VI. Cairo and Khartoum on the Arab Question, 1915-18

Extract

The Arab question in British diplomacy, it is remarkable to observe, has conjured up, both among those directly involved and among subsequent commentators, an amount of passionate discussion, of anguished retrospection, of accusation and self-denunciation, quite out of proportion to its intrinsic importance. For after all, compared to the great issues of Europe, America, the Commonwealth, and India, the Husain-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Balfour Declaration, are small and paltry transactions which, as luck would have it, have turned out, it is true, to be inopportune and profitless and the cause of much loss and tribulation. For the historian of the Middle East, of course, the British connexion must loom very large by reason of its immediate impact and of its ultimate consequences, but in British history can the short-lived middle-eastern episode be more than a passing incident in the Indian summer of the Empire? For they are perhaps right, those who assert that had Britain been able to retain India, her middle-eastern position could probably have been maintained, regardless of mistakes and confusions in middle-eastern policy itself, and that, once India gone, neither virtue nor virtuosity would have availed to preserve Suez, Haifa and Habbaniyya. But this cool, sceptical view is rarely met in the writings either of the participants or of the subsequent commentators, whose mode is one of burning regret, and vehement lamentations, and who are for ever weighing good faith against bad faith, promises kept and promises broken, scrutinizing motives and examining scruples, like the diligent followers of some strict pietism, oppressed by sin and dolefully thirsting for justification.