A Peace to End all Peace

by David Fromkin

  * Lloyd George was saved by Bonar Law, who held his angry Conservatives in line. Bonar Law disliked Churchill, and was bitter about not having been consulted in the matter. Nonetheless, he remained loyal to the Prime Minister. Lloyd George cleverly told him that Asquith had pledged, if he came back as Prime Minister, to bring Churchill back to power as First Lord of the Admiralty.11 The implied message was that a Lloyd George government, with Churchill confined to a relatively less important position, was preferable.

  * It was a vision that inspired secular idealists as well. George Eliot, in her novel Daniel Deronda (1876), proposed a Zionist program.

  * Among them were Moses Hess’s Rome and Jerusalem (1862) and Leo Pinsker’s Auto-Emancipation (1882).

  * At the end of 1984 the population of Israel was 4,235,000 and that of the West Bank was 1,300,000—a total of 5,535,000 people now living in about 25 percent of the territory of Palestine as defined by the British Mandate.

  * Born in Russia and naturalized a British subject, he was passionately pro-Allied and believed that only the western democracies were compatible with Jewish ideals. Since he held no official position in the international Zionist movement, he was free to depart from its neutrality; but as an official of the British Zionist Federation, he could nonetheless speak in a representative capacity.

  ** Years after the war, Lloyd George—in writing his memoirs—invented the story that he had given the Balfour Declaration in gratitude for Weizmann’s invention. Weizmann’s important invention was real, but Lloyd George’s story was a work of fiction.

  * The reference was to “millet,” a term used in the Ottoman Empire to designate a community entitled to a certain amount of autonomy in administering the affairs of its members.

  * It is sometimes pointed out that the Balfour Declaration was equally vague. But, unlike the Cambon letter, the Balfour Declaration (a) was published, (b) referred to the whole of Palestine, and (c) referred to the creation of an entity that was to have a distinctly Jewish national identity—a National Home.

  * Disraeli, of course, though of Jewish ancestry, was baptized a Christian.

  * Oscar Straus, Secretary of Commerce and Labor from 1906 to 1909.

  * Whether or not they constituted a majority in the city—and the then-current Encyclopaedia Britannica indicated that they did not—the Jews were economically preponderant. Baghdad, along with Jerusalem, was one of the two great Jewish cities of Asia, and a thousand years before had become the seat of the exilarch—the head of the Jewish religion in the eastern diaspora—and thus the capital of oriental Judaism. Jews in large numbers had lived in the Mesopotamian provinces since the time of the Babylonian captivity—about BC—and thus were settled in the country a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs in AD 634.

  * Is was probably Lawrence’s idea, though Auda and/or Feisal may have thought of it independently.

  * British officers put this program into effect when Feisal came to Aqaba, and served with him to provide professional advice and guidance. Lieutenant-Colonel Pierce Charles Joyce, stationed at Aqaba, was the senior British officer serving with Feisal’s corps, as O.C. (Officer Commanding) Hejaz operations, reporting to Colonel Alan Dawnay of Allenby’s General Staff. Dawnay at the planning level and Joyce at the operations level were the principal British officers placed in charge of the Arab army corps. General Harry Chauvel, commander of the Australian army in the Palestine and Syria campaigns, later wrote that “Joyce was the organiser of the only fighting force of any real value in the whole of the Arab Army and I always thought that he had more to do with the success of the Hejaz operations than any other British officer.”5

  * In the summer of 1916, when the Tory leader Lord Lansdowne privately argued in favor of a compromise peace, Clayton was in London; and on returning to Cairo wrote Wingate that “One impression I gained which confirmed what I have always thought, and which I know you take an interest in, was the widespread influence of the Jews. It is everywhere and always on the ‘moderation’ tack. The Jews do not want to see anyone ‘downed’. There are English Jews, French Jews, German Jews, Austrian Jews & Salonika Jews—but all are JEWS…You hear peace talk and generally somewhere behind is the Jew. You hear pro-Turk talk and desires for a separate peace with Turkey—again the Jew (the mainspring of the C.U.P.) [original emphasis].”3

  * This may have been the first indication that high-ranking British officials were thinking of restricting Zionism to those sections of Biblical Palestine that lay west of the Jordan river.

  * One of the great failures of Kitchener and his colleagues in the intelligence field had been their ignorance of the spectacular revival of the puritanical Wahhabi sect in Arabia which had begun under the sponsorship of Ibn Saud, and, in late 1912, gave birth to a warrior brotherhood: the fierce Ikhwan. Minutes of a Cabinet War Committee meeting on 16 December 1915, to hear testimony from Sir Mark Sykes on the Arab question, show Lord Kitchener asking, “Wahabism, does that still exist?” and Sykes answering, “I think it is a dying fire.”38

  Two years later—and a full five years after the Wahhabi warrior brotherhood began to form—Gilbert Clayton for the first time reported to Sykes that “we have indications of considerable revivalist movement on Wahhabi lines in Central Arabia, such as has in the past occurred when the prestige of Islam has fallen low. We are not yet in a position to appreciate the strength of this movement,” but conditions “conduce to fostering it. This question is engaging our serious attention here…it may modify the whole situation considerably.”39

  * If their purpose had been to raise a nationalist revolt, they would not have sought out Hussein, the Turkish-appointed guardian of the Holy Places, who employed Turkish troops to quell Arab discontent. They would have sought out a nationalist warlord. That indeed is the way Lawrence later told the story in his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, portraying Feisal, rather than his father, as such a leader.

  * In early 1918 Gilbert Clayton had written to Sykes that “If Feisal makes good in a military sense he may well carry Syria with him” but that if he did not, nobody from Mecca would matter in Syrian politics.7 The raising of the flag constituted a symbolic affirmation of Feisal’s military success that could pave the way for his political leadership.

  * Evidence is scanty as to who made the decision and why. A report to the Foreign Office from Allenby’s chief political officer, General Gilbert Clayton, suggests that Clayton must have feared there would be unrest in the city if the Australians occupied it, presumably because Damascenes would guess that Britain intended to turn them over to France. Clayton had expressed fears all along that Britain—by allowing herself to be associated with France—might excite the hostility of Syrian Arabs. Clayton later reported to the Foreign Office that “Our permitting the occupation of Damascus by the Sherifians has allayed some of the suspicions of French intentions.”13

  ** Nobody knows for sure what the quarrel between Lawrence and the Abd el Kaders was about, though a number of possibilities have been suggested. The Abd el Kaders may have feared that Hussein was being duped by the British or that Feisal was under Lawrence’s influence; while Lawrence may have considered them to be pan-Islam, anti-Christian chauvinists. Or Lawrence may have believed them to be pro-French or pro-Turk. It has also been suggested that the quarrel was mainly or entirely personal, and that perhaps the Abd el Kaders were about to reveal damaging information about Lawrence’s personal life.

  * In Chapter 101 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom, he admitted that he had known of the agreement and that “Fortunately, I had earlier betrayed the treaty’s existence to Feisal…”

  ** Some of the French troops were Armenian refugees who had been conscripted. Others were native troops from North Africa. The entire force has been described as “only 3,000 Armenians, 3,000 Africans ‘and 800 Frenchmen who had been promised that they would not have to fight.’”18

  * Winston Churchill, who had recognized it before the war and had arranged at that time for the British government to pu
rchase a majority shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, aroused a great deal of opposition, especially within the Government of India, from British officials who did not see the need for it.4

  * “White troops”: British rather than Indian soldiers of the Indian Army.

  * Interventions elsewhere in the Russian Empire by British and Allied troops fall outside the scope of this volume. The Government of India did not coordinate its three missions, discussed above with the other interventions, nor did Simla send out the three missions in the context of some more general plan or pattern of intervention.

  * But of course it can be argued that it would not have worked before 1918.

  * Three thousand years before, Troy had seen another wartime European alliance come to grief when Agamemnon, the leader of the alliance, did what Britain did aboard the Agamemnon: he withheld a victory prize that previously had been awarded to an ally.

  * Mosul, commercial center of the oil-rich region that is now northern Iraq, had been promised to France in the Sykes-Picot negotiations (1916) by Sykes and Kitchener.

  ** In French political circles, it was believed that Lloyd George had given assurances in return—though it is not clear what they were supposed to have been.

  * It killed more than twenty million people, overshadowing the eight and a half million killed in the war. It has been claimed that by 1919 every man, woman, and child on the planet had been infected by the disease.42

  * For Wilson’s speeches, see Chapter 31.

  * It will be remembered that Venizelos offered to bring Greece into the Ottoman war as Britain’s ally as far back as the summer of 1914. That was even before Turkey and Britain had definitely decided to go to war. See page 74.

  * The worthless paper currency issued in France during the French Revolution.

  * When Britain went to war against the Ottoman Empire at the end of 1914, the Asquith government formally announced that Egypt had been released from Ottoman suzerainty and had become a British protectorate; but the British authorities also announced that the freedom and independence of Egypt were among the goals for which Britain was fighting.1

  * Ahmed Fuad became Sultan of Egypt on the death of his brother in October 1917.

  * On 11 April 1919 a small British military force in the Indian city of Amritsar, the holy city of the Sikhs, opened fire on a group of people who had assembled in a public park for a political meeting, killing 379 of them.

  * Arab opinion in Palestine and Syria regarded both as part of the same country, so that Zionism was also an issue in Damascus, although it was not the overriding issue that it was in Jerusalem, Jaffa, or Haifa.

  * (See page 450.) Nuri el-Sa’id, the Mesopotamian officer who had served as one of the heads of Feisal’s Allied army corps during the war, advocated the creation of a single government for Syria and Mesopotamia.8 The Mesopotamian delegates associated with the Syrian General Congress in Damascus instead advocated splitting them between governments in Damascus and Baghdad.

  * Nonetheless in 1925 Reza Khan placed himself on the throne as Reza Shah Pahlavi, deposing Ahmed Shah, who by then resided in Paris. In 1935 Reza Shah changed the name of his kingdom from Persia to Iran.

  * The Bashkir leader, Zeki Velidi Togan, wrote (years later) that in 1920 Lenin had told him that the problem in the colonial countries was that they lacked a proletariat. In communist theory the proletariat was to dictate and to lead, but the peasantry of the East did not have an industrial working class to do that for them. In effect this meant that the peoples of the East were not yet ready to exercise their right to be free. According to Togan, Lenin said that even after the socialist revolution had succeeded everywhere in the world, the former colonies of the European Great Powers would have to remain in tutelage to their former masters until such time as they developed an industrial working class of their own.3

  * Turkestan is used here in its broad geographic sense, rather than in its technical sense as the governor-generalate ruled from Tashkent under the czars.

  * However, his colleague Djemal Pasha proved to be of immediate use. In 1920, at the suggestion (or at any rate with the encouragement) of Moscow, Djemal went to Afghanistan, where he helped to dispel Afghan suspicions of Russia. Reportedly, in a letter to Lenin at the end of 1920, the Afghan monarch remarked that “His Highness Jemal Pasha has told us of all the noble ideas and intentions of the Soviet republic in regard to the liberation of the whole eastern world…”11 As adviser to the monarch, Amanullah Khan, Djemal helped draft a new constitution and worked on reorganizing the army. Djemal told a Moslem colleague that his purpose in reorganizing and strengthening the Afghan army was to add to the Soviet threat against India.12 In addition to his work with the army, the Turkish leader also founded an organization called the Islamic Revolutionary League, devoted to freeing India from British rule. His intrigues with the warlike frontier tribes helped to keep them in a state of anti-British ferment. Over and above these activities, Djemal’s mere presence in Kabul, overlooking the troubled Indian Empire from a strategic location about which the British were especially nervous, caused anxiety and concern in Simla and Whitehall.

  * A few years later Thomas wrote a book called With Lawrence in Arabia, based on the show, repeating the story he had told to his mass audiences of millions around the world. It was an immensely readable, high-spirited write-up of Lawrence’s service career—much of it untrue—that made its points through hyperbole. The Arab Bulletin, which appeared in twenty-six copies, in Thomas’s account appeared in only four.12 Feisal’s corps of 3,500 men, added to the several thousands serving under Feisal’s brothers during the war, when added up by Lowell Thomas produced an Arab army of 200,000.13

  Pushing Kitchener, Wingate, Clayton, Hogarth, Dawnay, Joyce, Young, and other important British officials into the shade, Thomas showed young T. E. Lawrence single-handedly igniting and leading the Hejaz revolt. Thomas placed Lawrence in the Arabia desert fomenting the Hejaz revolt in February 1916;14 in fact, Lawrence had a desk job in Cairo at that time, and visited Arabia for the first time the following October.

  * Sir Hugh Trenchard, the head of the Royal Air Force, wrote to the R.A.F. Middle East commander on 5 September 1919 that “I am afraid from your many telegrams that you have not got the atmosphere that is reigning here. That atmosphere is, economy at all cost…”17

  ** His program was to cut commitments ruthlessly in order to cut costs. Indeed he cut the military budget so radically that his top professional army adviser took alarm. The Chief of the Imperial General Staff confided to his diary the following year that Churchill’s program “consists in arbitrary reduction of garrisons for financial reasons wholly regardless of whether or not the residue are liable to be scuppered.” He concluded that “Winston…is playing the fool & heading straight for disasters.”18 Actually, Churchill was doing no more than keeping in tune with the political temper of his times in insisting on cutting expenses, cost what it might in non-money terms. Churchill put financial considerations above all others, except when it came to dealing with Bolshevik Russia—the one area where Churchill, by his opinions and conduct, reminded the political world of his past excesses and extravagances.

  * As Secretary for Air since 1919, Churchill—in collaboration with Sir Hugh Trenchard, Chief of the Air Staff and father of the Royal Air Force—had played a leading role in exploring the revolutionary implications of air power for postwar British policy.

  * Churchill was in constant fear that Lloyd George’s anti-Turkish policies would bring about a Turkish attack in Iraq, which British forces were not equipped to meet.

  * The Kurds are a scattered, tribal people who inhabit the plateaus and mountains where Iraq, Iran, Russian Armenia, and Turkey now overlap. They are mostly Sunni Moslems, speak a language of the Iranian group, and are believed to be of Indo-European descent. There were perhaps two and a half million of them in 1921; there are no reliable figures. There may be seven million of them today. They continue to fight for autonomy and a
re a subject of current concern to the governments of Iraq and Turkey.

  * Thus Churchill’s aides accepted the view that meaningful pledges had been made to Hussein’s Arabs during the war. This was an important about-face for British officialdom; McMahon, Clayton, and other wartime officials who had been involved in making the supposed promises to Hussein believed at the time that they were phrasing the promises in such a way that Britain was not committed to anything. In their view the pledges were meaningless.

  * It is questionable whether he ever uttered such a threat. What happened is this: at a private dinner party he gave for the correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, Talib said something to the effect that if Britain were not fair and impartial in dealing with the rival candidacies, the tribes might again rise in revolt. Accounts of the actual words he used differ. Cox received his account from Gertrude Bell, who was not present at the dinner herself.