Britain's Middle East strategy, 1950-52: General Brian Robertson and the 'small' Arab States.

This article fills a lacuna in the study of a critical juncture in Britain's strategy for defence of the Middle East during the early 1950s. Scholarly attention to this period has dealt mainly with Anglo-Egyptian relations, the place of the Suez Canal in British strategy, the Anglo-Iranian crisis, and the gradual turn to a US-backed approach based primarily on Turkey (the 'Northern Tier'). The present research explores Britain's attempt and failure, from October 1950 until the announcement of the Middle East Command (MEC) in October 1951, to prepare Iraq and the 'small states' of the Arab Levant to take part in regional defence. This study highlights the role of General Brian Robertson, who from 1950 to 1953 served as commander-in-chief of British Middle East Land Forces (MELF).

Documents in the Public Record Office at Kew constitute the main source for this article, but a number of secondary sources also shed much light on this period. W. Roger Louis' The British Empire in the Middle East 1945-1951 remains the most detailed study of Britain's policy toward the region during those years. Richard J. Aldrich's edited volume British Intelligence, Strategy and the Cold War, 1945-51, David R. Devereux's The Formulation of British Defence Policy Towards the Middle East, 1948-56, and Peter L. Hahn's The United States, Great Britain, and Egypt, 1945-1956, provide essential background to the objectives of the Western powers in the Middle East and the East-West struggle. However, these works deal little with General Robertson's 1950-1 visits to the region. David Williamson devotes a chapter of his biography of Robertson to the general's term as commander-in-chief of MELF but only cursory attention to his talks with Arab leaders. In Fighting Worm War Three from the Middle East, Michael Cohen deals in considerable detail with Robertson's February 1951 visit to Israel and his subsequent talks with Israeli officials, but he does not examine the general's efforts in the neighbouring Arab states. (1) In any case, Anglo-Israeli relations remain outside the purview of this article.

Several studies analyse the Arab political context of the early 1950s. Among these sources, the most salient to the present research are Bruce Maddy-Weitzman's The Crystallization of the Arab State System 1945-1954, Andrew Rathmell's Secret War in the Middle East, and Patrick Seale's The Struggle for Syria. (2) As the authors of these studies note, the Arab states to one extent or another feared foreign domination, and even the pro-Western regimes among them were wary lest Britain exercise over their policies too great a degree of control. Thus, the incentive that Iraqi leaders found for collaboration with the Western powers was based principally on their desire to acquire arms and equipment that would allow them to perpetuate their rule and exercise greater influence in the inter-Arab arena. Syria was far more concerned with Israeli military power and what it perceived as the immediate expansionist aims of the Jewish state than with the apparently distant depredatory intentions of the Soviet Union. Jordan and Lebanon sought to guard the sovereignty and independence that they feared to see diminished or lost altogether. These books explain the factors that impacted on British endeavours to bring the Arab states into strategic cooperation, but they leave much of Britain's policy and Robertson's approach unexplored.

During the two world wars, the Middle East had been largely Britain's responsibility. The United States remained inclined, even after announcement of the Truman Doctrine in 1947, to entrust defence of the region to British and Commonwealth forces. (3) The outbreak of the Korean war in June 1950 blunted criticism in the United States of British imperialism and brought Washington to a heightened appreciation of the need to defend the Middle East. However, the Korean conflict also reinforced the determination of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff not to commit forces beyond Europe and the Far East, thereby obviating the stationing of troops in the Middle East. For this reason, Britain prepared for a war in the course of which, it assumed, Iran and Turkey would fall into Soviet hands, and resolved to defend the region in the context of strategic planning the centrepiece of which was its military presence in Egypt. In Britain's view, several factors made vital to Western security its continued sway in the Middle East. These were continued access to oil, lines of communication, the strategic value of the bases that it occupied, additional real estate that it wished to acquire for defence purposes, and the commitments it sought to elicit from several of the states in the region.

Britain wished to reach accomodation with Egypt that would allow it to retain its large base at the Suez Canal, or in case of an Egyptian refusal to permit such an arrangement, obtain an agreement that would at least permit the re-entry of its forces in wartime in order to defend the region. In December 1950, intensive Anglo-Egyptian talks failed to reconcile Britain's desire for extended base rights with Egypt's demand for an evacuation that would terminate (as stipulated in the treaty of 1936) before 1956 a presence that Cairo viewed not in terms of protection against a Soviet invasion, but as the perpetuation of imperialist occupation. (4) Nevertheless, the British Chiefs of Staff ordered General Robertson to prepare to defend the Suez Canal, instructing him to do so in accordance with a plan called 'Celery'. This plan assumed that Britain would be unable to maintain a line of defence in Lebanon and Jordan. According to the authors of 'Celery' a Soviet invasion would force Allied armies whose purpose was defence of the Suez Canal to fall back upon a line running from Tel Aviv through the West Bank towns of Ramallah and Jericho and then attempt to stem the Russian advance in a battle the venue of which would be Israel's coastal plain. (5)

General Robertson disagreed with this strategy and was convinced that Britain's proper Middle East defence perimeter was the 'outer ring', based on a line that ran from the mountain passes of southern Turkey to those in south-west Iran, and terminating at the Strait of Hormuz. A defence so organized would almost certainly have entailed the loss of Iran and Turkey, and Robertson knew that even holding a line that forfeited those two countries in order to defend the southern mountain passes was beyond the means of Britain and its Commonwealth allies. The deficiency in Britain's military presence in the Middle East in 1950-51 was some seven divisions, making British forces hopelessly inadequate for executing even the most minimal of contingency plans for defence against a Soviet attack. (6) Nevertheless, the MELF commander-in-chief was unwilling to acquiesce to the Ramallah line that 'Celery' stipulated and determined that allied forces instead make their stand in Iraq.

The present analysis focuses principally upon British goals vis-a-vis Iraq and Syria and the factors that explain the obstacles Britain faced when it attempted to bring those two countries to contribute to the defence of the region. We will devote considerably less attention to Robertson's visits to Jordan and Lebanon and to their roles in his planning. Nevertheless, Robertson strove to maintain at least the facade of 'equal-to-equal' relationships with all of the Arab states, as Britain sought to improve its own image in the entire region. Britain's policy makers were especially interested to ensure that the 'psychological' benefit of collaboration with the West motivate Iraq and Syria to greater military efficiency in the face of the Soviet threat. (7) Those governments, in turn, presented demands that Robertson and officials of the Foreign Office considered in light of the capacity of each state to contribute to regional security. Britain's resources were severely limited, and British policy makers viewed arms as a quid pro quo to be granted only in exchange for the requisite measure of cooperation. In fact, Robertson and British officials who dealt with the Middle East realized that with the exception of Jordan's very modest capabilities, they would be able to count on neither an effective deployment of forces nor the resources of the Arab states east of the Suez Canal. We will proceed presently to an analysis of Robertson's 1950-51 approaches to those governments and the measure of their success.