France, too, was troubled after the war by the appearance of independence movements in the areas of the Moslem Middle East she sought to control, and crushed them, as seen earlier, in 1920. Clemenceau had wanted to preserve France’s position as a power in Europe, and had always pictured the pursuit of overseas empire as a dangerous distraction; but his successors, by invading Syria, defined France’s role in postwar world politics in other, more ambitious and less realistic, terms. France’s occupation of Syria and Lebanon was formally validated by a League of Nations Mandate on 24 July 1922.
At the outset of the First World War, the three Allies had agreed to partition the postwar Middle East between them; but, in the postwar years, having lost unity of purpose, each went its own way in overcoming postwar disturbances in Moslem Asia, and each defined its own vision of its political destiny in doing so. Each followed its own road to 1922—for Britain’s position in her sphere in the Middle East, like Russia’s and France’s, was formally embodied in documents promulgated in that year.
Of the three Allies, Britain faced the most widespread challenges across the face of the Middle East after the war. She met the challenges while in the grip of an economic crisis and at a time of profound social and political change at home. Middle Eastern policy on the road to 1922 was to severely test Britain’s most colorful and creative politicians, Lloyd George and Churchill. For, as a result of the postwar troubles recounted earlier, everywhere from Egypt to Afghanistan, Britain’s Middle East policy was in tatters—just as Winston Churchill had said all along that it would be—in the face of native resistance, communal strife, and local disorders.
II
Ever since the end of the war, Churchill—inside the government—had been the most severe critic of the Prime Minister’s Middle Eastern policy, warning that peacetime Britain did not have the troops and that Parliament would refuse to spend the money to coerce the Middle East. He argued that Britain should therefore settle for terms that the Turks were willing to accept. On 25 October 1919 he presciently expressed concern that Greece might ruin herself in her Smyrna venture, and that Britain’s alliance with France might be injured by a French invasion of Syria with hordes of Algerian troops. He worried about the Italians “disturbing the Turkish World” and about “the Jews, whom we are pledged to introduce into Palestine and who take it for granted that the local population will be cleared out to suit their convenience.” Arguing that Allied policy in the Middle East ought to be completely reversed, he urged that the Ottoman Empire be restored to its prewar frontiers and suggested that the European powers renounce their claims to Syria, Palestine, and other such territories. “Instead of dividing up the Empire into separate territorial spheres of exploitation,” he argued, “we should combine to preserve the integrity of the Turkish Empire as it existed before the war but should subject that Empire to a strict form of international control…”1
Keenly aware of the purposes served by Britain’s Middle Eastern strategy during the nineteenth century, Churchill maintained that a similar strategy should be adopted by the Lloyd George government. “We ought to come to terms with Mustapha Kemal and arrive at a good peace with Turkey,” he argued, in a memorandum to the Cabinet on 23 November 1920, so as to stop estranging “powerful, durable and necessary Turkish and Mohammedan forces. We should thus re-create that Turkish barrier to Russian ambitions which has always been of the utmost importance to us.”2
In a letter to the Prime Minister written shortly thereafter, Churchill underlined his deep resentment at being obliged as War Minister to ask Parliament for vast sums to subdue the Middle East when it was only Lloyd George’s “vendetta against the Turks” that made the expenditure necessary. He wrote that “We seem to be becoming the most Anti Turk & the most pro-Bolshevik power in the world: whereas in my judgement we ought to be the exact opposite.” Pointing out that it was only because of the support of the Conservative Party that the government remained in office, he reminded the Prime Minister that the Conservatives were associated with the traditional nineteenth-century policy of supporting Turkey against Russia.
All yr great success & overwhelming personal power have come from a junction between yr Liberal followers & the Conservative party…But surely at this time—when we Coalition Liberals are vy weak in the Constituencies—it is adding to our difficulties to pursue policies towards the Turks & the Bolsheviks both of wh are fundamentally opposed to Conservatism [sic] instincts & traditions.3
Moving from domestic to foreign policy, Churchill wrote his most broadly reasoned criticism of British Middle Eastern policy some twelve days later in a memorandum to the Cabinet maintaining that “The unfortunate course of affairs has led to our being simultaneously out of sympathy with all the four Powers exercising local influence” in the Middle East: Russians, Greeks, Turks, and Arabs. A successful policy would consist rather in “dividing up the local Powers so that if we have some opponents we have also at any rate some friends. This is what we have always done in the whole of our past history. When Russia was our enemy the Turk was our friend: when Turkey was our enemy Russia was our friend.”4 According to Churchill’s analysis, Lenin’s Russia would not, and King Constantine’s Greece could not, help Britain to achieve her goals; the only practicable course, he argued, was to ally with Turks and Arabs.
Sir Henry Wilson, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, noted approvingly in his diary that Churchill had “written a good paper for the Cabinet showing that we are now hated by the Bolsheviks, Turks, Greeks, & Arabs & this must be bad policy & that we ought to make friends with Turks & Arabs & enemies with Bolsheviks & ignore Greeks. This has been my view all along.”5
On an administrative level, Churchill charged (as had Sir Mark Sykes in the early days of the world war) that Britain’s Middle Eastern policy was rendered incoherent by the number of government departments running their separate territories and operations. This impeded progress toward curbing costs, he repeatedly told the Cabinet Finance Committee. On 31 December 1920, at Churchill’s suggestion, the Cabinet decided to set up a special Middle East Department within the Colonial Office to be in charge of the troubled mandated territories, Palestine (including Transjordan), and Iraq.
Lord Milner, the Colonial Secretary, in failing health and spirits, was unwilling to assume such heavy new responsibilities and promptly resigned from the government. On 1 January 1921, Lloyd George offered the Colonial Ministry to Churchill who, after some hesitation, agreed to accept it. It was arranged that Milner should hand over the ministry on 7 February; but Churchill immediately began involving himself in Middle East departmental arrangements and affairs.
Churchill at once began trying to expand the powers of his new ministry, seeking military as well as full civil powers and attempting to bring all of Arabia within the ambit of his department. He also expressed decided views about the future of Egypt. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, protested repeatedly at Churchill’s encroachments on his perogatives. Curzon complained that “Winston…wants to grab everything in his new Dept & to be a sort of Asiatic Foreign Secretary.”6 A War Office official claimed that Churchill’s idea was to set up “a sort of War Office of his own.”7
The Prime Minister, at Churchill’s suggestion, appointed a special interdepartmental committee under the chairmanship of Sir James Masterson Smith (a career official who had served under Churchill) to consider—and, Churchill hoped, to expand—the powers of the Colonial Office’s new Middle East Department.
Churchill, who no longer spoke of restoring the Ottoman Empire, approached his new responsibilities with an open mind and with an evident desire to obtain guidance from the government’s ablest officials in a program aimed at cutting costs while trying to keep commitments.
III
By 1921 the Government of India, under the influence of Gertrude Bell in Baghdad, had come over to the views of Cairo. India, like Cairo, now believed in protectorate rather than direct government, and supported the sons of King Hussein as Britain’s candi
dates for Arab leadership. This brought an end to the long civil war within British ranks and Churchill’s luck was that Britain’s Middle East old hands now spoke with one voice; unlike previous ministers, he would not be caught in an official crossfire.
Churchill drew on the resources of other ministries to recruit an experienced and well-balanced staff to deal with his new Middle Eastern responsibilities. In the interim, while his staff was being assembled, Churchill relied upon the information, advice, and professional guidance of Sir Arthur Hirtzel, Assistant Under-Secretary of State for India, a career official who had served in the India Office since 1894. Hirtzel declined Churchill’s offer to head the new Middle East Department; in his place he sent another career official, John Evelyn Shuckburgh, who had worked under him and who had served in the India Office since 1900. Hirtzel wrote to Churchill that Shuckburgh was “really first-rate—level headed, always cool, very accurate & unsparing of himself: his only fault perhaps a tendency to excessive caution.”8
Churchill chose Hubert Winthrop Young of the Foreign Office to be Shuckburgh’s assistant. An army major during the war, Young had been in charge of transport and supplies for Feisal’s Arab forces. His appointment, and Shuckburgh’s, were endorsed in warm terms by the Masterson Smith committee. The committee found Shuckburgh to be “the best man” for the job and Young’s services to be “essential.”9 The committee expressed strong reservations, however, about another appointment Churchill proposed to make: T. E. Lawrence, who was to be an adviser on Arab affairs. The committee cautioned Churchill that Lawrence was “not the kind of man to fit easily into any official machine.”10
Lawrence indeed had earned a reputation for insubordination and for going over the heads of his official superiors to higher authorities. He was also the leading public critic of British policy toward the Arabs of Mesopotamia—a policy of which Churchill was now in charge. In the summer of 1920 Lawrence had written of Iraq in the Sunday Times that
Our government is worse than the old Turkish system. They kept fourteen thousand local conscripts embodied, and killed a yearly average of two hundred Arabs in maintaining peace. We keep ninety thousand men, with aeroplanes, armoured cars, gunboats and armoured trains. We have killed about ten thousand Arabs in this rising this summer. We cannot hope to maintain such an average: it is a poor country, sparsely peopled…11
Lawrence, a one-time junior officer in the Arab Bureau in Cairo, had by now become a celebrity, due to the efforts of an American named Lowell Thomas. Thomas, a 25-year-old fledgling showman from Ohio who until then had knocked about North America in search of fame, fortune, and adventure, had been working at a part-time job teaching public speaking at Princeton when, at the end of 1917, he raised enough money to go to England and then to send himself and a cameraman to the Middle East war front in search of a salable story with romance and local color. There he found Lawrence, wearing Arab robes, and decided to make him the hero of a colorful story he was about to write—a story about the Arab followers of Hussein and Feisal and the role they had played in the war against Turkey. The story was to form the basis of a show, in which—sacrificing truth to entertainment values—Thomas would picture Lawrence as the inspirer and leader of an Arab revolt that destroyed the Turkish Empire.
Thomas’s show was a lecture with photos. It was entitled The Last Crusade and Thomas opened it at the Century Theater in New York in March 1919, with the backing of the New York Globe. A few weeks later he moved it to the old Madison Square Garden, a vast auditorium in which to accommodate the crowds that Thomas hoped to attract. An English impresario then arranged to bring the show to London, where it played to the largest halls: the Royal Opera House at Covent Garden and the Albert Hall.
It was a masterpiece of ballyhoo and it set show business records. It played in London for six months and was seen there by perhaps a million people. Thomas then took the show on a road tour around the world. It made young Lowell Thomas rich and famous; and it converted “Lawrence of Arabia” into a world hero.*
Lawrence, though embarrassed by the crudeness of Thomas’s account, gloried in its bright glow. When The Last Crusade played in London, Lawrence frequently came up from Oxford to see it: Thomas’s wife spied him in the audience on at least five different occasions, causing him to “flush crimson, laugh in confusion, and hurry away.”15
The public believed Thomas’s account; so that when Lawrence became an adviser to Winston Churchill, his appointment overshadowed all others. His reputation grew. He passed off his fantasies as history,16 and, in the years to come, Lawrence was to claim far more credit for his share in Churchill’s achievements as Colonial Secretary than was his due.
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.*
Churchill responded to the changed political mood from the day that he took over the War and Air Ministries at the beginning of 1919;** 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”19 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.20
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.”21 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.22 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.23
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…”24 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. Whil
e he was still Secretary of Air and War, Churchill had proposed to cut Middle East costs by governing Mesopotamia by means of airplanes* 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.”25
Churchill recognized that this strategy would not defend Mesopotamia against invasion; its sole purpose was “maintaining internal security.”26 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.*
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.”27 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.
A Peace to End all Peace Page 58
