Ghosts of Empire (9 page)

The country itself was largely feudal. It was a place where the scriptural injunction ‘an eye for an eye' was still the rule; murder had to be the price of murder. It would be committed by a near relative of the first victim on some member of the aggressor tribe. All that was required of women was
to ‘produce sons . . . to milk, bake, make butter and cheese and weave mats and clothing'.
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It would be a mistake to describe the landscape as rural, as this conjures up images of rolling fields. The heat in Iraq was its most conspicuous feature. A writer in the 1930s described dust storms as ‘frequent'. The ‘least breath of wind sets the desert sand in motion', people commonly said. The extreme heat, where temperatures of 120 degrees Fahrenheit (45 degrees Centigrade) were common in summer, meant that it was a harsh environment for people who had just arrived from Europe. Under those sort of climatic conditions, ‘a man will leave his bath, dry himself' and find himself, the next moment, ‘as wet with perspiration as when in the bath'.
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The country was poor. What wealth existed was concentrated in very few hands. During the time of the Hashemite monarchy, only twenty-three banking and manufacturing families possessed between 50 and 65 per cent of the entire private capital of the country.
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In economic terms, Iraqi society was a narrow oligarchy. In politics, the country was more or less an absolute monarchy. As we have seen, Faisal came from the Hashemite family, whose main distinction was its descent from the Prophet Mohammed's daughter, Fatima. This connection made them ‘lord of lords' and the ‘grandest family of Islam', although they had been compelled to yield to the caliphs in Constantinople before the caliphate itself was abolished in 1924. Despite the undoubted prestige the Hashemite family enjoyed within the Islamic world, their interests and manners were more Western than Muslim.

Faisal's son Ghazi, who succeeded to the Iraqi throne aged twenty-one in 1933, was hardly a paragon of Islamic virtue. Obsessed with speed and glamour, he was a rather raffish Harrovian with an air of ‘reckless and unconventional independence'. As a child, he rode Arab racing stallions. At Harrow, he learned how to dismantle a high-compression engine, even before he learned to speak good English. The
Iraq Times
would comment on his new polo ponies, as he was an excellent horseman who played polo three times a week. New things fascinated him. In Iraq, after his expensive education in England, he bought one ‘flashy car after another', a Mercedes in phosphorescent paint being especially noteworthy. His craving for speed took him to the air, and in March 1939 he accepted delivery of a
British plane which could fly at 200 miles an hour. The Prince enjoyed cars, planes, motorcycles, girls and well-cut clothes, in no particular order.

On 4 April 1939, the twenty-seven-year-old King, after having a few drinks, got into his car to drive to the Harthiya Palace, a few miles from Baghdad. He was driving an open-top sports car with two companions in the back. As he sped past a crossing, he lost control of the car, shot off the road and crashed into a lamp-post. His two companions were killed instantly. His own skull was crushed and he died within an hour.
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The King's sudden death made the political situation difficult for the British. Despite his education at Harrow and his taste for Savile Row suits, Ghazi was the most anti-British of his family. His independent spirit railed against the control that London had imposed on his country. It was widely believed by Iraqi nationalists that his death was not accidental but had been orchestrated by the wicked British colonial power. The King had flirted with European fascism, but his anti-British actions amounted to nothing more than an openly expressed desire to annex Kuwait, which remained a British protectorate under the ruling Al-Sabah family, and to assert Iraqi military independence. Kuwait's sovereignty had been guaranteed in 1899 by Britain in an agreement with Sheikh Mubarak bin Sabah al-Sabah which also bound the Sheikh, his heirs and successors not to ‘cede, sell, lease, mortgage or give for occupation or any other purpose any portion of his territory to the Government or subjects of any other power' without the previous consent of the British government.
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Those who believed that the young King had been killed by the British suspected the connivance of high-placed Iraqi officials, such as Nuri As-Said, who had been bribed for their support. Crowds began to gather in a number of cities. In Mosul, the oil centre in the north, 260 miles up the Tigris from Baghdad, anti-British feeling was strong. Early on the morning of 5 April, the day after Ghazi's fatal accident, a large crowd gathered at the gates of the British Consulate, where the Consul, George Monck-Mason, and his wife lived. Monck-Mason, ‘a trim, clipped civil servant' according to
Time
magazine, appeared on the balcony to placate the crowd. He spoke good Arabic and proceeded to explain what had happened. He said that Ghazi's death had been an accident, which the crowd refused to believe. A group of men broke into the Consulate,
wielding pickaxes. In scenes reminiscent of General Gordon's death in Khartoum, more than fifty years previously, Monck-Mason was struck from behind as he stood on the balcony. It was an unfortunate end to a good, if unspectacular, career. Monck-Mason was described in the
Iraq Times
as a ‘man of quiet and studious type'. He was, his obituarist noted, ‘one of the finest linguists in the Levant consular service'. This was a period when Britons were good at languages, but, even by pre-war imperial service standards, Monck-Mason was exceptional. He was reputed to ‘speak no fewer than nine languages', having spent ‘nearly all his life in the Near and Middle East'.
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Monck-Mason's linguistic skills, and his career in general, point to an interesting feature of the British imperial service. The people dispatched to administer imperial justice in the far reaches of the empire were highly motivated by a desire to be there. They invariably learned the languages and immersed themselves in the cultures of the places they lived in. This meant that, for many administrators, an entire lifetime was spent, far from home, in a strange environment. It was unsurprising that many went native.

Throughout Iraq, the unpopularity of the British had not yet, in the late 1930s, reached the heights it would in the 1950s. Yet many Iraqis detected in British rule an arrogance and aloofness which meant that the reaction, when it came, was likely to be violent. Nubar Gulbenkian, the son of Mr Five Per Cent, had detected the ‘first rumblings of change' in 1931 when he was in Baghdad. One small instance of the ‘covert resentment' of the British occurred when the British Ambassador had ordered a small Arab hamlet to be removed so that he could ‘extend the gardens of the British Embassy' in the city. Nubar remarked, with some understatement, that the ‘Ambassador had undoubtedly improved what was already a beautiful residence but he made himself less than universally popular with the Iraqis'.
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On the whole, British civil servants and company workers were not adaptable. The businessmen kept themselves apart and socialized with each other, avoiding locals. British habits–clubs, horse racing, boar hunts –were maintained to a remarkable extent. The papers of Sir Harry Sinderson, an Edinburgh-trained doctor who was employed as physician to the Iraqi King and royal family in Baghdad between 1921 and 1946,
paint a vivid picture of British life in the heart of Iraq before the Second World War. In Baghdad, Sinderson took a keen interest in the Casuals, a cricket club based in the city, which held its dinners in the Alwiyah Club; it would also play the RAF team at the Alwiyah ground. The Casuals kept up their dinners even after the outbreak of the Second World War, with its toast to the club in verse:

The Alwiyah Club was a large complex. It provided a cinema, a venue for dances, sport, swimming pools and good old-fashioned British gossip. It was proudly referred to as the ‘hub of Anglo-Saxon' life in Iraq.
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There was also the Royal Society of St George which celebrated St George's Day, the national day of England, every year on 23 April. The 1938 dinner was a memorable occasion. The event was diligently written up in the
Iraq Times
, an English-language publication, which referred obsequiously to ‘Dr H. C. Sinderson Pasha, this year's President', and declared proudly that the main course had been the ‘Roast Beef of Old England', which had been specially imported. For dessert, the 128 guests enjoyed blackberry and apple pie with Devonshire cream. After reading a message from King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, Sinderson went on to give a speech. It was entitled, inevitably enough, ‘England'.

Sir Harry, who had represented Edinburgh University at both cricket and soccer, was a fanatical sportsman and enjoyed playing cricket in Iraq well into his fifties. The newspaper cuttings he kept refer to such events as puppy shows or the ‘first meet of the Baghdad Boar Hunt' in the 1936 season, of which Mr D. R. de C. Macpherson was the Master. There was the Bromilow Cup for pigsticking, in which people hunted boar with spears on horseback. Pigsticking was a typical imperial sport, popular with maharajas in India and with British officers. Military authorities encouraged it, because it provided good training for cavalry officers. Against a startled or angry wild boar, the pigsticker had to ‘possess a good eye, a steady hand, a firm seat, a cool head and a courageous heart'.
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To the extent that Ghazi had been regarded as unsympathetic to Britain's interests, his death was convenient for British officials, despite the civil unrest which ensued.
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His successor, Faisal II, was only three years old when he came to the throne. Strict primogeniture ensured the young Faisal's accession to the throne, but it was customary in Arab countries for respect to be shown to the eldest man of the family, so it was perfectly understandable that King Ghazi's cousin, Abd al-Ilah, a young man of twenty-six, would be chosen as regent. In Abd al-Ilah, the British now had a safe man, a man who was viewed as being ‘one of us'. His story, perhaps, more than that of any single individual, may stand as a metaphor for the British connection with Iraq, a connection based on money-making and chronic disengagement from the actual lives led by the ordinary people of Iraq.

Abd al-Ilah had been born in 1913, the son of Faisal I's elder brother, Ali. He had been educated in Egypt at the elite Victoria College in Alexandria, ‘a transplanted English public school' which had educated the sons of the Middle Eastern elite since 1902, and whose alumni would later include Edward Said, the Palestinian intellectual, and Omar Sharif, the actor. This educational background had made Abd al-Ilah ‘more at home among the English than the Iraqis'. Reticent, suave and ‘more English than the English', he became the stereotype of the Anglo-Arab pasha with his well-cut suits and his taste for cricket. He had the ‘house party charm and sophistication' which could ‘easily be imagined living in well-heeled exile in Sunningdale or Newport, Rhode Island'. He was calculating and smooth, but not as clever as he imagined himself to be. A small, dark, fastidiously tidy moustache testified to his vanity.
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In the course of the regency, which lasted until 1953, when Faisal II turned eighteen, Abd al-Ilah succeeded in earning a bad reputation with the Iraqis. He was viewed, rightly or wrongly, as a snob, a man who had married three times and indulged in a seedy love life. He flaunted a string of mistresses, though there were rumours of sexual impotence. According to popular legend, he dined every night at the British Embassy, where he and the Ambassador supposedly ate and conversed alone. Abd al-Ilah, remarkably, indulged a passion for fox hunting by importing foxhounds from England. He cruised around Baghdad in a Rolls-Royce. A crowd of social climbers, drawn from
the English, American and European community, continually sought his company. Yet much of the excess still lay in the future. In 1939 the full extent of the fragility of the monarchy had not yet been revealed.

Contrary to expectations, the war that broke out in 1939 did not bring forth another figure like Lawrence in the military theatre of the Middle East. Many in the Arab world felt that they had supported Britain against the Ottoman Empire only to be let down at the peace conferences after the First World War, when an independent Arab state failed to emerge from the wreckage of the old Ottoman imperium. In Iraq, even though Abd al-Ilah, the Regent, and his leading minister, Nuri As-Said, backed Britain, a number of army officers were more inclined to support the Nazis, as was a significant portion of the Arab world. The Mufti of Jerusalem, a committed anti-Zionist who would meet Hitler himself in Berlin in 1941, and his pan-Arab circle leaned towards the Axis. On 27 August 1940, Dr Fritz Grobba, the German Minister in Baghdad, submitted a memorandum to an Arab Committee formed under the presidency of the Mufti. This bold memorandum, it was hoped, would form the basis of an Arab–German agreement.

The memorandum directly confronted the central legacy of the post-Versailles settlement in the Middle East. It stated that Germany and Italy would not ‘abridge the independence of these Arab countries, e.g. by establishing mandates'; these were described as a ‘hypocritical device of the League of Nations and the democracies to disguise their imperialistic greed'. The mandates had indeed been somewhat hypocritical devices. People in political circles in Baghdad decided to act.
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The machinations in Iraqi politics in 1940 and 1941 are reminiscent of a storyline from a John Buchan novel. Rashid Ali, a member of a prominent Baghdad family, had been appointed prime minister in March 1940. From the outset, he sought to make life difficult for the British, using the war to further his nationalist ambitions. His faction was opposed by the Regent, Abd al-Ilah, and Nuri As-Said, leaders of the pro-British party. Rashid Ali rejected calls from Britain that Iraq should allow British troops to cross through Iraq to get to Palestine. When Italy declared war on the Allies on 10 June 1940, the British asked Iraq to break off diplomatic relations with Rome, a request that Rashid Ali refused. That November, the British issued
a virtual ultimatum to the Iraqi government to drop Rashid Ali, or lose the friendship and support of Britain. British sanctions against Iraq, coupled with military success against the Italians in North Africa, made Rashid Ali's position difficult. He resigned at the end of January 1941, but managed to come back at the beginning of April with the full backing of the Iraqi army, which was largely pro-German. Once their government had been toppled on 10 April, Abd al-Ilah and Nuri fled the country. On this occasion, however, the British responded forcefully. Iraq's oil was now of supreme importance for the Allied war effort, and British forces landed in Basra on 29 April. Rashid Ali sent troops to oppose them. The RAF annihilated the Iraqi air force, destroying twenty-five of its forty planes.
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The ‘Thirty Days' War' started on 2 May and ended with a conclusive British victory on the 31st. Fallujah fell on the 19th, and British forces pressed on to Baghdad, entering the city on the 29th. An armistice was signed two days later, which ensured that the pro-British party was reinstated. Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah and Nuri entered Baghdad in triumph on 1 June.