LONDON, 21 July 2003 — The “liberation” of Iraq was widely expected to give Prime Minister Tony Blair a big political boost. His anti-war critics routed, Blair was going to benefit from what was grotesquely termed the “Baghdad bounce”. In the event, in Britain (as in the United States), there is mounting bewilderment about what the war has achieved — not to mention about what purpose is being served by the coalition army of occupation.
Why are British troops struggling to police Basra in the scorching midsummer heat? Was Britain’s participation in the US invasion of Iraq much more than an excuse for the country’s powers-that-be to indulge in make-believe, to pretend that they preside still over a mighty empire? Certainly, Britain’s warmongering prime minister often appeared to be aping the heroic defiance of the World War II leader Winston Churchill. And his crusading talk of liberating the people of Iraq faithfully echoed the speechifying of bygone British empire-builders. Similar reflections were prompted by the senior military figures who cropped up on British television screens as the conflict in Iraq unfolded. Proclaiming their essential good will and unshakeable resolve, they, too, seemed to be reading from an old imperial script.
Increasingly, it seems as if the British establishment simply cannot divest itself of what the late Victorian poet Rudyard Kipling called the “white man’s burden”, the putative duty of the Anglo-Saxon race to rule “lesser breeds” for their own good. The other week, the Guardian reported the claim that the sometime leader of the Liberal Party, Paddy Ashdown, a former serviceman who has become the international community’s High Representative in Bosnia, is attempting to run Bosnia with the kind of high-handedness that the British once brought to administering the Indian Raj. (And this is a British politician who prides himself on his progressive credentials.) On the same day, as it happened, the Guardian brought news of an academic conference at which British historians deplored the absence of the British Empire from the syllabuses of British schools. The conference was organized by that arch-British traditionalist, the heir to the throne, Prince Charles; prominent among those taking part in it were right-wing historians like Niall Ferguson who share the prince’s preoccupation with the Britain of yesteryear and who are bent on challenging the anti-imperialist tendency of much British historiography during the past few decades.
Indeed, with chauvinistic accounts of Britain’s imperial past enjoying newfound respectability, critics of empire are in danger of being eclipsed by their empire-extolling rivals. Not that such critics are in short supply, or that they are about to fall silent. One of the most uncompromising of them, the prolific Scottish historian John Keay, has just published an account of Britain’s role in the Middle East which is as excoriating as it is timely. A salutary corrective to the self-flattering revisionism of Ferguson and company (as well as to the neocolonial posturing of Tony Blair), his book “Sowing the Wind” suggests that those who speak up for empire are duplicitous fantasists — much like the self-intoxicated men of destiny who prosecuted Britain’s hegemonic ambitions in the first place.
Keay can hardly avoid writing much about the part that France and, more recently, the United States, have played in the Middle East’s evolution. But the main focus of his voluminous narrative is Britain. There has been a national reluctance to acknowledge the predatory self-interest with which, following World War I, Britain set out to subjugate the Arab world. In the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, the British saw the opportunity to fashion a quick and cheap addition to their existing empire — one from which they could profit hugely without becoming encumbered by the costly administrative burdens entailed in ruling India. Chief among their objectives was to secure control over the Suez Canal, strategically vital as the route to and from the subcontinent. But the region’s oil wealth — if little mentioned at this point — was also one of their key concerns, as, together with the French, the British redrew the map of Arabia to suit their own purposes. The upshot of the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916 was that much of the Middle East was cynically parceled out as a collection of modest-sized Arab states presided over by pro-Western emirs. Then — as now — there was much grandiose imperial talk of acting in the Arabs’ best interests. And then — as now — such talk was little more than diplomatic moonshine.
As John Keay makes clear, far from being appreciated, the British presence in the Middle East soon became the object of widespread, if not universal, Arab resentment. Yet notwithstanding the tensions inseparable from colonial interference in the region, the history of the Middle East might have followed a rather different, possibly less tormented, trajectory but for one thing: The Balfour Declaration of 1917, according to which the British vouchsafed the Jews an eventual national homeland in Palestine. Keay is not the first to wonder what precisely was the rationale underlying the Balfour Declaration; indeed, one British historian has even questioned whether the Declaration ever had an intelligible rationale. That it was less a noble gesture than a piece of self-serving Realpolitik can scarcely be doubted — even allowing that some British statesmen were genuinely well-disposed toward the Zionist cause. Keay’s own surmise is that the British government were looking for a means of selling exclusive British control of Palestine to world opinion — and thereby isolating Palestine both from Arab claims to an independent state and from French aspirations to a Greater Syria. By recognizing the territorial rights in Palestine of a people whose political representatives seemed amenable to British influence, they perhaps felt that they had found a satisfactory answer to this dilemma — an answer furthermore which squared with the high-minded belief in national self-determination championed by aUS President Woodrow Wilson.
Whatever the true explanation, the British can hardly have anticipated the endless difficulties in which the Balfour Declaration was going to involve them. Charged with the management of Palestine under the terms of the British Mandate of 1922, they found themselves fighting a losing battle to keep the peace between Arab natives and swelling numbers of Jewish settlers. For centuries, Palestinian Arabs and Jews had lived together in amity. But with the mounting (and destabilizing) influx into Palestine of European Jews, Arab-Jewish relations became increasingly strained and the role of the British as purportedly evenhanded administrators ever harder to sustain. Though the Balfour Declaration had insisted on the rights of indigenous Palestinians, the British were scarcely regarded by Palestinians as zealous protectors of those rights; yet the Jews seldom saw them as their benefactors either. Much given to making disingenuous promises to both parties, they ended up being despised and distrusted by Arabs and Jews alike.
What changed everything was the looming threat posed to the British Empire by the rise of Nazi Germany. Anxious not to be denied access to the Arab world’s oil supplies, the British belatedly resolved to restrict Jewish immigration into Palestine — a step that greatly antagonized Jewish opinion and precipitated the growth of organized Jewish resistance. At the time of the founding of Israel in 1948, the British were trying desperately to maintain their dominion over Palestine in the teeth of well-armed, fanatically single-minded Jewish terrorists (one of the most prominent of whom was the future Jewish leader Menachem Begin). In the end, however, exhausted by the effort to defeat the Nazis, and with their own empire rapidly following the Ottoman Empire into oblivion, they simply lost the will to enforce their famous Mandate. The state of Israel — for all that it received the benediction of the United States and the newly established United Nations — ultimately came into existence because Jewish guerilla fighters forced the British to pack their bags and leave.
John Keay does not absolve the Arab elites of blame for the historic disaster visited on the Palestinians by the creation of Israel. But he leaves little doubt that he believes the British bore most of the blame for sowing the seeds of the Middle East’s protracted agony. “Having devised and embraced irreconcilable commitments of devastating consequence,” he remarks, “they stood back, knowing that the problems were insoluble but expecting sympathetic applause for their generally impartial and good-humored handling of them.” It is a suitably sardonic verdict — and hard to disagree with, even if Keay seems in some danger of underplaying Adolf Hitler’s responsibility for the way things have turned out. It was after all the systematic anti-Semitism of the Nazi regime that drove vast numbers of Jews out of Europe and imparted to Jewish immigration into Palestine the critical mass that made Israel possible. Moreover, if during the first decade or more of Israel’s existence mankind turned a blind eye to the deracination of 750,000 native Arabs, it was surely because of the overwhelming worldwide pity for the Jews that the Holocaust evoked.
All the same, the meddlesome British have a great deal to answer for: deluding themselves that they were actuated by the highest and most honorable motives, they surely did far more harm than they ever did good in the Middle East. What is so dispiriting is that, Britain is meddling in the Middle East once again, as though in the grip of some species of obsessive compulsive disorder. It is not so much that Britain’s old imperial habits are dying hard; it has begun to seem as if they refuse to die at all.
