PARIS 1919 (70 page)

The French also brought in a delegation asking for a separate Lebanon under the protection of France, whose praises they sang. “Her liberal principles,” said its leader, “her time-honoured traditions, the benefits Lebanon never failed to receive from her in hard times, the civilisation she diffused throughout made her prominent in the eyes of all the inhabitants of Lebanon.” France had historically been the protector of the Christian communities throughout the Ottoman empire but it had particularly close ties to the Maronites, who probably formed a majority in the wild country around Mount Lebanon. In 1861 France had forced the Ottomans to set up an autonomous province there. Maronites had fought side by side with French Crusaders; they claimed, improbably, a family connection with Charlemagne; like French Catholics, they looked to the pope in Rome rather than to the Orthodox patriarch in Constantinople; and, most important perhaps, they admired French culture almost as much as the French themselves. When Maronite leaders outlined a greater Lebanon, to include the Bekáa Valley and most of the coast from Tripoli to Sidon, as well as a large number of Muslims, France was sympathetic.
²⁷

Although Clemenceau himself was mainly concerned at the Peace Conference with France's security in Europe, he could not entirely ignore his own colonial lobby. He told Kerr, Lloyd George's assistant, that he “personally was not particularly concerned with the Near East. France, however, had always played a great part there, and from the economic point of view a settlement which would give France economic opportunities was essential, especially in view of their present financial condition. He further said that French public opinion expected a settlement which was consonant with France's position. He could not, he said, make any settlement which did not comply with this condition.” He was prepared, as he had shown at that famous disputed conversation in December 1918, to go a long way to accommodate the British; he could not give them everything in the Middle East.
²⁸

In the press of urgent business before Wilson left for his short trip home on February 14, nothing was decided about the Arab territories and the issue continued to fester. The main source of the trouble was that the British were still undecided about what they wanted. Should they keep their hands off and let the French have Syria, as they had promised in Sykes-Picot and as the Foreign Office preferred? Curzon's Eastern Committee and the military hastened to point out the dangers if France should end up controlling a swath of former Turkish territory from Armenia in the north to the borders of Palestine in the south. Then there were those, like Lawrence himself, who felt that Britain had an obligation to the Arabs and to Feisal in particular and could not therefore simply abandon them to the French. Lloyd George tended to agree; as he told the British empire delegation, “we could not face the East again if we broke faith.” He would give France Syria only if there was no alternative. On the other hand, he did not really want to alienate the French. As on other issues, Lloyd George tried to keep his options open. He delayed withdrawing British occupation troops from Syria, thereby persuading the French, if they needed persuading, that the British were untrustworthy. As Balfour complained:

We have got into an extraordinary muddle over the whole subject, partly owing to the unreasonableness of the French, partly owing to the essentially false position in which we have placed ourselves by insisting on a military occupation of a country which we do not propose under any circumstances to keep ourselves, while excluding those whom we recognise are to have it, and partly owing to the complicated and contradictory character of the public engagements into which we have entered.
²⁹

While Wilson was away, the British floated various schemes, all of which would leave France with nothing like what it would have had under Sykes-Picot. Lloyd George urged Clemenceau to accept Feisal as ruler of Syria and warned him that if he did not, there could be war in Syria. The British further infuriated the French with a plan to rectify the borders of Palestine, which would have taken, the French complained, almost a third of Syrian territory in the south. “The notes coming in from the French government,” said the British ambassador in Paris, “could hardly be worse if we were enemies instead of allies.”

Lord Milner, the British colonial secretary who had been given responsibility for the Syrian issue, arrived in Paris to reassure the French that “we did not want Syria and had not the slightest objection to France's being there.” He even persuaded Clemenceau, an old friend, to meet Feisal and see if they could work something out. Unfortunately, the attempt to assassinate Clemenceau came on February 19, before the meeting could take place. Milner, claiming he did not want to bother Clemenceau, never followed up; Clemenceau refused to have anything more to do with Milner. A few weeks later, Lloyd George apparently went back to Sykes-Picot, but three days later he produced yet another map leaving France with Lebanon and the port of Alexandretta in the north and Syria virtually independent under Feisal. Clemenceau complained bitterly to House that Lloyd George always broke his promises. The French government was under intense pressure from French colonialists; even the Quai d'Orsay was stirring up a press campaign to demand the Syrian mandate. “I won't give way on anything any more,” Clemenceau assured Poincaré. “Lloyd George is a cheat. He has managed to turn me into a ‘Syrian.'”
³⁰

On March 20, with Wilson back in Paris, Pichon and Lloyd George went over the whole history again in the Council of Four. Sykes-Picot, said Wilson in disgust afterward, sounded like a type of tea; “a fine example of the old diplomacy.” Sykes himself was dead by this time, carried off in the great flu epidemic, and Picot was in Beirut, trying valiantly to uphold his country's interests in the face of a hostile British military administration. Allenby, who had been summoned to Paris from Damascus, warned that the Arabs would violently oppose a French occupation. Wilson tried to find a compromise. After all, as he pointed out, his only interest was in peace. Why not send a fact-finding inquiry to ask the Arabs themselves what they wanted? The Peace Conference, he said, using a favorite formula, would find “the most scientific basis possible for a settlement.” To annoy the British, Clemenceau slyly suggested that the commission look at Mesopotamia and Palestine as well. With the insouciance that drove the French colonial lobby mad, he told Poincaré that he had agreed to the commission only to be nice to Wilson and that, in any case, the commissioners would find nothing but support for France in Syria, “where we have traditions of 200 years.” The French president was horrified. As he told his diary, “Clemenceau is a man for catastrophes; if he cannot prevent them, he will also provoke them.” Lloyd George agreed to the commission, but privately thought it a dreadful idea, and so, on second thought, did Clemenceau. The two stalled when it came to naming their representatives, with the result that Wilson, in exasperation, finally decided in May to go ahead unilaterally and send his own commissioners out to the Middle East.
³¹

When Feisal heard the initial news that a commission was to be appointed, he drank champagne for the first time in his life. He was confident, as was the ubiquitous Lawrence, that it would confirm Syrian independence under his rule. The months in Paris had been frustrating and boring for both men. A flight over the city helped relieve their feelings. “How dreadful, to have no bombs to throw upon these people,” Feisal exclaimed. “Never mind, here are some cushions.” Lawrence became increasingly difficult, playing silly practical jokes such as throwing sheets of toilet paper down a stairwell at Lloyd George and Balfour one evening. In April, Feisal and Clemenceau had their long-delayed meeting, at which they discussed yet another plan providing for a mild form of French mandate, which had been drawn up by British and French experts. Clemenceau found Feisal friendlier and more reasonable than before and believed that Feisal had accepted the terms. In fact, Feisal was stalling, on Lawrence's advice. By May, when it was quite clear that there was no agreement and no serious Allied commission of inquiry, Feisal was safely back in Damascus.
³²

In Paris the wrangling between Britain and France went on, culminating, on May 21, with a violent scene between Clemenceau and Lloyd George over the whole Ottoman empire. Clemenceau pointed out that France had agreed to the incorporation of Cilicia into an Armenian mandate under the United States. He reminded Lloyd George that he had given up Mosul the previous December. “I have thus abandoned Mosul and Cilicia; I made the concessions you asked of me without hesitation, because you told me that, afterwards, no difficulty would remain. But I won't accept what you propose today; my government would be overthrown the next day, and even I would vote against it.” Clemenceau threatened to go back on his offer of Mosul. That put before the Peace Conference the question of not just Mosul but the whole area stretching south to the Persian Gulf, now known as Iraq, an issue the British had managed to avoid up to this point.
³³

Mesopotamia—the term the British used loosely to refer to the old Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra—had scarcely been mentioned at the conference except as a possible mandate to be held, everyone assumed, by Britain. British troops were in occupation, British administrators from India were running it and British ships were sailing up and down the Tigris. No power was likely to challenge the British claim: Russia and Persia were too weak, the United States uninterested. France, until that stormy session of the Council of Four in May, had apparently given up any claim. Clemenceau spoke in anger but he may have also begun to realize just what he had given up so blithely: oil.

Coal had been the great fuel of the Industrial Revolution, but by 1919 it was becoming clear that oil was the fuel of the future. Tanks, aircraft, lorries and navies all needed oil. British petroleum imports alone quadrupled between 1900 and 1919 and most of the increase, worryingly, came from outside the British empire: from the United States, Mexico, Russia and Persia. Control of oilfields, refineries and pipelines was clearly going to be important in the future, as it had been in the Great War, when “the Allied cause,” according to Curzon, “floated to victory upon a wave of oil.” No one knew for certain whether Mesopotamia had oil in any quantity, but when black sludge seeped out of the ground and lay in pools around Baghdad, or gas fires flared off swamps in Mosul, it was easy to guess. By 1919, the British navy was arguing, without awaiting further evidence, that the Mesopotamian oilfields were the largest in the world. It seemed foolish to hand over control of any part to the French, whatever Sykes-Picot said. As Leo Amery, one of Lloyd George's bright young men, wrote: “The greatest oil-field in the world extends all the way up to and beyond Mosul, and even if it didn't we ought as a matter of safety to control sufficient ground in front of our vital oil-fields to avoid the risk of having them rushed at the outset of the war.”
³⁴

Clemenceau, who had once said, “When I want some oil, I'll find it at my grocer's,” had by now grasped the importance of the new fuel. He had given up formal control over Mosul but he insisted to Lloyd George that France should have its share of whatever was in the ground. Walter Long, the British minister of fuel, and Henry Bérenger, his French counterpart, a man who believed that oil was the “blood of victory,” were put to work. They produced an agreement under which France would have a quarter-share of the Turkish Petroleum Company and in return would allow two pipelines to be built across Syria from Mosul to the sea. Both sides agreed that they did not want the Americans, who were starting to take an interest in Middle East oil, muscling in. Unfortunately, what was a reasonable compromise got caught up in the confrontation over Syria. “There was a first-class dogfight,” Henry Wilson noted in his diary, “during which the Tiger said Walter Long had promised the French half the Mesopotamian oil! Lloyd George asked me if I had ever heard of this. Of course, never. Whereupon Lloyd George wrote at once to Tiger and said that arrangement was cancelled.” The Foreign Office did not find this out until some months later, which shows the confusion in British policymaking at this period. It was only in December 1919, after Britain and France had finally settled their dispute over Syria, that the oil issue was put to rest, on very much the same terms that Long and Bérenger had agreed. As part of the deal, the French government also agreed permanently to abandon France's claim to Mosul.
³⁵

The British knew that they did not want the French to have Mosul, but beyond that their own policy toward Mesopotamia developed by fits and starts. The initial British campaign there in 1914 had been defensive, designed only to protect the Persian Gulf from the Turks. Once they had secured their bridgehead, they had been drawn north toward Baghdad. A young political officer, Arnold Wilson, wrote to his parents: “The only sound thing is to go on as far as possible and not try to look too far ahead.” Four years later the British had gone very far indeed, up to the Kurdish areas on the borders of Turkey, and Wilson was now head of the British administration.
³⁶

Arnold Wilson was handsome, courageous, stubborn and stoical. His school report said: “He has fought his faults bravely and the worst of them are perhaps exaggerated virtues. His talent is for management and organization and he is capable of a great deal of work for others and unselfishness. His manners are his worst foe.” He loathed dancing, gossip and idleness. He quoted scripture freely; his finger never hesitated on the trigger. He had, in short, the qualities of a great proconsul of empire at a time when proconsuls were becoming obsolete.
³⁷

When the war started, Wilson was in the north of Turkey, near Mount Ararat, completing an immense project to map the boundary between Persia and Ottoman Turkey. (The border has stood with scarcely a change.) He and a colleague made their way back to Britain via Russia and Archangel. As he was about to join his regiment in France, he was ordered back to the Middle East, to join the Mesopotamian campaign as assistant to Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer. When, at the end of the war, Cox was called away to deal with Persian matters, Wilson was his obvious replacement. From April 1918 to October 1920 he governed Mesopotamia.
³⁸