Book Review: Empire of Sand: How Britain Shaped the Middle East, by Walter Reid \ A Line in the Sand, by James Barr

It’s our fault, and it takes a good, dry book to prove the point: we drew, redrew, tried to undraw and finally we blotted and fudged the map of the modern Middle East as we were hurrying to get out.

We absent-mindedly made ourselves a whole third British Empire in Mesopotamia just when the second one, the one which followed American independence, was in deep trouble; and we came out of the First World War – the one where we said we had no territorial ambitions, in charge of pretty much everywhere from Egypt to the Afghan border. We did this, in large part, in order to hold on to India which we knew we were going to lose. Our reward was 40 years of oil and the single most important British base in the Second World War – Egypt.

This is quite a story, and it takes a rather calm and detached approach just to get its wilder moments down on paper – all the casual promises, apparent betrayals and internecine fights. The Brits in their various imperial headquarters at Delhi, Cairo and London were hardly talking to each other while they separately plotted the future of the same millions of people. Mesopotamia was either going to be an Arab nation or an irrigated homeland for 25 million Indian Muslims, “martial races from the Punjab”, depending on who you talked to, and we were anointing and buying off Arab leaders while promising a national homeland for the Jews on much the same territory.

This might seem arcane stuff, but it still has the power to inflame and kill: the issue of where the Kurds belong, for example, or safe frontiers for modern Israel, the spread of austere Wahabism and whether Iraq can ever be a practical state, not to mention the 80-year grudge that al-Qaeda holds against us.

Most of all, it is a story of how empires rattle along until their sheer scale makes them nonsensical: how Britain and India became almost equal forces, armed, rich and bureaucratic, just as Britain and North America had run neck and neck before. Geography aside, not all imperialists wanted more territory, not all gentile Zionists liked Jews and it always matters when the money runs out: Britain quit Palestine in large part because we didn’t need safety on the road to India if we didn’t have India any more, and besides, we couldn’t pay the bills.

On such things does the fate of whole peoples turn. The special quality of this story is the mondo bizarro of upper class British persons, their almost incestuous connections, and their absolute faith that they had the right to fold, spindle and mutilate large parts of the planet. Anyone who thinks about our recent wars will squirm constantly.

Now you can tell this story as a meticulous catalogue of circumstances, as Walter Reid does, or an enquiry into covert plots and actions, as James Barr does. Barr is the archive man, meticulously bringing out a single conflict, us against France, and telling it racily. Reid is the library man, although he has his share of original sources, dependent on all the books we ought to have read and now won’t need to. He is judicious; his very capable prose just begs to be read. He’d rather understand the process than judge the result (“the judgements that matter are those that readers form”), which makes him sound like the lawyer for the defence. He keeps the world at a careful distance so it won’t bleed on him.

This, as it happens, is what makes his book so very valuable. He knows how to pick his way through a maze of committees, memoranda, doubts, bluffs and improvisations which only look like policy and plans much later. He makes us think along with the politicians, the diplomats, the riotous amateurs who made British policy so far from the dry sands.

This is a demanding business, sometimes bizarrely funny, sometimes horrifying. The men (and the woman) who made the Middle East out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire were not drab careerists; they belong in a Buchan thriller. Greenmantle, that glorious adventure, starts to seem more like a manifesto than a fiction: the need to thwart other nations’ ambitions, the exhilarating sense of change (“a dry wind blowing through the East … the parched grasses await the spark”) and the chance at last to be powerful, wild and even romantic in a world that seemed so much simpler than clubland and Whitehall – as long as you misunderstood it thoroughly. It was Buchan who, as chief propagandist during the First World War, set out his answer to the failing Ottoman Empire: “The Turk Must Go!”

He firmly believed that Brits were the “only race on earth” who are “capable of getting inside the skin of other people” (“perhaps the Scots are better than the English”) which was doubtful at first and catastrophic later. We didn’t see that rigorous tax collection might be unpopular after Ottoman informality, and the answer was brutal: to send in troops to be “as rough as nutmeg graters,” and planes to drop high explosives to keep the peace, “frightfulness in a more or less severe form.”

Practical force sat oddly beside those British in the Middle East who seem to have thought that putting a scarf on your head and not falling off a camel made you a mind-reader. They somehow didn’t notice that Zionists were serious and Arabs wanted their own nations; but nobody’s perfect.

It also helps explain the tension between policy and action. The visionary lot were dreaming of Arab nations while the India Office reckoned a nicely divided Arabia full of ineffectual buffer states would do very well – to protect India. They weren’t keen on sending Indian troops to defend “a score of mud villages, sandwiched in between a swampy river and a blistering desert”.

Some mandarins worried in wartime about the “one hundred million Mohammedan subjects of the King” while others reckoned Sir Edmund Allenby’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem was the moment to remember with pride the Crusades. Lawrence of Arabia was a magic lantern show that played to a million paying customers, the (possibly) true begetter of the Arab revolt before he metamorphosed into the counsellor of everyone’s favourite Arab nationalist, King Faisal (who got Iraq only because the French got Syria).

As for local knowledge, the same men paid off Ibn Saud and also Hussein in Arabia, who spent most of his subsidy trying to keep Ibn Saud at bay, and not successfully. They thought Wahabism, the version of Islam which gave Ibn Saud his authority, didn’t really matter.

The confusion was sometimes farcical. There was a full year between Lloyd George demanding at the Armistice talks that Britain rule Palestine “from Dan to Beersheba” and the day the Foreign Office found Dan on a map. It was not where they expected and they had to start demanding all over again.

All this was a great game to a bunch of clubbable gentry full of their own lurid prejudices. They included fools, like the diplomats who reckoned one Turkish politician was obviously a Polish adventurer financed by Jewish freemasons (he wasn’t) and adventurers like the consul at Kuwait who drove from Persia to Italy, never on a paved road and navigating by sextant.

The head of the London Intelligence Division was known like some prep school master for blinking. The Admiralty reckoned Aubrey Herbert, who turns up conspiring and hard-riding in Greenmantle, was highly suspect; any man who spoke so many languages must be seriously immoral.

The general run of ignorance gave real power to anyone who knew anything. Gertrude Bell had certainties the way other people have breakfasts; or at least she did once she was converted to the notion of Arab self-determination. She was a daring, cool-headed climber, a traveller whose six treks across the great deserts of Arabia left her hugely and assertively knowledgeable; “Frankly,” as she said, “who knows if I don’t?” She got to design Iraq’s flag and ceremonial when Faisal was crowned King (to the tune of the British National Anthem). She also got to design Iraq. And she did all this on sheer force of personality, her “Paris frock and Mayfair manners”, her Oxford mind.

She may have known many Arabs very well, but maybe not, since her villa by the Tigris was known as “Chastity Chase”. She was honoured by everyone except some of those who had to work with her; one of them thought her “a silly, chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globe-trotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass”.

Such fierce individuality is only part of the story. It matters that Churchill wanted oil for the Royal Navy’s fast ships, even if it meant inventing Iraq – making three rival peoples co-exist so two distant oil fields, Kirkuk and Mosul, could belong to London.

It matters that Nazi genocide upset the comfortable assumption that Jews wouldn’t want to live in Israel, they’d just think of Jerusalem warmly as their home. Money matters, too: just as it made the British scramble from Palestine early, it cut back Churchill’s notion of how much Mesopotamia Britain could afford. Reid may be a touch Pollyanna-ish about the peace that might have reigned between Arabs and Jews in Palestine; neither side was ever behaving well enough to make that seem plausible, and both wanted the same land. But here, as in the rest of his book, he’s careful to lay out all the facts he can establish. It is true that many Arabs were dispossessed and ruined when Zionists got their land. It is also true that Zionists bought the land, freely, from absentee Arab landlords. Class war has a lot to do with intifada.

The real issue Reid addresses, mostly by indirection, is not so much whether the British acted in good faith, or how all their various interests could be melded into one intelligible policy. “It was an amazing thing,” Gertrude Bell wrote of Faisal’s coronation, “to see all Iraq from North to South gathered together. It is the first time this has happened in history.” She didn’t, as Reid points out, bother to wonder if this was a good thing. She didn’t consider if making and rewriting other people’s history was any of her business at all.