PARIS 1919 (71 page)

Wilson, like most of the other British there, assumed that Britain was acquiring a valuable new property. With oil, if Mosul had any worth exploiting, and wheat, if irrigation was done properly, the new acquisition could be self-sufficient; indeed, it might even return money to the imperial treasuries. Wilson urged the government in London to make Mosul part of its war aims and, just after the Turkish armistice, he made sure that British forces moved in. Mosul was, he argued, important for the defense of Baghdad and Basra.
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With the collapse of the Ottomans and the Russian Revolution, it had also gained wider strategic importance. The British were backing anticommunist forces in Russia as well as the little independent republics that had sprung up in the Caucasus. One way of doing this, and of preventing the spread of Bolshevism farther south, was to open up communications between Persia and the Caucasus, and that meant through Mosul.

Wilson had firm ideas about how the area should be ruled. “Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul should be regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes and under effective British control.” It never seems to have occurred to him that a single unit did not make much sense in other ways. In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs make one country. As in the Balkans, the clash of empires and civilizations had left deep fissures. The population was about half Shia Muslim and a quarter Sunni, with other minorities from Jews to Christians, but another division ran across the religious one: while half the inhabitants were Arab, the rest were Kurds (mainly in Mosul), Persians or Assyrians. The cities were relatively advanced and cosmopolitan; in the countryside, hereditary tribal and religious leaders still dominated.
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There was no Iraqi nationalism, only Arab. Before the war, young officers serving in the Ottoman armies had pushed for greater autonomy for the Arab areas. When the war ended, several of these, including Nuri Said, a future prime minister of Iraq, had gathered around Feisal. Their interest was in a greater Arabia, not in separate states.

Arnold Wilson did not foresee the problems of throwing such a diverse population into a single state. He was a paternalist who thought the British would remain for generations. “The average Arab, as opposed to a handful of amateur politicians in Baghdad, sees the future as one of fair dealing and material and moral progress under the aegis of Great Britain.” He urged his government to move quickly: “Our best course is to declare Mesopotamia to be a British Protectorate under which all classes will be given forthwith the maximum degree of liberty and self-rule compatible with good and safe government.” His superiors in London ruled that out. They preferred indirect rule, something the British had used in the Indian princely states and Egypt. It had the advantage of being cheaper than direct control—an important consideration, especially in 1919. As Balfour pointed out, when the Eastern Committee was talking away about all the glorious possibilities that lay before Britain: “We consider the advantage to the natives, the advantage to our prestige; we consider certain things connected with trade and commerce, and all the rest of it; but money and men I have never seen referred to, and they seem to me to be the governing considerations.” And indirect rule did at least bow in the direction of Arab self-determination and liberal opinion. “What we want,” said a senior official at the India Office, “is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won't cost very much, which Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our economic and political interests will be secure.”
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This was easier said than done. There was a new spirit stirring in the Arab world and farther afield. In India, nationalists were rallying behind Gandhi; in Egypt, the Wafd party was growing day by day. Arab nationalism was still weak in Iraq, but it was already a potent force in Syria and Egypt. Arnold Wilson's oriental secretary and trusted adviser realized this, even if he did not.

Gertrude Bell was the only woman to play a key figure in the peace settlements in her own right. Thin, intense, chain-smoking, with a voice that pierced the air, she was accustomed to being out of the ordinary. Although she came from a rich, well-connected family, she had broken with the usual pattern of her class—marriage, children and society—by going to Oxford and becoming the first woman to receive a first-class degree in history. She climbed the Matterhorn and pioneered new routes in the Alps. She was a noted archaeologist and historian. She was also arrogant, difficult and very influential. In November 1919, when the British commander-in-chief in Baghdad held a reception for eighty notables, they left their seats to crowd around her.
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With only her servants and guides for company, Gertrude Bell had traveled all over the Middle East before the war, from Beirut to Damascus and from Baghdad to Mosul. She loved the desert: “Silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk around Muhammad's fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization contrives, and then the road again.”
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By 1914, she was widely recognized as one of Britain's leading authorities on the Middle East. In 1915, she became the first woman to work for British military intelligence and the only woman officially part of the British expedition to Mesopotamia.

She herself did not believe in rights for women. Nor did she like most of her own sex. “It is such a pity,” she said loudly in front of a young English bride, “that promising young Englishmen go and marry such fools of women.” Her best friends were men: Lawrence, St. John Philby (father of a notorious son), Feisal and, for a time, Arnold Wilson. She loved passionately but never married. When her first great love turned out to be a gambler, her father refused his permission, and her second was already married. On Christmas Day in 1920 she wrote to her father: “As you know I'm rather friendless. I don't care enough about people to take trouble about them, and naturally they don't trouble about me—why should they? Also all their amusements bore me to tears and I don't join in them.”
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She threw herself into her work in Mesopotamia. “We shall, I trust,” she wrote to her father, “make it a centre of Arab civilisation and prosperity.” The Arabs, she assumed at first, would play little part in their own government. “The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased.” She got on well with Arnold Wilson in those early days. He was, she reported enthusiastically to her parents, “a most remarkable creature, 34, brilliant abilities, a combined mental and physical power that is extremely rare.” Wilson in turn admired her “unwearying diligence” in dealing with paperwork. She was, he told his family, “extraordinarily vigorous and helpful in many ways.” Together they waited for word from their superiors about what would happen to Mesopotamia. It did not come. “I presumed,” said Wilson, “that if their oracles were dumb it was because their doubts were even greater than ours.” As they waited, Bell began to change her mind about the sort of government Mesopotamia needed. Arabs would have to play a larger role than she had at first thought.
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In January 1919, Arnold Wilson sent Bell off to Cairo, London and Paris to try to find out what was happening. In February, he followed her to Paris, where she was putting the case for a country in Mesopotamia. As she wrote rather grandly to her family, “I'm lunching tomorrow with Mr. Balfour who, I fancy, really doesn't care. Ultimately I hope to catch Mr. Lloyd George by the coat tails, and if I can manage to do so I believe I can enlist his sympathies. Meanwhile we've sent for Colonel Wilson from Baghdad.” She was convinced, rightly as it turned out, that the fate of Mesopotamia was linked to settlement of the dispute over Syria: “We can't consider one without the other, and in the case of Syria it's the French attitude that counts.” She had been spending a great deal of time with Lawrence and Feisal and now shared their hope that the French might be persuaded to have Feisal as king of an independent Syria. Arnold Wilson disapproved strongly of Lawrence and his views: “He seems to have done an immense amount of harm and our difficulties with the French seem to me to be mainly due to his actions and advice.”
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The talking and the lobbying accomplished little. As Montagu, secretary of state for India, wrote plaintively to Balfour: “We have now collected in Paris Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They are responsible to me. They come to me and say ‘We are here. What do you want of us?' I can give them no information of what is going on.” While the peacemakers prevaricated, in Mesopotamia unrest was spreading: among Kurds and Persians, who were restless under Arab domination; among the Shia, who resented Sunni influence; among tribal leaders challenged by British power; among high-ranking officers and bureaucrats who had lost their status with the collapse of the Ottomans; and among the increasing numbers of Arab nationalists. Bell worried from the sidelines. In April she wrote to her old friend Aubrey Herbert, himself anxious about Albania, “O my dear they are making such a horrible muddle of the Near East, I confidently anticipate that it will be much worse than it was before the war—except Mesopotamia which we may manage to hold up out of the general chaos. It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them.”
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That spring Egypt blew up. Egyptians had never taken happily to British rule, even though the British tried to disguise it by governing through a khedive. By the time the war started, Egypt had the foundations for a strong national movement: powerful religious leaders, local magnates and a growing professional class, who were building links to each other and downward, into the huge peasant population of the Nile delta. The war itself brought fresh trouble. When the Ottoman empire, still nominally the overlord of Egypt, declared war on Britain in 1914, the British declared a protectorate. That infuriated many Egyptians, as did the influx of quantities of British and Australian troops, and the accompanying rise in prices. The British sent out contradictory messages about the future: on the ground, their hold over the country tightened, but the government in London used Woodrow Wilson's language. The Fourteen Points themselves were received enthusiastically in Egypt.
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In November 1918, just after the Anglo-French declaration to the Arabs used precisely that language of self-determination, a prominent Egyptian nationalist led a delegation to speak to Sir Reginald Wingate, the head of the British administration in Egypt. Said Zaghlul was a distinguished lawyer, a literary man and a former minister of education. He had come out of traditional Egypt, from a landowning family in the delta, but with the patronage of a princess from the royal family he had moved into the more modern, cosmopolitan world of Cairo. The British had initially counted him as one of their supporters. “He should go far,” thought Lord Cromer, the first British proconsul in Egypt: “He possesses all the qualities necessary to serve his country. He is honest; he is capable; he has the courage of his convictions.” By 1914, however, the British were less enthusiastic. Zaghlul, perhaps because he had not been made prime minister, perhaps out of genuine conviction, was moving into the nationalist camp.
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In his interview with Wingate, Zaghlul demanded complete autonomy for the Egyptians. They were, he told Wingate, “an ancient and capable race with a glorious past—far more capable of conducting a well-ordered government than the Arabs, Syrians and Mesopotamians, to whom self-government had so recently been promised.” He asked permission for a delegation (or
wafd
) to travel to London and Paris to present the nationalists' demands. When Wingate refused, Egyptians protested furiously: “Extremist Indians had been given a hearing by Mr. Montagu; the Arab Emir Feisal was allowed to go to Paris. Were Egyptians less loyal? Why not Egypt?”
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By the start of the Peace Conference, petitions were circulating about Egypt; thousands, then hundreds of thousands, signed. The protests coalesced into a movement, appropriately called the Wafd. Zaghlul urged the khedive to demand complete independence. On March 9, the British authorities arrested Zaghlul and three other leading nationalists and deported them to Malta. The following day, strikes and demonstrations broke out all over Egypt. In an unprecedented gesture, upper-class women poured out of their seclusion; “I did not care if I suffered sunstroke,” said one; “the blame would fall on the tyrannical British authority.”
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The protests turned violent; the telegraph wires were cut and railway tracks torn up. On March 18, eight British soldiers were murdered by a mob. The British suddenly faced losing control of Egypt altogether.

In something of a panic, the British government hastily imposed martial law and dispatched Allenby to bring the Egyptians into line. To London's considerable surprise, he rapidly concluded that he must release the nationalist leaders from detention in Malta and allow them, if they wished, to travel abroad if he was to have any hope of working with the Egyptians. Zaghlul made his way to Paris, where he apparently had little success in winning support from the other powers.
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He had, however, impressed on the British that changes had to be made in the way they ran Egypt. Although it took many months of negotiations, in 1922 the British government finally conceded Egypt's independence. (It kept control, however, of the Suez Canal and foreign policy.) Zaghlul became prime minister in 1924.