Churchill and the Arab Bureau

Sir Henry Deterding, a naturalized British citizen who headed Royal Dutch Shell, and served as a trusted agent of British secret intelligence in that capacity, had secured dominant control over the huge untapped oil reserves of the Mosul and Mesopotamia by promising France a share for its needs in neighboring French Syria. The San Remo agreement itself was the work of Sir John Cadman, then head of the Petroleum Imperial Policy Committee, later head of the British government’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Cadman and Deterding privately shaped the terms of the San Remo accord. Not surprisingly, British state petroleum hegemony was greatly enhanced by it.

Under the San Remo petroleum agreement Britain accorded France 25 per cent of all petroleum extracted in Mesopotamia. France in return granted generous rights to the British oil companies to run an oil pipeline through French Syria to an oil port on the Mediterranean. The pipeline and everything related to it were to be exempt from French taxation. Cadman had calculated that the lack of substantial French oil capacity would ensure a virtual British monopoly of the emerging oil wealth of the entire Middle East. The San Remo agreement included a clause which allowed Britain to exclude any foreign concessions on its territories.

In addition, San Remo formalized an agreement whereby France would harmonize policy with Britain over oil relations with both Romania and Bolshevik Russia. The consequences of the latter agreement will shortly become clear. With France weakened economically by the war far more than Britain, San Remo appeared to be a coup by London, ensuring French support for a global oil dominion centered around the oil riches of the Arab Middle East of the old Ottoman Empire.

CHURCHILL AND THE ARAB BUREAU

In March 1921, His Britannic Majesty’s secretary of state for colonial affairs, Winston Churchill, convened some 40 top British experts on the Near East in Cairo to discuss the ultimate political divisions in the newly won territories of the region. Out of this gathering, attended by all the top British Arabists, including Churchill’s close friend T.E. Lawrence, Sir Percy Cox, Gertrude Bell and others, the British Colonial Offi ce Middle East Department was created, superseding, in effect, the 1916 Arab Bureau. Under the scheme agreed at Cairo, Mesopotamia was renamed Iraq and given to the son of Hashemite