Enemy on the Euphrates (24 page)

On 9 May 1919 Wilson received a telegram from Montagu informing him that Lord Curzon’s committee had studied his proposals and approved them. A subsequent communication from the India Office added that Wilson’s proposals ‘were necessarily of a provisional character; but they mark an important stage towards the provision of a definite form of administration for the occupied territories, the ultimate constitution of which must await the conclusion of peace with Turkey and the final decision of the Peace Conference in Paris’. It then went on to praise the ‘care and ability’ of Wilson and his staff, and stated that ‘they had addressed themselves to their task with a zeal that has been as admirable as it has been successful.’

What more could Wilson have wished for? It seemed to him that he was being given the government’s authorisation to construct – whatever its name – a new British colony in Iraq. He might have worried a little about the reference to provisionality; he might have wondered whether, perhaps, the decisions of the Versailles Peace Conference might eventually run counter to his scheme; but Wilson was not the man to let such hypothetical eventualities trouble him. Instead he now set about remaking Iraq along Indian lines as he had always desired.

With their armies reeling from a massive and successful Allied attack and facing revolution at home, the Germans were forced to sign an armistice with the Allies on 11 November 1918. As the two great Allied war leaders, the French prime minister Georges Clemenceau and his British opposite number David Lloyd George, strolled side by side in the gardens of the French embassy in London on 1 December 1918, still flushed with joy at Germany’s sudden collapse, Clemenceau had turned to Lloyd George and asked him, point blank:

‘Tell me what you want?’

‘Mosul,’ replied Lloyd George.

‘You shall have it,’ Clemenceau declared, ‘And what else?’

‘Palestine.’

‘You shall have that too.’
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In return Lloyd George made three secret reciprocal concessions. The first of these was that Britain would support French claims on the Ruhr, one of Germany’s most highly industrialised regions. The second was that when oil production in the Mosul vilayet commenced, France would receive a share, perhaps around 20 per cent. The third was that, as far as Syria was concerned, the terms of the Sykes–Picot Agreement would remain intact, regardless of the promises made to Sharif Husayn and the fact that Emir Faysal was already establishing an independent Arab state in Syria with the tacit support of General Allenby and the British Army of Occupation.
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Admittedly, the Sharif should have had no illusions about the fate of the littoral part of Syria – the correspondence
between McMahon and Husayn had acknowledged that France had ‘special economic and political interests’ in the Syrian littoral which would have to be protected in some way; but there had been absolutely no suggestion that the remainder of Syria would enjoy anything other than genuine independence within a newly established Arab state, an objective clearly inconsistent with the Sykes–Picot Agreement.

Coincidentally a vehicle was emerging which might bridge the seemingly gaping chasm between the desire of Britain and France to carve themselves out protectorates in the former German and Turkish territories in Africa and the Middle East, and President Wilson’s ‘Fourteen Points’ speech in which he had spoken of ‘self-determination’ for the subject peoples of the Central Powers.

By January 1919 it was becoming clear that full ‘self-determination’ in the form of unconditional independence was only considered appropriate for ‘civilised’ peoples: for example the European nationalities which had belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It never seems to have occurred to President Wilson and his advisors that the ‘semi-civilised’ Iraq, Palestine and Syria should become fully independent states. What the Americans wanted was order: order which would put an end to the destructive squabbles over colonies among the European states; and order within the conquered territories which would make them fully receptive to foreign capital.
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A fundamental codicil to the latter was that in the conquered territories there should be an ‘open door’ for investment: no dominant power should obstruct the free flow of US capital into these potentially lucrative markets or prevent US capitalists from exploiting their natural resources on an equal footing with the old European states.

So instead of full independence, the Arabs were to be placed under ‘mandates’ which would be awarded to the victorious powers at the Peace Conference. The mandatory system was first discussed at a meeting of the Allied Supreme Council on 30 January 1919, although no decision about the allocation of the mandates was made. However, the basic concept was clear: the former colonial and other dependent territories of the Central Powers outside Europe would be distributed to the Allies, but not as old-fashioned colonies; for while a mandate necessarily
involved the control of territory it also had a façade: it was presented to the world at large as a position of trust whereby the policies carried out by the mandatory power should be aimed at eventually bringing the country in question to a stage where it could become fully independent.

Word of the mandate proposals reached Iraq surprisingly quickly and immediately triggered a hostile response among the informed and educated, not only in Baghdad, Mosul and Basra, but also in the Shi‘i shrine cities. And yet there was still a widespread belief that President Wilson would somehow use his great influence to ensure that the former territories of the Ottoman Empire would enjoy the same rights as newly independent European states such as Czechoslovakia and Jugoslavia. Therefore, on 6 February 1919 Mirza Muhammad Taqi al-Shirazi, by now the most influential mujtahid of Karbela’, supported by the mujtahid Sheikh al-Shari‘a al-Isbahani, wrote to President Wilson via the American embassy in Tehran asking him to help in the establishment of an Arab state in Iraq.
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In a second letter, sent seven days later, the two senior mujtahidin profusely thanked Wilson for his desire ‘to grant the oppressed nationalities their rights and to open the way for their enjoyment of independence’ and informed him of the ‘desire of all Iraqis … that we should be free to make our own laws and to elect a King guided by a National Assembly’. As regards the mandate, ‘popular opinion’ either rejected it or considered that a decision about it ‘should be left to the National Assembly after the end of the Peace Conference’.
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However, if some kind of supportive response to these letters was expected from the US president, it never arrived.

Meanwhile, three months after the Anglo-Persian Oil Company’s geologist, G.B. Halse, submitted his report on Iraq’s oil prospects to the War Office, discussions about oil commenced between the British and French governments. Between 16 and 23 November 1918 the French commissioner general for fuel, Senator Henri Bérenger, visited London where he held preliminary talks with his opposite number, Walter Long, colonial secretary and minister for petroleum affairs. Discussions were resumed on 17 December but were soon dogged by a peculiarly inconvenient division of labour within the British Foreign Office.

After Lloyd George’s triumphant coalition election victory in December 1918, the duties of the Foreign Office were, in effect, split in two. The incumbent foreign secretary, Arthur Balfour, was dispatched to Paris to participate in the peace negotiations, while the remaining functions of the Foreign Office were placed in the charge of Lord Curzon, the government’s leader in the House of Lords, who remained in London. Curzon believed there should be no discussions about oil until the question of the mandates was settled at the Peace Conference. But unbeknown to him, Long had already dispatched his emissary in the shape of Professor John Cadman, director of the Petroleum Executive, to settle the ‘oil question’ with the French as soon as possible. And to add even more confusion to the matter, Lloyd George himself appears to have had no knowledge of the ongoing negotiations between Cadman and his French counterpart, Bérenger. The stage was now set for a classic case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand was doing.

What the French sought at the meeting on 17 December 1918 was actually much wider than the question of Mosul’s oil. They wanted a joint Anglo-French oil policy which would encompass a share in oilfield developments not only in the whole of Iraq, but also in Rumania, the Caucasus and Persia. As regards Iraq, they proposed that French interests, either public or private, should acquire Deutsche Bank’s share in the old Turkish Petroleum Company, the entity which had been on the verge of acquiring oil rights in Baghdad and Mosul vilayets on the eve of war. That the French were particularly keen to get their hands on as much oil as possible was reflected in a letter from Clemenceau to Bérenger (a copy of which was obtained by the Petroleum Executive and forwarded to the Foreign Office) in which the French prime minister expressed his view that the petroleum question ‘appears to be one of the most important economic questions at the Peace Conference. It affects crucially the future of France’s national defence and her general prosperity.’
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Walter Long considered an agreement with the French to be particularly urgent since he was convinced that the French were already in touch with the Standard Oil Company of New Jersey, and that if Britain didn’t rapidly come to terms with the French they would enlist
US support for a fully ‘open door’ to Iraqi oil.
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Therefore, on 13 March 1919 what would turn out to be only the first in a series of Anglo-French petroleum agreements was initialled in Paris by Long and Bérenger. The agreement stated that France would receive the German share (25 per cent) of the prewar Turkish Petroleum Company or any other company formed to exploit Iraqi oil reserves, with British interests receiving the remaining 75 per cent. These ‘British interests’ consisted of the 50 per cent Anglo-Persian share of the original TPC, represented by Anglo-Persian’s subsidiary the D’Arcy Exploration Company, plus the 25 per cent share belonging to the Royal Dutch/Shell Group subsidiary the Anglo-Saxon Oil Company. Shell remained partly Dutch-owned, but during the war the company had submitted to British control in order to continue to operate on the high seas. In addition, Henri Deterding, the general manager of the company, became a British subject and the company’s HQ was moved from The Hague to London.
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Moreover, although they eventually were to prove fruitless, negotiations were afoot to ensure that Shell Transport and Trading and a number of other companies in the Royal Dutch/Shell Group were brought under permanent British control.

The price to be paid by the French for the 25 per cent former German share would be that which the British government had previously paid to the public trustees holding the expropriated Deutsche Bank shares in the TPC, plus 5 per cent per annum interest since the date of that transaction. In addition, the agreement provided for France receiving a 50 per cent share of the oil rights which the two countries might obtain in the future in Russia, Rumania and Galicia; France would also receive 34 per cent of the disposable oil in British colonies while Britain obtained the same benefit in French colonies. Finally, Britain would have the right to construct two oil pipelines to the Mediterranean, one from Iraq and the other from Persia, and should one or both of these cross ‘territory within the French sphere of influence’ France would facilitate their crossing without demanding any royalty or wayleave.
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However, when Lord Curzon became aware of the draft agreement he expressed his disquiet to Balfour that he had not been kept properly informed about it and queried whether Balfour himself knew of the
deal. In Curzon’s view, the agreement was a mistake. It conceded to the French a share in Iraq’s oil for which the only British compensation was a promise of pipelines through territory which, as yet, had not been adjudicated to France and might possibly never be so adjudicated. So a second version of the Long–Bérenger oil agreement was drawn up which was now prefaced by the statement: ‘In the event of His Majesty’s Government receiving the mandate for Mesopotamia’, with an equivalent form of conditionality applying to the French territory (i.e. Syria) through which the oil pipeline from Iraq was to pass. Moreover, following an unexpected intervention by Arnold Wilson, who expressed concern about the loss of income which would be incurred by Iraq’s puppet government if the oilfields were handed over to what he described as ‘a comparatively small number of shareholders’, this second version of the Long–Bérenger agreement now also included the statement that a ‘native government’ of Iraq would have a 10 per cent share of any company formed to exploit Iraqi oil.

On 29 April 1919 the revised agreement was put to a meeting of an Interdepartmental Conference of the Eastern Committee called by Curzon at the Foreign Office, where it was decided that it now broadly met the previous objections of both the Foreign Office in London and Wilson in Iraq.

However, just as matters appeared largely settled, Lloyd George dropped a bombshell. Apparently it was Clemenceau’s firm belief that his secret agreement with the British prime minister in December 1918 committed the latter to support the request of France for a mandate over the whole of Syria – the inland areas as well as the coastal strip. But all the signs from Damascus were that some kind of fully independent Arab state under Emir Faysal was being established there with the connivance of the British occupation forces. The French prime minister was now under strong pressure from sections of the press linked to powerful colonialist elements who claimed that Britain was using Faysal as a front for their own takeover of Syria.
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This was completely untrue; but it does appear that although Lloyd George had no particular qualms about abandoning Faysal, he wanted to shift the southern boundary of any
future French-mandated Syrian territory further to the north to enable British pipelines and railways from Iraq to reach the Mediterranean without having to cross French-controlled territory. Somehow, at the beginning of May, a discussion on these issues between Clemenceau and Lloyd George blew up into a tremendous row. So when Lloyd George heard about the Long–Bérenger oil agreement – apparently for the first time and in the course of a casual conversation – he furiously ordered it to be cancelled, informing Clemenceau of his decision in a letter of 21 May in which he claimed that the oil agreement did not accord, in certain respects, with his previous private agreement with the French premier.
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