Dark Desert Hot River: War in the Middle East: a Memoir

By William Bryant

Dark Desert Hot River is a study of the historical background of the Gulf War, starting with T. E. Lawrence and the development of British interests in the Middle East, leading to the emergence of the Baath Party in Iraq and the rise of Saddam Hussein. The long essay on Lawrence is marbled with unexpected connectionsvignettes of E. M. Forster, Marcel Proust, Henry James, Joseph Conrad and Roger Casement, all in some way connected with Lawrence. The war journal details the six months leading up to the war and includes a picture of modern Arabia, underground gay life in the Middle East, with reports on the military situation up to the time of the authors evacuation. Waiting out the war, the author travels to Egypt and to Indiaareas affected by the conflict but in many ways oblivious of it. The visits to the great monuments of Luxor, Khajuraho, Puri, travels to Bombay and Goa, are punctuated by erotic incidents with fellahin, felluca boys, adolescent draymen, young Dravidian sailors, Shiva boys and beach freaks.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 7, 2003
• ISBN: 9781465333483

William Bryant

William Bryant was born and grew up in Southern California. He has lived and worked in the Middle East since before the Gulf War. In 1991 he was on assignment with the Saudi Navy, based close to the Iraqi border—experiences extensively described in Dark Desert Hot River. Bryant has written biographies of Roger Casement and Alfred Russel Wallace as well as Ross, a novel based on the later T. E. Lawrence, parts of which appeared in Evergreen Review.

Book preview

DARK DESERT

HOT RIVER

War in the Middle East:

A Memoir

William Bryant

Copyright © 2003 by William Bryant.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to

any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

PART ONE:

The Origins of the Gulf War

CONNECTIONS:

The Lives and Deaths of T. E. Lawrence

PART TWO:

War in the Gulf

DEALING WITH DISASTER:

Lawrence, Gertrude and Saddam

PART THREE:

Egypt in Time of War

A THOUSAND MILES UP THE NILE:

Gustave Flaubert, Amelia Edwards and Me

PART FOUR:

The Sub-Continent at Peace

LOOKING FOR ZERO:

India While the War Fades

THE RICKSHAW WALLAHS OF PURI

BOMBAY

THE SUBJECTION OF GOA

For John Perovich

PART ONE:

The Origins of the Gulf War

CONNECTIONS:

The Lives and Deaths of T. E. Lawrence

1

On 30 May 1914 an apprentice pilot by the name of Marcel Swann crashed his plane into the sea during a practice flight between Antibes and Cagnes. It was about five o’clock in the afternoon. Spectators could clearly see the pilot clinging to the fuselage, crying for help until he went under. The New York Herald reported the incident at the end of the month. The young pilot’s wife was reported to have been among those who witnessed the tragedy. Actually he was unmarried.

About the same time Thomas Edward Lawrence was carrying out an expedition to the Sinai, accompanied by his native servant Dahoum. Dahoum would assist the young archeologist by making squeezings and taking photographs. That was, said the boss of the digs, Leonard Woolley, the reason for him to accompany Lawrence. The reason for the expedition was only ostensibly archeology.

During this same May a militant suffragette, carrying a meat cleaver concealed in her cloak, smashed the glass covering the portrait of Henry James by Sergeant. She slashed at the picture until they could restrain her. The madwoman was not attacking Henry James in particular, had no complaint against the women portrayed in his fiction: she was simply making a statement. The portrait had been widely discussed, was prominently displayed and as good a target as any. Henry at Rye felt that his own body had been slashed. Has public patience no limit? he asked.

Home from India in 1914, E. M. Forster was daydreaming about sex, cruising the public lavatories in London during his trip there from Weybridge, and went to see Nijinsky nearly naked in L’Après-midi d’un faune. He had finished his novel Maurice and was full of irritability: Civilization, he wrote in his diary on August first of that year, as it topples carries my brain with it.

Proust learned of Agostinelli’s death with despair—he had seen it coming, but had nevertheless promised to buy him an airplane (and had spent 27,000 francs on one) as well as a Rolls Royce. Agostinelli had escaped from Paris, was hiding from Proust—which was why he signed for his training course under the name of Marcel Swann. Proust’s isolation was now almost complete; he had had his telephone cut off; he rarely went out. The political situation, while halting the publication of the Novel at the same time gave him vast stretches of time in which to develop it further. Proust, on one of his rare excursions, had also seen Nijinsky dance that year.

Roger Casement’s life was taking a different turn. In America, which he originally liked but came to detest, he arrived at the decision to visit Germany in order to ask for help in the movement for Irish independence. Meanwhile he was, as usual, cruising the streets. On Broadway in New York he picked up a young Norwegian, Adler Christiansen, who probably displayed something which Casement found, invariably, irresistible. Casement invited Adler to his hotel room. This young crook would be one of many pleasurable missteps in his declining life.

2

The British Empire before the first World War was at an apogee; the Ottoman Empire was on its way out.

For hundreds of years the Ottoman Empire had been easing back from its further limits—Eastern Europe (Bulgaria, Hungary, Greece, Albania, Yugoslavia), central Asia. The small sheikdoms on the Eastern shores of the Persian Gulf had come under British influence. Egypt was nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, but it was crumpling away under the French and British (who occupied the country in 1882). Cyprus was practically lost. Yet the Sultanate in Constantinople was still the leader of the Islamic world; and as bad as some of its officials were, Constantinople was symbol of a shadow greatness held together by the Muslim faith.

Faith held the Ottoman Empire together. The Sultan, the Caliph, was the nominal head of the Muslim faith, though in Islam each man is his own pope, there being no hierarchy of religious authority comparable to the Christian.

The Ottoman Empire was not an amalgam of nations as such. The boundaries of Mesopotamia, Kuwait, Syria, the Hejaz were poorly defined and power within them was widely diffused. Only in urban areas were the Ottoman authorities in charge—in the countryside throughout the Middle East it was the local sheiks who wielded power. The central government was unable to perform some essential tasks, in spite of the well established garrisons of the Turkish army. Taxes by 1914 had to be collected by agents—tax farmers—a source of corruption and resentment.

The Ottoman Empire was a historical reality, not a farce; under the rule of the Sultan, housed in his fabulously rich cocoon beside the Dardanelles. Islamic law was strictly administered, the educational system controlled, expenses budgeted. Government iniquity—outright oppression by the Turks—was more Western fantasy than reality. There were perhaps twenty-five million Ottoman subjects by the time of the war; few human beings in the inhuman vastness encompassing the modern day Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian peninsula.

Within the Empire only about a quarter of the population was Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, or some other religious faith. The Ottoman Empire was a loosely unified Muslim dominion, full of a wide spectrum of races. Important segments of the existing population were invisible, constantly on the move, never recorded.

T.E. Lawrence and other British observers were convinced that an underground revolution was taking place throughout the Middle East, and that it would result in changes that would affect the whole area. This revolution had been documented for some time. The Empire, radiating out from Constantinople, had been for years a sphere of secret societies, palace plots and espionage. The Young Turks finally rebelled against the Sultan Abdul Hamid (18761909) the spiritual director of the Islamic world, (in Lawrence’s words) and effectively deposed him in 1908. Enver Pasha, who had arranged the coup against the Sublime Porte, took office along with his friends, married the Sultan’s niece and moved into the palace.

There had been numerous nationalist movements in Egypt and Persia—but these were already old nations with a unity defined by established borders. Rebellions in Syria, Mesopotamia and Arabia although symptomatic were hardly significant. Turkey had during the past decades been gradually making concessions to Arab interests, especially in education where Arabic was at last made the medium of instruction except for Koranic studies. Local authorities continued to have much say in the government.

Nationalist sentiments were however growing—in response to the worldwide movement of nationalism that had gained impetus during the latter 19th century, a movement which would lead through a labyrinth of wars and revolutions up to the present.

The Arab Movement had begun with demands for equitable representation in the Turkish Assembly. It was not an armed revolt in any sense of the term, nor did it aim at the dissolution of the Empire. As Lawrence noted in the early pages of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Arabian referred to the Arabic speakers of the Empire who made up the majority of subjects in an immense expanse: The Arabic-speaking areas of Asia in this sense were a rough parallelogram. The northern side ran from Alexandretta, on the Mediterranean, across Mesopotamia eastward to the Tigris. The south side was the edge of the Indian Ocean, from Aden to Muscat. On the west it was bounded by the Mediterranean, the Suez Canal, and the Red Sea to Aden. On the east by the Tigris, and the Persian Gulf to Muscat. An area about the size of the Indian sub continent, held together for hundreds of years—since the beginnings of Islam and Mohammed’s proselytizing—in a brotherhood of the faith.

By 1914 the Empire had lost North Africa and Hungary; there was a clandestine movement in which Turkish intellectuals, the military, industrialists and students plotted new developments in manufacturing, political organization, economy and education so that the Empire could take its place in the rapidly transforming modern world.

Confrontation with Britain constituted a major error. When the Reshadieh and Sultan Oman I, new Dreadnought class battleships being built in British shipyards for Turkey, were taken over by the British (who however did arrange for compensation to the Turkish nation), the crisis came to a head. There were ferocious demonstrations in Constantinople against the British. Turkey was moved toward the German camp—unwillingly, it turned out, since its leaders wanted desperately to avoid embroilment in European conflicts. A treaty of alliance with Germany was signed on 1 August 1914 and soon after this mobilization began. Ever the intriguer, Enver Pasha kept the door open for negotiations with the Allies and even suggested that Turkey might join them—strange considering the fact that he had already promised to turn the Sultan Osman I over to the Germans, knowing full well that he would never actually receive the enormous battleship.

Roger Casement, in Germany during the end of 1914, was unsuccessful in recruiting Irish boys for his Brigade. They whistled and threw trash at him, spat and yanked his clothes as he tried to make his escape after announcing that Britain was losing the war.

He later suggested—seriously—that his fifty-odd boys be sent to Syria to fight—if Enver Pasha would have them.

3

The history of modern Turkey is chaos—a tapestry of lies, violence, deceptions and genocide, much like the history of many developing nations. The specific details of this history were practically unknown and unpublished in 1914. By that date no major study had been made of the country and statistics were scarce. Thus, when war began, the enemy—Britain and the allies—had little hard information to go on—merely travel works for the most part, aesthetic pieces, occasional reports but little solid fact. It would be the difficult job of the Intelligence Service, aided by amateurs such as T. E. Lawrence to fill in the gaps, occasionally aided by Turkish or Arab defectors.

Britain had a widespread but inefficient Intelligence Service at that time. One of the primary figures in the service was David Hogarth the archeologist, with whom T. E. Lawrence worked in the digs at Carchemish. Others were Sir Reginald Wingate and Sir Gilbert Clayton with long experience in the Middle East—primarily Egypt and the Sudan. These men were not professionals in the field of Intelligence. Lloyd George, after the war was over, would point out the ineptness of these amateur bunglers.

The political goal in the Middle East was clear for Britain. The Ottoman Empire—the entire Middle East—was to be freed and drawn into the British sphere of influence. Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Trucial Coast, Transjordan would belong to the British who would manage them from the wings. One is awed by the arrogance.

The Seven Pillars of Wisdom, read from this point of view, is part of the great deception. Lawrence, so English, romantically clings to the humility, simplicity, honesty of the Arab of the desert as an ideal. The desert life of the Bedouin was a luxury of abnegation, renunciation, self restraint. [The Arab] made nakedness of the mind as sensuous as nakedness of the body. He saved his own soul, perhaps, and without danger, but in a hard selfishness. His desert was made a spiritual ice-house, in which was preserved intact but unimproved for all ages a vision of the unity of God. Lovely surprising images yet hardly useful to any but the literary critic. But in a sense political. Lawrence inherited an Empire, the British Empire; he believed in the movement of the Arab nations within the sphere of influence of that Empire. The Arab peoples’ independence from Turkish oppression was to be achieved under the guidance of Britain, a Christian nation. Lawrence did not consider that, within the Muslim world, freedom under the stewardship of non-Muslims would represent a kind of spiritual slavery. It would be for the Wahhabis to point this out.

There was much intrigue by the British authorities throughout the war. The Sykes-Picot agreement, for example, was kept secret for some time and was only learned about when in 1917 the Bolsheviks came to power and advertised the secret agreement in the world press. Opinion in Cairo was extremely unsure about this: Hogarth wrote that, the conclusion of this Agreement is of no immediate service to our Arab policy as pursued here, and will only not be a grave disadvantage if, for some time to come, it is kept strictly secret. Perhaps the agreement could be revised later, since it promised no solution to Middle Eastern questions. The Bolshevik revelations were an embarrassment; the agreement, in any case, did not materially change the status quo. The Powers could do as they wished. They had the money—the Arab Bureau spies enjoyed what seemed inexhaustible funds.

Lawrence was privy to the machinations of the British, including the Sykes-Picot Agreement and its ramifications. As a protégé of Hogarth he was aware that the British were poised to draw Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Gulf states, Palestine, Transjordan out of the maelstrom and absorb them into a revised British Empire. He spent some two years of his life first on an intelligence mission to the Hejaz and then on assignment with Feisal. He lived as an Arab while aware—excruciatingly—of his Englishness. The war would change him, just as it would change the world. It would also transform the Middle East, but in ways that were unexpected.

Lawrence, who had been part of the great deception, would end by stating that he wanted to have no part in the deceit which the British had organized in the Middle East.

A 1918 memorandum by Feisal (amended by Lawrence) submitted to the peace conference in Paris claimed that The aim of the Arab nationalist movements . . . is to unite the Arabs eventually into one nation. As an old member of the Syrian Committee I commanded the Syrian Revolt, and had under me Syrians, Mesopotamians and Arabians . . . . The unity of the Arabs in Asia has been made more easy of late years, since the development of railways, telegraphs and air-roads. In old days the area was too huge, and in parts necessarily too thinly peopled, to communicate common ideas readily.

Feisal harps on the importance of his father, the Emir Hussein—the Sherif of Mecca—whose credibility had worn threadbare. Feisal was determined to become King of Syria. This he achieved with the help of the British before being forced out by the French. After being ousted from Damascus, Feisal was settled upon an unsteady throne in Baghdad by the British, who had groomed him for the leadership of Mesopotamia. In Mesopotamia the nationalists wanted independence, however, and not a British mandate, nor an imposed monarch. But Britain was not ready to give up its special status in Mesopotamia; Feisal was duly established in Baghdad as king, having received an invitation from major political figures there. Feisal always referred deferentially to his father, Hussein, the cunning old traitor and ruler of the Hejaz, the man who had been secretly condemned by the Turks. Hussein was Feisal’s main claim to Legitimacy—and also his brother Abdullah’s. Abdullah would soon descend upon Transjordan with his tribesman and establish his sovereignty there.

As for the question of Arab unity, Feisal finally considered the provinces of Iraq, Jezirah, Hejaz, Nejd, Yemen too diverse economically and socially to be ruled by a single government. He asked that independence be conceded and local competence established; according to him the natural influences of race, language and interest would soon draw us together into one people.

It would be up to the Great Powers to ensure the internal frontiers, common railways and telegraphs and a uniform system of education. In 1922, Sir Percy Cox persuaded Feisal and his government to ratify an Anglo-Iraqi treaty which was highly favorable to Britain.

4

By then, Lawrence had become Aircraftman Ross and was no longer involved with events in the Middle East. Now the Middle East was beginning a slow descent into a state of political and economic dependency that would last for decades.

During the 1930s Feisal in Mesopotamia assured the British a safe route from the Mediterranean down to the Persian Gulf, thus maintaining a firm link with India, that other key segment in the spider’s web of the British Empire; Basra, along with Aden, became a critical location in the British Empire. Simla did not, as earlier conceived, send out hordes of Indian immigrants to settle Mesopotamia—the massive Indian immigration was to come later, during the oil boom in the Middle East

The end of the Ottoman Empire marked the beginning of enhanced British influence in the Middle East. This political situation represented for Lawrence treachery on the part of the British government. The Arab lands were no longer part of the Ottoman Empire. As nations they still had to define themselves. Syria, Lebanon—now no longer united; Transjordan, a scrap of land north of Aqaba, scrounged from the desert; Mesopotamia, borders fixed by British surveyors, its political system staggering toward an imitation of Western democracies; Saudi Arabia in process of being united by force under the brilliant Ibn Saud. Most of these emerging nations found Britain their support, commercially and politically, with the French a close second.

The Turkish army, never been present in force, had faded away. In its place, the French army was ruthless in controlling the new colonies of Syria and Lebanon. The economics of independence adjusted to the economics of colonialism, now that Constantinople no longer existed as a power base for taxation.

Some were bold enough to claim that the Ottoman Empire was preferable to colonialism.

How were the new nations to survive with their rickety infrastructure and their fledgling political systems, freshly designed for them by foreigners? As much as Lawrence envisioned freedom for the Arabia, the actuality was that they would remain dependent—dependent on British or French economic programs, driven by the cultural tyranny of these foreign powers; plagued by dishonest elections and a corrupt bureaucracy. This situation was the general rule for all of the new entities pieced together after the fall of Germany and its allies. It was not true, however, for the poorest of the Arab nations—Saudi Arabia and Yemen—who had been saved by their relative unimportance from European domination.

For Mesopotamia, soon to be renamed Iraq, the reality was the British mandate; for Syria it was remorseless French colonialism, a vicious Gallicism wiping out the indigenous cultures; for Transjordan it was a kind of tottering British dependency; for Palestine it was Zionism; for the so-called Trucial States, a hanging on to the English fringe. But for Saudi Arabia it was the independence of poverty and the religious fanaticism of the Wahhabis.

The Anglo-Arab monarchies would define Britain’s interests. In Iraq it was oil that was in play, as it still is. Britain had made no bones about its intention to control the Turkish Petroleum Company which held concessions in Mesopotamian oil from the Sultan; Turkey had lost the Mosul oil fields early on. (Britain still maintained a subsidy to the impoverished Saudis of some 60,000 pounds; nobody believed that their country contained anything much of commercial interest, least of all oil.) In Egypt Britain maintained the political and economic reins of power while declaring the country’s nominal independence; imperial interests were kept alive and industry was closely tied to England, the economy enslaved to British interests and enormous debt. In the Sudan, on the other hand, England shelved any definitive solution to the socio-political problems, simply avoiding the question of independence and self determination.

5

The Ottoman Period had not been a period of greatness for greater Arabia. Sultan Selim I drew Egypt, Syria and Arabia into the Ottoman Empire in 1516-17 and these four centuries of Ottoman rule are spoken of even now as a dark period for the Arabs, yet they seem to have submitted readily to the centralized government in Constantinople and they were in no sense slaves. The conquest of Arabia by the Turks in effect did not mean a loss of independence for the Arabs. They became simply part of a huge empire which administered their lands—efficiently for the most part. Arabia except for the large cities (Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo) was thinly populated; Bedouins and other nomadic peoples moved constantly across the wastes and lived by raids and rapine, tribes in the mountains were inaccessible. Freedom—independence—was easier where the Ottoman government was immobilized in urban concentrations.

The Ottoman Empire may have represented a period of shame, quite forgotten today by Arabs, but it was a powerful Islamic Empire and the inheritor of the greater Islamic empires of the past.

The golden age of Islam—the times of the Abassid caliphates, dating from 720 AD—is invariably spoken of as Arab; but the empire was a thick soup of bloods, from the Persian mixtures to those of Syria and Egypt. In fact, Arabic tribal aristocracy had all but ended even while the Arabic language was spreading. Baghdad—the City of Peace—was the glittering center of the empire: a modern city with a tracery of roads and waterways, a postal system, a hub of trade connected by camel train to Persia and by ship down the Tigris to Arabia and beyond. Yet Arab was even in those times a romantic term—the Arabs themselves in their conquests intermarried with non-Muslims and with different races. Racial egalitarianism had always been a characteristic of Islam. For five hundred years, until Hulagu Khan’s sacking of Baghdad in 1258, the Abassid Empire blossomed, was shaken by storms of civil war, grew and began a decline, a disintegration choking on cultural greatness.

This is the Arabic greatness, the greatness remembered and spoken of dreamily by the Arabs of today.

By the turn of the 19th century there was a movement for stronger Arab representation in the Ottoman government. However,