Feeney on Friday: How the British laid ground for Middle East instability

The British laid the groundwork, literally in sand, which guaranteed instability in the Middle East until today.

After the French had defeated an Arab army in July 1920 and consolidated their control of Syria under the terms of their League of Nations mandate, the British faced a serious revolt in the eastern part of their mandate then known as Mesopotamia (from Greek for between the two rivers, Tigris and Euphrates).

What the British called Mesopotamia was made up of three former Ottoman provinces or vilayets, Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, roughly corresponding to religious or ethnic divides, Shia, Sunni and Kurdish.

None of them accepted the idea of a British mandate. Instead they demanded self-determination as an Arab state as the British had promised in 1916, though the Kurds in the north wanted their own Kurdistan.

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Throughout 1920, Sunni and Shia inhabitants combined to offer strong resistance to the British. 100,000 British and Indian troops were dispatched to suppress the revolt. Distances were huge and much of the land trackless desert.

Secretary of State for War Winston Churchill, under pressure to reduce expenditure on the armed forces after World War I but fighting in Ireland and the Bolshevik government in Russia, decided “to effect economies by holding Mesopotamia through the agency of the Air Force rather than by a military force”. Aerial policing, he called it.

The RAF started bombing villages and settlements suspected of harbouring supporters of the revolt. Not content with destroying buildings, Churchill contemplated using poisoned gas. In the end, an estimated 10,000 Arabs were killed and 400 British soldiers. The cost was about £50 million.

The campaign had several fateful results. Since its success in saving manpower and money was credited to the RAF, the air force was given military control of the region. Success led the RAF to believe that bombing could win a war.

As the historian AJP Taylor wrote: “Here was an independent strategy of the air. From this moment, it was accepted that bombs could not only quell tribal revolts, but could win a great war.”

Unfortunately they can’t. One of the squadron leaders enthusiastically promoting this belief was Arthur – later ‘Bomber’ – Harris, leader of Bomber Command in World War II, when several of his senior officers had flown in his squadron in Mesopotamia.

Following the quelling of large-scale resistance, Churchill called the Cairo Conference in March 1921 to settle the government of the part of the British mandate east of the River Jordan. The fate of the western part, Palestine, had already been determined by the Balfour Declaration and a Zionist High Commissioner, Sir Herbert Samuel, already appointed.

The conference, composed of politicians, officials and experts, was largely window dressing, for the shape of the region had already been determined in London.

There would be two new kingdoms, Jordan and Iraq, a name the British devised patronisingly to link the new kingdom with antiquity and perhaps provide some authenticity.

The kings would be the sons of the Emir of Mecca, Abdullah in Jordan and Faisal in Iraq. Churchill believed that fulfilled the spirit of Britain’s wartime promise to the Arabs, or so he said. The kings would be nominal rulers with British High Commissioners actually running the new states.

The borders of Jordan were devised arbitrarily. On a map it looks like overlapping quadrilaterals drawn with a ruler or set square cutting straight through tribal and religious districts regardless.

In the new Iraq none of the major groupings accepted King Faisal, with Shia presenting the greatest opposition led by Muhammad Mahdi as Sadr.

Sporadic RAF bombing continued until 1924, with Britain determined to hold on to the Mosul oilfields. In Jordan, more sparsely populated and devoid of oil, the new regime remained wholly dependent on the British with a garrison of British troops for years.

As yet another British-created artificial state, Iraq remained unstable even during the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein (1979-2003), with repeated unrest in Shia and Kurdish districts.

When the Americans and British returned to wreck the country again in 2003, the Shia opposition was led by Muqtada al Sadr, the great-grandson of Muhammad Mahdi. Yet another legacy of British imperialism.