HOW IRAQ WAS BORN

HOW IRAQ WAS BORN The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 tried to pick up the pieces after the First World War, disposing of many parts of the world with a varying effectiveness vividly described by Margaret MacMillan in her new book, Paris 1919. The Conference was the closest thing there has ever been to a world government.

Well before the war ended, European politicians already were negotiating how to divvy up the Middle East. In 1916, the British and French concluded what was known as the Sykes-Picot agreement, which assigned spheres of influence in the region. Rather than worrying too much about the desires and welfare of the inhabitants, the British were busy jiggering the agreement so that the French would serve as a buffer against encroachment by Russia.

Under the agreement, France was to rule greater Lebanon and to have exclusive influence over the rest of Syria. The British were to get Mesopotamia's two southern provinces, Basra and Baghdad, along with part of Palestine. The rest of the region was supposed to form a confederation of Arab states that was divided into French and British spheres of influence.

The British, during this exercise, posed as champions of the Jews and of Arab nationalism. In 1916, in the person of Col. T.E. Lawrence, famous as Lawrence of Arabia, they helped direct the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire.

Then in 1918, the Ottoman Turks did lose their empire, and the Allies were faced with a reality they had not seriously considered. Macmillan shows how several modern countries were born from their improvisations. Before the Peace Conference, for example, there had never been such a state as Iraq.

One day during the Peace Conference, the historian Arnold Toynbee, who was then an advisor to the British delegation, had to deliver some papers to the prime minister. "Lloyd George, to my delight, had forgotten my presence and had begun to think aloud," he wrote. " 'Mesopotamia ... yes ... oil ... irrigation ... we must have Mesopotamia; Palestine ... yes ... the Holy Land ... Zionism ... we must have Palestine; Syria ... h'm ... what is there in Syria? Let the French have that.' "

Thus the lineaments of the peace settlement in the Middle East were exposed: Britain seizing its chance; the need to throw something to the French; a homeland for the Jews; oil; and the calm assumption that the peacemakers could dispose of the former Ottoman territories to suit themselves. For the Arab Middle East, the peace settlements were the old 19th-century imperialism again. Britain and France got away with it -- temporarily -- because the United States did not choose to involve itself and because Arab nationalism was not yet strong enough to challenge them.

Mesopotamia -- the term the British used loosely to refer to the old Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra -- had scarcely been mentioned at the conference except as a possible League of Nations mandate to be held, everyone assumed, by Britain. British troops were in occupation, British administrators from India were running it and British ships were sailing up and down the Tigris. No power was likely to challenge the British claim: Russia and Persia were too weak, the United States uninterested. France -- until a stormy session in May of the leaders of the big four powers (Britain, France, Italy and the United States) -- had apparently given up any claim. Georges Clemenceau, the French Prime Minister, spoke in anger but he may have also begun to realize just what he had given up so blithely: oil.

Coal had been the great fuel of the Industrial Revolution, but by 1919 it was becoming clear that oil was the fuel of the future. Tanks, aircraft, trucks and navies all needed oil. British petroleum imports alone quadrupled between 1900 and 1919 and most of the increase, worryingly, came from outside the British Empire: from the United States, Mexico, Russia and Persia. Control of oil fields, refineries and pipelines was clearly going to be important in the future, as it had been in the Great War, when "the Allied cause," according to Lord Curzon, who was running the Foreign Office in London, "floated to victory upon a wave of oil."

No one knew for certain whether Mesopotamia had oil in any quantity, but when black sludge seeped out of the ground and lay in pools around Baghdad, or gas fires flared off swamps in Mosul, it was easy to guess. By 1919, the British navy was arguing, without awaiting further evidence, that the Mesopotamian oil fields were the largest in the world. It seemed foolish to hand over control of any part to the French.

Clemenceau, who had once said, "When I want some oil, I'll find it at my grocer's," had by now grasped the importance of the new fuel. He had given up formal control over Mosul but he insisted to Lloyd George that France should have its share of whatever was in the ground. Walter Long, the British minister of fuel, and Henri Berenger, his French counterpart, a man who believed that oil was the "blood of victory," were put to work. They produced an agreement under which France would have a quarter-share of the Turkish Petroleum Company and in return would allow two pipelines to be built across Syria from Mosul to the sea.

Both sides agreed that they did not want the Americans muscling in. Unfortunately, what was a reasonable compromise got caught up in the confrontation over Syria.

"There was a first-class dogfight," a British general noted in his diary, "during which the Tiger [Clemenceau] said Walter Long had promised the French half the Mesopotamian oil! Lloyd George asked me if I had ever heard of this. Of course, never. Whereupon Lloyd George wrote at once to Tiger and said that arrangement was cancelled."

The Foreign Office did not find this out until some months later, which shows the confusion in British policy-making at this period. It was only in December, 1919, after Britain and France had finally settled their dispute over Syria, that the oil issue was put to rest, on very much the same terms that Long and Berenger had agreed.

As part of the deal, the French government also agreed permanently to abandon France's claim to Mosul.

The British policy toward Mesopotamia had developed by fits and starts. The initial British campaign there in 1914 had been defensive, designed only to protect the Persian Gulf from the Turks. Once they had secured their bridgehead, they had been drawn north toward Baghdad.

A young political officer, Arnold Wilson, wrote to his parents: "The only sound thing is to go on as far as possible and not try to look too far ahead." Four years later the British had gone very far indeed, up to the Kurdish areas on the borders of Turkey, and Wilson was now head of the British administration.

Arnold Wilson was handsome, courageous, stubborn and stoical. He loathed dancing, gossip and idleness. He quoted Scripture freely; his finger never hesitated on the trigger. He had, in short, the qualities of a great proconsul of empire at a time when proconsuls were becoming obsolete.

When the war started, Wilson was in the north of Turkey, near Mount Ararat, completing an immense project to map the boundary between Persia and Ottoman Turkey. He and a colleague made their way back to Britain via Russia and Archangel. As he was about to join his regiment in France, he was ordered back to the Middle East to join the Mesopotamian campaign as assistant to Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer. When, at the end of the war, Cox was called away to deal with Persian matters, Wilson was his obvious replacement. From April, 1918, to October, 1920, he governed Mesopotamia.

Wilson, like most of the other British there, assumed that Britain was acquiring a valuable new property.

He urged the government in London to make Mosul part of its war aims and, just after the Turkish armistice, he made sure that British forces moved in. Mosul was, he argued, important for the defence of Baghdad and Basra. With the collapse of the Ottomans and the Russian Revolution, it had also gained wider strategic importance. The British were backing anti-communist forces in Russia as well as the little independent republics that had sprung up in the Caucasus.

One way of doing this, and of preventing the spread of Bolshevism farther south, was to open up communications between Persia and the Caucasus, and that meant through Mosul.

It seems never to have occurred to Wilson that Basra, Baghdad and Mosul did not make much sense as a single unit. In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria.

Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats and Serbs make one country. As in the Balkans, the clash of empires and civilizations had left deep fissures.

The population was about half Shia Muslim and a quarter Sunni, with other minorities from Jews to Christians, but another division ran across the religious one: While half the inhabitants were Arab, the rest were Kurds (mainly in Mosul), Persians or Assyrians. The cities were relatively advanced and cosmopolitan; in the countryside, hereditary tribal and religious leaders still dominated.

There was no Iraqi nationalism, only Arab. Before the war, young officers serving in the Ottoman armies had pushed for greater autonomy for the Arab areas. When the war ended, several of these, including Nuri Said, a future prime minister of Iraq, had gathered around Feisal, the leader of the Arab revolt and son of the Sharif of Mecca. Their interest was in a greater Arabia, not in separate states.

Arnold Wilson did not foresee the problems of throwing such a diverse population into a single state. He was a paternalist who thought the British would remain for generations, and he urged his government to move quickly:

"Our best course is to declare Mesopotamia to be a British Protectorate under which all classes will be given forthwith the maximum degree of liberty and self-rule compatible with good and safe government."

His superiors in London ruled that out. They preferred indirect rule, something the British had used in the Indian princely states and Egypt. It had the advantage of being cheaper than direct control -- an important consideration, especially in 1919 after an expensive war. And indirect rule did at least bow in the direction of Arab self-determination and liberal opinion. "What we want," said a senior official at the India Office, "is some administration with Arab institutions which we can safely leave while pulling the strings ourselves; something that won't cost very much, which Labour can swallow consistent with its principles, but under which our economic and political interests will be secure."

This was easier said than done. There was a new spirit stirring in the Arab world and farther afield. In India, nationalists were rallying behind Gandhi; in Egypt, the Wafd party was growing day by day. Arab nationalism was still weak in Iraq, but it was already a potent force in Syria and Egypt. Arnold Wilson's oriental secretary and trusted advisor realized this, even if he did not.

Gertrude Bell was the only woman to play a key role in the peace settlements in her own right. Thin, intense, chain-smoking, with a voice that pierced the air, she was accustomed to being out of the ordinary. Although she came from a rich, well-connected family, she had broken with the usual pattern of her class -- marriage, children and society -- by going to Oxford and becoming the first woman to receive a first-class degree in history.

She climbed the Matterhorn and pioneered new routes in the Alps. She was a noted archaeologist and historian. She was also arrogant, difficult and very influential. In November, 1919, when the British commander-in-chief in Baghdad held a reception for 80 notables, they left their seats to crowd around her.

With only her servants and guides for company, Gertrude Bell had travelled all over the Middle East before the war, from Beirut to Damascus and from Baghdad to Mosul. She loved the desert: "Silence and solitude fall round you like an impenetrable veil; there is no reality but the long hours of riding, shivering in the morning and drowsy in the afternoon, the bustle of getting into camp, the talk around Muhammad's fire after dinner, profounder sleep than civilization contrives, and then the road again."

By 1914, she was widely recognized as one of Britain's leading authorities on the Middle East. In 1915, she became the first woman to work for British military intelligence and the only woman officially part of the British expedition to Mesopotamia.

She herself did not believe in rights for women. Nor did she like most of her own sex. "It is such a pity," she said loudly in front of a young English bride, "that promising young Englishmen go and marry such fools of women." Her best friends were men: T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), St. John Philby (father of the notorious Kim), Feisal and, for a time, Arnold Wilson. She loved passionately but never married.

She threw herself into her work in Mesopotamia. "We shall, I trust," she wrote to her father, "make it a centre of Arab civilization and prosperity." The Arabs, she assumed at first, would play little part in their own government. "The stronger the hold we are able to keep here the better the inhabitants will be pleased."

She got on well with Arnold Wilson in those early days. Wilson admired her "unwearying diligence" in dealing with paperwork. She was, he told his family, "extraordinarily vigorous and helpful in many ways." Together they waited for word from their superiors about what would happen to Mesopotamia. It did not come. "I presumed," said Wilson, "that if their oracles were dumb it was because their doubts were even greater than ours."

As they waited, Bell began to change her mind about the sort of government Mesopotamia needed. Arabs would have to play a larger role than she had at first thought.

In January, 1919, Arnold Wilson sent Bell off to Cairo, London and Paris to try to find out what was happening. In February, he followed her to Paris, where she was putting the case for a country in Mesopotamia. As she wrote rather grandly to her family, "I'm lunching tomorrow with Mr. Balfour [the Foreign Secretary] who, I fancy, really doesn't care. Ultimately I hope to catch Mr. Lloyd George by the coat tails, and if I can manage to do so I believe I can enlist his sympathies. Meanwhile we've sent for Colonel Wilson from Baghdad." She was convinced, rightly as it turned out, that the fate of Mesopotamia was linked to settlement of the dispute over Syria: "We can't consider one without the other, and in the case of Syria it's the French attitude that counts."

The talking and the lobbying accomplished little. As Edwin Montagu, secretary of state for India, wrote plaintively to Balfour: "We have now collected in Paris Miss Bell and Colonel Wilson. They are responsible to me. They come to me and say, 'We are here. What do you want of us?' I can give them no information of what is going on."

While the peacemakers prevaricated, in Mesopotamia unrest was spreading: among Kurds and Persians, who were restless under Arab domination; among the Shia, who resented Sunni influence; among tribal leaders challenged by British power; among high-ranking officers and bureaucrats who had lost their status with the collapse of the Ottomans; and among the increasing numbers of Arab nationalists. Bell worried from the sidelines.

In April she wrote to a friend, "O my dear they are making such a horrible muddle of the Near East, I confidently anticipate that it will be much worse than it was before the war -- except Mesopotamia which we may manage to hold up out of the general chaos. It's like a nightmare in which you foresee all the horrible things which are going to happen and can't stretch out your hand to prevent them."

At the San Remo Conference in April, 1920, the British and French, their differences temporarily forgotten, awarded themselves mandates, the British for Palestine and Mesopotamia, the French for Syria.

The Middle East was divided on lines that did not deviate all that much from the Sykes-Picot agreement.

For the Arabs, 1920 remains the year of disaster: Palestine gone, then Syria, Lebanon and finally Mesopotamia. In the summer of 1920, rebellions broke out over about a third of Mesopotamia, up and down the Euphrates valley and in the Kurdish areas of Mosul. Bell had long since come around to the view that Mesopotamia must have self-government and had warned of this. Arnold Wilson, with whom she was no longer on speaking terms, blamed it all on outside agitators and the influence of his U.S. namesake's Fourteen Points.

Railway lines were cut and towns besieged; British officers were murdered. The British reacted harshly, sending punitive expeditions across the land to burn villages and exact fines. In a new but very effective tactic, their aircraft machine-gunned and bombed from the air. By the end of the year, order had been restored and Wilson had been replaced by his old mentor, the more diplomatic Cox.

"We are at our wits' end," said Winston Churchill, "to find a single soldier." Critics asked whether Mesopotamia was worth the cost. Curzon, Churchill and Lloyd George all wanted to keep it if they could. The practical solution, which Bell and Cox had been urging, was to find a pliable Arab ruler.

Conveniently, they had Feisal -- the French having driven him out of Syria -- to whom, after all, they did owe something. At a conference in Cairo in March 1921, Churchill, as colonial secretary, agreed to make Feisal king. As a second prize, his older brother Abdullah, "a sensualist, idle, and very lazy," would get the little state of Transjordan. Feisal was duly invited to visit Mesopotamia, where the stage management of Cox and Bell produced a stream of supplicants asking him to stay as their king. St. John Philby, who favoured a republic and said so loudly, was sent packing. An election produced a vote of 96% in favour of Feisal. Bell designed his flag, his coronation and his kingship. "I shall have to set about getting proper ceremonial for Feisal's court," she sighed.

On Aug. 23, 1921, in the cool of the early morning, Feisal was crowned king of what was henceforth known as "the well-rooted country": Iraq. "It was an amazing thing to see all Iraq, from North to South, gathered together," reported Bell. "It is the first time it has happened in history."

In time, Feisal proved less amenable than the British had hoped. In 1932, Iraq joined the League of Nations as an independent state.

In 1958, King Faisal II, grandson of the first King Faisal, was killed in a military coup. Military regimes have been the norm in Iraq since then. Saddam's Baath party achieved power in a coup in 1968, and he became head of state in 1979.

Saddam now operates, as the British did, through a series of networks, historian David Fieldhouse of England's Jesus College said. His are based on his Sunni relations in northern Baghdad and in Mosul province.

Based on the article “Paris peace talks: How Iraq was created” National Post 26 October 2002

1899 Germans build Konya to Baghdad railway 1902 Germans extend railway to Basra 1908 Young Turk reforms 1912 Turkish Petroleum Company (TPC) established 1914 Anglo Persian oil buys 50% of TPC 1914 World War I: British land and take Basra 1915 British attempt to take Baghdad; Genocide against Ottoman Christians (750,000 Assyrian lives lost -1923) 1916 Ottomans besiege and capture Al-Kut from British 1917 British take Baghdad 1918 British take Mosul; Assyrian Patriarch Mar Benyamin Assassinated; Assyrian Exodus to Central Iraq 1919 Iraq becomes British administered League of Nations Mandated territory British officer assassinated - leads to arrests by British - leads to strikes and demonstrations by Iraqi nationalists 1920 Open revolt against British 1921 Cairo Conference 1922 Plebiscite confirms Faysal as King; Britain imposes constitution and alliance on Iraq 1925 Mosul awarded by League of Nations to Iraq 1927 Oil discovered in Kirkuk 1929 Britain informs Iraq of renegotiation of treaties 1930 New treaty limits Britain's involvement in Iraq. Air bases ceded to Britain 1932 Iraq admitted to League of Nations 1933 The Semel Massacre: Over 3,000 Assyrians Killed; Assyrian Patriarch exiled to Cypress. 1934 Tribal rebellions 1935 Pipeline links Kirkuk to Mediterranean 1936 Military coup 1937 Sadabad pact 1941 British overthrow Iraqi government by force 1942 Iraq forced to declare war on Germany 1945 Britain scales back direct rule; Mar Eshai Shimmun speaks before First Session of the United Nations 1948 New Treaty with Britain; Street demonstrations against Treaty and creation of Israel 1952 Uprising, martial law imposed 1958 Coup removes Hashemite Royal family 1968 Rise of Baath party to Power in Iraq 1975 Assyrian Patriarch, Eshai Shimmun, Assassinated in the U.S. 1979 Saddam Hussein comes to Power; Iyatollah Khomeini deposes Shah of Iran 1980 Iran-Iraq War (-1988) 1990 Iraq invades Kuwait 1991 Iraqi Army surrenders to the U.S. led Allied Forces. 1992 Kurdish Regional Government and Parliament is Established in North Iraq’s Protected Zone. Assyrians capture five seats in the Kurdish Parliament.

League of Notions
Al Stewart
I'm here sitting in the wreck of Europe
   With a map of Europe
Spread out in a hall of Versailles
   And every single nationality and principality have come for a piece of the pie
   I'm sitting in the wreck of Europe
With a map of Europe
   And the lines and the borders are gone
We've got to do this jigsaw puzzle
   It's an awful muddle
But somehow we've got to go on
Lawrence of Arabia is waiting in the wings
   He's got some Arab sheikhs and kings
And we're in debt to them somehow
   Lawrence of Arabia has got this perfect vision
Gonna sell him down the river
   There's no time for him now
I think I'm gonna take a piece of Russia
   And a Piece of Germany
And give them to Poland again
I'll put together Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia
   And hope that is how they'll remain
Then I'll take a bit of Turkey
   Then a lot of Turkey
This is all quite a heady affair
   There's Persia and Iraq to pick up
And there's Churchill's hiccup
   And we can't leave it up in the air
Woodrow Wilson waves his fourteen points around
   And says "The time to act is now
Won't get this opportunity again"
   Woodrow Wilson has his fourteen points
But Clemenceau turns to Lloyd George
   And says "You know that
God himself had only ten"
[Chorus:] Today I'm carried by a league of notions
    (It's a league of notions)
By a league of notions
   I don't think I quite understand
(I don't think I understand)
   I only know from this commotion
(From this commotion)
   There's a chance that we could turn
The world in the palm of our hands
(   We can turn the world in the palm of our hands)
Voices in the corridors of power
   Candles burning hour by hour
Still you know that to the victors go the spoils
   Such a great responsibility to make it fair
And there must be some reparations now
   And don't forget the oil!
[Chorus:] Today I'm carried by a league of notions
    (It's a league of notions)
By a league of notions
   I don't think I quite understand
(I don't think I understand)
   I only know from this commotion
(From this commotion)
   There's a chance that we could turn
The world in the palm of our hands
(   We can turn the world in the palm of our hands)
Pax vobiscum
   Wo-Oh, Pax vobiscum.

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