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.
The impression was created, too, that most of the interested parties, in the Middle East as elsewhere, were being excluded from the deliberations. Instead of all the Allied Powers, only five of them met in the first instance to plan the negotiations. They were then superseded by the Council of Four: the leaders of the United States, Britain, France, and Italy. Disagreements and difficulties at home led Italy to withdraw; domestic politics led the United States to withdraw. Discussing the Middle East a year after the armistice, the French Foreign Minister told the British Foreign Minister, who agreed, that “there remained only two parties whose interests had seriously to be considered and reconciled, namely, Great Britain and France”29 and together they went on to make the decisions about the Ottoman domains.
Yet there were dozens of other parties whose interests were at stake, and their numbers were swelled by the number of their spokesmen. In addition to two main rival delegations from Armenia, for example, there were some forty independent Armenian delegations at the Peace Conference. Ten thousand people came to Paris for the Peace Conference. The hordes of claimants in the background cast into bold relief the narrowness of the interests taken into account by the two governments that remained to make the decisions.
Moral claims and wartime promises were the stock-in-trade of those who came to plead a case. The texts of wartime pledges by Allied leaders, and especially by various British government officials, were scrutinized and compared, as indeed they still are by scholars, to see whether such pledges could be read in such a way as to be consistent with one another, and as though such pledges had given rise to rights that could be enforced in a court of law. The Constantinople Agreement (1915), the Treaty of London (1915), the Hussein-McMahon correspondence (1915–16), the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916), the Agreement of St Jean de Maurienne (1917), the Balfour Declaration (1917), the Hogarth message (1918), the Declaration to the Seven (1918), and the Anglo-French Declaration (1918), as well as President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points (8 January 1918), Four Principles (11 February 1918), Four Ends (4 July 1918), and Five Particulars (27 September 1918), were among the many statements that were presented by rival claimants to be honored as promissory notes or contracts at law.
David Lloyd George, who saw the negotiations as a bargaining rather than a judicial process, was proud of what he had been able to accomplish in the Middle Eastern settlement. He had made material gains for Britain. Referring to assignats* the Prime Minister told an intimate friend: “Well, Wilson has gone back home with a bundle of assignats. I have returned with a pocket full of sovereigns in the shape of the German Colonies, Mesopotamia, etc. Everyone to his taste.”30 In all the Prime Minister had succeeded in adding nearly a million square miles to the British Empire.
He was not blind to the moral considerations at issue, but his interpretations of them were fiercely partisan. Writing to defend the peace treaties more than a decade later, Lloyd George claimed that “The Treaties of Paris constitute the greatest measure of national liberation of subject nations ever achieved by any war settlement on record…no peace settlement has ever emancipated as many subject nationalities from the grip of foreign tyranny as did that of 1919.”31
He was particularly incensed by claims that he had not honored the pledges made to the Arabic-speaking peoples.
The Allies redeemed the promises made in these declarations to the full. No race has done better out of the fidelity with which the Allies redeemed their promises to the oppressed races than the Arabs. Owing to the tremendous sacrifices of the Allied Nations, and more particularly of Britain and her Empire, the Arabs have already won independence in Iraq, Arabia, Syria, and Trans-Jordania, although most of the Arab races fought throughout the War for the Turkish oppressors.
He added in particular that “The Palestinian Arabs fought for Turkish rule.”32
Perhaps he could have imposed his Middle Eastern settlement more effectively if he had arrived at it at the end of 1918. But the attempt to go back on Britain’s wartime pledges had taken an immense amount of time and so had lost him that chance. By the summer of 1920 it was too late for the Prime Minister to impose his terms upon his wartime Allies and upon an increasingly troublesome Middle East because—as Churchill had warned repeatedly—by then he no longer had the troops to do so.
42
THE UNREAL WORLD OF THE PEACE CONFERENCES
I
“Diplomacy by Conference” was a phrase, attributed to Maurice Hankey, that described Lloyd George’s proceedings in the postwar years.1 It became the standard description of the unreal world in which the Prime Minister lived. Divorcing himself as best he could from the other responsibilities of his office, he spent more than three years in attending international meetings aimed at shaping the postwar world. The meetings among the Allies began almost as soon as the armistices were signed, and developed into a way of life. Lloyd George, between 1919 and 1922, attended no fewer than thirty-three international conferences; and, even before they began, had engaged in informal meetings, such as those with Clemenceau and with Wilson in London at the end of 1918. The formal preliminaries to the Peace Conference began in Paris in January 1919, and shifted to other locations from time to time. At issue were the terms to be imposed upon the German, Austro-Hungarian, and Ottoman empires, and their ally, Bulgaria. The decisions about the Ottoman Empire were agreed upon for the most part at the First Conference of London (beginning in February 1920), were confirmed in the Italian Riviera resort town of San Remo (April 1920), and were embodied in a treaty signed at Sèvres, a residential suburb of Paris, on 10 August 1920.
With respect to the negotiation of the peace settlement in the Middle East, the decisive fact was that it took so much time. Of all the peace treaties, that with the Ottoman Empire was the last to be concluded. Beginning with the informal discussions between Lloyd George and Clemenceau after the armistice, it took sixteen months to reach agreement on substantive matters, and another four months to dispose of remaining issues and sign a treaty. In all, it took nearly two years to conclude the peace treaty with the Ottoman Empire; at the outset Lloyd George had predicted that it would take about a week.2
Because of the long delay, situations were allowed to develop, and decisions were required to be made, that in the end proved more important than the terms of the treaty itself. The Allied statesmen thought that they had determined the future of Arabic-speaking Asia by what they did at San Remo, and of the Turkish-speaking Ottoman Empire by what they did at Sèvres; but what they did not do in 1918 and 1919 proved to have more influence on the future of both.
At the outset Lloyd George had stated that it would be impossible for his country to support indefinitely its 1,084,000-man army of occupation in the Ottoman Empire.3 Churchill and the General Staff, it will be recalled, had impressed upon him the need to reach a settlement while he still had the troops to enforce it. By the summer of 1919, some six months later, the British Cabinet was told that the army of occupation was down by more than two-thirds to 320,000 men.4 As the army melted away, its commanders adhered to a timetable of withdrawal that imposed a series of deadlines upon the Prime Minister at the Peace Conference, as did the continuing drain of British financial resources.
In the north, along the Caucasus frontier with Russia, British troops had remained in place in the hope that the United States, Italy, or France could be persuaded to replace them and defend newly independent Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan if Russia or
Turkey should revive sufficiently to attack them. But Britain lacked the men and money to undertake the job, and was eventually forced to abandon her charges to their fate.
In ordering British forces to leave these formerly Russian territories, the Prime Minister disregarded the strong objections of Winston Churchill. For all his recent enthusiasm for retrenchment, Churchill was a firebrand on the communist issue and was prepared to send men and money into Russia to overthrow the Soviet regime. Even Maurice Hankey, who believed that “in the coming years Bolshevism was the greatest danger to Europe,”5 described Churchill as “quite barmy in his enthusiasm for the anti-Bolsheviks”6 Churchill was obsessively determined to keep British troops north of the Turkish frontier to help the Whites fight the Reds in the Russian Civil War. Lloyd George’s political fears were of a different sort. The Prime Minister told Hankey that he was anxious to get all British troops out of all formerly Russian territories to keep them from becoming “restless” by which he presumably meant that he wanted to keep them from being infected with the revolutionary virus.7 Pursuant to his orders, British forces north of the Russian-Turkish frontier were evacuated in the summer of 1919.
To the south of the old Russian frontier, in mountain valleys where the present Turkish borders run with those of Syria, Iraq, and Iran, lay the area imprecisely known as Kurdistan, where British officials thought of sponsoring another of their protectorates. The area fell within the sphere promised to France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, so the British envisaged a series of autonomous Kurdish states, to be advised by British political officers, which the French were to be asked to concede in the Wilsonian spirit of self-determination for the Kurdish people. The Kurds are an ancient mountain people who have never known unity, and whose energies have been channeled into violent quarrels with neighbors, especially Arabs and Armenians. A British attempt to organize them in 1919 resulted in three uprisings, as the Kurds turned against the British newcomers; soon afterward, British troops pulled back from Kurdistan, too.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 47
