Here’s the sitch: during World War One (as indeed, before
and after) the British had no unified policy on the Middle East. British policy
looks like a hot mess in hindsight…because it was a hot mess. My personal favorite parsing of this hot mess is
David Fromkin’s Peace to End All Peace, but since that is a little long and you
are busy, here are the cliff notes.
To be
reductionist about it, British policy in the Middle East during World War One
aimed at two main goals: protect India, and supply the struggling Russian
Empire so that they could continue to field an army in Eastern Europe and keep
the Germans busy with a two-front war.
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| Seriously, dat map tho. |
If you look
at the map, you will notice that the most effective route to Russia for the
British was through the Mediterranean Sea, through the Dardanelles, and into
the Black Sea, however, the latter part of that route was controlled by the
Ottoman Empire who were on the German side. The British – not unreasonably, but
incorrectly – assumed that the Ottomans would be easy to defeat and launched a
disastrous amphibious assault on Gallipoli that nearly cost Winston Churchill
his career. The British then attempted another invasion from the Persian Gulf
into what is now Iraq, which also ended badly. In 1916-1917, things were not
going well for the British.
The latter
half of the war in the Middle East, and the aftermath, is best understood
through three conflicting agreements that the British entered into during
1916-1917 when they were desperate enough to promise anything to anyone.
The first
of these agreements is usually referred to as the Hussein-McMahon
Correspondence, a series of letters from a British official, Henry McMahon,
wooing Sharif Hussein of Mecca into rebelling against the Ottoman Empire. The
British promised Hussein a “caliphate” which, according to Fromkin, the British
understood as a “papacy” and Hussein understood as a “kingdom.” The revolt was
engineered by the Arab Bureau in Cairo – where Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence
worked, remember? From my own reading, I get the sense that Bell and Lawrence –
if no one else – knew very well that Hussein was being promised a kingdom, and
Bell and Lawrence – if no one else – seemed to feel that Hussein, or at least
his sons, should have a kingdom.
Regardless, the “Arab” or Hashemite Revolt (which Lawrence joined as a liaison
and explosives expert, not as a
leader) launched a guerilla campaign against the Ottoman Empire that, in
collaboration with the British Military, captured large swaths of territory in
the Arabian Peninsula, Syria, and Palestine. It may not have been the death
knell of the Ottoman Empire, but it did significantly weaken it. The British
military succeeded in capturing Mesopotamia (now Iraq) in 1917, and Gertrude
Bell joined them there.
However, at
the same time that this warm-and-fuzzy revolt on behalf of an Arab nation-state
was being fought, the British had entered into another agreement that the
Bolshevik rebels in Russia leaked to the world: The Sykes-Picot Agreement. Despite
the bleakness and uncertainty of the war, certain elements of the British, French,
and Russian governments drew up a plan for how to divide up the Ottoman Empire
amongst themselves when they won the war. This was, after all, the heyday of
imperialism, when all of Africa, except Ethiopia and Liberia, was directly
under European rule, and much of Asia was also administered or else strongly
influenced by European powers. Many French, British, and Russian officials took
it for granted that the Ottoman Empire would collapse and Europeans would fill
in the vacuum. The Sykes of Sykes-Picot was Sir Mark Sykes, a somewhat
misguided British diplomat, and rival of Gertrude Bell’s. The 1916 agreement
divided up lands that the British had promised to the Hashemite Rebels between
the British and the French. When the nascent communist government in Russia
made this agreement public it was – shall we say – embarrassing?
The third
of these conflicting pledges, the British government made quite public: The
Balfour Declaration in 1917. The surprisingly short Balfour Declaration was
not exactly a promise, rather, it was
a statement of support by the British government for the Zionist movement’s
ambition of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. Many Zionists in the aftermath of
the war read this as a promise – as did many Arab Nationalists who felt that they had also been promised Palestine as
part of their state. (As a side note: Bell was not in favor of the Zionist
movement and did not approve of this declaration.) Why the British government
would suddenly favor the Zionist movement doesn’t make much logical sense.
Fromkin’s explanation is that there was faulty intelligence in the British
government which suggested that the Ottoman Empire and Germany were run by a
cabal of Jews, and the Balfour Declaration was a Hail Mary Pass to get Jews to
remove support from the Central Powers. (I love a good Zionist conspiracy,
don’t you?)
Regardless
of why and how, when the war ended in November 1918, the British had to contend
with conflicting territorial promises in the Middle East, in addition to the
mess everywhere else. After several conferences, some failed treaties, and a
couple more wars, the “final” settlement of the modern Middle East was
established in Cairo in 1921. At the Cairo Conference, Gertrude Bell, T.E.
Lawrence, Winston Churchill, and others drew a new map and created the new
states of Syria, Iraq, Palestine, and Transjordan, without inviting any Arabs,
Kurds, or other natives of the region to the party. These states were created
as British and French “mandates” – aka fledgling states under the wing of the
European powers that would receive independence when they were “ready.” (Cynicism
aside, Iraq was only under British Mandate for 10 years, and became independent
in 1932, while Palestine remained under British Mandate until they abandoned it
in 1948.) In the case of Iraq and Transjordan (present day Jordan), the British
also provided handpicked kings: Faisal for Iraq, and his brother Abdullah for
Jordan. Abdullah’s descendants still rule Jordan today.
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| Gertrude Bell sitting camelback in front of the sphinx between Winston Churchill and T.E. Lawrence, because, why not? |
The
historiography of characters like Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence is a
challenge. In Lawrence’s case, the most accessible pieces of writing he left
behind (his memoirs) are mostly bogus and he was intentionally enigmatic. Bell,
on the other hand, was an avid diarist and letter writer – so she left behind
quite a lot of her own words about her life and her thoughts on contemporary
events. In the aftermath, Bell and Lawrence both are characterized in one of
two ways: either as heroes and champions of helpless “Arabs,” or, as engines of
the imperial machine in the Middle East.
To me, they are a little bit of
both. Both Bell and Lawrence were believers in British Imperialism and though
they were more knowledgeable of and caring towards Arabs than the average
British imperialist, they still rested on their own prejudices and were racist
in their own ways. However, even though they did believe in imperialism,
neither Bell nor Lawrence approved of the particular way that the British were
going about it, and thought that imperialism should be done differently.
Bell was
without a doubt a remarkable woman, and absolutely should be taught as part of
the British makeover of the Ottoman Empire at the end of World War One, of which
she was an integral part. But, the way that she is typically talked about by
Westerners is problematic. I know this is supposed to be a blog about giving
women credit. Too often, Bell is left out, but when she is mentioned, Western
biographers tend to give her too much
credit for the period between 1921 and 1958 when Iraq was a relatively stable
constitutional monarchy.
Did she contribute to its stability? Probably.
She made Iraq her home for the last five years of her life, and dedicated much
of that time to helping out with government affairs, but also to archaeology.
She founded the Iraq Museum in Baghdad, which still remains to this day,
although it did suffer from some serious looting in 2003. But, Bell died in
1926 of an overdose of sleeping pills. The Iraqi Monarchy and parliament were
not overthrown until 1958. Furthermore, when too much credit is given to Bell,
it means that too much credit is taken away from Arab actors, such as King
Faisal I and his advisors and Prime Ministers, not to mention the people of the
new kingdom of Iraq. (The author of the Guardian article I cited refers to
Faisal as Lawrence’s “protégé” which is laughable.) For more on Faisal’s
contributions, I recommend Ali Allawi’s Biography “Faisal I of Iraq” – but this
is a blog about women who don’t get enough credit, so I rest my case.
Sources:
Gertrude
Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell
A
Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin
Miss Bell’s
Line in the Sand, by James Buchan, The
Guardian, March 11, 2003
If you are interested in Gertrude Bell, keep your eyes
peeled for this documentary, Letters from Baghdad.
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