The real difficulty under which we labour here is that we don’t know exactly what we intend to do in this country. We rushed into this business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. Can you persuade people to take your side, when you’re not sure in the end whether you’ll be there to take theirs?
- Gertrude Bell
It’s incredible how precisely and damningly Bell’s insight into Western “diplomatic” affairs translates to the present day.
The Cairo Conference - a meeting of Britain’s Middle East experts - began formally on the morning of Saturday, March 12, 1921. The conference approved a plan for giving control over two large pieces of the former Turkish territories that Britain controlled to princes in the Hashemite family. It was agreed that Prince Feisal, with whom both Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence had worked during and after the First World War, would become king of a new country created from the Turkish Province of Mesopotamia; it would be called Iraq. His brother, Prince Abdullah, would rule a country made up of Palestine west of the Jordan River: Transjordan (now Jordan).
Lawrence had left the Paris Peace Conference in Versailles two years earlier in 1919 deeply frustrated by the way France and Britain had carved up the former Turkish territories with little regard for Arab rights. Winston Churchill met Lawrence at Versailles and had come away unimpressed. But something had changed after Versailles and before Cairo.
When Churchill took over the Colonial Office, he inherited a muddled Middle Eastern policy that was fought over by different branches of the British government. And Churchill inherited an unpopular war in Mesopotamia, where British and Indian troops were fighting Arab rebels. Churchill quickly appointed Lawrence - that “Wild Ass of the desert” as some of his detractors called him - as his assistant for Middle Eastern affairs. They began to work out their plan to give Lawrence’s Arab allies part of Palestine (today’s Jordan), and Mesopotamia, which would be called Iraq. This presumably would end the war there. These countries would then join the British Commonwealth.
T.E. Lawrence was in Cairo in March 1921, working for Winston Churchill, the British Colonial Secretary, who had arranged the conference. Churchill and Lawrence had worked out this plan for Iraq and Transjordan in advance of the conference along with input from Gertrude Bell.
And their plan was based on two ideas for which both Bell and Lawrence had been crusading during and after the war. First, the Arabs must be given control of their own lands (as Lawrence had implied they would when the Arabs were fighting alongside him against the Ottoman Empire and for Britain). And, second, the proper Arabs upon whom to bestow this power were the members of the Hashemite family: King Hussein and his sons, including Feisal and Abdullah.
Thirty-nine British men and one British woman, Gertrude Bell herself, attended the conference in Cairo, but none - probably including Churchill - had more influence upon its outcome than T.E. Lawrence.
The Cairo Conference approved the plan Churchill had worked out. Both Bell and Lawrence, thereby, had fulfilled some of his promises to Feisal and the Arabs. “Everything he (Lawrence) had hoped for when he joined the Colonial Office had been achieved,” writes T.E. Lawrence biographer Jeremy Wilson. Lawrence later called this “the period of which I am proudest.”
However, the map of the Middle East that resulted from this conference would prove anything but stable over the 90 years that followed. Quite a bit of the history and turmoil of the modern Middle East can be traced back to the Cairo Conference, where Iraq was patched together out of Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish territories. The Kurds were not given their own country. Palestine was divided in half, with an eye towards eventually giving the Jews the other half.
**Middle Eastern Conference, Cairo, March 1921.[Group includes: (Front row, left to right) M. Stevenson, General Congreve, Sir Herbert Samuel, Winston Churchill, Sir Percy Cox, General Haldane, General Ironside, General Radcliffe.(Second row, left to right) Sir G Archer, Gertrude Bell, Sasun Effendi, General Atkinson, Jafar Pasha, TE Lawrence, General Salmond, General Trevor, Hubert Young. (Extreme top, centre) Sir Archibald Sinclair (with bow tie), (below him) Joseph Crosland (with bow tie). In foreground, two lion cubs on their way from Somaliland to London Zoo]
