Cairo 1921: Ten Days That Made The Middle East, Faught - B

                  The Conference, called by Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill, was to address issues left unresolved at Paris. It created two new states, Iraq and Jordan, and established Mandate Palestine. The purpose was to remake the Middle East after the tumultuous war that had ended the Ottoman Empire. Its intent was to establish independent states after a period of trusteeship under the League of Nations.

                 On October 3rd, 1918, in newly emancipated Damascus, Gen. Allenby told Prince Faisal and his British military advisor, Col. T. E. Lawrence, that independence was not imminent. There would be a French supervisory role in Syria. Unbeknownst to all but a few, France and Britain had previously allocated their interests for a post-war settlement without regard for Arab independence. Complicating matters further, Britain had made assurances to the Zionists. The Paris Peace Conference and the San Remo Conference a year later solidified European supervision of the Middle East. The ongoing European mandates were very unpopular in the Levant.

                   Churchill took over the Colonial Office in February, 1921. He brought on T.E. Lawrence as a special advisor. Their plan was to put Faisal on the throne in Iraq, and his brother Abdullah, in Transjordan. Churchill, Lawrence, and staff headed to Cairo for the conference, which opened on March 12. "Churchill, Lawrence and the rest of the Middle East Department worked hard to ensure...this conference would be both brief in duration and focused on producing tangible results." The first order of business was Iraq. Discussion of the few alternatives to Faisal were considered before the endorsement of Faisal as king. Both Churchill and  Lawrence wanted to see an independent Kurdistan, as they feared the Arabs would either ignore or suppress the Kurds. However, the majority conclusion was to keep the Kurds in Iraq. Churchill believed Abdullah as king of Transjordan was a necessity to establish a completely Arab state to the east of a Palestine he hoped could be balanced between Jew and Arab. A substantial subsidy for Ibn Saud was agreed to in order to keep him away from the new states to his north. On the 23rd, the principals departed for Jerusalem. Churchill spent days in Jerusalem discussing with Abdullah the need for him to support peace with the French in Syria, and to not allow Transjordan to become a base for anti-Jewish activity. To the Jews and Arabs of the Holy Land, he stressed the importance of working together to create a modern Palestine.

                  The following year was a "watershed" in the implementation of the Cairo Conference. The UK and Iraq signed the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty. Abdullah settled in in Amman where he would rule for over three decades. However, in Palestine, the situation deteriorated. The Arabs protested vigorously about more Jews immigrating to the area.  Ultimately, the solutions set up in Cairo did not succeed. In Palestine neither the Jews nor the Arabs were willing to cooperate and share. Indeed, one scholar has said "Palestine was the greatest failure in the whole history of British imperial rule." In the dozen years before his death, Faisal was unable to break down Iraq's "traditional tribal society." Only in Jordan did the Cairo solution survive and succeed. Indeed today, Abdullah's great-grandson sits on the throne of the Middle East's only continual monarchy. It was granted complete independence from the UK in 1946.

              "Today, a hundred years later, it is hard to avoid concluding that the multivalent failure of the Cairo Conference's geopolitical prescriptions of the post-war Middle East may well have been a grand opportunity missed, the dire implications of which remain with us still."