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‘When the internal health of Iraq has been restored, and not before, it will
be time to begin thinking of adventures further afield.’^63
The first of Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd’s two final tasks before leaving
CICI at the war’s end was to provide for his successors an outline of how
he envisaged the reorientation of the Defence Security Office’s work in
the postwar era. ‘While political-intelligence and security-intelligence
work have always run closely together and in many respects have had to
dovetail into one another,’ he wrote, ‘the DSO’s work will now, even
more than ever, be linked with that of T&P. The difference will largely be
that, while it is the duty of T&P to portray the general outline of the
political picture, it is the responsibility of the DSO to ascertain and report
on the intrigues of personalities, the machinations of various subversive
bodies or societies working behind the scene, and lastly, but not least, the
activity of foreign powers.’ Dawson-Shepherd then went on to list in some
detail the subjects and types of activities which DSO Iraq would have to
cover, as follows: pan-Arabism, Zionism, communism, the Kurds, the
Armenians, the Assyrians, the Shia, Japanese and Turkish activity, and war-
criminal escapees.^64
Hanbury Dawson-Shepherd’s second, more broadly conceived ‘swan
song’ was the prescient ten-page appreciation of the general security situ-
ation in Iraq that he wrote shortly after the war, during the summer of
1945, at the request of the GOC and the British ambassador. Here he
wrote, from the depths of his experience, about the regency, Arab unity,
internal issues, and the inevitable loss of British influence. The mood of
uncertainty is set in the introductory paragraphs: ‘It is impossible to pre-
dict with any precision what the future of security in Iraq will be,’ Dawson-
Shepherd wrote. ‘External and internal causes of unrest are too numerous.’
Unsympathetic British treatment of the Palestine question, French treat-
ment of the Syrian problem, foreign subversive activity, unrestrained radical
activity provoked by adverse economic conditions or bad government, or
nationalism developing into xenophobia were but a few of the causes which
might lead to a security situation inimical to both Iraqi and British interests.
The wing commander clearly felt that the supreme challenge that lay before
the Iraqi Arabs was to reconcile somehow their potentially divergent loyal-
ties—to the pro-British Hashemite monarchy on the one hand and to Arab
unity on the other. With the continued benevolent help of British advisers
and experts, it should be possible for Iraqis to build on the legacy of war-
time British public-relations initiatives and goodwill, and to develop posi-
tive future relationships with the British Council and with British teachers