Ghosts of Empire (10 page)

The short war had cost 1,200 British lives and over 8,000 Iraqi. The attempt to detach Iraq, with its useful oilfields, from the Allied cause had failed. Yet the war had stirred a large section of the Arab world against the British. In a speech broadcast on 9 May 1941, the Mufti declared jihad against Britain and invited every able-bodied Muslim to take part in a war against the ‘greatest foe of Islam', the British Empire.
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Meanwhile the British government had become concerned that the oil of Iraq could fall into the wrong hands. A memorandum on the subject by Major Desmond Morton for the War Cabinet, dated 4 June, argued that even though Abd al-Ilah and Nuri were back in power it might prove safer to destroy the oilfields altogether than to leave things to the hazard of an increasingly volatile political situation in Iraq. Morton found that there ‘is no known means of destroying the Iraq oil fields themselves'. Even if the fifty wells were set alight, they would ‘burn for about 10 years'. He thought it would be better ‘to start work on the destruction of the pipelines'.
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The British government did not act on this, concluding that the political situation did not warrant such drastic action.

The return of Abd al-Ilah and Nuri As-Said completed the triumph of the British faction in Baghdad. Nuri As-Said, though not as polished an
Anglophile as Abd al-Ilah, was a noted survivor in Iraqi politics and dominated the political scene for much of the thirty-year reign of the Hashemite monarchs in Iraq. Nuri had been born in 1888 to a middle-class Baghdad family and was outside the privileged ruling elite. It was his military experience that smoothed his path to power and influence. Trained by a German colonel in Constantinople, as a young Turkish army officer, in the years before 1914, he had fought under Faisal in the Arab revolt. He had got to know T. E. Lawrence at that time, who praised his ‘courage, authority and coolness'. He had first become prime minister in 1930 and would hold that office a further six times. Nuri's methods were methodical, steady and unchanging. He had modest, some might say ascetic, tastes, rising at six in the morning, consuming grapefruit and coffee, while listening to the news on Voice of America.
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A small man with a chubby face and bushy eyebrows, Nuri was a loyal friend who delighted in children and always acted as the ‘most perfect of hosts'. To his friends and admirers, he was a statesman in the grand manner. International strategy ‘seems to have been the breath of [his] life in much the same way as it always absorbed so much of the mind and energy of Winston Churchill', wrote one British observer in a book published shortly after Nuri's death.
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Unlike Churchill, however, Nuri was feared and hated by his own people.

Nuri's modest tastes contrasted with the extravagance and vulgar posturing of Abd al-Ilah, the Crown Prince. An incident in America in the early 1950s captures the difference between them. When out walking in Washington, the two men looked at men's suits in a shop window, and Nuri pronounced himself impressed by the seersucker suit; the Crown Prince merely commented that such suits were appropriate for the ‘working class'. Nuri, nonetheless eager to buy one, was eventually dissuaded, but he was gratified to see President Truman wearing the same suit the next day. Despite this apparent modesty, Nuri, the strongman of Iraq, was widely viewed within Iraq as a British stooge.
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He and Abd al-Ilah wanted to keep Britain on their side. They thought that all would be well as long as the oilwells kept on producing their liquid gold. The war, in the first instance, had not altered the position in Iraq significantly. The same people were still in power–the British still had a
strong presence in the country and the Iraq Petroleum Company still presided over the oilfields. Archives relating to Iraq in the period immediately after the end of the Second World War give a striking impression of continuity. In December 1947, Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah could write to Stewart Perowne, the wartime public relations officer in the British Embassy, expressing his pleasure at seeing Perowne while visiting England that summer and stating that hunting had started up again in Baghdad, where the first meeting of the season would take place on 12 December.

After the war was over, it was only to be a matter of time before little King Faisal reached the age of majority and took control of the government. Faisal's education was a very British affair; like any young English boy of the upper-middle classes, he was sent to a British preparatory school, Sandroyd in Wiltshire, which the future Prime Minister Anthony Eden had enjoyed so much in the years before 1914. From Sandroyd, Faisal wrote a letter, in January 1949, thanking Perowne for the parcel of sugar he had sent him, because during the post-war austerity in England ‘one has great difficulty in finding such lovely sugar'. Faisal claimed to be enjoying school ‘very much', though he missed ‘Baghdad and the lovely warm sun'.
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The next term, the Lent term of 1949, Faisal entered Harrow, from where he informed Perowne that was he ‘getting on much better' as he now had learned his ‘way around'. Faisal was a good student at the school, more successful there than his cousin Hussein, later King of Jordan, who was six months his junior. Faisal was attentive, quick and eager. He was, as a consequence of Sandroyd and Harrow, by far the most Anglicized of the three kings of Iraq; his grandfather, Faisal I, had spoken very little English, while his father had been too restless and resentful to pass himself off as a real English gentleman, even if he had wished to do so. Faisal II, by contrast, was a proud specimen of the Anglo-Arab gentleman, and had grown up, after his father's death, in an atmosphere ‘unerringly Anglophile'. He had been brought up by a ‘proper English nurse maid', as well as by ‘a proper English governess'. Young Faisal was popular at Harrow, where he cultivated the ‘gentlemanly manner'. He liked sport, art and cheerful living and spoke English ‘with an impeccable metropolitan accent. His clothes were Savile Row, and he never looked more attractive or more at
his ease than when, in a bowler hat and a duffle coat, he peered at some tweedy open-air function.' His tradition was that of the ‘Eton Maharajas', a tradition that had produced urbane sportsmen and gentlemen, rich, smooth, genial young men who were perfectly at ease in the clubs of St James's and Pall Mall, but who couldn't relate, even remotely, to the people they were meant to be ruling. In Faisal II's case, few Iraqis felt close to him. He was born ‘cruelly out of his time'.
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While Nuri As-Said, the Crown Prince and the young King Faisal II were trying their best to keep internal order, the Iraq Petroleum Company reaped the rewards of the capital investment it had made before the war. Oil production in Iraq had increased substantially from the time of the struggles between the French, the Americans and the British in the immediate aftermath of the First World War. In 1934, Iraq exported only 600,000 tons of oil a year; in 1950 the figure hit 6.5 million tons. Oil production in the Middle East had exploded during that time, with the production figure in 1950 being nine times the total production of oil in 1934. General worldwide production did not experience anything like the same growth, increasing by only 50 per cent between 1934 and 1950.
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Oil brought riches to the oil-producing states of the Middle East and it altered the relationship between their governments and the West, while also changing the relationship between those governments and the people. Iraq's oil revenues were boosted to a remarkable extent. From £1.5 million in 1941, the figure had reached £5.2 million by 1950, an increase of nearly 250 per cent.

The government of Iraq always had a thorny relationship with the Iraq Petroleum Company. The IPC's annual report of 1936 referred to ‘certain difficulties which had arisen between the Government and the Company' in respect of ‘lands acquired by the Company'. The same report shows just how wily the company could be in its dealings with the Iraqi government. It entered a deal in 1936 which allowed it to pay rent on government-owned property until 1941 at ‘rates in force in 1931'. The years 1931 and 1932 had been the hardest of the global economic slump, as prices and rents reached all-time lows, so fixing rents at 1931 levels was a particularly shrewd move on the part of the company's directors. Towards the end of the war, in the 1943 annual report published in May 1944, the company
looked forward to the ‘final Victory' which, it believed, was ‘somewhere round the corner'. This victory would allow a ‘further expansion of the company's activities' and would make the need for plans to ‘meet demands for increased production' more urgent.

The 1952 annual report showed that the days when the company could do what it liked were coming to an end, the IPC proudly declaring that a ‘number of Iraqi doctors were recruited during the year' while the ‘training of Iraqi girls as nurses continued'. This kind of extracurricular pursuit was hardly the sort of thing of which Mr Gulbenkian would have approved. By the early 1950s, Gulbenkian himself was living in the Aviz, a luxury hotel in Lisbon, enjoying his £5,000,000 yearly dividend. Meanwhile, the IPC had to deal with realities on the ground in Iraq. People were on the streets protesting; increased revenues from oil production only accentuated the difference between the middle class, who could enjoy the country's increasing prosperity, and the vast urban poor, who had no share in that wealth. In the meantime, the Iraqi government was successfully lobbying for a greater share in the growing revenues derived from oil production. The 1952 annual report indicated how far things had changed. In February that year a new profit-sharing agreement was ratified by the Iraqi parliament which meant that Iraq now received nearly £29 million from the operations of the company, nearly six times the £5 million earned in 1950, only two years before.
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The company had to go further in appeasing the Iraqi people.

During the debate on the new profit-sharing agreement in the Iraqi parliament, Nuri is said to have invited any members of parliament who thought they could have negotiated better terms to take his place. There was popular discontent over the arrangement. The IPC still shrouded many of its operations in mystery. Certainly, its accounts from the 1930s through to the 1960s do not accord with more modern ideas of corporate governance. No annual sales figure is provided, and only the amount sold, with the resulting royalty, is revealed. Nothing like an ordinary profit and loss account, or balance sheet, or any of the normal paraphernalia of modern corporate accounting is presented. There were other accusations relating to the company's accounting in these years. Exploration and drilling costs were put under operating costs rather than capital
expenditures. This sounds technical, but it had the very practical result that the company's annual profit was shown to be lower than a fair valuation would have ensured.
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The cost of running the head office in London was also listed under operating costs, further depressing the profits from which the Iraqi government would be paid.

In the 1950s, as oil was beginning to bring tangible wealth to Iraq, large cities were founded, for instance at Kirkuk in the north of the country, while further south Baghdad itself was being filled with grand new buildings; expensive suburbs sprang up; air-conditioned hotels arose, as if by magic, from the desert. Yet the urban masses remained much as they were before, impoverished and illiterate. Even in 1958 only one in seven of the population was literate. By 1950, in a country with a population of nearly 5 million, there were still only 121 secondary schools, with barely 22,000 students enrolled.
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Iraq remained highly dependent on oil, which provided 65 per cent of the state's total revenue in 1954.
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The price of Iraqi crude, however, in those pre-OPEC days, was determined by the few firms which dominated the international oil industry, not by market forces.

Meanwhile Nuri was desperately trying to cling on to power.
Time
magazine, in a feature entitled ‘The Pasha', described him as looking like a ‘grizzled old bear' with his ‘big ears and jet-black bushy brows'. He was, in the view of the magazine's correspondent, a ‘dictator' who ruled Iraqis with ‘an indifference to their opinion that verges on contempt'. He needed to be resourceful and he continued to be what Gertrude Bell had called him all those years before, a ‘supple force'. But, for all his suppleness and guile, Nuri had now become cynical and more intolerant. There were new rumours that spoke of his growing partiality to whisky. In 1954, he banned political parties, after elections didn't go as planned; he had become increasingly autocratic.

The decline of British prestige in the Middle East in the course of the 1950s undermined the position of Nuri and his Hashemite masters. The sureness of touch that had characterized British diplomacy in the region had, it seemed to many observers, disappeared. The Hashemites and their Anglo-Arab friends, with their Savile Row suits and Bertie Wooster manners, looked out of date and irrelevant when compared to politicians like Gamal Abdel Nasser, the charismatic Arab nationalist, who had
taken power in Egypt in 1952. Under Nuri and Faisal II, Iraq remained isolated from the mainstream of Arab nationalism, although on the streets of Baghdad Arab nationalism was a growing and more conspicuous force.

Nuri had the good sense to create an Iraqi Development Board that would channel 70 per cent of the Iraqi state's oil revenue into infrastructure spending. But this money was directed towards large development projects, dams, bridges and the like, when schools and hospitals were increasingly demanded by the Iraqi people. While the Iraqi Development Board built sixteen dams, the population of Baghdad had doubled to 1 million in the five years from 1952 to 1957. Most of these people lived in shanty towns, while the earth-floored mud hut continued to be a characteristic feature of the Iraqi countryside. The Development Board was a great boon to the economists, planners, architects and engineers who thronged Baghdad from the West. It was said that there were at least a hundred American officials associated with it, whose salaries were paid directly by agencies of the US government. One English economist observed that the Development Board ‘in discharging its responsibility has made a skilful use of foreign experience, notably through the employment of consulting firms'. Yet in the 1954 budget the amount of public expenditure committed to the police force was 50 per cent greater than the money spent on education.
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The consultants and their wives were enjoying themselves. Many thousands of people had come from Britain, Europe and America to gorge themselves, so it appeared to many Iraqis, on funds supplied by the Iraqi taxpayer.