime Minister, Asquith, when he asked in the Commons, ‘Why are Arabs rebels? To whom traitors?’
Such cruel ambiguities might easily have been avoided, if, as Lawrence argued, the government had sought a partnership with the Arabs rather than insisting that they submitted to the India Office’s satraps. At the very end of the war he had proposed the partition of Iraq into two kingdoms under Abdullah and Zaid. This
appealed to Hussain, who in January 1919 suggested Abdullah as king of all Iraq, and to Faisal who tolerated the use of Damascus as a base for pro-Hashemite subversion in Iraq. In March 1919 Faisal had asked the British government to permit the repatriation of those Iraqi officers attached to his army. Lawrence supported the request, admitting that, while these men were Abdullah’s partisans, they were ‘mostly very pro-British’.4 Wilson was convinced that once in Iraq these men would throw themselves into pro-Hashemite agitation.
He was correct. General Mawlud Mukhlis, Faisal’s ex-Chief of Staff and pre-war al Ahd activist, advocated a Hashemite kingdom in Iraq and favoured a nationalist alliance with Atatürk, and Nuri es Said hoped for a Syrian-Iraqi federation under Hashemite rule. Both were involved in anti-government, Hashemite scheming in Iraq and ultimately would be rewarded by high office when Faisal was made king. (Nuri was murdered in 1958 during the coup which overthrew Faisal’s grandson, Faisal II.) During the war, as Lawrence knew, these men had been anglophiles and afterwards, like the other Iraqis who had fought alongside Faisal, they were anxious to find outlets for their talents in the new Iraqi government. These were denied them under the Indian policy which severely restricted official posts opened to Arabs. As Lawrence recognised, this stubborn refusal to rule in harness with local men turned old friends into enemies and contributed to the present mess in Iraq. Repeating Sir Mark Sykes’s wartime gibe, Lawrence stigmatised the Indian administration as worse than the Turkish. It was loathed, it wasted soldiers’ lives and squandered money.
Lawrence not only castigated the government’s policy in print; behind the scenes he was gathering support from former friends in the army, civil service and House of Commons. From his All Souls base, he approached eminent and experienced men whom he thought would be sympathetic to his ideas. On 21 May, he invited Philby to join a knot of Middle East experts which included Hogarth and Arnold Toynbee, a historian who had been attached to the Middle East section at the Peace Conference. Their purpose was to persuade Lloyd George to create a new Middle East Department with sole responsibility for the area which, with a complement of ‘new men’, could devise and implement fresh policies. The India Office would be the loser since, as Lawrence warned Philby, ‘Curzon is of course the enemy; but he’s not a very bold enemy.’
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