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A Century of War
superiority in iron and coal, but it had not taken sufficient account of our superiority of oil.’3 With this emerging role of petroleum in the war, we should now follow the thread of the postwar Versailles reorganization, with a special eye to British objectives. Britain’s creation of the League of Nations through the Versailles Peace Conference in 1919 became a vehicle for giving a facade of international legitimacy to a naked imperial seizure of territory. For the financial establishment of the City of London, the expenditure of hundreds of thousands of British lives was a seemingly small price to pay in order to dominate future world economic development through the control of raw materials, especially of the new resource, oil. BRITAIN’S SECRET EASTERN WAR If anything demonstrated the hidden agenda of the Allied powers in the 1914–18 war against the Central Powers grouped around Germany, Austria–Hungary and Ottoman Turkey, it was a secret diplomatic accord signed in 1916, during the heat of battle. The signatories were Britain, France and later Italy and czarist Russia. Named after the two officials, British and French, who drafted the paper, the Sykes–Picot agreement spelled out betrayal and Britain’s intent to grab commanding control of the undeveloped petroleum potentials of the Arabian Gulf after the war. While France was occupied with Germany, in a bloody and fruitless slaughter along the French Maginot Line, Britain moved an astonishingly large number of its own soldiers, more than 1,400,000 troops, into the eastern theatre. Britain’s public explanation for this extraordinary commitment of scarce men and matériel to the eastern reaches of the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf was that this would ensure the more effective fighting capacity of Russia against the Central Powers, as well as allowing Russian grain out through the Dardanelles into Western Europe, where it was badly in need. This was not quite the reality however. After 1918, Britain continued to maintain almost a million soldiers stationed throughout the Middle East. The Persian Gulf had become a ‘British Lake’ by 1919. The angry French feebly protested that while millions of their forces bled on the Western Front, Britain took advantage of the stalemate to win
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