The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (37 page)

Disraeli's financial coup was a boon for the national interest, but it was also—as Disraeli's Liberal opponent William Gladstone recognized and bemoaned—a looming imperial obligation. It came due on Gladstone's prime ministerial watch. In 1881, Colonel Ahmed Arabi led a nationalist rebellion against the khedive, who ruled Egypt on behalf of the decrepit Ottoman Empire. For the better part of a century the British had defended the Ottoman Empire as a barrier to Russian expansion (and fought the Crimean War of 1853 to 1856 at the Turks' side against the Russians). Gladstone, however, was never a friend of the Turks—seeing them as oppressors, if not slaughterers, of Eastern Christians—and Arabi's platform was attractive to a liberal frame of mind: not only nationalist, but appealing to British ideals of free government.

That was all very well, but when Arabi seized power it seemed as though the European population of Egypt—and Anglo-French management of the Canal and of Egyptian finances (to protect European holders of Egyptian debt)—might be at risk. A joint Anglo-French naval task force was sent to intimidate Arabi. The French arrived; mobs rioted; Egyptian batteries took aim at the flotilla; and the French turned tail. The British, however, knew what to do. They bombarded Alexandria (11 July 1882) and then, in September, landed an army under Sir Garnet Wolseley, who knocked Arabi and his rebellion into the desert wastes in what military historian Byron Farwell deemed “the most brilliantly devised and executed campaign of the century,”
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the highlight of which was the Battle of Tel el-Kebir (13 September
1882). The British restored the khedive, exiled Arabi to Ceylon, and took as their responsibility the military protection and financial management of Egypt.

Her Majesty's consul-general in Egypt, Evelyn Baring, later Lord Cromer, acted as Egypt's de facto governor from 1883 to 1907. Even before that, as controller general of Egypt's finances, Baring had arranged for one khedive to be replaced by another. To common Egyptians he was known as
El Lord
and was thought to be behind everything that went on in the country—in reality, he was behind enough. A thoroughly efficient administrator, he installed a British shadow government behind the Egyptian ministries, completely reorganized the army, and with the creation of the Anglo-Egyptian Condominium over the Sudan (which lasted from 1899 to 1956) ran a little empire of his own.

When the Ottomans became a German ally in World War I, Egypt ceased to be an Ottoman territory administered by the British and became a British protectorate. It also became headquarters of the British Arab Bureau, which (as part of British Intelligence in Cairo) helped direct the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. In 1922, Egypt was declared an independent kingdom, though the British kept their military bases in the country, which remained de facto a British protectorate. That proved awfully useful in the Second World War. While the Egyptian government remained officially neutral until February 1945—just in case—Egypt was home to Britain's Middle East Command, which was responsible for the war in Africa, the Middle East, and Greece.

What had started at Suez ended there. In 1951, the Egyptian government revoked its treaty commitments to Britain
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and demanded that all British troops leave Egypt. To prod the British out, the Egyptian government winked at terrorist attacks on the Canal Zone. The Egyptian mob went one better and burned down Shepheard's Hotel (the great World War II watering hole for Allied officers), the Turf club, and any British enterprise they could find. In 1952, a military coup advanced the nationalist cause further, with Egypt becoming a republic the following year. Facing an unsympathetic Eisenhower administration—with its stridently anti-imperial secretary of state John Foster Dulles—Britain negotiated with Egypt a gradual withdrawal of British troops from the Canal Zone, the last troops to depart in 1956.

In July 1956, Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalized the Canal. Dulles had naïvely supposed Nasser would be a pro-American nationalist, rather than a Communist-leaning one. He was peeved at Nasser's diplomatic dalliances with the Communist Chinese and the Soviets,
and his arms purchases from the Eastern bloc, and in protest cut off American loans for the construction of the Aswan dam—which, ironically, Nasser used as part of his pretext for nationalizing the Canal. British Prime Minister Anthony Eden had a better read on Nasser, regarding him as a pharaonic Mussolini.

Eden believed the Suez Canal had to be placed safely under international control. To achieve this, the British and French governments resolved on a joint strike at Egypt; but inevitable calls for a diplomatic solution, led by the United States, delayed any action. The French, meanwhile, began cooking up an elaborate plot with the Israelis, who would attack Egypt across Sinai, giving the French and British an excuse to interpose themselves between the combatants and secure the Canal Zone.

The military portion of this Frankish legerdemain went off like a charm—the Israelis charged across Sinai on 29 October 1956; British and French troops occupied the Canal Zone on 5 November. Diplomatically, however, the operation came a cropper. World opinion—including that of the United States—was sharply hostile, and British domestic opinion, bullish immediately after the nationalization, weakened in the intervening months of futile diplomacy and became deeply divided. The supreme irony was that while Britain was calumniated by the rest of the world for protecting the Suez Canal from a petty dictator, the Soviet Union was crushing an Hungarian uprising against Communist tyranny. The Soviet Union and the United States actually allied themselves in condemning Britain, with the United States blocking an International Monetary Fund loan that Britain needed to stop a run on the pound, until the British government agreed to withdraw its troops from Suez. British imperial influence over Egypt was at an end. The myth that America is an anti-imperial power caused the Eisenhower administration to punish America's friends and reward her enemies.

Eisenhower later conceded that he had made a mistake at Suez; it weakened the West and strengthened the hand of radical Arab nationalists who
would soon topple the pro-Western government of Iraq and stir up trouble throughout the Middle East. Among Nasser's targets was Lebanon, which he encircled by forming the United Arab Republic with Syria. In 1958, Eisenhower felt compelled to send 14,000 troops and 70 ships to Lebanon after Nasserite Muslims tried to overthrow the pro-Western President Camille Chamoun. Chamoun, unlike Ike, had not condemned the British and French at Suez.

British Prime Minister Anthony Eden was dining with Iraq's King Feisal II and Prime Minister Nuri es-Said when news came that Nasser had nationalized the Suez Canal. Nuri told Eden, “You must hit him. You must hit him hard, and you must hit him now.”
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He clearly understood that Nasser posed a threat to the pro-Western states of the Middle East, like British-created Iraq with its British-installed monarchy; but he was also a typical Arab statesman. When Britain finally acted against Nasser, he protested Franco-British aggression.

From the sixteenth century until it was taken by the British in the First World War, the territory of modern Iraq had been under Ottoman rule. The Turks had divided it into three provinces whose geographical boundaries were ethnic-religious ones, with a Kurdish north, a Shi'ite South, and a Sunni center. When the Ottoman Empire allied with Germany in World War I, the British seized Basra, beginning a Mesopotamia campaign that had its humiliations—especially the siege of Kut (December 1915 to April 1916), where the British lost 30,000 men as casualties, and another 13,000 were taken as prisoners, most of whom didn't survive the Turkish camps—but ended with British victory.

The British decided to govern Mesopotamia as a unitary state, and did so under a mandate from the League of Nations. After repressing an initial
rebellion, the British ruled indirectly through local elites, mostly Sunnis who were thought to be better educated, more pro-British, and less prone to Islamic extremism than the Shi'ites. Prince Feisal—a political protégé of British officer T. E. Lawrence (of Arabia) and a Sunni—was put on the throne. In principle Feisal was acceptable to the Shi'ites because he belonged to the Hashemite family, which claimed descent from the Prophet Mohammed. He was, nevertheless, an obvious outsider with little reason, besides being favored by the British, to be named king of Iraq.

The British established Iraq as a constitutional monarchy with an elected parliament. In 1932, it became an independent state, though the British retained military bases in the country. During the Second World War, Iraq's Prime Minister Rashid Ali foisted a pro-Nazi military coup against Iraq's pro-British foreign minister (Nuri es-Said) and Prince Abd al-Ilah (regent for the young King Feisal II). The coup was short-lived. In a swift campaign, the British deposed the pro-Nazi regime and restored the rightful monarch. After the war, Iraq was the initial cornerstone of the Baghdad Pact (1955), which united Britain, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, and Turkey in an anti-Soviet front in the Near East. In 1958, nationalist military officers launched a pro-Nasserite coup in Iraq. Feisal II, Abd al-Ilah, and Nuri were killed, and Iraq, like Egypt, became a republic (in 1959) and then a dictatorship, and it withdrew from the Baghdad Pact.

Though Iran was never formally part of the British Empire, the British Navy had patrolled the Persian Gulf since the eighteenth century. At first its mission was to suppress pirates and protect the trade routes to India; later it added the suppression of the slave trade; and as the presence of the Royal Navy grew so did the presence of British diplomatic “residents” who proved highly influential in Gulf ports. In Persia itself, the British dueled
with the Russians for influence. In 1901, through superior finance and diplomacy, Britain gained the oil concessions for three-quarters of the country. That became all the more important as the Royal Navy started moving from coal to oil power.

After the First World War, the British no longer had to worry about the encroachments of czarist Russia. They did, however, confront the far more dangerous subversion of Russian Bolsheviks. British troops were dispatched to keep Persia free from the Bolshevik menace, as Red and White armies battled on Iran's borders, a Persian Communist Party was formed, and a northern Persian province was annexed by the Soviet Union. To alleviate the strain on the British army, whose troops were needed around the world for postwar policing operations, Major-General Sir Edmund “Tiny” (6'4”, 275 pounds) Ironside came up with precisely the right solution, one suitable for most foreign policy jams: “A military dictatorship would solve all our troubles and let us out of the country without any trouble at all.”
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To that end, Ironside found a likely lad in Colonel Reza Khan of the Persian Cossack Division. Ironside had no more than picked his man and the act was done. Reza Khan led his Cossacks into the capital and, presto change-o, became prime minister. The coup worked splendidly in terms of relieving British troops from defending Persia—it did rather less well in terms of perpetuating British influence, as Reza Khan saw British advisers as impediments to his absolute authority and dismissed them; the Persian people, nevertheless (like the Egyptians with El Lord), suspected a British hand behind everything.

In 1925, Reza Khan became king, inaugurating a new dynasty, setting Iran (the name he gave his country) on a modernizing course in the spirit of Kemal Ataturk. In the 1930s, as an anti-British, anti-Soviet autocrat, he sided with the Third Reich, which became Iran's major trading partner. Nevertheless, he kept Iran officially neutral during the war. That was not good enough for the British. In 1941, the British and the now Allied Soviets
demanded the shah boot the Germans out of Iran. When the shah refused, the British and the Soviets booted Reza Shah out of the country. His son was crowned in his place.