WELL EDUCATED HEADS IN THE SAND . . .
James Buchan uncovers the
error-strewn history of British diplomacy in the Arab world
I FIRST wondered about British Arabists in 1978, when I went to take up a job in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. For years, I'd lived and breathed the legend of T. E. Lawr- ence. As the aircraft door opened, 'the heat of Arabia came out like a drawn sword and struck us speechless', just like in Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Lawrence's heirs are the 221 or so Arabic- speaking diplomats in the Foreign and Com- Sir Donald Maitland, who re-organised the famous Foreign Office Arabic school in Lebanon in the 1950s, once said: 'Our day will come when we have a Permanent Under Secretary who is an Arabist.' That day has come. Both the present PUS (Sir Patrick Wright) and his predecessor (Sir Anthony Acland) learned Arabic at the school, which was called the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies or Mecas (except to the Lebanese, who still call it the Spy School). Six out of 13 Assistant Under Secretaries at King Charles Street are Mecas Arabists. Another Mecasite, Sir Anthony Parsons, was Mrs Thatcher's Middle East adviser.
In the 1950s, choosing Arabic as your hard language gave you what a former ambassador called a 'decent middle cut'. There were enough embassies to make rungs on a career ladder. After 20 years shuttling between Kuwait, Amman and Jeddah, you might even land Cromer's beautiful residency in Cairo, with its gar- den running down to the banks of the Nile (or at least until the Egyptians cut off the bottom of it for a corniche). Nowadays, Riyadh, the main Arabist post, has become so important that it stands only just outside the inner circle of heavyweight embassies: Washington, Moscow, Paris and the Brus- sels mission to the EEC. There are 23 other British diplomatic missions in the Arab world. In the words of a 1989 internal Foreign Office memorandum: 'British in- terests will require a continuing and sub- stantial throughput of Arabists for the foreseeable future although conditions in the Middle East are not likely to increase its attraction as an area of specialisation.'
The odd thing is that all those Arabists don't seem to have achieved much. The chief diplomatic issue in the Arab world — The British Empire needed Arabists in abundance. They staffed the Levant Con- sular Service and the Sudan Political, laboured for the Colonial Office in man- dated Palestine and Aden and for the Government of India in Iraq, Kuwait and the sheikhdoms of the Gulf. British power collapsed with the second world war, India became independent, Palestine was drop- ped and all these services were swept into the Italianate pile on King Charles Street, now known as the Foreign and Common- wealth Office. Safeguarding the route to India gave way in importance to blocking the Soviet route southwards and then to keeping the Arab oilfields open to the West. The rationale changes. The Arabists remain.
From 1947 until it was shut down in the Lebanese Civil War in 1978, the Arabists were trained at Mecas. They also learned a certain esprit de corps. They are not proconsuls, like Cromer, or Arab roman- tics in the tradition of Burton. You couldn't imagine Harold Beeley, James Craig, Philip Adams, John Wilton, Tony Parsons or David Gore-Booth putting on Arab dress like Lawrence.
They also share a sympathy for the Palestinians. And since the posts in the Arab world vastly outnumber the British Embassy in Israel, this is the Foreign Office house view, which Douglas Hurd accepts. One very senior Arabist official said this to me: 'We're not modern-day Lawrences, but we basically agree: one, that the Palestinians have had a pretty raw deal; two, the Palestine problem is a poison in the veins of the region and unless something is done, there will be further degradation in the Arab world and periodic explosions of the kind we've just been through; therefore, third, we Arab- ists have come to the conclusion that something must be done about the prob- lem.' The only snag, this official says, is that 'we have more Arabists than we have power'. The Arabist defence is this: Bri- tain's moment in the Middle East, to borrow the title of a famous book by Elizabeth Monroe, passed with Suez in 1956. Britain can only work through the EEC, with all its internal rivalries. Or through the UN Security Council, domin- ated by the United States with its sym- pathies for Israel.
For most of the post-war era, the Arab- ists have had to represent policies repug- nant to Arabs. It was possible to wield influence on the fringes, say in drawing up the boundaries of the Trucial States.
In the heart of the Arab world, the Arabists say, the state of Israel stands like a symbol of British perfidy. This perfidy was repeated in spades at Suez, when the Arabists were simply kept in the dark. On the eve of the crisis, Sir Harold Beeley (then an Under Secretary) asked Kirkpat- rick if he should perhaps cancel his holiday in Rye. 'Oh no,' said KirkpatTick. 'Take a couple of weeks, if you like. You look washed out, old boy.'
The collusion with Israel at Suez des- troyed what was left of British power in the mainstream Arab world, though it survived on the fringes. From then on, it was a matter of saving what could be saved. Keep open diplomatic relations. Keep the oil flowing. Maintain a trade surplus. Lengthen production lines at British Aerospace (or its predecessors). Put out consular fires, particularly in Saudi Arabia. Beeley, who spent much of his career painstakingly re-establishing relations with Egypt (twice) and Iraq, said: 'Considering the things we've done to the Arabs in the post-war period, Britain has suffered re- markably little damage and that must be attributable to the Arabists.' (Beeley doesn't speak Arabic but is probably the most influential of all post war Arabists.) Other Foreign Office Arabists claim that their view of Palestinian rights has cap- tured Parliament, the press and public opinion in this country and this has worked back to strengthen moderate elements among the Palestinians. This in turn has given the PLO leadership the confidence to accept the UN resolutions that recognise Israel.
History may not judge so kindly. If Suez was such a disaster, why didn't the Arabists resign? I know of only one who quit, and he was a student at Mecas. The Arabists themselves have made just as catastrophic misjudgments. In 1958, the Ambassador in Iraq, Sir Michael Wright, misunderstood the power of Arab nationalism just as completely as Sir Anthony Parsons, in Iran 20 years later, misjudged the Islamic opposition to the Shah. The result in both cases was a disastrous loss of influence.
British Embassies in the Middle East have always taken trade seriously. But the emphasis on exports and defence sales, which by the turn of the 1980s was occupy- ing as much as half of some ambassadors' time, has had unexpected effects. Sir John Moberley, who as Ambassador to Iraq tried unsuccessfully to sell Saddam the Nimrod airborne warning system — the Iraqi Air Force wasn't that stupid — said to me: 'We all took the view that we had to go after all these lucrative opportunities, be- cause if we didn't then the French or Americans would. So we poured in far more weapons than they needed and they used them on each other, except in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf where the problem was they didn't use them."
The British Government must carry a good share of the blame for the shambles in the Arab world of the past year. It fed Saddam's paranoia with tales of superguns and nuclear triggers while giving a quite unwarranted impression of British feeble- ness with the Bazoft affair. Finally, the Foreign Office utterly misjudged Saddam's intentions over Kuwait. To say, as one senior official said this month, that nobody else saw the invasion coming, not even the Israelis, is all very well. But who else has such fine Arabists and so many of them? And when you have to fight Arabs to get them to listen, you don't need Arabic.
'That was yesterday's specials. Now would you like to hear tomorrow's?'
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