Book of the dayHistory booksReviewJames Barr has written an illuminating account of the United States’ efforts to supplant the British empire in the Middle EastIn February 1942, a remarkable event took place in the centre of Cairo. Tanks and troops surrounded the Abdeen Palace while Britain’s ambassador to Egypt, Sir Miles Lampson, ordered King Farouk to come up with a compliant candidate to replace his recently resigned prime minister or abdicate. Farouk backed down and kept his throne.
Lampson, at 6ft 5in a towering embodiment of imperial arrogance, relished the encounter, but Egyptians remembered a national humiliation. The British had ruled the most populous country in the Arab world for 60 years. Victory at El Alamein a few months later marked the “end of the beginning” of the second world war, in Winston Churchill’s famous words. But the empire’s future was already looking uncertain – and especially to the Americans.
James Barr’s beautifully written and deeply researched book covers 25 years of competition between Britain and the US for hegemony in the Middle East. Churchill’s warning that he had not entered Downing Street to liquidate the empire didn’t sit easily with Franklin Roosevelt’s Atlantic Charter. Still, American idealism was not entirely altruistic: British “imperial preference” tariffs left US companies at a disadvantage. Oil was an increasingly important consideration.
Barr demonstrates that the two countries were becoming outright rivals, a fact obscured, he argues, by their anti-fascist alliance and a special relationship that lasted through the cold war and beyond. Roosevelt’s envoy Wendell Willkie was dismayed by British colonial officials, who sounded like Rudyard Kipling and appeared oblivious to the implications of a changing international order.
Britain played second fiddle as the Americans treated their wartime ally with ‘patronising pity and contempt’British-ruled Palestine, where the Americans were increasingly sympathetic to the Zionist cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust (Harry Truman quipped that Jewish voters far outnumbered Arabs), was an early flashpoint. In 1953, the CIA-MI6 operation to overthrow the Iranian nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh was an exceptional joint venture. It was also the origin of the enduring view from Tehran that America and Britain were the great and little Satans respectively.
Washington and London were often at odds over the military coups, secret subsidies and general jiggery-pokery that were part of the landscape in Syria, Iraq and Jordan in the 1950s. Massive bribery by Saudi Arabia, financed by rocketing oil revenues, was a disruptive novelty. The Emir of Kuwait, keen on “Cadillacs and concubines”, was the single biggest investor in the City of London.
Tensions peaked over Farouk’s eventual replacement, the charismatic Gamal Abdel Nasser. It was Anthony Eden’s fateful obsession with the man he called “Hitler of the Nile” and a “Moslem Mussolini” that led to the Suez debacle of 1956, an episode of extraordinary deception that is still shocking to contemplate. From then on, Britain indisputably played second fiddle as the Americans treated their wartime ally with “patronising pity and contempt”.
The action of Lords of the Desert takes place largely in corridors of power. There is barely a subaltern in sight. But it goes far beyond classic diplomatic history, the genre of “what one clerk said to another”, superbly illustrating the constraints of Britain’s decline and America’s inexorable rise, the two united only by hostility to the Soviet Union and concern for their respective national interests. Barr also deftly integrates the role of secret intelligence in foreign policy, drawing on the diary of a little-known journalist-cum-MI6 agent to add indiscreet and illuminating detail.
If most of the events covered are broadly familiar, they are seen from an unusual angle, just as the author’s acclaimed A Line in the Sand placed unrelenting Anglo-French rivalry at the heart of the history of the Middle East in the first half of the 20th century. The lesson of both books is that as war rages, strategies for defeating enemies are closely linked to securing the spoils of peace to gain advantage over allies.
Barr relies on both documentary evidence and interviews with key players in the episodes he reconstructs. Britain’s clandestine role in the anti-Nasser war in Yemen and the Oman counter-insurgency in the 1960s are vivid and fascinating stories. One of the most memorable texts he quotes is the conclusion reached by Harold Wilson’s cabinet in 1968, when the Americans were mired in Vietnam and Lyndon Johnson was annoyed at the message Britain was broadcasting to the world by finally pulling out of its last Middle Eastern outpost in Aden. “For God’s sake, act like Britain,” the US secretary of state, Dean Rusk, beseeched George Brown, Wilson’s foreign secretary.
“The time had come,” as the minutes recorded, “for a decisive break with our previous policies. We would no longer adopt policies merely because the United States wished us to adopt them and out of fear of the economic consequences if we did not do so. The friendship of the United States had been valuable to us; but we have often paid a heavy price for it.”
Ian Black is the Guardian’s former Middle East editor.
Lords of the Desert: Britain’s Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East by James Barr is published by Simon & Schuster (£20). To order a copy for £17 go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
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