Enemy on the Euphrates (58 page)

If we were to ask the question, ‘On whose side did the Arabs fight in the First World War?’ most people who know something of the war’s history would probably say ‘Britain’s’. Such a reply would reflect the orthodox account, emanating from the glorification of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and the ‘Arab Revolt’ of Sharif Husayn and his sons, an episode also burned into our imagination by David Lean’s spectacular and immensely popular film on this subject. In both the film and Lawrence’s original memoir –
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
– we see an epic struggle in which ‘the Arabs’ join with the British in a fight to the death against the former’s cruel Turkish overlords. In return, the British promise the Arabs ‘freedom’, for their contribution to winning the war in the Middle East, a promise which would never be redeemed. This ‘orthodox narrative’ is also exemplified by the writings of some Arab historians who interpreted the pro-British stance of the Hashemites as part of an ‘Arab awakening’ after centuries of Turkish domination.
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However, over the last two decades, this orthodox narrative has been questioned by a number of historians – not just the role claimed by Lawrence himself, but more fundamentally the assumption that Britain’s opponents in the Middle East were almost entirely ethnic Turks, that the Arabs’ experience of the Ottoman state was little more than a ‘Turkish yoke’, and from the outset they were only waiting for an opportunity to rebel against it.
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Enemy on the Euphrates
has implicitly followed in this questioning of the orthodox account. In reality, the vast majority of Arabs did not ‘fight for the British’ in the First World War. In 1914 about one-third of the
regular troops in the Ottoman army were Arabs, mainly from the towns and cities of the regions which subsequently became Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Palestine. Numbering around 300,000, they were mainly conscripts (as were their fellow Turks) but, as we have seen, many fought bravely for the preservation of the Ottoman Empire and their religion on the battlefields of Suez, Gallipoli, Ctesiphon and many others. In addition, among the tribal Bedouin there were thousands of Arab volunteers who flocked to the Ottoman colours – not only in Iraq, but also among the Senussi tribesmen of Libya who fought the British across the Egyptian border between 1915 and 1917.

It is true that, as the First World War dragged on with one defeat for the Ottomans following another and Turkish officers responding to those defeats by ever more brutal methods of conscription, many Arab soldiers became demoralised and some deserted to the British.
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Nevertheless, a study by a US military expert on the Ottoman army has shown that, even towards the end of the war, proportionately, Arab soldiers were no more likely to surrender or desert than ethnic Turks.
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It is also worth commenting briefly on the manner in which
Enemy on the Euphrates
has portrayed the role played by Sir Mark Sykes. Another feature of that ‘orthodox narrative’ referred to at the beginning of this chapter is that Sykes was a typical imperialist and the Sykes–Picot Agreement the epitome of Anglo-French betrayal. However, from our narrative Sykes emerges as a more complex character and the Sykes–Picot Agreement as a somewhat less significant instrument of imperialist double-dealing.

It seems that Sykes may have actually believed that his actions had the best interests of the Arabs at heart: that those ‘conservative’ and ‘traditionalist’ Arabs so prominent in his orientalist conceptualisation would be untroubled by a settlement which only offered them a modicum of national independence for the foreseeable future, although whether this was the result of Faruqi’s devious intervention or was already part of Sykes’s evolving thinking on the subject of ‘friendly native states’ is unclear. Certainly, his political alignment before his premature death in January 1919 was closer to those like Bell and Lawrence who thought of
themselves as being ‘enlightened’ compared with men like Wilson and Leachman.

At the same time, it is clear that by the end of the war, the Sykes–Picot Agreement no longer had the relevance in Anglo-French plans for the future of the Middle East which it had in 1916. In fact, the ultimate outcome of the Allies’ deliberations – the mandate system – was in some respects actually worse for the Arabs than Sykes–Picot, certainly in the case of Syria, which simply became an outright French colony, and Palestine, where the consequences of the Balfour Declaration would eventually have tragic consequences for both Palestinian Arabs and those tens of thousands of Jews who had led relatively secure lives in the old Ottoman Empire.

Indeed, the extent to which Sykes–Picot itself was an egregious ‘betrayal’ of the Arabs is questionable. This is not to side with those revisionist historians who deny that there was any betrayal at all on the grounds that Sharif Husayn appears to have already known something of its secret provisions before it was signed. The real betrayal of the Arabs was not the abrogation of the Sharif’s expectations for a vast Arab empire, but that the Baghdad Declaration of 1917 and the Anglo-French Declaration of 1918 – which openly offered the Arabs ‘the aspirations of their race’ and ‘complete liberation’ – were later ruthlessly ignored by the political and military authorities in both Britain and France.

For the Arabs of Iraq, the Great War never really ended. Only ten months after the armistice, the British were already bombing Arab tribesmen and by July 1920 a full-scale revolutionary war against the British occupation had begun. Moreover, as we have seen, it was largely the same Arab tribes and tribal leaders – those of the mid-Euphrates region – who played a leading role in both the Jihad of 1914–15 and the revolution of 1920.

Until the 1970s, the relatively few historians who discussed the 1920 uprising tended to dismiss its importance and denigrate its participants.
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Two themes had equal importance. The first is that the rebellion was largely the product of agitation and, indeed, direct intervention, by the ‘Sharifian’ former Ottoman army officers based in
Faysal’s short-lived Syrian kingdom. For example, Elie Kedourie, writing in 1956, noted approvingly that Sir Percy Cox, ‘knew that the tribal rising of the summer of 1920 had been instigated from the outside’.
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Similarly, for John Marlowe, whose biography of A.T. Wilson was published in 1967, ‘the Rebellion in Iraq was deliberately incited by agents of the Sharifian Government in Damascus.’
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The same author stated that ‘the suggestion … that the rebellion was a spontaneous rising against British oppression is nonsense.’ A similar stress on ‘outside’ agitation is found in Bell’s report to Parliament in December 1920, where the emphasis is upon ‘a league of conspiracy organised by the Bolsheviks in cooperation with Turkish nationalists’.
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A second and equally pervasive ‘explanation’ found in a number of official and semi-official accounts – including those of Iraq POs – is that the uprising was mainly ‘tribal anarchy’ and a pervasive desire to acquire ‘loot’. For example, Bell’s account of the rebellion also refers to ‘anarchy gaining ground’ and the tribes being ‘out for loot’ while the PO and historian of Iraq, Stephen Helmsley Longrigg, headed his list of causative factors with ‘tribal recalcitrance, love of freedom and loot …’ .
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However, it should now be clear that these explanations are untenable. Not only were the military interventions of the sharifian officers restricted to the Syrian borderlands and had largely evaporated before the real revolution began in July 1920, but some of their number, like Nuri al-Sa’id, were actively opposed to the uprising. As for the claim that Britain’s occupation was in no way oppressive, the evidence of our narrative shows that this view is simply risible while the claim that the tribesmen who fought the British were mainly ‘out for loot’ overlooks the fact that the primary objective of the ‘looters’ was to acquire modern weaponry in an attempt to counterbalance their enemy’s overwhelming superiority in this respect – a perfectly sound military objective.

A much more sophisticated analysis of the 1920 uprising is that of the Palestinian Marxist historian Hanna Batatu, whose monumental work on Iraq’s social and political history, first published in 1978, argued that the revolution of 1920 was primarily the reaction of what he termed ‘the old social classes’, seeking to defend their traditional rights and privileges
which the new regime of British colonialism threatened to undermine.
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There is considerable truth in this analysis: men like the Shi‘i landowner Muhsin Abu Tabikh and the Sunni judge Yusuf al-Suwaydi exemplified the traditions, culture and social status of an only recently destroyed Ottoman world; certainly, they would have resented the loss of privileges and prestige which an enduring British domination appeared to herald. On the other hand such an explanation does not adequately account for the mass participation of the predominantly Shi‘i Arab peasantry in the uprising, or the fact that, among those who refused to support it – both Sunni and Shi‘i – there were many notables and landowners who were subject to precisely the same social and economic pressures as those who did.

Perhaps the most accurate appraisal of the 1920 uprising is that of the historian Amal Vinogradov, in an article in an academic journal published in 1972: ‘The Iraqi Revolt was a “primitive”, but genuine, national response to fundamental dislocations in the political and socio-economic adaptation of the tribally-organised rural Iraqis. These dislocations were brought about through the direct and indirect encroachment of the West.’
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Although it omits any specific reference to the actions of the Baghdad nationalists, this short but succinct paragraph comes very close to explaining the historical ‘meaning’ of the Great Arab Revolt of 1920.

What, then, were the enduring consequences of the uprising for the British and Iraqis? Although the events of 1920 became progressively erased from official versions of Britain’s imperial history, its lessons were not forgotten by the empire’s rulers. The ‘cost effective’ model of repression and control, which had come into its own in the final days of the uprising, became standard policy after 1921. Moreover, in the words of one British politician, Iraq became ‘a splendid training ground’ for the RAF as it took over responsibility for the security of Faysal’s puppet government and its successors.
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Henceforth it would be ‘friendly native states’ led by collaborating elites and buttressed by relatively small numbers of British bombers and armoured cars that would be the chosen method for sustaining the Empire’s economic and political interests east of Suez, not only in
Iraq but also in the southern Yemen (the Aden protectorate) and, to a lesser extent, in Transjordan.
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Even after Iraq was granted nominal independence in 1932, the model which has been described alternatively as ‘Informal Empire’ or ‘Covert Empire’ continued as a successful mechanism for achieving British imperial control until the Iraq revolution of 1958.
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On the other hand, what was probably the principal original objective of Britain’s involvement in Iraq – oil – was to prove something of a disappointment. Between 1905 and 1921 the imperial quest for oil was an abiding concern of Britain’s rulers; but by 1925, technical problems and a lack of both capital and oil-industry expertise compelled Britain to ‘open the door’ to US oil companies. In that year, the old Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) controlled by Anglo-Persian, Shell and the Compagnie Française des Pétroles was compelled to accept the acquisition of 23.75 per cent of its capital by an entity known as the Near East Development Corporation owned by five major US oil companies.

Over the next three decades Britain performed the role of policeman of the Gulf. But under this Pax Britannica it was the USA which gained most. Already, from 1928, it was American geologists who led the exploration programme of the TPC (shortly to be renamed the Iraq Petroleum Company) and behind Britain’s protective shield ‘East of Suez’, more US oil companies moved into the Middle East. By 1960, five of the seven giant multinational oil companies which dominated the Gulf were American – Exxon (Standard Oil of New Jersey), Mobil (Standard Oil of New York), Chevron (Standard Oil of California), Gulf Oil and Texaco – and between them they controlled 60 per cent of the 164 billion barrels of proven Middle East oil reserves.
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For all the blood and treasure spent both in the war and in defeating the 1920 uprising, as far as oil was concerned, by the 1960s Britain was very much the junior partner in the business.

According to the historian Eugene Rogan, ‘the uprising of 1920, referred to in Iraq as the “Revolution of 1920”, has a special place in the nationalist mythology of the modern Iraqi state comparable to the American Revolution of 1776.’
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A typical example of that ‘mythology’ can be found in the following passage from the introduction to a book first
published in 1971 and reprinted in 2004: ‘The revolt of the Iraqis against the English in 1920 is one of the most important events in the history of Iraq during this century. It brought the modern state of Iraq into existence and opened-up new horizons of progress and development.’
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However, while it is true that the uprising convinced the British that they could not proceed with the explicitly colonial regime in Iraq favoured by men like Arnold Wilson, and swiftly resulted in a series of arrangements which provided at least a gloss of independence, it is difficult to accept the previous writer’s rose-tinted vision of ‘new horizons of progress and development’.

Firstly, it should be pointed out that it was not until fifteen years after the uprising that a historical work by an Iraqi writer was published which contained an account of this ‘most important event’.
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Indeed, the puppet kingdom of Iraq, created by the British in 1921 in the aftermath of the uprising, made sure that the whole topic was swiftly buried. Not only had its near success at one point been an acute embarrassment to the British but some of those Sunni Iraqi officers and large landowners who formed the entourage of the British-installed King Faysal and his successors had actually opposed the uprising. Consequently, for the next three decades, newly printed Iraqi school history books omitted any reference to the uprising and there was no official holiday in celebration of its anniversary.
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