Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [250]
Curiously, Picot and Sykes managed to work well together. Their plan, which was approved by their respective governments in May 1916, was reasonable enough, if you were a Western imperialist. The Syrian coast, much of today’s Lebanon, was to go to France, while Britain would take direct control over central Mesopotamia, around Baghdad, and the southern part around Basra. Palestine, a thorny issue because of the intense interest of other Christian powers (Russia in particular), would have an international administration. What was left, a huge area that included what is now Syria, Mosul in the north of Iraq, and Jordan, would have local Arab chiefs under the supervision of the French in the north and the British in the south. (The Arabian peninsula was not mentioned, presumably because no one thought all those miles of sand worth worrying about.) The agreement appeased the French, who had considerable investments along the Syrian coast and who saw themselves as protectors of the area’s large Christian communities, such as the Maronites around Mount Lebanon. It suited the British equally well, and they had cleverly placed the French between themselves and the Russian empire as it reached southward.7
Almost as soon as the deal was made, the British nevertheless began to regret it. Would it not be wiser to control Palestine, so close to the Suez Canal, directly? This was much urged by British officials in Egypt. Why should the French get Mosul? When Russia dropped out of the war in 1917, it suddenly seemed less essential to have France as a buffer. Sykes, reported a colleague as news of the Ottoman surrender came in, “has evolved a new and most ingenious scheme by which the French are to clear out of the whole Arab region except the Lebanon and in return take over the protectorate of the whole Kurdo-Armenian region from Adana to Persia and the Caucasus.” 8
In France, a heterogeneous colonialist lobby—fabric manufacturers in Lyon, who wanted Syrian silk; the Chamber of Automobile Manufacturers, who noted that Mosul was wonderful country for driving; Jesuit priests, whose order ran a university in Beirut; the financiers, officials and intellectuals in the Comité de l’Asie Française—urged their government to stand firm. Syria, for this lobby, was invariably Greater Syria, stretching south to the Sinai and east into Mosul. Parliamentary groups pointed out the strategic imperatives. France already had Algeria and Tunisia along the south shore of the Mediterranean; now it must add Morocco. It was too late, alas, for Egypt, snaffled away by the British in a devious maneuver in 1882. But it was not too late for Lebanon and its Syrian hinterland and Palestine. The Quai d’Orsay sent memoranda to Clemenceau on “this heavy but glorious burden.” France’s connection with Syria went back to the Crusades. It had already done much to protect Christians and bring civilization to all the Arabs. Now the locals were counting on France to repair the damage done by years of Turkish rule. France must not give up Syria. French public opinion would be rightly enraged if “after such a war and such a victory, which has consecrated the preeminent role of France in the world, its position [were] inferior to what it was before August 1914.”9
The British position hardened. The Eastern Committee of the War Cabinet, set up in 1918 to work out British policy in the Middle East, returned repeatedly to the need to contain their ally. If France got Palestine and Syria, Britain, according to Curzon, the committee’s chairman and moving spirit, would be obliged to keep a large force in Egypt to protect the Suez Canal and the vital route to India. And there were other routes, overland or by air (a new possibility), from the eastern end of the Mediterranean through Syria and Mesopotamia, or farther north along the Black Sea and past the Caucasus. Balfour pointed out that this was a dangerous argument: “Every time I come to a discussion—at intervals of, say, five years—I find