Ghosts of Empire (5 page)

Although a committed imperialist, Winston Churchill, as secretary of state for air and war, argued for more economy in spending in the Middle East. In the summer of 1920, the large number of casualties and the high cost of the military campaign had provoked a political reaction against the mandate and Britain's imperial mission in the Arab world. In August, a
Times
editorial asked, ‘what is the total number of casualties we have
suffered in Mesopotamia during the single month of July, in our efforts to emancipate the Arabs, to fulfil our mandate, and to smooth the way for the seekers after oil?' In Parliament, the Labour Party were lobbying for a complete withdrawal from Iraq. Churchill, as a senior member of the Lloyd George coalition, was pragmatic enough to suggest that the ‘cost of garrisoning Iraq' was ‘prohibitive' and ‘out of all proportion to its value'.

Combined with high costs, there was also administrative confusion. Britain's empire in the Middle East had come into being only as a result of the defeat and collapse of the Ottoman Empire. There was little infrastructure in Whitehall, the centre of the imperial government in London, from which to administer the new empire in the Middle East. Nominally, the Foreign Office was responsible for Palestine, Egypt and the Sudan, while the India Office was responsible for the Gulf and Iraq. The War Office also had considerable authority in the region. Middle East policy was a battleground, in which each of the three departments sought to gain advantage over the other two.
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By February 1921, Iraq had returned to a peaceful state. Churchill, who had now been moved to become secretary of state for the colonies, was anxious to create a more stable Iraq, at a much cheaper price. He had also staked a claim for the Middle East for his new department, the Colonial Office. Curzon, still foreign secretary, was anxious to maintain the prestige of his department, and in reality the Foreign Office still retained responsibility for Egypt, Persia and Central Asia. Churchill, with characteristic energy, convened a conference in Cairo in March 1921, after just a few weeks in the job. In the pleasant warmth of the Cairo sun, at favoured colonial-era haunts like the Shepheard's Hotel, the Middle East experts of the British Empire gathered and, for three weeks, discussed the various problems which faced Britain in this turbulent part of the world. From Cairo, on 23 March, Gertrude Bell wrote to Humphrey Bowman, the Old Etonian Arabist, that the ‘stream of nationalist sentiment' was often ‘the only visible movement' in Arab politics.
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The most famous man at the conference of the ‘forty thieves', as Churchill called it, was undoubtedly T. E. Lawrence, an ‘object at once of awe and pity'.
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Lawrence continues to fascinate Western minds, influenced perhaps unduly by what is perceived to be the romance of the East. His participation in Iraqi affairs was peripheral, despite the fact that
regarded himself as a ‘foundation-member' of the new kingdom of Iraq.
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Lawrence famously was convinced of the need for the Arabs to be independent. He boasted as much to Charlotte Shaw, the wife of the playwright George Bernard Shaw, declaring that he had been ‘right to work for Arab self-government through 1919 and 1920'. The self-government he had in mind was a figment of his own romantic imagination. Despite his vaunted support for the cause of Arab self-determination, Lawrence told Mrs Shaw in the same letter that the Arabs were not yet ready for the self-government he had so generously conceived for them. ‘As for Irak [sic] . . . some day they will be fit for self-government and then they will not want a king: but whether 7 or 70 or 700 years hence, God knows.'
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He was clear that until the Iraqis proved ‘fit' for self-government they would have to make do with a king, provided by Britain.

The monarchy that the British so obligingly gave to the Iraqi people would, in the long run, produce as many problems as it supplied solutions. Faisal, the new king, was a thirty-eight-year-old Sunni from the Hejaz, on the Red Sea, to the west of the modern kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and he had spent his earliest years among the Bedouin tribesmen. As a member of the Hashemite family, he was descended from the Prophet Mohammed in the thirty-eighth generation, and his father, Hussein bin Ali, was the Sharif of Mecca, the keeper of the holy city. The Hashemites had been subordinate in status to the Ottoman Sultan, who presided over the extensive Ottoman Empire from the Topkapı Palace in Constantinople. Faisal, as was the custom for the sons of important dignitaries in the Ottoman Empire, had spent time in Constantinople. He had been educated to play his part as a high official in the empire, not to become a leader of an Arab nation. He had been befriended during the First World War by T. E. Lawrence, to whom he seemed an obvious candidate to be king of Iraq. The British felt that a king would be a convenient stabilizing figure in the country's unsettled political situation. The precise ethnic origins of the monarch were regarded as a minor consideration. Gertrude Bell, in a letter to her father at the end of January 1921, had wondered whether a Turk might not be a better bulwark against the Shias than a ‘son of the Sharif'; the Sunnis of Baghdad were worried that they would be swamped by the Shias, and
the Ottoman Turks had shown themselves historically to be fierce antagonists of the Shias.
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The Cairo conference had set Faisal on the way to becoming king of Iraq. A plebiscite was arranged in which he got 96 per cent of the vote, enough to give a veneer of popular legitimacy to the new dynasty. T. E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell were proud of their handiwork. Bell wrote to her father on 28 August 1921, in a gushing manner, telling him about the ‘terrific week' she had just enjoyed. ‘We've got our King crowned.' Faisal's coronation had taken place the week before; at six in the morning of the 2 1 st he had stood in a military uniform and been formally crowned and proclaimed king.
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A political solution of a kind had been found, in which Iraq would be a constitutional monarchy, with a constituent assembly, under the aegis of the British Empire. It was a Sunni monarchy in a country most of whose people were Shia. In October 1922, a treaty between Britain and Iraq was signed which proved to be the ‘backbone of Britain's indirect rule'. Mindful of the costs of imperial rule, the British government insisted that the Iraqis paid for the costs of the British Residency, where the High Commissioner would live, and other general costs of administration. Over all these arrangements hung the ‘smell of oil'.
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If the political problem of control had now been partially solved, how would the oil itself be obtained? What structure would now be required to serve the British Empire's interest in this important matter?

Gertrude Bell had never bothered about oil. By 1926, she was tired and on Sunday 11 July, after the usual afternoon swimming party, she returned home, worn out by the dust and heat. She went to bed, asking to be woken at 6 a.m. During the night, she took an overdose of pills, from which she died. The circumstances of her death remain obscure. What is known is that she had sent a note to Ken Cornwallis, a British adviser to the King of Iraq, the day before, asking him to look after her dog Tundra, ‘if anything happened to her'. Her death certificate, signed off by Dr Dunlop of the Royal Hospital in Baghdad, stated that she had died from an overdose.
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Her death was widely mourned, as she had been a celebrated figure within the British establishment. She had believed in her personal mission. ‘Seven years I've been at this job of setting up an Arab state. If we fail, it's little
consolation to me personally that other generations may succeed,' she told her father in January 1923.
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More than a year after her death, T. E. Lawrence expressed his sense of loss to Gertrude's father. He had never, he wrote, met ‘anyone more entirely civilized, in the sense of her width of intellectual sympathy . . . her loss must be nearly unbearable'.
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Others, less sentimentally, began to wonder about the oil.

Even before the First World War, many politicians and administrators had realized how important oil would be to the maintenance of the British Empire. At the same time, Arab nationalism was acknowledged to be a potent factor in Iraqi affairs. Trying to create a regime that would allow relatively unhindered access to the oil of Iraq was a delicate operation. By early 1922, a political settlement had been reached, in which a broadly pro-British ruler, foreign to Iraq, had been installed. It was now time to reach a commercial settlement in which Iraq's oil wealth could be efficiently exploited.

Conveniently enough, there already existed a company, the Turkish Petroleum Company, or TPC, which had been formed in 1912 precisely to exploit the oil found in the old Ottoman Empire. The company had been interested in Iraq more as an investment, a medium-term bet rather than a ‘get rich quick' scheme. The TPC's initial capital had been £80,000, which made it a relatively small concern even in those days. In the eighteen years from 1910 to 1928 Iraq could ‘scarcely be called an oil producer'. In 1929 the annual production figure was still only 800,000 barrels. Iran, Iraq's Shia neighbour, produced 42.1 million barrels of oil in the same year, more than fifty times as much.
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It was, in fact, only in 1927 that oil was struck. This did not deter the great powers, least of all Britain. A note prepared by the Middle East Department of the Colonial Office on 11 December 1922 was quite clear about the importance of Iraq's oil. The oilfields of Iraq were rich with potential and they had not ‘even been properly prospected'. The report confidently stated that there was ‘no doubt that there are considerable deposits of oil', particularly in Mosul, in the north of the country.
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The successful conclusion of the war had strengthened British political interests in the Middle East and, by diminishing the power of the Turks and the Germans, it had also provided a powerful boost to British enterprise. ‘Furthermore, the treaty of October 10, 1922 between Great Britain and the Kingdom of Irak' had conferred ‘sufficiently wide “advisory” powers upon the British High Commissioner at Baghdad' to protect the ‘economic rights' of British nationals in the country. More particularly, in relation to the Turkish Petroleum Company, the German defeat had strengthened Britain's hand. Deutsche Bank, Germany's greatest financial enterprise, had been an initial investor in the TPC when it was formed back in 19 12. Because Germany had lost the war, however, the Deutsche Bank shares in the TPC–amounting to 25 per cent of the company–were simply expropriated in December 1918. The British were already well represented in the company: Anglo-Persian, which would many years later be called Anglo-Iranian and then British Petroleum, or BP, owned 50 per cent. Consequently, when combined with the Deutsche Bank shares, the British stake in the company was three-quarters of the shares. The Anglo-Persian Company itself was majority-owned (51 per cent) by the British government, thanks to a deal brokered in 1914. This deal had been considered ‘radical' for the times, since no British government had ever acquired shares in any private enterprise in this way.
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This shareholding was not only useful in itself. It provided a bargaining chip with which Britain could keep its wartime allies, who were now potential commercial rivals, happy–the prospect of acquiring shares in the much prized company was an alluring prospect during any diplomatic negotiations. In the aftermath of the war the Sykes–Picot Agreement had been buried and Mosul reverted to British control. In compensation, the San Remo Agreement of April 1920 granted the former German stake of 25 per cent to the French, and the British share was reduced to around a half.
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Eliminating the Germans, who had been the principal capitalists and investors in the country before the First World War, from the scramble for Iraqi oil wealth was fortunate for the British. The famous Berlin–Baghdad railway had been a German enterprise, financed by German capital and built largely by German engineers. The Baghdad Railway Company had
begun, even before 1914, using local crude oil to fuel its locomotives.
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As early as 1904 the Germans had prevailed on the Ottoman Sultan in Constantinople, Abdul Hamid, to grant them a railway concession, which gave them the right to survey for oil in Mosul and Baghdad.
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The Turks had been less obliging on the issue of oil rights. Although they had allowed the German railway company to prospect for oil, they refused to recognize the claim of the actual oil company, the TPC. After intensive lobbying, the oil concession in the provinces of Mosul and Baghdad was finally granted on 27 June 1914, the day before Archduke Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo.
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By the end of the war in 1918, the position had become confused. Britain had strengthened its position immeasurably. It now controlled most of the oil in the Middle East. Anglo-Persian was dominant in Iran, the TPC controlled Iraqi oil, while oil in the Gulf had not yet been discovered. Britain's enemies, the German Empire and the Ottoman Empire, had collapsed, allowing Churchill to remark that the end of the war had witnessed a ‘drizzle of empires' falling through the rain. There were some annoyances. King Fuad of Egypt claimed that he was now de facto heir of the sultans and therefore the rightful owner of any oil found in the old Ottoman Empire. The exiled Turkish royal family also claimed the oil rights. While their claims could be ignored, a more formidable business negotiator emerged in the shape of Calouste Gulbenkian, an Armenian merchant, as he called himself, who had brokered the initial deal in 1912. His tenacity in holding on to his small shareholding in the company would provoke the ire of the colonial powers and make him tremendously rich. Though his initial stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company had been 15 per cent, he managed to keep hold of 5 per cent during the negotiations of the 1920s and hence earned the sobriquet ‘Mr Five Per Cent'.
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