Paris 1919 - Margaret Macmillan [259]
When the war started, Wilson was in the north of Turkey, near Mount Ararat, completing an immense project to map the boundary between Persia and Ottoman Turkey. (The border has stood with scarcely a change.) He and a colleague made their way back to Britain via Russia and Archangel. As he was about to join his regiment in France, he was ordered back to the Middle East, to join the Mesopotamian campaign as assistant to Sir Percy Cox, the chief political officer. When, at the end of the war, Cox was called away to deal with Persian matters, Wilson was his obvious replacement. From April 1918 to October 1920 he governed Mesopotamia.38
Wilson, like most of the other British there, assumed that Britain was acquiring a valuable new property. With oil, if Mosul had any worth exploiting, and wheat, if irrigation was done properly, the new acquisition could be self-sufficient; indeed, it might even return money to the imperial treasuries. Wilson urged the government in London to make Mosul part of its war aims and, just after the Turkish armistice, he made sure that British forces moved in. Mosul was, he argued, important for the defense of Baghdad and Basra. 39 With the collapse of the Ottomans and the Russian Revolution, it had also gained wider strategic importance. The British were backing anticommunist forces in Russia as well as the little independent republics that had sprung up in the Caucasus. One way of doing this, and of preventing the spread of Bolshevism farther south, was to open up communications between Persia and the Caucasus, and that meant through Mosul.
Wilson had firm ideas about how the area should be ruled. “Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul should be regarded as a single unit for administrative purposes and under effective British control.” It never seems to have occurred to him that a single unit did not make much sense in other ways. In 1919 there was no Iraqi people; history, religion, geography pulled the people apart, not together. Basra looked south, toward India and the Gulf; Baghdad had strong links with Persia; and Mosul had closer ties with Turkey and Syria. Putting together the three Ottoman provinces and expecting to create a nation was, in European terms, like hoping to have Bosnian Muslims, Croats, and Serbs make one country. As in the Balkans, the clash of empires and civilizations had left deep fissures. The population was about half Shia Muslim and a quarter Sunni, with other minorities from Jews to Christians, but another division ran across the religious one: while half the inhabitants were Arab, the rest were Kurds (mainly in Mosul), Persians or Assyrians. The cities were relatively advanced and cosmopolitan; in the countryside, hereditary tribal and religious leaders still dominated.40 There was no Iraqi nationalism, only Arab. Before the war, young officers serving in the Ottoman armies had pushed for greater autonomy for the Arab areas. When the war ended, several of these, including Nuri Said, a future prime minister of Iraq, had gathered around Feisal. Their interest was in a greater Arabia, not in separate states.
Arnold Wilson did not foresee the problems of throwing such a diverse population into a single state. He was a paternalist who thought the British would remain for generations. “The average Arab, as opposed to a handful of amateur politicians in Baghdad, sees the future as one of fair dealing and material and moral progress under the aegis of Great Britain.” He urged his government to move quickly: “Our best course is to declare Mesopotamia to be a British Protectorate under which all classes will be given forthwith the maximum degree of liberty and self-rule