Learning lessons in the Middle East

Nelson received intelligence on July 28th, 1798 that the French fleet he had been chasing across the Mediterranean had reached Egypt. Four days later, at Aboukir Bay near Alexandria, 11 French battleships and two frigates were sunk. ‘Victory’, the admiral wrote home to his wife, ‘is certainly not a name strong enough for such a scene.’ The Battle of the Nile marks the beginning of Britain’s modern engagement with a part of the world that would come to play an increasingly prominent and distinctive role in the history of its foreign policy. British activity in the Middle East spans the Napoleonic Wars, 19th-century rivalry with Russia in Persia, two world wars and the Cold War. Contrary to all expectations, the end of Empire in the Middle East did not mean permanent withdrawal. Despite withdrawing formally from the Persian Gulf in 1971, Britain has been involved in a succession of military conflicts, against Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, Colonel Gadaffi’s Libya and now ISIS. Britain is building a new military base in Bahrain this year.

British fears and emotions run high in the Middle East. The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, became a vital route to India and gained a symbolic significance in the British imagination, which, by the mid-20th century, made it peculiarly hard to relinquish. It was no accident that the biggest crisis of the end of Empire, the Suez Crisis of 1956, centred on the canal’s nationalisation. Oil evoked even more emotive reactions. ‘No Cyprus’, Prime Minister Anthony Eden declared in 1955, ‘no certain facilities to protect our supply of oil. No oil: unemployment and hunger in Britain. It is as simple as that.’ Fear of a British 9/11 underlay Tony Blair’s intervention in Iraq in 2003. Prime Minister David Cameron has referred to ISIS as ‘an existential threat’.

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The number of British mistakes and failures in the Middle East is striking. British policy in the region has been remarkably accident-prone, resulting in a series of official enquiries. The first of these was into the surrender in 1916 of some 13,000 British and Indian troops at Kut-al-Amarah, in what was then Mesopotamia. In the interwar years there were enquiries into disturbances in Palestine. The Iraq invasion of 2003 sparked a raft of enquiries, including the long-awaited Chilcot report. 

The cost of Britain’s self-inflicted wounds in the Middle East has been high. The heaviest brunt has been born within the region, where the impact of decisions made nearly a century ago, over Palestine and Iraq, along with the consequences of the 2003 Iraq War, are still working themselves out. From the British perspective, the pursuit of certain policies has undermined its position in and beyond the Middle East. Suez drove Britain and France apart, with Britain embracing its ‘special relationship’ with Washington with new urgency, while France turned away from the Entente Cordiale towards West Germany. The consequences of this would be played out in de Gaulle’s two vetoes, in 1963 and 1967, of Britain’s application to join the European Economic Community (EEC). Both Eden and Blair suffered serious reputational damage as a result of their actions in the Middle East. 

How are we to explain these failures? Were they caused by mistakes made in London or were they result of the challenging circumstances in which policy was often made and the peculiar complexities of Middle Eastern politics? The answer is best approached by looking at three clusters of failures. 

Israel, Palestine and Iraq

The first surrounds the final, helter-skelter expansion of British power in the Middle East during and immediately after the First World War, when Britain expelled the Turks and then gained League of Nation mandates over Palestine, Iraq and Transjordan. Dividing the rump of the Ottoman Empire was a difficult task, conducted under unpropitious circumstances. Decisions about an important, but nevertheless secondary theatre of the war were made by ministers and officials much more concerned with the disastrous stalemate on the Western Front. The bureaucratic machine dealing with the Middle East was hydra-headed. During 1916, 18 different authorities needed to be consulted about decisions on the region. Ministers and officials were ill-equipped to cope with the problems of reconciling competing claims to the Ottoman territory, while attempting to create a stable new order in a region riven with ethnic, tribal and sectarian divisions. 

The result was a series of muddles and delays, with conflicting promises to the Hashemites and the French over Syria and to Arabs and Zionists over Palestine. Under the Anglo-French Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916, Palestine was to be internationalised. This may have saved a great deal of future trouble. In November 1917, however, the British government decided instead, with the Balfour Declaration, to sponsor a Jewish homeland. This was seen as offering an immediate propaganda advantage with American and Russian Jewish populations, as well as establishing an important strategic buffer for the Suez Canal. Put more bluntly, it kept the French out. 

The Balfour Declaration suffered from the problem characteristic of most of Britain’s Middle Eastern failures: its practical implications had not been thought through. By endorsing the Zionist claim to Palestine, Britain created a new conflict in the region. In a far-sighted memorandum to the War Cabinet, Lord Curzon warned that the local Arabs, who then constituted some 92 per cent of the population, ‘will not be content either to be expropriated for Jewish immigration, or to act merely as hewers of wood and drawers of water to the latter’. A qualifying rider was then added to the British declaration of support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland: that ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine’. The result was an incompatible set of promises to two communities, both of whom wanted the same land. The British tried to muddle through for 30 years, only admitting defeat in the wake of the Second World War when, in the words of the colonial secretary’s report of June 1948, their task ‘concluded in circumstances of tragedy, disintegration and loss’.  

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Britain’s other troubled creation was Iraq, a state which might be best described as having been born out of mission creep. A campaign that eventually absorbed some 890,000 men had originated in the despatch, in October 1914, of a mere 5,000 troops from India to the head of the Persian Gulf. Their mission was to protect oil facilities in Persia and to reassure Britain’s two main allies in the area, the sheikhs of Kuwait and Mohamerrah. Following the Turkish declaration of war in early November, Force D, as it was known, landed and quickly took Basra. Baghdad immediately beckoned. Sir Percy Cox, political adviser to the expedition, found it ‘difficult to see how we can well avoid taking over Baghdad. We can hardly allow Turkey to retain possession and make difficulties for us at Basra; nor can we allow any other Power to take it’. 

Unaware of how the advance was outstripping its lines of supply, ministers in London looked to this seemingly successful Mesopotamian expedition to provide the victories eluding the generals on the Western Front. The government of India, despite having no experience of operations on this scale, was responsible for the campaign and was anxious for it to continue, so as to avoid India being overshadowed by the European fighting. The result was the disaster at Kut-al-Amarah, the worst British military humiliation since defeat by George Washington’s forces at Yorktown in 1781. The 8,000-strong British-Indian garrison in the town of Kut was besieged by Ottoman troops, with the survivors imprisoned at Aleppo. As the subsequent commission of enquiry noted, ‘the scope of the object of the mission was never sufficiently defined in advance’.

No lessons were learned. The advance was resumed in 1917, despite the fact that it had no real strategic rationale in the larger context of the war. It was only once Baghdad had been taken that the War Cabinet set up a Mesopotamia Administration Committee to consider the problems raised by occupation of the two Turkish provinces of Basra and Baghdad, which were serious. Antipathy between the minority Sunni and majority Shia population, along with tribal and clan rivalries, meant that a unified and cohesive government was almost impossible. But the British then proceeded to compound the difficulties at the end of the war with a dash to Mosul, which was believed to have valuable oilfields. Officials subsequently debated whether Mosul province, with its large Kurdish population, should become part of Iraq, but the argument that the new state needed these potential oilfields to be economically viable was seen to outweigh the additional risks to its political cohesion. 

The costs to Britain of its Mesopotamian venture were brought home by a revolt in 1920. While the British were able to extract themselves from the difficult situation they had got themselves into, the Iraqis were faced with the problem of creating unity out of Britain’s contrived invention. Shortly before his death in 1933, King Feisal I had remarked that ‘there is no Iraqi people inside Iraq. There are only diverse groups with no patriotic sentiment’. Nearly 80 years later, little had changed, with the Economist noting in 2011 that few Iraqi politicians seemed willing to put their country above their religious sect or ethnicity. 

Egypt and the Gulf

British policy regained its poise in the interwar period and the region was held successfully during the Second World War. There was one serious misjudgement, however. Egypt was central to the British war effort, yet the sympathies of King Farouk were with the Axis powers. In February 1942 the British ambassador, Sir Miles Lampson, surrounded the Abdin palace in Cairo with tanks and forced the king to either change his government or abdicate. This deliberate humiliation of the monarch was supported by Churchill and Eden, the foreign secretary. But there was a dangerous element of personal animus behind the affair. Lampson had long had poor relations with Farouk. ‘So much for the events of the evening’, the ambassador recorded in his diary, ‘which I confess I could not have more enjoyed.’

While Britain’s immediate strategic interests had been secured, there was a long-term cost. The incident helped set the scene for a second cluster of British failures. This centred on the ending of Britain’s informal empire in the Middle East, which proved much more painful than decolonisation in Africa and Asia. Britain’s problem was that its interests in the Middle East had increased at the very moment when its ability to defend them had declined. While the route to the subcontinent had lost much of its strategic importance following Indian independence in 1947, Britain had become dependent on the Middle East for oil. In addition, the Cold War put a premium on maintaining military bases in the region, the most important of which was the Suez Canal Zone base. But Britain now faced a resurgent Arab nationalist movement, led by one of the Egyptian army officers who had resented Lampson’s behaviour in 1942. Gamal Abdel Nasser stands out among nationalist leaders in the postwar world in that he sought not only his country’s independence but also waged a propaganda war against the British presence across the Arab world. The crisis came to a head in July 1956, with Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal. British patience finally snapped. 

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Nasser caused a government comprised of senior ministers, who had held high office during the Second World War, to do something which Hitler had never succeeded in doing. He caused them to panic. Eden’s description of Britain’s secret agreement with France and Israel to attack Egypt as ‘the highest form of statesmanship’ suggests a policy which had lost its traditional moorings. The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Harold Macmillan, believed that, if Britain failed to act, it would become ‘another Netherlands’, a view shared by the US Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles. In addition, the Soviets were making inroads in Egypt and Syria. Britain was facing an existential crisis. In the words of Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick, Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office:    

If we sit back while Nasser consolidates his position and gradually acquires control of the oil-bearing countries, he can, and is according to our information, resolved to wreck us. If Middle East oil is denied us for a year or two, our gold reserves will disappear. If our gold reserves disappear, the sterling area disintegrates. If the sterling area disintegrates and we have no reserves, we shall not be able to maintain our force in Germany, or, indeed, anywhere else. I doubt whether we shall be able to pay for the bare minimum necessary for our defence. And a country which cannot provide for its defence is finished.

Egypt had become the lightning rod for British anger at the loss of Empire and great power status, with Nasser in Egypt as its focus. This meant that, as far as British ministers were concerned, the crisis had become dangerously personalised. Getting rid of him, like getting rid of Saddam Hussein in 2003, became an overriding imperative. It drove and distorted policy. Dissenting views, whether from the US or from British officials, were either excluded or ignored. In consequence, the impracticalities of trying to put the imperial clock back by reinvading Egypt – the dubious international legality of the operations, the transparency of the charade of Britain and France intervening to separate Egyptian and Israeli forces after an Israeli attack, the political risks for Britain’s being seen to cooperate with Israel, not to mention the lack of any exit strategy – were either downplayed or glossed over. 

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After Suez, the focus of British policy moved to Arabia and the Gulf, where by 1957 Kuwait was providing around half of British oil, as well as amassing large sterling reserves. The security of Gulf oil supplies was judged to require a regional base. The place chosen was Aden, the only sovereign British territory in the region. Securing it in an era when Cairo radio’s nationalist messages could be heard in even the remotest parts of Arabia, represented a challenge which was not fully confronted in London. Once again an overriding imperative was allowed to ride roughshod over inconvenient facts.

Officials tried to square the circle. The Governor of Aden, Sir William Luce, put forward a far-sighted proposal in 1958 for an early merger between protectorates and colony. The new state, in a treaty relationship with Britain, would acquire independence within ten years, with provision for the maintenance of the base. Ministers, however, regarded this as too risky. What they failed to appreciate was that so were the alternatives. This was certainly true of the chosen option: a federation between Aden and its tribal hinterland. It had some advantages, not least the fact that the protectorate rulers, who would constitute the majority in the South Arabian Federation, were friendly to Britain, while political activists in the more developed port of Aden were not. This was a shotgun marriage. Charles Johnson, who succeeded Luce as governor, wrote ‘of bringing together not only urban and rural but different centuries as well; modern Glasgow say and the 18th-century Highlands’. Lack of knowledge of the area among politicians meant that the federation’s flaws were not properly appreciated in London.

Ministers and officials compounded their difficulties in at least two ways. Although ready to invest heavily in developing the base, the Treasury was reluctant to provide economic development funds for the federation, a classic failure to view policy in the round. This was further complicated by British intervention in the Yemeni civil war, which had begun in 1962, in part an attempt to get even with Nasser, who had made the mistake of sending troops to Yemen. This was dangerous, since it did not take much violence to render the base too expensive to keep, a lesson which should have been learned from the experience in Palestine in the late 1940s and the Suez Canal zone base in the early 1950s. The enforced British withdrawal from Aden, completed in November 1967, led to the collapse of the South Arabian Federation. It was replaced by a People’s Democratic Republic, which proceeded to allow access to Aden to the Soviet navy and supported the growing insurgency in the neighbouring Dhofar province of Oman. Along with the forced withdrawal from Palestine, Aden ended up one of the worst debacles in the history of end of Empire.

Failures in intelligence

There is one remaining cluster of Middle East failures: those involving intelligence. Policy-makers were taken by surprise by a whole series of events after 1945. They include the Egyptian, Iraqi, Libyan and Iranian revolutions, Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal in response to the US withdrawal of the offer to finance the Aswan Dam, the 1961 Iraqi threats to Kuwait, the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, the fall of the Shah in 1979, the 1990 Iraqi seizure of Kuwait, the absence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq in 2003 and the emergence of ISIS. Intelligence was also critically lacking during the Palestine insurgency of the late 1940s and the Aden insurgency of the 1960s. The repercussions were serious. The course of recent Middle Eastern history might have been different had it been possible to pre-empt the 1958 Iraqi coup or the occupation of Kuwait in 1990. Had it been known that Saddam Hussein no longer had a WMD programme in 2003, the rationale for the war would have been undercut. 

The Middle East in the second half of the 20th century was highly volatile and Britain’s allies shared some of the intelligence failures. Britain’s problems were in the field of human intelligence (HUMINT): getting agents and information. MI6 had a particular problem in penetrating conspiratorial nationalist movements in Egypt and Iraq in the 1950s, which were by nature anti-British. Recruiting agents was also difficult in the highly secretive and tightly controlled totalitarian regimes, like Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, where there were high levels of fear and intimidation. In addition, policy-makers were taken by surprise as a result of some bad diplomatic judgements. In the run-up to the Iraqi coup of 1958, the ambassador, Sir Michael Wright, insisted that there was no revolutionary situation in the country, suppressing the dissenting views of his oriental secretary. In Iran the British had got too close to the Shah, avoiding contacts with opposition figures, which they knew, thanks to Britain’s long history of intervening in Iranian affairs, would be unpopular with him. Britain’s one advantage was in the field of signals intelligence (SIGINT), with Egyptian ciphers known to have been broken. 

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British policy in the Middle East since the First World War has been, to say the least, challenging. Britain’s informal empire in the Middle East reached its apogee when its global power was already well into decline. As Commander Hogarth of the Arab Bureau in Cairo warned in 1920:  

The Empire has reached its maximum and begun the descent. There is no more expansion in us … and that being so we make but a poor Best of the Arab Countries.  

Against this background it was a tall order to try to create a stable new order in place of the Ottoman Empire. Managing the complex political, strategic and psychological adjustments entailed in the precipitous decline of British power in the Middle East after the Second World War proved unexpectedly painful. The subsequent instability of the region has, as most recently evident in Iraq and Syria, created a new set of difficulties.

The British compounded their own problems. Policy-making was often vitiated by a lack of intellectual rigour. Problems were not thought through, whether because ministers were distracted, as during the First World War, or because the machinery of government was inadequately coordinated and at times short-circuited. Experts were not infallible, as evidenced by Lampson’s wartime handling of King Farouk. Nevertheless, the key mistakes were made by those ministers in London who either failed to consult or ignored expert advice. This was most true of Suez and the 2003 Iraq War. In the run up to the Iraq conflict the Foreign Office sent an official to explain some of the complexities of Iraq to the prime minister, Tony Blair. ‘That’s all history’, came his reply. ‘This is about the future.’

In his 1967 account of the Suez Crisis, Anthony Nutting, minister of state at the Foreign Office, drew his title, No End of a Lesson, from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The Lesson’, written after the Boer War: 

Let us admit it fairly, as a business people should,
We have had no end of a lesson: it will do us no end of good.
Not on a single issue, or in one direction or twain,
But conclusively, comprehensively, and several times and Again.

Learning lessons has not been a strong point of British policy-making in the Middle East, yet those lessons are certainly there to be learned. 

Peter Mangold is a former member of the BBC World Service and Foreign Commonwealth Office Research Department. He is an Academic Visitor at St Antony’s College, Oxford. His history of Britain and the Middle East will be published in 2016. 

Learning lessons in the Middle East