James Buchan
Saturday June 21, 2003
The Guardian

Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East
by John Keay
506pp, John Murray, £25

In 1930, a young RAF officer named Alan MacDonald was posted as a political
agent to the town of Nassiyah, then as now a strategic bridging point on the
lower Euphrates in Iraq.

MacDonald's task was to collect intelligence on the activities and
affiliations of local tribes that might be of use to his colleagues in the
air. In two-and-a-half years of waiting on local sheikhs, MacDonald came to
the conclusion that British official policy was rooted in a misconception.

In London, Cairo, Jerusalem and Baghdad, policies and ideals were
formulated, speeches made and men and machines deployed under the
impression that Britain was a force for good in the world. Yet in Iraq at
least, and by extension in Egypt and Palestine, far from being welcomed or
respected, "we are loathed".

This epiphany comes in more or less blinding form to all Englishmen and
Englishwomen who have anything to do with the Arab world. Arab good manners
and their own useless home-grown governments cannot for ever conceal a deep
resentment of this country. Of the most able Britishers who have worked in
the Middle East - and some have been very able indeed - most have ended up
in despair.

AT Wilson was recalled from Iraq in disgrace when the Euphrates tribes
revolted in 1920, St John Philby switched his loyalty to the Saudis
(setting an example of defection to his son Kim), while Gertrude Bell in
Baghdad in 1926 and TE Lawrence on the Bovington Road 10 years later ended
their lives in accidents that looked more than willed. Lawrence had already
written his suicide note in the last phrase of Seven Pillars of
Wisdom : "and then at once I knew how much I was sorry".

John Keay's new history of the British in the modern Middle East, the best
for almost 40 years, tells us precisely why in the Arab heartlands of
Egypt, Syria, Palestine, Jordan and Iraq we are (in MacDonald's
phrase) "unpopular, positively disliked, even hated".

Keay dutifully describes acts of duplicity and brutality by the French in
Syria and the naivety and negligence of the Americans since the second
world war. But those are interludes. His chief focus is Britain and her
haphazard campaign to create a cheap, modern empire from the Ottoman
dominions after the first world war; to maintain that empire in a state of
subordination through puppet monarchies, coercive bilateral treaties, air-
power and general bonhomie; and then, at the worst possible moment, to turn
her back on the whole mess.

For all Keay's good humour, and occasional twinges of nostalgia, this makes
for a ghastly story. Closing the book, the reader will be less inclined to
see the British forces now in Basra as selfless gifts to the Iraqi people.
Having landed there in 1915 and 1941, and stayed both times, we British
look to be up to our old tricks. The occupation raises anew the question
Keay poses and answers every 10 years or so of his narrative: what did
Britain want with these countries in 1916, 1926, 1936, 1946, 1956? What
does it want now?

Sowing the Wind opens in 1906 with the so-called Dinshawai (or Dinishwai)
incident, where a group of British officers out pigeon-shooting in the Nile
delta were assaulted by local villagers and one of their number killed. The
British responded by hanging four of the villagers and flogging 16. This
"excessive and medieval punishment", in the words of the British official
Ronald Storrs, exasperated the Egyptian public and unleashed the growing
anti-colonial and nationalist sentiment that had been brewing, in the Arab
cities and Iran, since the 1870s. Keay then takes us through British
attempts to exploit the Arab nationalist "awakening" and the tangle of
promises and counter-promises to the Arabs, the Jews by way of the Balfour
Declaration and the French to shore up the region during the first world
war.

This is a familiar story, but Keay tells it well. He has a knack for
portraying the chief actors and actresses in the drama in half a sentence.
Bell, who travelled to Iraq in 1916, comes across as a much more powerful
and passionate personality than the giddy clothes-horse of recent
biographies, while Lawrence is neither brilliant strategist nor fantasising
catamite but a rebellious man driven by a conflict between imperial loyalty
and the "dream-palace" of Arab independence. Having persuaded his superiors
to support and finance the Arab rebellion against the Turks in the Hijaz,
Lawrence wrote in October 1916: "Their military weakness ... should
henceforward ensure us advantages immeasurably greater than the money, arms
and ammunition we are now called upon to spare."

Keay's best chapters describe how Britain sought to establish in the
territories detached from the Ottoman empire a new-look empire of its own,
without the paraphernalia and expense of the Raj in India: "to secure
imperialist interests", as the perceptive American William Yale put it,
"without assuming the invidious burden of colonial rule".

Those interests included at one time or other the land and sea routes to
India, stops for short-hop aviation, military bases, fuel oil for the Royal
Navy and then for the entire British industrial economy, captive markets
for British products and contractors, the Suez canal. With the second world
war, and the independence of India, concrete commercial and security
interests were matched by what the historian John Kent, quoted by Keay,
calls "an irrational commitment to preserve prestige and status" come what
may.

For Palestine, where all Britain's diplomatic chickens eventually came home
to roost, Keay reserves a judgment no less withering for being
generous. "Having devised and embraced irreconcilable commitments of
devastating consequence," he writes, "the British stood back, knowing that
the problems were insoluble but expecting sympathetic applause for their
generally impartial and good-humoured handling of them." Again the story of
the Jewish immigration, Arab protest, the Peel commission, the white papers
of 1930 and 1939, the assassinations and the exodus of Jews from Europe is
well known, but it is also well told.

By the 1950s, with an exhausted Britain now displaced in Saudi Arabia, Iran
and Egypt by the United States, Keay loses some of his grip only to regain
it well in his account of Suez in 1956. Here Britain responded to Abdul
Nasser's nationalisation of the canal with a dishonourable military
adventure that it simply could not afford. The main narrative ends in 1958
with the revolution that toppled the Iraqi monarchy and buried British
influence in the Arab heartlands for a generation. A brisk and external
epilogue brings the story up to September 11 2001, by which time the
mantles of both good intention and bad effect had well and truly passed to
the United States.

Elizabeth Monroe, in her great Britain's Moment in the Middle East,
concluded from Oxford in 1963 that this country's belated empire-building
in the Middle East was not wholly without merit. British officials earned
enough "acquiescence, and at times admiration, to save the British skin in
two world wars. It also afforded the local peoples a life-giving interlude
of freedom ..."

Forty years and five great conflicts later, Keay has no such consolations
for us. The ramshackle and ineffectual statelets Britain created have
lasted but are not prosperous, secure, just or happy. The map the British
drew is unaltered except to accommodate the state of Israel, whose
existence, whatever  its justice for Israelis, is a permanent affront to
the Arabs and a symbol of British failure.

James Buchan has reported on conflict in the Middle East since the 1970s.


Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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