Mapping and Remapping the Arab World-Part 2 Remapping

Listening to the Better Angels of Our Nature: Ethnicity, Self-Determination, and the American Empire Chapter Sixteen Mapping and Remapping Arabia Part 2 - Remapping David Steven Cohen Chapel Hill, NC The term “the Middle East” was coined by the American naval officer Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1902 in an article titled “The Persian Gulf and International Relations” in the British journal The National Review. The term referred to Egypt, the Arabian Peninsula (Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Oman, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Bahrain, today), Palestine (Israel, today), Syria (Syria, Lebanon, and Jordan, today), Mesopotamia (Kuwait and Iraq, today), and Persia (Iran, today). Important for trade were it seas (the Mediterranean Sea, Red Sea, the Arabian Sea), its gulfs (the Gulf of Suez, the Gulf of Aqaba, the Gulf of Aden, the Gulf of Oman), its rivers (the Nile flowing into the Mediterranean and the Euphrates and Tigris flowing into the Persian Gulf), its deserts (the Syrian, and An Afud, Ad Dana’, Ar Rub’ Al-Khali, Negev, and Sinai), and its mountain ranges (the Hejaz, Asir, Hadramawt). http://www.worldatlas.com/webimage/countrys/menewlndcn.gif “Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire had been kept afloat by the support of Britain and France. . . . The British and French fought on the Ottoman side [in the Crimean War] against the empire’s longtime enemy, Russia. In the early twentieth century, however, there was a major diplomatic revolution. Britain had traditionally regarded Russia as her enemy, especially in India, where the two empires collided. But in 1907, the United Kingdom and the Russian Empire patched up their quarrels and came to a reconciliation,” writes Christopher Catherwood. “Both Russia and France had for a long time been more than suspicious. . . of the aggressive and expansionist German empire, ruled over by the unbalanced and glory-seeking Kaiser (Emperor) Wilhelm II. He had actively courted the Ottoman Empire, from which, over the previous decades, Britain and France had seized what the Ottomans had regarded as the jewels in their crown: Algeria, Egypt, Cyprus, and later, Morocco.” Christopher Catherwood, Churchill’s Folly: How Winston Churchill Created Modern Iraq (New York: Carroll and Graf Publishers, 2004), pp. 32-33. After the Ottoman Empire was declared bankrupt in 1876, the British abandoned its support for the Ottomans against Russian expansion along the Black Sea. In 1878 the British seized Cyprus from the Ottomans, and in 1882 it took control of Egypt and the Suez Canal, in the words of James Barr “in order to secure the route to India. As the canal turned into the major artery for Britain’s growing eastern commerce, Egypt became the fulcrum of the British Empire.” James Barr, A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948 (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 5. In his article Mahan argued that Britain would need naval bases around the Persian Gulf to protect the Suez Canal as its main passage to India and to counter Russian and German expansion. In 1905 in the midst of a crisis over France’s plans to annex Morocco, which adjoined Algeria which France previously had annexed in 1834, the German Kaiser visited Tangiers and offered his support to the Sultan of Morocco. Britain took the side of its new ally France, and President Theodore Roosevelt mediated a settlement at Algeciras, which provided for the nominal independence of Morocco. At the time Germany had plans to extend its Berlin-to-Baghdad railway to the Persian Gulf. Sultan Abdul Hamid II, who ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909, ordered that a railroad be built from Damascus to Mecca to facilitate the Hajj (the pilgrimage to Mecca that all observant Muslims were to make at least once during their lifetime), which was completed in 1908. In April 1909 the Young Turks deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid II and replaced him with his younger brother, who became their puppet. Sultan Abdul Hamid II had tried to unite all Muslims under his rule; the Young Turks sought to extend Turkish rule outside the empire. Turkish nationalism or pan-Turanianism provoked a reaction among the Arabs, who began to form secret societies to plot against them. The Young Turks embraced the concept of a secular state and embarked upon a program of adaptation of Western customs, but at the same time they wanted to free Turkey from European control. They also tended to discriminate against the Arab, Greek, Armenia, Kurdish, and Jewish populations under their control, who together constituted about 60 percent of the population of the Ottoman Empire. David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Avon Books, 1989), p. 48. In 1911 France and Germany again clashed over Morocco, when the French occupied the Algerian capital at Fez. Claiming that this violated the Algeciras Agreement, Germany sent a gunboat off the coast of Agadir. Again, Britain sided with France, and Germany recognized France’s right to a protectorate over Morocco in exchange for receiving a part of the French Congo. In the same year, Italy took advantage of the British and French colonization of North Africa by declaring war on Turkey and seizing Tripoli (in present-day Libya) and the Dodecanese Islands in the eastern Mediterranean in what has become known as the Tripolitan War. “The Ottoman Empire’s center of gravity now shifted significantly eastward,” writes James Barr. “Besides Turkey itself, the Ottomans now controlled only Syria and Palestine, Iraq, and the coastal fringes of the Arabian Peninsula.” Barr, op. cit., p. 6 In July 1914, with the possibility of war on the horizon, Winston Churchill, then the First Lord of the Admiralty, ordered the seizure of two Dreadnought- class battleships that had be built in British shipyards for Turkey, but had not yet been delivered. Churchill was the son of Lord Randolph Churchill, who was descended from the aristocratic George Spencer, the Duke of Marlborough. His mother was a New York socialite named Jennie Jerome. Young Winston was educated at Harrow and Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy. He served in India, in the Sudan under General Horatio Herbert Kitchener. Churchill doubled as a war correspondent for the Morning Post and wrote articles and a book about these campaigns. In 1899 when the Second Boer War commenced, Churchill went to South Africa as a civilian war correspondent, where he was captured and escaped from a prisoner of war camp in Pretoria. He returned to Britain in 1900, and his writings about the war made him a hero. He was elected to Parliament as a Conservative in the same year, but crossed over to the Liberal Party in 1904. When the Liberal Herbert Henry Asquith became prime minister in 1908, he appointed Churchill to his cabinet as the President of the Board of Trade. In this position, he supported Liberal reforms. In 1910 he was promoted to Home Secretary, and in 1911 he became the First Lord of the Admiralty. At first the Ottoman Empire was reluctant to go to war, despite the fact that it had signed a secret treaty with Germany the day after Germany declared war on Russia. The treaty with the Ottomans did not require them to go to war, because it stipulated that the Ottomans would go to war only if Germany went to war based on Germany’s treaty with Austria-Hungary. As it was, Germany declared war on Russia on August 1, several days before Austria-Hungary declared war on Russia on August 6. So at the outset of the war, Turkey remained neutral. Its position was that it would enter the war only in partnership with Bulgaria, but it feared that Bulgaria might want to invade Turkey while Turkey was fighting the Russians. Turkey negotiated a defensive treaty with Bulgaria in August in which they agreed to assist each other in one or the other were attacked by a third party. On August 6 Germany requested that Turkey allow two German ships that were being chased by the British Mediterranean Squadron to escape into the Dardanelles. The Turkish Grand Vizier Said Halim gave the German ships permission to enter the straits. Because Turkey was supposedly still neutral the Turkish government arranged a “fictitious purchase” of the two ships. The Ottomans were moving toward Germany, because they feared that if the Allies won the war they would partition the Ottoman Empire. In September the British Dardanelles Squadron stopped a Turkish torpedo boat from enter the Mediterranean. In response, the German officer in charge of the Turkish defense of the Dardanelles ordered the placement of mines across the straits. This cut off the only warm-water route to the West for Russia’s wheat crop, which constituted half of its export trade. On August 2 Turkey had signed a secret alliance with Germany. Although the Turkish government was divided on the issue, the Young Turks wanted Turkey to enter the war on the side of Germany and ordered an attack on Russian ships in the Black Sea. Instead of following these orders, the admiral in charge bombarded the Russian coastline. At the end of October Churchill ordered the British forces in the Mediterranean to attack Turkey even though no declaration of war had been issued. On November 2 Russia declared war on Turkey, and on November 5 Britain declared war on Turkey. On November 14 the Ottoman Sultan as caliph of the Muslim World declared a holy war for all Muslims against Russia and its allies, Britain and France. “Of those who go to the Jihad for the sake of happiness and salvation of the believers in God's victory, the lot of those who remain alive is felicity, while the rank of those who depart to the next world is martyrdom. In accordance with God's beautiful promise, those who sacrifice their lives to give life to the truth will have honor in this world, and their latter end is paradise." When the Ottoman Empire declared war on Britain, the British declared a protectorate over Egypt. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f9/Map_of_Ottoman_Rail_Network_in_World_War_I.jpg The British cabinet was split over whether to concentrate on the Western Front which had reached a stalemate or to invade Turkey, either at Gallipoli or Alexandretta (ĺstenderun, in Turkish), the south easternmost port in Turkey on the Mediterranean near the Syrian border today. Alexandretta was important because it was near the railroads connecting Constantinople with Baghdad and Damascus. The French ambassador in Cairo was alarmed that an invasion at Alexandretta would be a violation of the 1912 commitment to give France free reign in Syria. In February 1915 the French Foreign Minister Théophile Delcassé wrote to the British Foreign Minister Edward Grey requesting him to stop the Alexandretta plan. Grey agreed, and instead of attacking Alexandretta, in April 1915 British, New Zealand, and Australian troops landed at Gallipoli, a narrow isthmus of land on the European side of the Dardanelles straits that protected the city of Istanbul, 150 miles to the east. The leader of the Turkish forces was Kemal Pasha, later known as Ataturk. The Gallipoli Campaign was a disaster, and the British were forced to withdraw. Now Britain feared that the Ottomans might counter-attack, and the likely target was Egypt. http://www.eyewitnesstohistory.com/images/gallipoli1.jpg In November 1914, General Horatio Henry Kitchener was recalled from Cairo to London to become Britain’s secretary of state for war under Prime Minister Herbert Henry Asquith. As a Field Marshal in the British army, Kitchener had been the victor at Omdurman, avenging the defeat of General Gordon by the Madhi at Khartoum in 1885. He defeated the French at Fashoda in 1898, thus adding the Sudan to the British Empire, and he was responsible for the defeat of the Boers in South Africa in 1900. In 1902 Kitchener was appointed Commander-in-Chief in India, where he came into conflict with Lord George Nathaniel Curzon, then the British Viceroy and Governor-General of India. In 1909 he returned to Cairo to be the British Agent and Consul-General of Egypt (in effect, the administrator of the country). The British assumed that once Turkey was defeated the caliphate (i.e., the leadership of the Islamic World) would shift from Turkey to back to Arabia. Despite his supposed knowledge of the Arabia, David Fromkin argues that General Kitchener and his aides did not understand that degree of disunity and fragmentation. Their plan assumed that Ibn Saud, the leader of the fundamentalist Wahhabi sect, would submit to the spiritual authority of Hussein, the Sunni ruler of Mecca. Fromkin, op. cit., p. 104. http://www.zum.de/whkmla/histatlas/arabworld/sarhistreg.gif At the beginning of the twentieth century there were three kingdoms in central Arabia: Hejaz ruled the Hussein the Sharif of Mecca who sided with the British against the Turks; Ha’il Province (also known as the Emirate of Jabal Shammar in northern Saudi Arabia today) under Ibn Rashid who remained loyal to the Turks; and the Nejd under the Emir Ibn Saud. Hejaz is the region in northwestern Saudi Arabia in which the port of Jeddah and the Holy City of Mecca are located. Jeddah was the main port in Hejaz. Muslims came from all over the world through Jeddah on their way to Mecca during the Hajj. Another stream came by railway through Medina. The Grand Sharif of Mecca, Hussein was a member of the Abadila clan. Only the Abadila clan and the Dwahi Zeid clan could claim the title of Sharif, which meant they were the Emira of Mecca, the capital of Hejaz. The Abadila clan and the Dwahi Zeid clan conspired against each other for the title of sharif and against the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. Hussein ibn Ali was a Hashemite, one of many branches of Prophet Muhammed’s Arabian descendants. They were also known as Sharifs, an honorary title given to descendants from the Prophet. As Sharif of Mecca, Hussein sought to become the new caliph. Hussein’s main rival was Abdul Azziz ibn Saud, who was a Wahhabi and the ruler of the desert regions each of the Hejaz known as el-Nejd. Ibn Saud opposed Hussein’s aspirations, believing that his Wahhabi faith was the true direction for the Arab world. Abdul Aziz ibn Saud was a direct descendant of Muhammad ibn Saud. The Wahhabi sect was founded by Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab (1703-1792), who preached that the Shiites were heretics. They banned all music, dancing, poetry, religious shrines, and bodily ornaments. One of his converts was Muhammad ibn Saud, who founded the first Wahhabi Kingdom at Nejd. Al-Wahhab made an alliance with Muhamman ibn Saud, the ruler of Dir’iya, a small market town in the Nejd region of the Arabian Peninsula. Ibn Saud’s Bedouin warriors captured the sacred city of Medina in 1802. In 1902 with the help of Wahhabi tribal fighters known as the Ikhwan (or the Brotherhood), Ibn Saud was able to remove Ibn Rashid from Riyadh making it his own capital and suppress twenty-six rebellions of Bedouin tribes against his rule. Britain was concerned that once the Ottomans entered the war, they would attack the Suez Canal. The solution was to win over the Arab part of the Ottoman Empire to the British side. In 1912 Hussein had sent one of his sons, Abdullah, to Cairo to meet with Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the British war minister, suggesting that the Arabs were prepared to revolt against the Ottoman Empire. In September 1914 Kitchener, now the British foreign secretary, ordered Sir Ronald Storrs to send a message to Abdullah, the son of the Hussein ibn Ali, the Emir of Mecca, to inquire whether in the case of war, the Hejaz, the highlands in western Arabia and the site of the Islamic holy places of Mecca and Medina, would be for or against Britain. Sir Ronald Storrs was the son of an Anglican priest who was the Dean of Rochester Cathedral in England. Sir Ronald was educated at Charterhouse School and Cambridge University, and in 1904 he entered the Finance Ministry of the Egyptian Government. By 1909 he had risen to the position of Oriental Secretary of the British Residency in Egypt. T.E. Lawrence called him “the most brilliant Englishman in the Near East.” In early 1914 Emir Abdullah met with Lord Kitchener and the British Oriental Secretary, Ronald Storrs, to ask whether Britain would support his father if the Turks attempted to depose him. The British were non-committal then, but in September Kitchener sent a message to Abdullah asking if there were a war between Turkey and Britain, on which side would the Arabs in the Hejaz be. Hussein wanted assurance that Britain would not intervene in the internal affairs of “Arabia,” and Kitchener agreed if “the Arab nation” assisted Britain in the war. “This phrase,” writes Jeremy Wilson, “. . . was a broad hint that if Hussein’s Arab nationalist movement went beyond the Hejaz, Britain would support it. The encouragement of a wider Arab movement was fully intended. In London, Kitchener was now advocating his scheme for setting up an independent Arab state, and he believed that secular unity might be achieved over a wide area by transferring the spiritual leadership of Islam from Constantinople to Mecca.” Jeremy Wilson, Lawrence of Arabia: The Authorized Biography of T. E. Lawrence (New York: Atheneum, 1990), p. 165. In January 1915 Hussein’s oldest son, Ali led a group of Arab volunteers into Medina in preparation for an attack on Suez. Meanwhile, Fauzi al-Bakri, a Syrian who had become a member of the Arab secret society al-Fatat (the Young Arab Society), visited Mecca to consult with the Grand Sharif Hussein about a possible Arab revolt against Turkey. Hussein sent his oldest son, Feisal, to Constantinople to pledge his father’s continued loyalty to the Turks. En route he consulted with the members of the secret societies in Damascus, including al-Fatat and al Ahd (“the covenant”). On his return trip Feisal agreed with the Damascus plotters to the so-called Damascus Protocol. It called for a federation of Arab countries within a single, independent Arab Empire under Grand Sharif Hussein that would stretch from present-day Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea, including Palestine, and encompass the entire Arabian Peninsula. In July 1915 Hussein wrote to the British High Commissioner in Egypt, Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry McMahon, informing him about the Damascus Protocol and asking whether the British approved of it, and if not suggesting that the Arabs might side with the Ottomans. The correspondence between Hussein and the British in Cairo resumed in August 1915 in a message from Hussein expanded his territorial claims from the Hejaz and the Arabian Peninsula to include Syria and Mesopotamia as well. McMahon wrote back that Britain approved of an independent Arabia, but that it was premature to discuss the boundaries of such a state. Although Hussein wanted to be the leader of all the Arabs, the British were concerned about alienating the French. In October McMahon wrote another message to Hussein indicating that the “districts” of Mersina and Alexandretta and “portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Hama, Homs, and Aleppo” must be excluded from the boundaries of a future Arab state. But he continued, “without prejudice to our existing treaties with Arab chiefs we accept those limits and boundaries and, in regard to those portions of the territories therein in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her Ally, France. . .” In addition, the Arabs had to accept the fact that Britain could have administrative control in the vilayets of Baghdad and Basra. Jonathan Schneer, The Balfour Declaration: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (London, Berlin, and New York: Bloomsbury, 2010), pp. 64-65. The existing treaties with Arab chiefs referred to the principalities along the Persian Gulf with which British government in India had established diplomatic relations. The territories “in which Great Britain is free to act without detriment to” France referred to France’s territorial claims to Syria. France had economic and religious interests in Syria and Lebanon. The French consul general in Beirut, François Georges-Pico, was in contact with Christians in Syria who favored a French occupation of the country. When a list of these Syrian nationalists became known as a result of Picot’s carelessness, the Turkish authorities retaliated against them. The British were suspicious of the French and the Russians in the Middle East, because it wanted to protect its own interests in India and Egypt. The British were especially interested in Mesopotamia (Iraq today) as a buffer between India and the Russians. Map of Ottoman Yilayets http://www.houshamadyan.org/uploads/pics/Mapa_osmanian_empire_22_02.jpg Although the French had a historic claim to Jerusalem from the time of the Crusades, the new French prime minister, Aristide Briand, felt that administering Palestine would place too great a burden on France. George-Picot still wanted the French sphere of influence to extend past Mosul to the Tigris River, and the British wanted Lebanon to be included in the new Arab state. In June 1914 François Georges-Picot, who was the French consul in the port of Beirut before World War One, was sent an Arab leaflet demanding complete independence for Syria. He secretly arranged for the Greek government to provide Christians in Lebanon with arms. When the war broke out, Georges-Picot needed to leave the country, and the uprising in Lebanon never took place. Georges-Picot believed that the French had sustained most of the casualties on the Western Front and that the idea of a large Arab state was unrealistic, because, as he put it, “you cannot transform a myriad of tribes into a viable whole.” Barr, op. cit., p. 22. At the same time McMahon and Hussein were exchanging letters, Mark Sykes was negotiating with François Georges-Picot, the first secretary in the French embassy in London. Sir Mark Sykes proposed to Churchill that the Britain needed to attack Alexandretta because it was the only Mediterranean base that the Germans could use to attack Egypt. Sykes was the son of a Yorkshire squire. His mother, Lady Jessica Sykes, who converted to Catholicism, brought him up as a Catholic. Both his parents took him on their travels to Jerusalem, Mexico, Lebanon, Syria, Egypt and India. He was educated in Jesuit schools in Monte Carlo and Brussels and at Cambridge University. In 1899 he served as a lieutenant in the Boer War in South Africa. Upon returning from the war, he stood for election as a Conservative in the House of Commons. Sykes was a Conservative member of Parliament from Yorkshire, who had established himself as an expert on the Ottoman Empire, because of his travels there first with his family and later as an honorary attaché at the British embassy in Constantinople. This resulted in a book he wrote titled The Caliphs’ Last Heritage (1915). At the age of thirty-six-year Sykes was invited to advise the British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith. In June 1915 the British war minister, Horatio Herbert Kitchener, sent him to Cairo, where he worked with David G. Hogarth, the founder of the Arab Bureau, and Colonel Gilbert Clayton, the Director of Military Intelligence (DMI). Picot wanted to expand French influence in Lebanon, Syria and Palestine; Britain wanted France to establish a sphere of influence from the Mediterranean to Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad as a shield against Russia. Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac say that George-Picot “envisioned a French-dominated Syrie intégrale that embraced Damascus, Aleppo, and Beirut, along with Palestine’s Holy Places, the ports of Alexandretta and Haifa, the Ottoman provinces of Mosel, and assorted lands extending southward from the Taurus Mountains to the borders of Egypt—a prospect viewed with utter horror by the British Arabists in Cairo.” Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac, Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East (New York and London: W. W. Norton, 2008),Meyer and Brysac, Kingmakers, p. 106. In December 1915 Sykes and Picot reached a compromise under which France would be granted direct administration in a so-called Blue Zone in Lebanon and Syria and the British would have similar rights in a Red Zone in southern Mesopotamia and in Baghdad, Haifa and Acre with the right to build a railroad between the three cities. Palestine and Jerusalem would be under international control within a Brown Zone. In the zone between Mesopotamia and Palestine Britain and France agreed to “protect and recognize an independent Arab State or Confederation of Arab States” which included the inland cities of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and Hama as well as the province of Mosul. This Arab State would be divided into spheres of influence for Britain and France. The Sykes-Picot Agreement then was presented to the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Sazanov, in April 1916, who demanded a the territory between the Black Sea and Mosul, including the provinces of Erzerum, Trebizond, Van, and Bitlis in Ottoman Armenia as well as parts of northern Kurdistan. The agreement, says David Fromkin, “was entirely inconsistent with the correspondence between the British negotiator Sir Henry McMahon and Sharif Hussein, which made no mention of a colonial role by Britain but spoke only of supporting Arab freedom from Turkish oppression.” Fromkin, op. cit., pp. 42-43. The modified agreement was sealed with an exchange of letters and remained secret until the Bolsheviks made it public following the Russian Revolution in November 1917. http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_07ZE5biJmYg/SfBJaIcsNrI/AAAAAAAAASM/xzlG0_3n63A/s640/sykes-picot.JPG Karl Meyer and Shareen Brysac write that “beginning in the eighteenth century, rulers of British India treated the [Persian] Gulf as a proprietary lake and came to view its emirates as semidetached annexes. The key to British influence was sea power, used beneficially by warships and merchantmen to clear the Gulf of piracy and to suppress the maritime slave trade, and employed strategically to open adjacent areas to commerce and to prevent hostile rivals from threatening India.” Meyer and Brysac, op. cit., p. 132. The Anglo-Russian Convention of 1907 divided Persia into “Zones of Influence” with Russia getting the northern section, including Tehran, the Britain claiming the southeastern section, and the southwest being a neutral zone. In 1908 oil was discovered in the neutral zone, but Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson ordered his Bengal Lancers to take control of the area around the oil fields. Sir Arnold Talbot Wilson was the son of an Anglican clergyman who taught at British boarding school Rugby and later became headmaster of Clifton College. He was educated at Sandhurst, the royal military college, and upon graduation was stationed in India and then given the job of political agent in southwest Persia at the time that the royal navy was converting from coal to oil. In 1913 Wilson served on the International Boundary Commission that drew the boundary between Persia and Turkey. Persia was an independent nation that controlled the eastern shores of the Persian Gulf. The Arab emirates along the western shore, like Kuwait and Muscat, were tribute states of the Ottoman Empire. The East India Company posted “Residents” in the Persian port of Bushire (Büshehr, Iran today). Lord Curzon, then Viceroy of India, offered Sir Percy Cox the position of Political Agent and Consul in Muscat, and in 1904 Cox became Acting Chief Political Officer and Resident in Bushire. Sir Percy had been educated at Harrow and Sandhurst and post to India. In 1893 he volunteered to become Resident in British Somaliland on the Horn of Africa, where he was successful in suppressing a tribal rebellion. After World War One broke out in August 1914, the British seized Basra, Cox was appointed its Chief Political Officer, and he appointed Arnold Wilson as his deputy. In October 1914 the Indian Army Expeditionary Force (IEF) departed from Bombay, India, and sailed up the Persian Gulf to take control the day after Britain declared war on Turkey of the British oil installations near Basra. From there they continued north to the Shatt al Arab (the river formed by the merging of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers). http://www.ccis.edu/courses/HIST359mtmcinneshin1/week13/middleeasttheater.jpg Previously, in August Abdul Aziz al Masri also had contacted the British in Cairo about obtaining British support for a united Arab state independent from Turkey. Al Masri was a former officer in the Turkish Army who earlier in the year along with other Iraqi officers had founded a secret society named Ahd dedicated to gaining Arab independence. He came from an Egyptian and Circassian family, so he technically was not an Arab. At that time Turkey had yet not entered the war, so al Masri was turned away. Now the British were interested in al Masri’s plan to make contact with the Arab officers in the Turkish Army stationed in Mesopotamia, especially an Iraqi officer named Nuri as-Said and an Iraqi civilian named Sayid Taleb who had taken refuge in Kuwait. However, Jeremy Wilson notes that there was strong opposition to “native independence movements” among the Anglo-Indian community. There were nationalists in India who had fomented what the British considered “anarchical crimes” between 1907 and 1909. Wilson, op. cit., p. 161. Thus, the Chief Political Officer in Basra, Sir Percy Cox, spoke out against the plan, thinking that the IEF might be able to militarily take control of Baghdad without making any concessions to the Iraqi Arabs. In 1915 the India Expeditionary Force (IEF) advanced up the Tigris River to capture in September the town of Kut al Amara within Turkish-held territory. From there they attempted to advance towards Baghdad, but a Turkish counter-attack forced them to retreat back to Kut. The town was then besieged by the Turks. At this point Kitchener decided to revive the plan for an Arab insurrection in Mesopotamia, and a young intelligence officer named T. E. Lawrence was chosen to go to Basra to assess the situation and possibly bribe Arab members of the Turkish Army to switch sides. Lawrence was the illegitimate son of an Anglo-Irish baron named Sir Thomas Chapman (a.k.a. Thomas Robert Lawrence). In 1909 as a student at Oxford University, Lawrence made a walking tour of Crusader Castles in Lebanon, Syria, and Turkey as search for his thesis at Oxford University against the advice of the archeologist D. G. Hogarth, whom he met at Oxford. When in 1910 Hogarth was sent by the British Museum to begin an archaeological dig at the Hittite site at Carchemish on the Upper Euphrates River in Anatolia, he agreed to take Lawrence along with him. Lawrence continued to work as an archeologist for the next three years. In 1914 Lawrence was asked to join a surveying party to make maps of the Sinai Desert south of Beersheba for the Palestine Exploration Fund. Once Britain entered World War One, these “archaeological” maps took on military importance. In December 1914 Lawrence was sent to Cairo to work in the Intelligence unit being organized there. Because of his map-making skills, he was assigned to be the liaison between the Royal Flying Corps photographers and the Survey of Egypt. When Lawrence arrived in Basra in April 1916, he was told that bribery scheme had been cancelled. He reported back to Clayton that the pan-Arab party in Mesopotamia was virtually non-existent. In May 1916 garrison at Kut was forced to surrender. Meanwhile, in March 1916 Hogarth was sent to Cairo to help establish a new Arab Bureau specializing in the Near East as a branch of Cairo Military Intelligence under Clayton’s command. However, the Arab Bureau reported to the Foreign Office through McMahon, while the Cairo Military Intelligence was part of the Egyptian Expeditionary Force. When Lawrence returned to Cairo from Mesopotamia in May, he was allowed to work part-time for the Arab Bureau. Also in April Sharif Hussein learned that Turkey was about to send a force through the Hejaz to Yemen. His son Feisal was in Damascus in May trying to determine whether there was enough support to begin an Arab Revolt, when Turkey executed twenty-one Syrians nationalists. Hussein came to the conclusion that the revolt against Turkey needed to commence. In June Feisal attacked Medina and the railway to the north, and Abdullah advanced toward Ta’if (about 60 miles southeast of Mecca). Storrs met with Hussein’s youngest son, Zeid, and agreed to provide naval support for an attack by Arab forces on Jedda. Before the end of the month the Arabs were successful in taking control of Jedda and Ta’if, but they were forced to retreat from Medina. In July it was determined that a British military officer should be sent to Jeddah permanently, and Lieutenant-Colonel C. E. Wilson chosen for the assignment. “Since Hussein thought it extremely important that the rebellion should not appear to be orchestrated by infidels, Wilson was given the official title of ‘Pilgrimage Officer,’” writes Wilson. Ibid., p. 292. Wilson reported back that the Arab Revolt was on the verge of collapse and that the only way to prevent that was for Britain to send military forces to the Hejaz. In September 1916 the Arab Bureau was separated from Military Intelligence, and Lawrence continued to work in the Arab Bureau under Clayton. In October Clayton suggested that Lawrence accompany Storrs and Wilson to Jedda to meet with Abdullah and Abdul Aziz al Masri, who was now Hussein’s acting Chief of Staff. Lawrence applied for a leave from the military before going on this mission. Once in Jedda, Lawrence asked to be allowed to travel 100 miles inland to meet with Feisal and Storrs, Abdullah, and Hussein agreed. Lawrence reached Feisal at a place called Wadi Safra. Lawrence knew about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but Feisal did not; and Lawrence believed it was important that the Arabs take Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo in Syria, rather than the French. Upon returning to Cairo, Lawrence was re-assigned to working full-time for the Arab Bureau. In November 1916 Clayton ordered Lawrence to return to the Hejaz and “do what seemed best.” Wilson says: “By mid-December the Revolt had almost collapsed on the battlefield, the one area outside Britain’s control. From the start Hussein had been dependent on British help in money, food and arms. His rebellion was now surviving only through the presence of the Royal Navy’s Red Sea Patrol, which formed the one serious obstacle to a Turkish advance on Yenbo, Rabigh, or indeed Mecca.” Ibid., pp. 333, 340. http://ottomanempire4.files.wordpress.com/2010/04/map20of20hejaz201922.jpg By the end of 1916 it became clear that there needed to be a change of strategy. According to Wilson, “Since there was no hope of defeating the Turks around Medina, the only feasible course was to attack their lines of communication. The best scheme seemed to be for Feisal to advance on Wejh as quickly as possible with most of his army, and from there to mount a large-scale offensive against the railway.” Ibid., p. 346. After the initial success of this new strategy, both Lawrence and Feisal felt it was important for Lawrence to remain with him. In January 1917 Feisal wrote to his father asking him to request that Lawrence be permitted to be indefinitely posted as a liaison officer to the Arab army, and Clayton agreed. Also in January with the help of British aerial reconnaissance, the Arab army was able to capture the Red Sea port of al-Wajh. From there they were able to launch attacks on the Hejaz Railway, which was the main Turkish supply line from Damascus to Medina. In April an Arab sheikh named Auda abu Tayi, the leader of the nomadic Huwaytat tribe that inhabited the Sinai Peninsula and the Syrian Desert, offered his support. Auda told them if they could capture Aqaba, the port at the head of the Red Sea, they could launch an attack on Syria with the help of the Rwala clan of the Aniza tribe whose territory was the desert lands to the north. Lawrence also sought to gain the support of the Druzes, who lived on the Jabal Druze Plateau to the southeast of Damascus. The Druzes got their name from a Muslim missionary named Durazi who came to Lebanon circa 900 A.D. promoting the belief that the Shia Fatimid caliph a-Hakim was God. They also believed in reincarnation, which resulted in their reputation as fearless warriors. Other Muslims regarded the Druze sect as a heresy. In the 1860s they fled their native territory in the mountains of Lebanon inland to Jabal after they were involved in a massacre of Maronite Christians. The Druze allied themselves with the British against the French. Sultan Zuqan al-Atrash had been executed by the Ottoman’s during a Druze revolt against the Turks in 1909. However, the Druzes and the Bedouin were not natural allies. This plan didn’t work out as expected, and the Rwala leader Nuri Shaalan was unwilling to commit himself to the Arab Uprising at this time. Lawrence decided in June to proceed on his own to Damascus through territory that had been promised to the French. Along the way he destroyed a railroad bridge northeast of Beirut, thus alienating the local Shia inhabitants. The Druze leader Hussein Atrash also was not ready to commit to the Arab Uprising. Nevertheless, Lawrence and Auda in June attacked the Turkish outpost near Aqaba in June and in July the Turkish local commander surrendered Aqaba without a fight. Map of the Hejaz Railroad http://nabataea.net/Hejazmap11.html In the spring of 1917, General Edmund Allenby arrived in Cairo as commander of the Egyptian Expeditionary Forces with orders to invade Palestine and capture Jerusalem by Christmas. Allenby was a veteran of the Boer War and distinguished himself as the commander troops on the Western Front at the First and Second Battles of Ypres in France. Prior to his departure for Egypt, he learned that his son had been killed in action. Fearing that the Turks would use the Hejaz Railway to move troops to attack British supply lines between Egypt and Gaza, Lawrence proposed to Allenby that he organize guerilla raids by Arab forces against the railroad. According to James Barr, Allenby “decided to bring Feisal and Lawrence under his command, formalizing the Arabs’ role in exactly the way that Lawrence had intended. Lawrence had brilliantly married his own political agenda to the tactical needs of Allenby’s campaign.” Barr, op. cit., p. 44. Lawrence, however, was hampered by feuding between the Syrians, Iraqis, and Bedouins within the Arab forces. In October 1917 Allenby ordered Lawrence to attack the branch of the Hejaz Railway connecting Damascus with Palestine. In October rather than attacking Gaza, Allenby attacked Beersheba to the east, and then launched a bombardment against Gaza. “So far the United States had been reluctant to join the Allies’ side, writes James Barr. “As public opposition to imperialism grew stranger, late in 1916 the newly reelected U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, urged all belligerent to renounce the imperial ambitions he believed were largely responsible for the war.” Ibid., p. 28. Unaware of the Sykes-Picot agreement, Wilson his “Peace Without Victory” speech in January 1917 restated the doctrine that was to become known as “self-determination” in a speech in which he said, “No nation should seek to extend its polity over any other nation or people,” and “every people should be left free to determine its own policy . . . the little along with the great and the powerful.” Wilson stated that he was opposed to seeing the postwar war world dominated by “little groups of ambitious men who were accustomed to use their fellow men as pawns and tools.” President Woodrow Wilson “Peace Without Victory” Speech, January 22, 1917, http://wwl2.dataformat.com/Document.aspx?doc=30688 This was the precursor of his famous Fourteen Points Address in January 1918 in which he stated: “It will be our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and that they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandizement is gone by; so is also the day of secret covenants entered into in the interest of particular governments and likely at some unlooked-for moment to upset the peace of the world.” Point Number 5 was: “A free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims, based upon a strict observance of the principle that in determining all such questions of sovereignty the interests of the populations concerned must have equal weight with the equitable claims of the government whose title is to be determined.” President Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” Speech, January 8, 1918, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp In May 1918 Lawrence requested that Allenby provide him with two thousand camels to transport a force of one thousand men to take the town of Dara (Dera), eighty miles south of Damascus. Dara was the hub of the Syrian railway network. However, it also was located within the zone that had been promised to the French. In September 1918 Lawrence with one thousand Bedouin and Druze fighters on camels launched his attack on Dara. Three days later by Allenby’s main offensive at Tulkarm and Nazareth. By the beginning of October Lawrence was able to ride into Damascus as the Turks evacuated the city. Lawrence and Feisal were the first to enter the Syrian capital of Damascus, which undermined the French claim to Syria under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In fact, it was the British General Edmund Allenby who defeated the Ottomans and their German advisers. Lawrence promoted Feisal as the liberator of Damascus, even though the Australians deserve the credit. Feisal was made the chief administrator of Syria. The French viewed this as reneging on the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In September 1918 the French launched an attack from Salonika in Greece against Bulgaria, which asked for an armistice. This led by Germany and the Ottoman Empire to ask for armistices as well. In October the Ottomans signed a separate armistice with Britain, which upset France. Constantinople was occupied by British and French forces. In November the British entered the straits of the Dardanelles and occupied Constantinople. When Greek forces land at Smyrna, Kemal and his supporters declared their independence from the Ottoman Empire. Four days after the armistice in November 1918 British troops took control of Mosul. The Turkish nationalists won elections held at the end of 1919, and the new Chamber of Deputies met in Angora (today Ankara) and called for the creation of a Turkish Muslim nation-state. In the fall of 1918 the Turks abruptly abandoned Beirut, leaving a vacuum that was quickly filled by Syrian nationalists acting in the name of Feisal. This caused a problem for the French who claimed that Beirut and the surrounding territory under the Sykes-Picot Agreement. Meanwhile, George-Picot was on his way to Syria to take the position as the French High Commissioner. Alfred Balfour felt obligated to uphold the Sykes-Picot agreement. When Allenby stated that Syria was going to be under the protection of France, Feisal refused to accept this outcome. To pacify Feisal, Allenby temporarily allocated to France a narrow strip of coastal Lebanon, while Lawrence left for London to argue that the facts on the ground negated the Sykes-Picot agreement. In late October T. E. Lawrence came to London, where he appeared before the Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet. Lawrence recommended that the Hashemite family be rewarded for their wartime alliance with Abdullah being made the ruler of Baghdad and southern Mesopotamia, Zeid made the ruler of northern Mesopotamia, and Feisal the ruler of Syria. Then, Lawrence maintained, Feisal probably would allow the French to take control of Beirut and Lebanon, providing France didn’t annex Lebanon. Wilson, op. cit., p. 576. Lawrence met with the junior foreign office minister, Lord Robert Cecil, who raised the issue of the future government for Mesopotamia (Iraq, today). Lawrence suggested that King Hussein’s son, Abdullah, be made the governor of the territory. The next day Lawrence told the British Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet, chaired by Lord Curzon, that Feisal was pro-British and that he was willing to acknowledge Britain’s right of conquest to Palestine and Mesopotamia, if Britain would oppose France’s claim to Syria despite the Sykes-Picot Agreement. In December a coalition government of Liberals and Conservatives appointed David Lloyd George as Prime Minister replacing Lord Herbert Henry Asquith. Lloyd George asked Winston Churchill to become his Secretary of State for War. Lloyd George also wanted to repeal the Sykes-Picot agreement, because he wanted to bring Palestine and Mosul into the British zone and keep the French out of Syria. Mosul was important to Britain because it was thought that the British fleet should be shifted from coal- to oil-power. British troops were advancing from Basra to Baghdad and were now closing in on Kirkuk, thus putting them in range of the oil fields around Mosul. James Barr argues that “the Eastern Committee and the Foreign Office continued to believe that unilateral support for self-determination represented the best way to achieve the British goal of dominance in the Middle East obliquely.” So in December 1918 Balfour arranged a meeting with both Feisal and the British Zionist Chaim Weizmann which resulted in a pact both men signed in January 1919 that postponed any talks about the boundary between Palestine and Hejaz until after the Peace Conference. “Today this document is sometimes cited as a freely given Arab acknowledgment of the legitimate existence of the state of Israel,” writes Barr, “but Feisal depended on a British subsidy of £150,000 a month and that was why he signed. He also made his support conditional on the Arabs’ achieving their independence.” Barr, pp.61, 63. “To ward off the inevitable French pressure for an international administration once Palestine had been conquered, the British government now made it support for Zionism public,” writes Barr. Ibid., p. 47. In November it published in the Times the letter from the British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild that became known as the Balfour Declaration, stating that Britain supported the creation of a “Jewish homeland” in Palestine. In November British forces were able to capture the junction where the Gaza and Jerusalem branch lines joined the trunk line north to Damascus. By December the Turks left Jerusalem leaving it to the British without a fight. George-Picot was present for the celebration of the conquest of Jerusalem and told Allenby that was prepared to immediately establish a civil government for the city, but Allenby replied that it would remain a military zone under his authority. In January 1918 Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Commissar for External Affairs, had renounced the Convention of 1907, under which Britain and Russia agreed on spheres of influence in Persia. “The British government feared that the Russian withdrawal would expose the Indian Army in Mesopotamia to an attack from behind by Ottoman armies wheeling through Persia…” Fromkin, op. cit., p. 353. At the end of the war, Mesopotamia was under the temporary administration of the British Captain Arnold Wilson. Both he and his assistant Gertrude Bell didn’t think the people of Mesopotamia were ready for self-government and there was no way to ascertain the public opinion there. Mesopotamia included the provinces of Basra and Baghdad. In addition, Lloyd George had gotten from Clemenceau an agreement to cede its claim to the province of Mosul, which was thought to be the site of valuable oil resources. The problem was that there was bitterness between the majority Shi’ite Muslims and the minority Sunni Muslims. https://2012middleeast.wikispaces.com/file/view/Screen_Shot_2012-02-10_at_11.04.46_PM.png/300704702/Screen_Shot_2012-02-10_at_11.04.46_PM.png In 1919, the population of Mesopotamia as half Shi’a Muslim, one quarter Sunni Muslim, with smaller numbers of Jews and Christians. Half the people were Arabs, and the rest were Kurds (around Mosul), Persians, and Assyrians. Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World (New York: Random House, 2001), p. 398. During World War I the Kurds sided with the Ottoman Empire, and with the encouragement of the Ottomans participated in the slaughter of hundreds of thousands Armenians. The Kurds are not Arabs. They are an Indo-European people ethnically close to Iranians. The Muslim general Saladin, who defeated the European crusaders in the twelfth century, was a Kurd. About three quarters of the Kurds lived in the Ottoman Empire, the majority in Turkey and the rest in Iraq, Syria and Persia (Iran, today). Most of the Kurds were Sunni Muslim, although some were Shi’ias and Christians. The Ottomans used the Kurdish Muslim to slaughter Armenians. But they didn’t have as strong a sense of nationalism as the Armenians, nor any patrons at the Paris Peace Conference. The British were more interested in getting a mandate for Mesopotamia because of its promising oil deposits. They were the only ones interested in an independent Kurdistan. Margaret Macmillan writes: “A Kurdistan would have the advantage of protecting the southern boundary of Armenia, if it survived, and so providing yet another barrier between Bolshevism and British interests. It would also neatly block the French in Syria and southern Anatolia from extending their influence north.” Ibid., p. 446. At the Paris Peace Conference the British sent for Gertrude Bell, who had been a political officer with British forces in Mesopotamia during the war and felt that if Syria achieved an Arab state then Mesopotamia would demand the same. Gertrude Bell was the daughter of a wealthy, British ironmaster from Durham County, England. She attended Oxford University where she studied Modern History. She then took a grand tour of Europe and the Ottoman Middle East. In 1905 she traveled from Beirut through the Syrian Desert to Druze territory in the mountains. She made the acquaintance of T. E. Lawrence at the Hittite site of Carchemish. She also made trips into the Arabian Desert. When World War One erupted, she joined the Arab Bureau being formed at the Savoy Hotel in Cairo under General Gilbert Clayton. Bell’s job was to compile a handbook on the Bedouin tribes in northern Arabia. After a brief stay in Cairo, Bell was dispatched to India and then to Basra, where she served without a salary drawing maps to aid the British army advance toward Baghdad. There she became acquainted with Arnold T. Wilson, who served as Mesopotamia’s chief administrator during Cox’s absences in London and Tehran. Bell was given the title of Oriental Secretary with a modest salary. When the British forces took Baghdad, she moved there. This is when the British began calling the country Iraq. T. E. Lawrence introduced Bell to Faisal, and she became a proponent of his becoming the king of Iraq, but this put her at odds with A. T. Wilson. Arnold Wilson wanted to see the creation of an Iraq consisting of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul. The British Foreign Office at Whitehall wanted a separate state for Kurdistan. Lawrence proposed separate emirates for Basra and Baghdad. Emir Feisal wanted a federation of Syria and Iraq, and the French wanted Mosul to be part of Syria. Wilson convinced Britain’s prime minister Lloyd George of his position, and Lloyd George reached an oral agreement with the French prime minister Clemenceau. At the Peace Conference Feisal met with French Premier, Clemenceau, and reached a secret understanding that Feisal could reign over an independent Syria, but France would exercise a loose trusteeship over the country. Feisal stated that he excluded Palestine from the area claimed by the Arabs. The French, however, felt that making Feisal the ruler of Syria would mean that it would become part of the British, rather than the French, sphere of influence. President Woodrow Wilson then suggested that a commission be sent to the Mid-East to determine the will of the people in both Syria and Mesopotamia. Clemenceau agreed and added that the commission should also visit Palestine as well. “Lawrence was ecstatic at this plan; the other members of the British delegation were not. Independent scrutiny of Britain’s claim to be the power that the people of Mesopotamia and Palestine wanted to rule them was the last thing that British officials wanted,” writes Barr. “The British knew that the commission would find in favor of Arab independence in Syria. But even if it did also accept the case for British rule in Mesopotamia and Palestine, the Syrian example was bound to be infectious.” Barr, op. cit., p. 73. At the Peace Conference Feisal met with French Premier, Clemenceau, and reached a secret understanding that Feisal could reign over an independent Syria, but France would exercise a loose trusteeship over the country. Feisal was considered an outsider in Damascus. In June 1919 the General Syrian Congress called for an independent Syria that would include what is today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Neither Britain nor France agreed to participate in the commission. Consisting of only two Americans (a theologian named Henry King and a Chicago businessman named Charles Crane), the commission arrived in Palestine in June. They traveled to Jaffa, Jerusalem, Damascus, Beirut, and Aleppo. One of the advisers to the commission was William Yale, who before the war had worked for the Standard Oil Company. The British convinced the two American commissioners to rely on a pro-British summary of Iraqi opinion rather than visiting the country in person. “The Arabs were consulted, but only by the Americans. Woodrow Wilson’s Commission of Inquiry, which Clemenceau and Lloyd George had declined to support, had gone ahead,” writes Margaret Macmillan. “They found that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants wanted Syria to encompass both Palestine and Lebanon; a similar majority also wanted independence. . . . Their report was not published until 1922, long after the damage had been done.” Macmillan, op. cit., p. 406. Based on petitions they solicited in Syria and Lebanon, the King-Crane commission recommended that the United States assume the mandate for a united Syria and Palestine with Feisal as the head of state and that Britain be given the mandate for Mesopotamia. It also stated that the “extreme Zionist program” be modified to prevent a war between the Arabs and the Jews. Under the Treaty of Versailles a League of Nations was to be created that would establish three mandates in the former Ottoman Empire—Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine – to be ruled by “mandatories” until such time as they were ready for eventual independence. That point was vaguely defined “provisionally recognized subject to the rendering of administrative advice and assistance by a Mandatory until such time as they are able to stand alone.” Class A Mandates were communities that had reached a stage of development supported a provisional recognition as independent nations, but under the “administrative advice and assistance” by a Mandatory. It was applied to certain parts of the Turkish Empire, including Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan as mandates of Great Britain; and Syria and Lebanon as mandates of France. “The terms ‘mandate’ and ‘mandatory powers’ do not appear in the Fourteen Points, but they were used in memoranda for the Inquiry about the future of Mesopotamia and Germany’s African colonies,” writes Derick Heater. The team that expanded the meaning of the Fourteen Points stated in reference to Point Five: “It would seem as if the principle involved in this proposition is that a colonial power acts not as the owner of its colonies, but as trustee for the natives and for the interests of the society of nations, that the terms on which the colonial administration is conducted are a matter of international concern and may legitimately be the subject of international inquiry.” However, Heater argues that Woodrow Wilson had not thought through the implications of the mandate system. “Were the mandatory powers to prepare all these territories for ultimate self-determination? How was the readiness for independence to be gauged? Was the League to have any financial liability for the mandates? How was friction to be avoided in the triangular relationship of the League, mandatory and mandate? Or was the League itself to wield direct control over some of these territories? Furthermore, whatever arrangement might be considered desirable, one significant fact had to be coped with: virtually all the candidate territories had been occupied by Allied armies.” Derek Heater, National Self-Determination: Woodrow Wilson and His Legacy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), pp. 89, 90. Tom Segev argues that “The mandatory system was designed to give colonialism a cleaner, more modern look. The Allied powers refrained from dividing up the conqueror’s spoils as in the past; rather they invited themselves to serve as ‘trustees’ for backward peoples, with the ostensible purpose of preparing them for independence. This new form of colonialism was said to incorporate international law, as well as the principles of democracy and justice, and respect the wishes of the inhabitants of each country. Awarded by the League of Nations, mandates could, theoretically, be revoked by it. In reality though, the postwar system was merely a reworking of colonial rule.” Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate, translated by Haim Watzman (New York: Henry Holt, 1999), p. 118. Meanwhile, fighting broke out on the southern Turkish border with Syria, which was occupied by the French. Between February and April 1919 the Turks defeated the French in a series of battles. With the Allied military occupying Constantinople, the Chamber of Deputies in Angora created a new government with Mustapha Kemal as president. In May 1919 General Mustapha Kemal, who had been instrumental in the British defeat at Gallipoli, began to rally forces throughout Turkey against Allied occupation. Feisal was considered an outsider in Damascus. In June 1919 the General Syrian Congress called for an independent Syria that would include what is today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. In September 1919 the British government announced that it would withdraw from Syria, leaving the French and Feisal to settle the future of Syria and Lebanon. Feisal wanted to become the leader of a united Arabia, but the Allied Powers at the Peace Conference didn’t listen to him. Instead, the British and the French divided the Middle East between themselves. Feisal returned to Damascus and appointed himself the ruler of Syria, refusing to acknowledge the French claim. The French were willing to let Feisal remain King of Syria if he would let France rule Greater Lebanon and allow Syria to become a client state of France. However, Clemenceau was not re-elected president of France, and his successor Alexandre Millerand didn’t agree to these terms. In December 1919 there was a clash between French and Arab forces in the fertile Beqaa Valley of Lebanon, and the French seized Baalbeck, the main town in the valley. Feisal immediately returned to Damascus from Paris and refused to allow the French to use the railway between Damascus and Aleppo that the French needed to supply their troops. Feisal had already established a General Syrian Congress in July 1919 that voted for full independence even before Crane and King arrived in Damascus. The resolution passed by the Congress called for a constitutional monarchy under Emir Feisal that included present-day Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine. It also rejected both French claims to Syria and Lebanon as well as Zionist claims to a Jewish commonwealth in Palestine by invoking President Woodrow Wilson’s principle of self-determination and his condemnation of secret treaties. In June 1919 the General Syrian Congress called for an independent Syria that would include what is today Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel. Feisal attended the Peace Conference, where he met with French Premier, Clemenceau, and reached a secret understanding that Feisal could reign over an independent Syria, but France would exercise a loose trusteeship over the country. Feisal was considered an outsider in Damascus. “The Arabs were consulted, but only by the Americans,” writes Macmillan. “Wilson’s Commission of Inquiry, which Clemenceau and Lloyd George had declined to support, had gone ahead. . . . They found that an overwhelming majority of the inhabitants wanted Syria to encompass both Palestine and Lebanon; a similar majority also wanted independence. . . . Their report was not published until 1922, long after the damage had been done.” Macmillan, op. cit., p. 406. When Feisal returned to Damascus, he learned that Syrian nationalists were unwilling to accept any role for France in Syria’s future. Seeing no alternative, Feisal decided to seek full independence from France. On March 7, 1920, the Syrian Congress proclaimed Feisal king of Syria, encompassing from Lebanon and Palestine to the Euphrates River. Shortly after another congress met in Damascus and declared Mesopotamia independent from Britain and proclaimed Feisal’s brother Abdullah king. http://www.worldology.com/Iraq/images/post_war_iraq.jpg The Lebanese Christians declared their own independence from Syria in March 1920. The French rewarded their Christian allies with expanding Lebanon to include not only Mount Lebanon, but also the Bekaa Valley, the ports of Tyre, Sideon (Sidon), Beirut and Tripoli and south to the border of Palestine. The state was dominated by Christians until the 1970s, when a civil war resulted in the Syrian government sending in troops to occupy Lebanon. Feisal carried out guerrilla attacks against the French and Christians in Lebanon and offered support to Kemalist Turkey in their attack on the French in Cilicia. In July 1920 France using primarily Senegalese troops took control of Damascus and forced Feisal into exile. In August France created Great Lebanon, which was the land originally promised France in the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It included Turkish canton of Lebanon as well as the Bekaa Valley in the interior and the coastal cities of Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, and Tyre and south to the border of Palestine. This meant creating a country which included Maronite Christians, their enemies the Druses, and Sunni and Shi’ite Muslims. Britain would have a mandate for Palestine and would proceed with implementing the Balfour Declaration. In the weeks prior to the agreement, Palestinian Arabs rioted against the Jews in Palestine. The implementation of the mandate took another two years. By then Winston Churchill became the British colonial secretary. At his urging the British mandate was divided in two. Palestine was confined to the area west of Jordan, and the new Arab state of Transjordan was established under the rule of Feisal’s brother Abdullah. Weizmann was not happy with this outcome stating that the area east of the Jordan River had always been considered part of Palestine. In July 1922 the League of Nations ratified the British mandate for Palestine, but the Arab Palestinians rejected it. The new French prime minister, Alexandre Millerand, and the Lloyd George were scheduled to meet at the Italian resort town of San Remo in April 1920 to allocate the mandates for the Middle East. The British, says Barr, “knew that agreeing to a French mandate in Syria was certain to cause Arab uproar, they also knew that if they objected, the French prime minister was bound to carry out his threat to call for an international administration in Palestine—a step that in current circumstances the Zionists might support. At San Remo, therefore, Britain did not object to the French claim to Syria, and Millerand did not follow through with his threat.” Barr, op. cit., p. 92. The French mandate for Syria and Lebanon and the British mandates for Palestine and Mesopotamia were confirmed, and the French were granted a quarter share in the company established to explore for oil near Mosul. Large sections of Muslim and Druze territory were allocated to the Maronite Christian Arabs in order to provide them with economic support. This caused deep discontent among the Arab nationalists in Syria. “‘One could say, with justice,” writes Christopher Catherwood, “that we still live with the consequences of the decision of a few Allied leaders at San Remo, in April 1920, to give France mandates for Syria and Lebanon.” Catherwood, op. cit., pp. 78-79. After the San Remo conference, France told the British that they planned to use military force against Feisal. This alarmed the British who decided not to withdraw their forces from Palestine. In July the French attacked the Arab forces, took control of Damascus, and Feisal fled to Palestine. The British then put him on a train to Egypt. Meanwhile, in June 1920 the Arabs in Mesopotamia rebelled against the three years of British military rule there. The military governor was Arnold Wilson who believed that the Arabs were not capable of governing themselves, especially because of the internal divisions between Sunni and Shi’a and between Arabs and Kurds. These opinions caused a split between him and his former colleague Gertrude Bell. Barr says that the British officials in London “worried that if they gave the Arabs a degree of autonomy in Baghdad, the French would accuse them of trying to destabilize Syria and retaliate by vetoing the British claim to the Mosul oil fields and Palestine at the League of Nations.” Barr, op. cit., p. 98. When the Syrian Congress declared Abdullah the emir of Mesopotamia there was no Arab government in place. Furthermore, the boundary between Syria and Mesopotamia remained undefined. The French administered its mandate in Syria and Lebanon differently than the British. The French separated Lebanon from Syria in an effort to curry favor with the Christian population there and divided Syria into four separate provinces that separated Damascus from Aleppo and recognized minority Alawite and Druze sects. The French high commissioner, General Henri Gouraud, appointed the Arab governor of each state, and each Arab governor had a French advisor. Barr describes this as “a cynical attempt to split the nationalists that was also directly contradictory to the mandate, which required France to prepare Syria and Lebanon for self-government.” Ibid., p. 120. In June 1921 there was an assassination attempt in the Golan Heights on the General Gouraud. Some of the would-be assassins fled south into Transjordan for protection under Abdullah. The French high commissioner protested, but the British declined to intervene. In 1922 the French revised this structure by integrating three of the four states into a federation, but leaving Jabal Druze to be a separate state. In the same year General Gouraud received a tip that one of the assassins was being sheltered by Sultan Atrash in Jabal Druze. The French raided the Sultan’s home and captured the suspect, but the convoy bringing the prisoner back to Damascus was ambushed by the Sultan’s forces and a French officer was killed. In 1923 the French tried to bring the Druzes under their control by appointing a military governor named Gabriel Carbiller who imposed a regime of forced labor on the people. In 1925 Sultan Atrash went to Beirut with a Druze delegation to complain to the new French High Commissioner former general Maurice Sarrail, but the high commissioner refused to meet with them. When in July shots were fired at a Druze ceremony in the town of Suwayda in the Jabal, Sarrail sent Tommy Martin, the head of French intelligence in Damascus, to take control of the town. Sarrail ordered Martin to invite four Druze leaders to Damascus for talks, and when three of the four accepted they were immediately arrested. Sultan Atrash was the only one not to fall for the trick. A few days later Sultan Atrash seized control the city of Salkhad in the south of the Jabal Druze. A French force that was dispatched to retake the city was ambushed, and in July Sultan laid siege to Suwayda. A second larger French force sent to break the siege was also ambushed. A third force under the command of General Maurice Gamelin, who had stopped the German advance toward Paris at the Battle of the Marne in 1914, with a large contingent of French Foreign Legion was able to temporarily take Suwayda, but they soon had to abandon it because of a shortage of food and water. Another rebellion against the French broke out in October 1925 in the market town of Hama on the Orontes River in northern Syria. This rebellion started as mutiny among the gendarmerie led by a Syrian gendarme named Fawzi al-Qawukji, but the rebellion was quickly suppressed by French artillery and aerial bombing. Another leader of the rebellion, Abdul Rahman Shahbandar, had been the interpreter for the American Charles Crane, but had been imprisoned by the French and sent into exile. He was pardoned in 1924 and returned to Syria where he declared Sultan Atrash as king of Syria. He was forced to take refuge in the dense orchards southeast of Damascus from which he and his nationalist forces made guerilla raids against the French. In October the Druzes took control of Maydan, a town south of Damascus on the Hejaz Railway. From there the Druzes were able to set fire to the Azm Palace, the residence of the high commissioner in Damascus, but Gamelin had already left the palace. The French responded by destroying the town of Maydan killing as many as 1,400 Syrian civilians. When news of the bombardment of Damascus reached Paris, Sarrail was recalled in disgrace. Sarrail was replaced as the French high commissioner by Henri de Jouvenel, who had been the editor of the French newspaper Le Matin, a delegate to the League of Nations, and had divorced the French writer Colette after she had an affair with his son from his first marriage. Knowing that the Druzes were receiving supplies through Transjordan, De Jouvenel first went to London to have talks with the British. At that time Britain was involved in a In dispute with the Turks over control of Mosul, and the matter had been placed before the League of Nations for arbitration. The Turks were backing Kurdish separatists who wanted to be independent from Iraq, and the French were backing the Turks in an effort to gain a greater share of Mosul oil. The British accused the French of permitting the Turks to use the railroad along the Syrian and Turkish border to send supplies to the Kurds in Iraq. But in March 1926 the League of Nations decided the Mosul issue in Britain’s favor. Meanwhile Charles Andréa the French commander in Damascus built a boulevard around the old city, which when completed in 1926 separated the old city with barbed wire from the outskirts in which the rebels were hiding. Then he sent out Circassian, Armenian, and Kurdish irregular forces in the orchards on the outsides to weed out the rebels. In April 1917 Andréa again tried to recapture Suwayda with an alliance he made with the Amer clan, which was the rival of the Atrash. This time he succeeded in taking Suwayda. In May 1926 France was able to suppress a rebellion led by Abd al-Krim in Morocco, which enabled it to deploy additional troops to Syria. Over the winter of 1926-1927 1,500 Druzes who had camped in the desert at Azraq within Transjordan were weakened by a shortage of money and medical supplies. In the Arabian Peninsula Ibn Saud had expelled Sharif Hussein from the Hejaz, and the British was worried that he had designs on adding eastern Transjordan to his kingdom. Also, the British were concerned that France might withdraw from Syria. In January 1927 the British decided to remove the Druzes from the camp at Azraq. By July the removal by the British of the Druzes from Azraq effectively ended the Druze Revolt, and France announced that it would absorb Jabal Druze into the state of Syria and continue the French mandate. “By 1918, the military importance of oil began to be generally recognized,” writes David Fromkin. Fromkin, op. cit., p. 354. During the war, the British navy under Churchill had switched from coal to oil as their fuel, and trucks replaced horses and wagons for the transport of supplies. In addition, tanks and airplanes were also being used. In early 1918 the British sent a force from Mesopotamia to the Caucasus. By the time they arrived, most of Transcaucasia had fallen to either the Ottomans or the Germans. In January 1918 Leon Trotsky, the Soviet Commissar for External Affairs, had renounced the Convention of 1907, under which Britain and Russia agreed on spheres of influence in Persia. “The British government feared that the Russian withdrawal would expose the Indian Army in Mesopotamia to an attack from behind by Ottoman armies wheeling through Persia…” Ibid., p. 353. Lloyd George reached an agreement with Clemenceau that France would have a quarter-share of the Turkish Petroleum Company and in exchange it would allow an oil pipeline to be built from Mosel through Syria to the Mediterranean Sea. The problem was that there was bitterness between the majority Shi’ite Muslims and the minority Sunni Muslims. In the summer of 1919 three British officers were murdered in Kurdistan. The following year a full revolt against British rule broke out both in the Shi’ite holy city of Karbalah and in the tribal northwestern frontier. The month following the San Remo Conference Sunni and Shi’a in Baghdad revolted against the mandate and in favor of complete independence. It began with attacks British posts on the yet to be determined boundary between Syria and Mesopotamia, continued with raids on the Baghdad-Mosul railroad, and reached its peak in the summer. The Arab insurgents received money and arms from Mustafa Kemal in Turkey and from Emir Feisal, whom the French had removed as King of Syria. The Beni Huchaim tribes who lived along the Euphrates River in southern Iraq refused to accept Feisal’s government nor to pay taxes to it. The Iraqi Minister of Interior enlisted the help of the British Royal Air Force captain John Bagut Glubb to suppress two tribes in the confederation—the Barkat and the Sufran. Glubb scouted their villages and made maps of bombing targets. Then the RAF dropped leaflets giving the Barkat and Sufran tribal leaders 48-hours-notice to assembly in the nearby town of Samawah and to give assurances that their people would pay their taxes. When the sheiks said that they didn’t have that kind of control over the tribesmen, the RAF commenced two days of bombing in which 144 tribesmen were killed. The insurgency was finally quelled after several months by A.T. Wilson, after he banned meetings in mosques and imposed a general curfew. An estimated 10,000 Arabs were killed, most from bombings by the Royal Air Force. After the insurgency was suppressed, the British war minister, Winston Churchill, and Britain’s postwar foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, decided to replace Wilson with Sir Percy Cox. Wilson later became the managing director of the Anglo Persian Oil Company. Glubb resigned from the army in 1926 and joined the British administration in Iraq. Sir Percy asked Gertrude Bell and Harry St. John Bridger “Jack” Philby (the father of the Cold-War Russian spy Kim Philby) to create a council for a provisional government for Iraq. Rather than holding elections Bell and Philby chose a council made up mostly of the minority Sunni, with each ministry having a British advisor. When the Shia protested, Bell said that they were not really Iraqis, but Persians. Philby actually was in favor of making Iraq a republic, but he then was forced to resign. A plebiscite was held in July. It had one single question: “Do you want Faisal as king?” The Kurds and the Shi’as boycotted the election, and Faisal received 96 percent of the vote. Meyer and Brysac, op. cit., p. 183. In August 1920 the Allies (excluding the Soviet Union and the United States) met with the Turkish government representatives in a porcelain factory in the French city of Sévres, outside of Paris, to sign a final peace treaty. Under the treaty, the former Ottoman vilayet of Hejaz was recognized as an independent kingdom under the Hashemite king Hussein. The pre-war secret agreements and the provisions of the Treaty of San Remo were confirmed with France obtaining a zone of influence in Syria and southeastern Anatolia and a mandate over Lebanon; and Britain obtaining a mandate over Iraq. There would be a referendum to determine the fate of Kurdistan, including the province of Mosel, but not the Kurdish regions of Iran, British-controlled Iraq, or French-controlled Syria. The treaty was signed by the Ottoman government, but was later rejected by the new Turkish nationalist government, and most of its conditions were never enforced. In March 1921 a conference was held at Cairo’s Semiramis Hotel attended by among forty delegates Winston Churchill; T. E. Lawrence; Sir Percy Cox; General Gilbert Clayton; and Gertrude Bell, who had been Wilson’s Middle East expert. In 1918 Lloyd George had made Winston Churchill secretary of state for war, despite the fact that he had been blamed for the failure of the invasion of Gallipoli and had been forced to resign from the cabinet by Lloyd George when he replaced Asquith as prime minister in 1916. Then, in 1921 Lloyd George moved Churchill from the War Office to head the Colonial Office. Churchill invited T. E. Lawrence to work for him, despite the fact that Churchill viewed Lawrence with suspicion. At the conference Britain decided to offer the throne of Mesopotamia (from then on to be named Iraq) to Feisal under the guise that the offer came from the Iraqi people. Kurdistan was within the sphere of influence promised to France by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, but it was occupied by the British. Britain wasn’t sure whether to include the Kurdish areas in Iraq or to allow it to become an independent country Kurdistan. So it remained a separate entity under the British High Commissioner in Mesopotamia. The Allies thus reneged on their vague promises of an independent Kurdish state made at the Treaty of Sévres. There was to be a plebiscite in Iraq, and Churchill asked Sir Percy Cox, who was to become Iraq’s High Commissioner, and Gertrude Bell, Cox’s oriental secretary, make sure that Faisal won the election. While there was a discussion of whether a separate Kurdistan should be created as a buffer between Turkey and Iraq and Churchill expressed concern about how the Kurds would react to a Hashemite king backed by an Arab army, it was decided that Iraq should consist of all three provinces. The plebiscite was held in August, and 96 percent of the electorate elected Amir Feisal King of Iraq. Barr, however, quotes Churchill having said in January before the plebiscite that “Western political methods are not necessarily applicable . . . and [the] basis of election should be framed.” Barr, op. cit., p. 111. In August Feisal was proclaimed King of Iraq, but Britain still ruled Iraq under a mandate from the League of Nations. In August Feisal was proclaimed King of Iraq, but Britain still ruled Iraq under a mandate from the League of Nations. Feisal was not happy with this arrangement and announced he would not accept the restrictions of Iraqi sovereignty under the League mandate. Churchill, according to Catherwood, was aware of the problem of making Feisal the king of Iraq, where the majority of the people were Shi’a. Feisal was a Sunni Arab. “Theologically, the Kurds chose Sunni rather than Shia Islam, and it was the desire of Feisal, the first King of Iraq, to balance the Shia Muslim majority in southern Iraq with Sunni Arabs in the center and Sunni Kurds in the north. Feisal’s scheme was one of the key factors in Britain’s unfortunate decision to absorb Kurdish territory into Iraq in the 1920s rather than give the Kurds their independence. . .” Catherwood, op. cit., p. 26. The Kurds are a Persian people whose Kurdish language is part of the Iranian sub-group of the Indo-European family. Their traditional territory (Kurdistan) includes what is today eastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northeastern Syria. The majority of the Kurds are Sunni Muslim, but there are also smaller numbers of Ahl-i Haqq or Yarsan (a syncretistic religion founded in the 14th century by the Iranian Sultan Sahak). Yazidis (a syncretistic religion founded in the 12th century by a Lebanese mystic named Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir), Zoroastrians (an dualistic, ancient Persian religion in which the creator, Ahura Mazda, is goodness as opposed to Angra Mainyu, the principle of chaos), Jews, and Christians. The most famous Kurd was Saladin (1137-1193), who led Muslim armies during the Crusades to conquer Jerusalem, Syria, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and North Africa. In July 1923, Britain, France, Italy, and other allies met with Turkey in Lausanne, Switzerland, to try again to negotiate an end to the state of war between them. The Treaty of Lausanne settled the new borders of Turkey, except for that with Iraq. It did not mention anything about an independent Kurdistan. The matter of the Kurds would be referred to the League of Nations, which awarded Kurdistan to Iraq in 1925. Iraq became an independent country in 1932. In 1925 Britain signed a seventy-five year contract with the Iraq Petroleum company in which Iraq received royalties and the Britain received the oil. In 1932 achieved Iraq independence and became the first Arab member of the League of Nations. The following year King Feisal died, and the Iraqi army permitting the slaughter of 400 Assyrian villagers by Kurdish and Arab tribesmen. The Hashemite dynasty ruled Iraq until 1958, when they were overthrown by a military coup. In autumn 1918 the British General Allenby had driven the Turks out of Transjordan (the part of Syria that had been included in the British sphere of influence under the Sykes-Picot Agreement), and it became part of the territory administered by King Feisal in Damascus. Britain was concerned that France might try to exercise control over Transjordan. Meanwhile, the Arabs in Amman were threatening to launch a Holy War against the French in Syria. At the Cairo Conference it was decided that in exchange for renouncing his claim to the Iraqi throne, Feisal’s older brother Abdullah would be offered the crown of Transjordan. While the conference was taking place Abdullah with an army of Bedouins had arrived at Amman, apparently en route to attack the Syrian capital of Damascus. It was Churchill’s plan, according to Fromkin, that by offering Abdullah the territory east of the Jordan River, Britain could honor the Balfour Declaration by establishing a Jewish National Homeland west of the Jordan. Fromkin, op. cit., p. 504. Transjordan had been included by the League of Nations as part of Palestine under the League mandate to Britain. “The recurring suggestion that Palestine be partitioned between Arab and Jews ran up against the problem that 75 percent of the country had already been given to an Arab dynasty that was not Palestinian.” Meyer and Brysac, op. cit., p. 514. Churchill later said that he “created Jordan with a stroke of a pen one Sunday afternoon.” Ibid., p. 260. Abdullah was to receive a payment of Ł5,000 per month, but he was to have a British Resident to advise him. T. E. Lawrence initially became the adviser who was sent to Amman, the capital. He was succeeded by Jack Philby in November 1921. Philby attempted to rein in Abdullah’s extravagant ways, but it became necessary for the Resident to take control of Transjordan’s treasury and military affair. Technically Transjordan became part of the British mandate, but unlike Palestine it would not be subject to being a Jewish homeland. Sir Herbert Samuel, the British High Commissioner for Palestine, insisted that Transjordan could not be separated from Palestine, which led Philby to resign his position in protest. “Churchill’s scheme was, in effect, to establish a series of pro-British client monarchies, all of whose rulers would owe Britain a debt of considerable gratitude simply for the fact that they were in power at all. As he told Sir Herbert [Samuel, one of Britain most eminent Jews] and other committee members, this way the whole Sharifian family—Hussein in the Hijaz, Feisal in Iraq, and Abdullah in Transjordan—would thereby be place ‘under an obligation to His Majesty’s Government in one sphere or another,’” writes Christopher Catherwood. “This shows us clearly that the British were intending to use the sharifian clan in the same way that the British Raj in Indian used the great array of maharajas, nawabs, and similar local client rulers to rule millions of Indians on the cheap (not to mention similar tribal chiefs in large parts of British Africa).The appearance of independence would be granted, but real control would remain British.” Catherwood, op. cit., pp. 141-142. Churchill’s concern at the Cairo Conference was to cut the costs of administering the British Empire. “Churchill was still leaning strongly toward a Hashemite solution, though he realized that intense ill-will between Feisal’s and Abdullah’s father, King Hussein of the Hijaz, and the predatory Ibn Saud of the Nejd, could complicate things greatly,” writes Catherwood. “It is no exaggeration to say that the experts who gathered together in the elegant Semiramis Hotel in Cairo in March 1921 created the map of the Middle East that we know today.” Ibid., pp. 116, 127. The outcome of the conference was to create a separate state of Transjordan to be ruled by Abdullah and Iraq of which Feisal would be king. Former British army officer John Bagot Glubb, known as Glubb Pasha, became the head of the Arab Legion described by Meyer and Brysac as “the best equipped, best trained, and most disciplined of the Arab armies and the backbone of the Jordanian monarchy for more than a quarter century.” Meyer and Brysac write that Glubb “exemplified many of the paradoxes and dilemma of indirect rule—his very presence and authority undermined the legitimacy of the Hashemites, and his loyalty to Jordan would always be suspect.” Meyer and Brysac, op. cit., p. 265. In 1912 a religious revival known as the Brethren spread among Bedouin tribesmen. Ibn Saud managed to gain control of this movement, which threatened Hussein, who was an orthodox Sunni Muslim. Cox appointed William Henry Shakespear as Resident in Kuwait, where he set about exploring the Arabian Peninsula. Shakespear met and befriended the Arab warlord, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, who had regained his ancestral throne at Nejd. In January 1915 Shakespear was killed in fighting between Ibn Saud’s Wahhabis and the pro-Turkish forces of Ibn Rashid of Hail. Jack Philby became convinced that Britain should be supporting Ibn Saud rather than Sharif Hussein, but he was overruled. After the war ended in November 1918, Philby returned to England, but was asked by Sir Percy Cox to come to Baghdad to be the adviser to the Interior Ministry of the new provisional Iraqi government. However, when he was given the assignment to escort Prince Faisal on his first visit to Iraq, Philby made the mistake of telling him how unpopular the hand-picked king was with the Iraqi people, and Philby was asked to resign. In May 1919 Hussein’s son Abdullah’s army was defeated in a major battle against the Brethren. The British had to rush to the rescue of Hussein. Neither Ibn Saud nor John Philby was invited to the Paris Peace talks. Instead, Feisal and T. E. Lawrence were touted as the heroes of Damascus. Andelman notes that the British Cabinet, which had been lobbied by T. E. Lawrence on behalf of Feisal, became convinced that there was no oil in Saudi Arabia. Instead, they thought it was to be found in Mosul, which could be controlled by Hussein and his family. Ibn Saud considered this a betrayal, and turned to the Americans for support. Ibn Saud used his band of Wahhabi warriors known as the Ikhwan (or the Brethren) to seize control of the cities of Jeddah and Riyadh by the time of the Paris Peace conference. In October 1921 Philby was offered the position of replacing T. E. Lawrence as Chief British Representative to Emir Abdullah in Trans-Jordan. Abdullah had designs on Syria, Palestine, Iraq, and Arabia, and he launched a series of cross-border raids. In 1922 at a conference at Uqair, Saudi Arabia, Ibn Saud recognized Iraq and settled the border between Kuwait and the Nejd (Saudi Arabia today). It was actually Sir Percy Cox who drew the border on a map. In 1926 an International Boundary Commission determined the border between Turkey and Syria and Transjordan. Iraq retained the oil fields around Mosul. Meyer and Brysac write: “Seldom did these lines correspond to any political or geographical reality, nor did they reflect the wishes of the inhabitants. Nor was the government of Iraq popular or representative, composed a it was of a minority, the urbanized Sunni Arabs.” Ibid., p. 189. Even before the war, Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony) had obtained concessions (i.e., exclusive licenses) from the Ottoman Empire to explore for oil in Palestine and Syria. When Socony sent geologists to Iraq, the British refused them permission to prospect for oil there. In April 1920 at the conference at San Remo Britain and France agreed to a secret bargain to divide Mid-eastern oil concessions between the two of them. When the agreement was made public in the summer of 1920 the United States formally protested it. Finally in June 1922 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was allowed to participate in a British-owned oil concession in Iraq. “Ferocious and unforgiving in battle,” writes Meyer and Brysac, “the Ikhwans took no prisoners, excelled at beheading and amputation, and celebrated their victories with rows of spiked heads.” Ibid., p. 239. In March 1924 Mustafa Kemal, the founder of the Turkish Republic, abolished the Caliphate, and Sharif Hussein declared himself the new Caliph. In April 1924 Philby resigned from the British Foreign Service, moved to Jeddah, and offered his services unofficially to Ibn Saud. In the same year, the British ended its wartime subsidies to both Hussein and Ibn Saud, which resulted in Ibn Saud’s Wahhabi fighters in 1925 conquering the Hejaz (including Mecca and Medina) and the port city of Jeddah. His rival Sherif Hussein was forced into exile, and the British refused to intervene on his behalf, because he had refused to accept the loss of Palestine and Syria. The Saudis and the Hashemites continued to be mortal enemies. In 1928 the Saudi Wahhabi forces invaded Transjordan, but British armored cars and machine guns and RAF bombers saved the capital of Amman. After this in 1930 the Jordanians invited Glubb to become a lieutenant general in the Arab Legion. As second in command of the Arab Legion, Glubb reinforced the troops patrolling the Jordanian-Saudi border with Bedouin recruits from the Shammar, Beni Sakhr, and Howeitat tribes. In 1929 the Wahhabi ambushed a Protestant missionary named Reverend Henry Bilkert and the Chicago philanthropist Charles R. Crane, who were traveling by car from Kuwait to Riyadh, resulting in Bilker’s death. Ibn Saud later apologized to Crane, who was actually an advocate of Arab rights. In 1932 Ibn Saud created the second Wahhabi Empire named Saudi Arabia, and oil was discovered in Bahrain by driller hired by the Standard Oil of California (Socal). Charles Crane, whom Woodrow Wilson had sent to the Middle East to ascertain the feelings of the local people towards the British and the French, facilitated bringing Standard Oil of California into Saudi Arabia under the new company named Aramco. In May 1933 Ibn Saud signed an agreement in the Kazam Palace in a suburb of Jeddah with an American lawyer named Lloyd Hamilton representing Socal. Under this agreement in exchange for Ł55,000 Socal would be giving exclusive rights for 60 years to drill for oil in eastern Saudi Arabia, including the offshore waters and islands in the Persian Gulf. “With the stroke of those pens, America ended the British stranglehold on Middle East oil,” writes Meyer and Brysac. The man who helped seal the deal with Jack Philby, who at the time was an unpaid adviser to the Saudi court and who secretly was being paid by Socal. In 1936 Socal’s Saudi subsidiary, the California Arabian Standard Oil Company (Casoc) merged with Texaco, and in 1944 Casoc became the Arabian American Oil Company (Aramco), which then merged with Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon) and Socony-Vauum (later, Mobil) forming in the words of Meyer and Brysac “an oil conglomerate of imperial dimension.” Ibid., pp. 238, 254. http://www-tc.pbs.org/wnet/wideangle/previous_seasons/shows/saudi/images/map1.gif Even before the war, Standard Oil Company of New York (Socony) had obtained concessions (i.e., exclusive licenses) from the Ottoman Empire to explore for oil in Palestine and Syria. When Socony sent geologists to Iraq, the British refused them permission to prospect for oil there. In April 1920 at the conference at San Remo Britain and France agreed to a secret bargain to divide Mideastern oil concessions between the two of them. When the agreement was made public in the summer of 1920 the United States formally protested it. Finally in June 1922 Standard Oil Company of New Jersey was allowed to participate in a British-owned oil concession in Iraq. In October 1927 oil was discovered in northern Iraq on the steppe ten miles northwest of Kirkuk by the Turkish Petroleum Company. The governments of British and France were two of the major shareholders in the company. Its chairman, Sir John Cadman, was a British mining engineer who in 1913 joined the Admiralty Fuel Oil Commission created by Winston Churchill to find oil in the Mid-East to enable the conversion of the British fleet from coal to oil. When it discovered oil along the Persian Gulf, Britain took control in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. When World War One broke out, Britain sent its army to Basra to protect the nearby oil refineries, which led to them taking control of Baghdad and Mosul during the war. Prior to that Britain was dependent on oil imported from the United States. The British had plans to construct a pipeline from the northern Iraqi oil fields to the Mediterranean, and at the Paris Peace Conference they demanded control of the oasis of Palmyra in the Syrian Desert northeast of Damascus, which was claimed by France. In order to appease the French, Cadman negotiated a side deal at the San Remo conference in 1920 to divide between Britain and France Germany’s share of the Turkish Petroleum Company. Suspecting that the French and the Americans secretly were encouraging the Turks to retake Mosul, Churchill decided to send to the United States in 1922 to offer the Americans a share in the company as well. Under an agreement signed in July 1928 four companies were created—Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell, the French state-owned Compagnie, Française des Pétroles, and the Near East Development Corporation (made up of the American companies). Each of these companies owned a stake in the Turkish Petroleum Company whose chairman was John Cadman. http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-EtA_K6ib8uA/TVl4fi6WDfI/AAAAAAAABQs/8eTc9S--5ag/s1600/oil.jpg After the creation of the four companies a dispute broke out over the planned route of the proposed pipeline. France wanted the Mediterranean terminus to be either at Beirut, Tripoli or Alexandretta, all of which were under French control. The British wanted it to be at Haifa, which was farther away from the Iraqi oil fields. In May 1930 the British high commissioner in Baghdad met with Emir Feisal, Iraqi prime minister Nuri Said, and war minister Jafar Pasha and offered them Iraqi independence in return for their opposition to the route of the pipeline through Syria and some changes in the concessions granted the Turkish Petroleum Company (now renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company). To counter this plan, the French approached Walter Teagle, president of Standard Oil of New Jersey (the main company in the Near East Development Corporation) which had received financial backing from a French bank. Teagle went to London and negotiated a compromise in which the pipeline would have terminals in both Haifa and Tripoli. While the French were not altogether happy with the compromise, the revised convention was signed in March 1931. Barr concludes that while Britain initially acquired Palestine in 1920 to protect the Suez Canal, it “now gained a new strategic importance as the outlet for Iraq’s oil.” Barr, op. cit., p. 153. Most of the problems in the Middle East today can be traced to World War One and the settlement imposed by the victors, in particular, the British and French empires in the secret Sykes-Picot treaty. Britain also made an alliance with the Hashemite family from Saudi Arabia rather than their fundamentalist Wahhabi rivals, the House of Saud that created the country of Saudi Arabia after the war. The British goal was not merely to defeat the Ottomans (who were allied with Germany and Austria-Hungary), but to protect the oil resources in the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal, which was the transportation link to their prized colony of India. Britain also wanted to check the designs of France in Palestine and Syria that date back to the Crusades. After the World War One, the British rewarded their Hashemite allies by creating the countries Transjordan and Syria, and then Iraq when King Abdullah was deposed in Syria. These artificially created countries did conform to the principles of self-determination and open-treaties, openly-made championed by President Woodrow Wilson in his Fourteen Points and at the Peace Conference in Versailles. With British troops and its Arab allies on the ground and the United States having entering the war late and not yet being the world power it was to become, President Wilson had limited influence to affect the outcome, and even less after the United States Senate refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or to join the League of Nations. Thus, the British created countries, such as Iraq that combined two Arab sects (Shiite and Sunni) and one non-Arab group (the Kurds); and Lebanon that combined Maronite Christian, Druze, and Shiite Arabs; put in power Hashemite rulers from Arabia (Feisal in Transjordan and Abdullah in Iraq) over populations that were Arab, but not Arabian (that is, from the Arabian Peninsula); and (as we shall see in the next chapter) partitioned Palestine in an effort to create a “Jewish homeland” in a land that was holy to three religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) and internationalized the city of Jerusalem, also holy to these three religions. It is in terms of empire and ethnicity, not the fallacious concept of the War on Terror, that we need to understand these issues.