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Articles
A New Account of Churchill Remaking the Mideast by Brad Faught
- By WILLIAM JOHN SHEPHERD
- | March 13, 2023
- Category: Books
Brad Faught, Cairo 1921: Ten Days That Made the Middle East. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2022, 264 pages, $30, Amazon $20.43, Kindle $19.41.
It is just over a century since the epochal Cairo Conference of 1921. The meeting, chaired by Secretary of State for the Colonies Winston Churchill, was called to redraw the map of the Middle East. The delegates were British and colonial officials, amusingly known to Churchill as the “40 Thieves.” The map to be redrawn was that of the former Ottoman Empire, defeated in the First World War. This famous or infamous conference created the modern states of Iraq and Jordan and set the boundaries of Palestine.
The Cairo Conference has long interested historians. Sara Reguer’s Winston S. Churchill and the Shaping of the Middle East, 1919-1922 (2020) reexamined the sausage making which occurred at Cairo. Professor Faught focuses on both Cairo and the subsequent, lesser-known gathering in Jerusalem. Both Faught and Reguer complement each other and should be read in conjunction with David Fromkin’s standard work, A Peace to End All Peace (1989).
Dramatis personae
An imperial historian and biographer of Kitchener, Faught teaches at Canada’s Tyndale University. His study is supported by endnotes, bibliography, a regional map, and 21 enumerated photographs of significant players and key sites.
He focuses on two photographs in particular. The first is the book’s cover, the famous photo of Churchill and company, mounted on camels, during a sightseeing excursion to the Sphinx and Pyramids at Giza. Also in the photo are Clementine Churchill, Gertrude Bell, the swashbuckling T.E. Lawrence, colonial administrator Sir Percy Cox, and WSC’s bodyguard Walter Thompson.
This image symbolizes the British Imperium’s exotic and sometimes ridiculous nature. The latter was made more so by Churchill falling off his camel soon after the photo was taken, prompting his wife to quip, “How the mighty have fallen” (135). (WSC, refusing a horse for the ride back, said, “I started on a camel, and I will finish on a camel.”)
The second notable photograph was taken the next day, at the conference’s end, showing the participants. Such photographs were a custom of diplomatic conferences going back to Vienna in 1815. But Faught assures us that Cairo was not mere theater. Less “Hot Air, Arabs, and Airplanes” or “Churchill’s Folly,” as some historians have stated (206), it was a serious endeavor to stabilize a key region in a more progressive manner than traditional imperialism.
A comprehensive survey by Faught
Sarah Reguer in her excellent study was more narrowly focused on the three specific territories created as a result of the conference. Faught offers a superior study with his broader view. Overlapping areas of responsibility were confusing, then and now. Churchill at the Colonial Office was in charge of dealing with the conquered Ottoman territories. Mesopotamia (Iraq) was transitioning out of the control of the India Office. Meanwhile, the Foreign Office was responsible for relations with Egypt and the nascent Arab kingdoms of Hejaz and Nejd, unified as Saudi Arabia in 1932.
Faught’s coverage explains why officials such as Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon and Egyptian High Commissioner Lord Allenby both opposed a Jewish homeland within the Mandate of Palestine. Allenby, aided by Lawrence, was the general who had conquered the Ottoman provinces. Neither he nor Curzon had looked favorably on the 1917 Balfour Declaration, promising a Jewish homeland, which had inflammatory effects in the Arab-speaking world.
Churchill in particular believed competing diplomatic and wartime concerns could be reconciled at Cairo and did his best to accomplish it. Besides the Balfour Declaration, two wartime agreements were addressed. The first was the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence of 1915-16. Therein, Egyptian High Commissioner Sir Henry McMahon, and the Sharif (later King) Hussein of Hejaz recognized postwar Arab independence in return for their rebellion against the Ottomans. The second was the secret 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement between Britain and France dividing up the Ottoman Empire, with modern Syria and Lebanon going to France.
Additionally, there was the huge economic and military resource of Middle Eastern oil to be secured as well as the financially crippling costs of military occupation and rebel suppression, especially in Iraq, that “ungrateful volcano,” as Churchill called it (200).
“The Sheriffian Solution”
Churchill, Lawrence, Bell, Cox, and many others spent ten days at Cairo deciding these things, augmented by further discussion soon after in Jerusalem. Churchill promoted what he dubbed “The Sheriffian Solution,” to subsidize Hussein of Hejaz and Ibn Saud of Nejd while establishing the former’s sons, Faisal and Abdullah, as Kings of Iraq and Transjordan. This also involved partitioning 6/7ths of Palestine to become Trans-jordan. Kurdish independence was denied and Kurdish areas around Mosul placed under Iraq. France’s claims in Syria-Lebanon were recognized without much ado, though Britain kept a watchful eye on her periodic ally.
Overall, Britain and France would administer the territories as mandates under the League of Nations, and eventually put them on the path to independence. The path led to mixed results. Trans-jordan became independent in 1946. Renamed Jordan in 1949, it remains to date a largely stable and successful state under Abdullah’s successors. The military costs of security in Iraq were mitigated with an innovative scheme of air policing by the Royal Air Force, and Iraq became independent in 1932. While a pro-Nazi revolt was defeated in 1941, a bloody 1958 coup put the Ba’athist Party in power. That eventually gave rise to dictator Saddam Hussein, oppression of the Kurds, and near endless war ever since.
Finally, the one-seventh of the original Palestine Mandate not to become Arab Jordan, emerged controversially as the State of Israel in 1948 and has also been at almost perpetual war since then. Though in many other ways it proved a remarkable and notable country, it was hardly what Churchill intended with his naïve belief that Arabs and Jews could cohabit peacefully.
A notable book
Brad Faught has given us an expertly researched and thoughtfully argued examination of one of the seminal diplomatic events of the 20th century. Cairo cast a long shadow well into the current century. One wonders how the Middle East might have turned out had the Kurds been put on the path to statehood at Cairo. (Churchill, Martin Gilbert reported, was in favor of protecting the Kurds “from some future bully in Iraq.” He was outvoted by colleagues who were certain that Iraq would never pose that kind of a problem.)
The Cairo Conference was notable for the formal participation of Gertrude Bell, almost unheard of for a woman in that era, and much to Churchill’s credit. Bell was pro-Arab, in the British Imperial context, but not, like Lawrence, an advocate of the Kurds. Indeed Cairo was to be almost the last hurrah for Lawrence on the world scene. He soon faded into obscurity, in part through his own desires, and died young.
Churchill, of course, would go on to many more defeats, triumphs, and mixed outcomes like Cairo. For more on this aspect and era of his life, read the aforementioned books by Fromkin and Regeur. I also recommend Sir Martin Gilbert’s Churchill and the Jews (2007), Warren Dockter’s Churchill and the Islamic World (2019), and David Stafford’s Oblivion or Glory: 1921 and the Making of Winston Churchill.
Video viewing
Sara Reguer with Richard Cohen: A Conversation on Churchill and the Middle East 1919-1922 (2022).
The author
William John Shepherd, archivist and historian, is a long-time contributor to The Churchill Project and Historynet magazines.