Running into the sand

Mr. Kelly's Arabia, the Gulf, and the West is being reissued by Basic Books.

The Arabs consider that they are the victims of a shameful injustice. Iraq and Saddam will henceforth embody, in an imperishable fashion, the spirit of resistance and the refusal to accept what, because one is an Arab, is the calamity of bending the knee."

Sid Ahmad Ghozali, foreign minister of Algeria, March 4, 1991

ONE OF the less edifying sights in recent weeks has been that of French politicians of every stripe scurrying around the capitals of the Maghreb, anxiously reassuring the Algerians, Moroccans, and Tunisians of France's undiminished esteem and affection for them, despite the anti-French demonstrations in Algiers, Rabat, and Tunis provoked by the French participation in the war against Iraq. Uninspiring though the spectacle has been, it has at least had the merit of providing a twofold warning to the United States: of how not to behave in the months ahead in making arrangements for the future security of the Gulf, and of how some of America's partners in the anti-Iraq coalition can be expected to behave.

The present situation at the head of the Gulf bears a distant resemblance to that which followed the military defeat of the Ottoman empire seventy-odd years ago. The vilayets of Basra and Baghdad were under British military administration, which was in the process of being extended to the vilayet of Mosul in the north. To the eastward, Persia was in a state of upheaval, due in part to the effects of the Great War, in part to Shi'i agitation, but most of all to the incapacity of the Qajar shah to govern his country. To the north the nascent Soviet Union was wracked by civil war, its economy was foundering, and its sovereignty was being impaired by foreign intervention. To the southwest the sultanate of Najd (the forerunner of present-day Saudi Arabia) and the sheikhdom of Kuwait had taken advantage of the war to throw off the remnants of Turkish suzerainty, to place themselves under British protection, and to reap the dual financial benefit of British subsidies and profits from running the British blockade of the Tarkish Arabian provinces. Finally, France was staking her claim to dominion over Syria and a share, if not a monopoly, of the oil of Mosul.

Something obviously had to be done to impose order on Turkish Iraq and the upper Gulf, and the only power in a position to do anything was Britain. Acting, in the first instance, by right of conquest, and afterward on the authority of the mandate conferred on her by the League of Nations, Britain united the three former Turkish vilayets into the kingdom of Iraq, installed the Hashemite prince Faisal Ibn Hussein as its sovereign, and laid down the frontiers of the new state. In 1932 Britain relinquished the mandate and Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as a fully independent state.

Lines in the Sand

BRITAIN'S definition of the frontiers of Iraq with Kuwait and Saudi Arabia has been the subject of much heated comment in recent months, the burden of the complaints being that these frontiers were "arbitrarily drawn" lines on the map, devised by Britain for her own "imperialist purposes" and imposed upon the people of the area "regardless of their wishes." W'hat criticism of this kind ignores is, in the first place, that the frontiers of the Arab successor states of the former Ottoman empire had to be drawn upon the empire's dissolution, and that Britain alone, as the mandatory power in Iraq and the protecting power in Kuwait and Najd, had the legal right to do so. In the second place, the boundaries of Iraq, Kuwait, and Najd were not arbitrarily conceived lines, languidly plucked from the ether, as it were, by the Machiavellian figure of Sir Percy Cox, the British high commissioner in Iraq. On the contrary, they were drawn in consultation with the Arab leaders concerned, and with the knowledge acquired by British officers of the old Indian Political Service, of whom Cox was one, from a century's experience of eastern and northern Arabia.

by J.B. Kelly