Although his forces were like rude and insecure interlopers in the fertile south, Mao was obsessed with China’s future place in the world. In August 1946, on the first anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the exiled American radical feminist journalist Ann Louise Strong had interviewed Mao. The subject of the Bomb arose, as well it might on such an ominous date. Mao brushed such a weapon aside: ‘The atom bomb is a paper tiger that the US reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn’t. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon.’49 He claimed that nuclear bombs would make no appreciable impact on the vast turbulent zone between the USA and the USSR, a concept he illustrated by positioning several small wine glasses between two teacups. To conquer the Soviet Union, the US would have to subjugate the huge number of smaller powers within this intermediate zone, or what would be called the Third World. While Mao was prepared to concede primacy to Stalin’s Soviet Union, he was also indicating that China and the intermediate zone as a whole were as much players as pieces on the chessboard, assets as much as burdens. While the US State Department devoted a thousand-paged China White Paper in August 1949 in defence of policies that were under ferocious domestic Republican attack, Mao and Stalin looked forward rather than back.
A Chinese mission led by Liu Shaoqi went to Moscow in the summer of 1949. Stalin met them six times, which was more direct contact than he allowed Mao when he arrived in December of that year, partly to celebrate the Great Master’s birthday on the 21st.50 Their first encounter was frosty. Stalin abruptly changed the subject when Mao asked for an apology for Russia’s fitful and duplicitous support for the Chinese Revolution. Stalin was also bewildered by the elliptical way in which Mao (through his translator) expressed his need for aid. Nonetheless the result was the Sino–Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance of 14 February 1950, from which China received a relatively modest $300 million credit and increased military aid. The Soviets got the Chinese to exclude all non-Soviet foreigners from Manchuria and Xinxiang, while retaining humiliating naval and railway concessions made to tsarist Russia. A secret appendix excluded from the ambit of Chinese law Soviet advisers who committed crimes.
While the Soviets promised to come to China’s aid in the event of Japanese or ‘other’ aggression, Stalin conceded China a subaltern role in fomenting revolution in South-east Asia. He advised extreme caution in the case of Vietnam, lest Mao’s intervention on behalf of Ho embroil him in a war with either the French or the US. Nonetheless Mao had a Chinese Military Advisory Group and PLA troops operating in North Vietnam from the autumn, by which time newly built roads connected the two countries. There was a major conflict of interest here, although Mao and Stalin suppressed it in favour of the international revolution. Mao regarded Vietnam as the most likely launching pad for any imperialist attempt to wrest southern China from his control; Stalin was more worried about how overt support for Ho might impact on his relations with France, the lynchpin of his attempts to stymie German rearmament through membership of NATO. In the event, the first major contest of the Cold War would come in Korea, as a civil war took on international ramifications.
The Korean Civil War
Korea, roughly the size of the Japanese island of Honshu, was once an independent kingdom but one successively subjected to Chinese and Japanese rule. It had rarely prospered except by emulating the hermit crab, but a keen desire for independence remained among its twenty-seven million people. Korea had been divided at the 38th parallel on 9 August 1945, notionally so that Japanese troops would surrender to Chiang Kai-shek in the north and to the Americans in the south. The bleaker more industrialized north had ten million people, the more agrarian south seventeen million. The line was entirely arbitrary, the work of a late night in Washington DC by Colonel Dean Rusk, whose source material was a copy of National Geographic; he was unaware that imperial Russia and Japan had chosen that line of division forty years previously. There was no obvious physical feature on which to base a border and Rusk and his colleague Colonel Charles Bonesteel were determined to keep Seoul in the southern zone. These arrangements were upset when Soviet, rather than Nationalist Chinese, forces arrived in the north a month before the first Americans were shipped in from Japan and the Philippines. Soviet troops systematically plundered the country, raping the Japanese women and robbing fifty million yen from the main bank. They also dismantled and removed such assets as the Hungnam petrochemical plant and the Sup’ung hydroelectric plant on the Yalu River.
In September 1945 a Russian ship, the Pugachev, docked in Wonsan. Aboard was Kim Il Sung, who in 1940 had slipped into Siberia to evade the Japanese. In the interim Kim had become a captain in the Red Army’s 88th Special Reconnaissance Brigade within the Twenty-fifth Army. He deftly formed his own North Korean Communist Party in June 1946 with Soviet support, murdering any older or more charismatic rivals. Nearly 60 per cent of the 4,500 members were intellectuals, entrepreneurs and ‘others’ rather than workers. At the same time Kim, a fluent Mandarin speaker, built up his credit with Mao by allowing Lin Biao’s PLA troops to flee into Korea when they were hard pressed in Manchuria in late 1946 by Chiang’s troops. While Mao’s fortunes in China hung in the balance, Soviet influence in Korea was undisputed, the most powerful Russian being General Terentii Shtykov, Stalin’s de facto viceroy.51 Many Korean Communist-nationalists were nonplussed when, in a lacklustre debut at a mass rally, Kim was flanked by three Red Army generals who listened gravely to his lengthy paean to Stalin. Kim implemented a programme of land reform and nationalization of industry. Around a million northerners fled south after experiencing the beginnings of Communist rule.52
The lands south of the parallel had been occupied by troops from a US corps stationed on Okinawa. Their commander was General John Reed Hodge, who answered to General Douglas MacArthur, America’s supremo in the Pacific theatre. MacArthur had little interest in this part of his imperium, and visited it only once in the five years before the outbreak of the Korean War in June 1950. Initially the Americans found the orderly Japanese occupiers more congenial than Korea’s fractious politicians. The US relied on former collaborating elites – including soldiers and policemen – and Korea’s own Flying Dutchman, Syngman Rhee, as governing institutions took shape. Although Syngman Rhee was regarded with suspicion by the US State Department, the tough old septuagenarian, known as the Walnut because of his leathery skin, had the immense advantage of being one of the few Koreans the Americans knew. Rhee understood ‘his’ Americans too. His devout Methodism, anti-Communism and authoritarianism fitted the job description of the sort of charismatic leader the US hoped would do their bidding in Asia. Members of the conservative Korean Democratic Party dominated the eleven-man advisory council established to aid the US Military Governor, while the rival Korean People’s Republic grouping and the labour unions were suppressed as Communist fronts, which they were not.
In December 1945, the Russians agreed to an American proposal that Korea should be entrusted to a Four Power International Trusteeship lasting five years. This would ease the transition to an independent and unified Korean state. In reality, both the Americans and the Soviets encouraged the consolidation of their own client governments, as they had been doing in Germany. A provisional legislature and interim government emerged in Seoul, dominated by conservatives who had collaborated with the Japanese. The Chief of Staff of the new South Korean Army was a former colonel in the Japanese army and his successor was also a former soldier in the Kwantung Army in Manchuria. While the Russians proposed that they and the US simply pull out of Korea, leaving local rivals to battle it out, the US persuaded the United Nations to support nationwide elections under UN supervision as a preliminary to US–Soviet withdrawal.
After North Korea had refused to accept these arrangements, the majority of members of a UN General Assembly Interim Committee on Kor
ea allowed elections to proceed only in the South.53 Although Rhee’s ‘police goons’ used considerable brutality to rig the outcome of elections, which the opposition boycotted, the UN accepted a result that brought Rhee to power in a coalition of conservative parties. After the establishment of the Republic of Korea (ROK) in July 1948, Syngman Rhee became its first president. Although he made a stab at eliminating former collaborators, under the December 1948 National Security Law some 58,000 leftist South Koreans were jailed amid endemic political violence, while the press was brought under stringent controls. In June 1949 one of Rhee’s most prominent critics was assassinated.54
The regime emerging in the South was far from universally popular, and not all the opposition came from so-called Communists, a term Americans were bandying around with decreasing discrimination. The political consolidation of the ROK ran into a regional insurgency that owed little to the guerrillas the North Koreans infiltrated into north-eastern Kangwon Province. Throughout South Korea People’s Committees had spontaneously come into existence amid the collapse of Japanese rule. Some of these were dominated by adherents of the left, notably in south-westerly Cholla and Kyongsang, and on the island of Cheju. In November 1946 US troops joined the police in repressing a peasant rebellion in Cholla. Known as the Autumn Harvest Rebellion, it was sparked in part by a dry monsoon season and a poor rice crop.55
On the island of Cheju socialism and separatism combined to fight against attempts by Syngman Rhee’s supporters to sideline the People’s Committees that had run the island’s affairs with minimal interference by the Americans since late 1945. The regime in Seoul introduced a rightist militia, called the North-west Youth Corps, to aid and abet the police in suppressing leftists with murderous violence. The rebels formed an insurgent force called the People’s Democratic Army. The US Army provided advisers to the police and militias, who then used Japanese counter-insurgency tactics to rid the island of rebels. This involved destroying interior villages and removing their inhabitants to the coast, where they could be closely controlled. The guerrillas were then attacked when the winter snows impeded their mobility and made them more visible. Anywhere between 30,000 and 60,000 islanders were killed in this pacification campaign, with a further 40,000 fleeing overseas to Japan.
Many members of the North-west Youth Corps were incorporated into the police, while a senior policeman from Seoul became one of the island’s deputies to the National Assembly. The rebellion on Cheju spread to ROK troops who refused to embark at a port called Yosu to fight the insurgents and then linked up with guerrillas. Korean officers who had fought for the Japanese in Manchuria used Japanese counter-insurgency methods to suppress them, with the Americans providing intelligence, aerial reconnaissance and C-47 transporters to move Korean troops into the war zones. It has been estimated that 100,000 Koreans died in these counter-insurgency operations, which ended a year before the Korean War broke out.
With the rebellions crushed, and a South Korean state in being, the US withdrew Hodge and the two remaining US divisions, confident that the 60,000-strong ROK armed forces could cope with any future challenges. All that remained of the US presence was a 500-man Korean Military Advisory Group. North of the parallel, Kim had proclaimed a Democratic Republic of North Korea in September 1948, rather as the establishment of the German Democratic Republic postdated the creation of the Federal Republic. Although the Soviets withdrew their forces in late 1948, their 120,000-strong Twenty-fifth Army handed its weapons to the newly formed Korean People’s Army as well as the arms the Soviets had earlier confiscated from two entire Japanese armies.
From May 1949 onwards, cross-border clashes between North and South intensified, involving ever greater numbers of troops. Although the US had denied the South Koreans heavy artillery, tanks and aircraft, this did not stop South Korea’s leaders from engaging in bellicose rhetoric. In October 1949 Syngman Rhee told a senior US journalist, ‘I am sure we could take Pyongyang . . . in three days.’ The same month the South Korean Defence Minister told the press that his troops were ‘ready to drive into North Korea. If we had our own way, we would have started already . . . We are strong enough to march up and take Pyongyang within a few days.’56 What some historians call a civil war to unify Korea, after forty years of Japanese occupation, was about to become the most dangerous crisis of the post-war years.57
3. ARAB NATIONALISM, JEWISH HOMELAND
It’s about Oil
With the defeat of Germany and Japan, some perspicacious American observers reckoned that the Soviets would focus their attention on the Middle East, where the British position seemed enfeebled. In addition to promoting Communist activity in Greece, the Soviets sought concessions from Iran and Turkey, using increasingly strongarm methods to achieve them. But were the Americans justified in seeing this as a pathological pattern, or was Stalin acting much more opportunistically as each new chance arose? Was he acting within the historic tradition of tsarist Russian policy, or was a more ideological ambition involved? Moreover, British imperial power throughout the region was being contested by nationalist movements that had almost nothing to do with Communism, towards which cultural Islam often proved a major obstacle.
The collapse of European authority in the Middle East after the Second World War was much less precipitate than what happened to the colonial powers in Asia. Although the British had a long-standing presence in Egypt and close relations with the Trucial Emirates of the Persian Gulf, their involvement in the area had only deepened in the final year of the First World War, when British Imperial forces drove the Germans’ Ottoman allies from their historic Arab dominions. Hegemony over this enormous area came to be seen as crucial to the survival of the British Empire, not only to ensure communications between Britain and India but also because of the strategic importance of oil deposits in Mesopotamia and Persia. Mesopotamia was the ancient Greek toponym for ‘land of the two rivers’, the cradle of ancient civilization between the Tigris and Euphrates where modern Iraq now sits; Persia was the vast ancient empire ultimately beneath modern Iran.1
After the First World War the British and French became the administrators of hugely increased imperial territories in the Middle East, usually as mandates from the League of Nations for a specified time. The trick was to turn them into the equivalent of perpetual tenancies through puppet rulers. Amir Abdullah’s Hashemite kingdom of Transjordan became the most dependable after the British had expelled his independent advisers in 1924. But it was Iraq that was supposed to exemplify the ‘civilized tutelage’ the British elites envisioned for these mandates, although in reality it was a defence in depth of the Anglo–Persian Oil Company, whose majority shareholder was the British government. In 1918 Anglo–Persian increased its controlling share of the Turkish Petroleum Company (renamed the Iraqi Petroleum Company) to 75 per cent after expropriating the 25 per cent formerly held by Deutsche Bank. Hashemite Amir Faisal, first proclaimed king of Syria, was transferred to the Iraqi throne in 1921 after a referendum from which the British subtracted rival contenders, shipping one of them to Ceylon. That Faisal was a Sunni and that the majority of Iraqis were Shiite simply perpetuated the divide-and-rule strategy employed by the Ottomans. At his pre-dawn coronation ceremony, the band played the British anthem, ‘God Save the King’.
The Anglo–Iraqi Treaty of 1922 cemented British influence over a nominally independent Iraq for twenty years, during which resistance was ruthlessly suppressed. Iraqi crude was not even refined locally and was of little benefit to the local population, 90 per cent of whom were still illiterate in 1950. When the British mandate expired in 1932, a new treaty pared down the British presence to a military minimum, retaining two air bases at Habbaniyah and Shaiba and the right of their armed forces to transit the country. Two years later Iraq became the first Arab state to be admitted to the League of Nations. Its independence remained a sham in the eyes of Iraqi nationalists, and it was also a hotbed of ethnic and sectarian animosities between Kurds and A
rabs, Sunnis and Shias, and political tensions between the army, the elites and left-wing reformers.
Resentments grew towards a monarch who was nothing more than a British client, and the resentful seized their moment when fate resulted in that shaky moment for all monarchies, a period of regency and minority rule. After Faisal had died in Switzerland in 1933, his son Ghazi, a Harrow-educated playboy with a love of fast cars, took over until he drove one at high speed into a lamppost in April 1939. The throne passed to three-year-old Faisal II under the regency of Ghazi’s twenty-six-year-old cousin Abdullah, with a pro-British prime minister called Nuri as-Said. Once the Second World War had broken out, opponents of the regime were naturally drawn towards Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. In April 1941 the pro-Axis Rashid Ali al-Gayani deposed Abdullah and Nuri and appointed the Mufti of Jerusalem to his new cabinet, prompting the British to intervene in strength in what Iraqis call the ‘Thirty Days War’. Baghdad’s Jewish community fell victim to a terrible pogrom in the period before the British established control. As the chief inciter of these riots, the Mufti had blamed an alleged Zionist fifth column for the fall of the Rashid Ali regime. Unlike Iraqi Christians, the Jews had indeed been indiscreet in their warm welcome for the British. Rashid Ali and the Mufti fled, the latter to the Japanese embassy in Tehran, which proved an uncertain sanctuary.
Meanwhile Faisal II was sent to Harrow to become more thoroughly anglicized than his Bedouin father. Commercial sharp practice ensured that the Iraqi Petroleum Company kept the lion’s share of Iraq’s oil profits, with very little of the remainder invested in anything that might have benefited ordinary Iraqis rather than their profligate rulers. The arrangement continued until 1958, when King Faisal, his Crown Prince and Nuri As-Said were brutally murdered in a popular uprising and Iraq embarked on its future as a republic.2
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