promised Britain its full support and unrestricted
use of all Egyptian facilities and territory. Under
the terms of the treaty the Egyptian army would
also pass under British command in wartime. For
a while all seemed peace and harmony and the
foreign secretary, Anthony Eden, was even fea-
tured on Egyptian postage stamps. But within
two years there was renewed bitterness about the
continued presence of British troops.
During the 1939–45 war King Farouk and the
Egyptian government proved uncertain allies.
Egypt did not declare war on Germany and Italy,
but was nonetheless ‘defended’ by the British
Eighth Army against Rommel’s Afrika Korps.
Meantime, Farouk and his government were
making secret overtures to Hitler in 1941, pro-
fessing to welcome a German occupation. Hatred
of Britain played a part, but there may also have
been an element of reinsurance in case Rommel,
as seemed likely, entered Cairo victorious. The
British victory at El Alamein in 1942 settled
Egypt’s immediate future, since Britain’s wartime
needs overrode all notions of genuine Egyptian
independence. To the Egyptians at the end of the
war what stood out starkly was not that they had
been defended against a German invasion but
that, despite Britain’s recognition of their inde-
pendence in 1936, the British remained virtually
an occupying power ten years later. By then an
economically exhausted but still militarily domin-
ant Britain faced a chorus of strident nationalist
demands to revise the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of
1936 and to hand complete independence over
to Egypt’s rival political leadership. As elsewhere
in the Arab world, after 1945 Britain was faced
in Egypt with the immensely difficult task of
appeasing an Arab nationalism that was now
stronger than ever.
Treaties and a special relationship also protected
British interests in Iraq which became a British
mandate after the First World War. In many ways
Britain carried on where the Ottoman rulers had
left off. Except in non-Arab Persia, where Shia
Muslims are the majority, the Arab governing
elite in country after country was chosen from the
same group, the Sunni Muslims, whether they
were in a majority as in the Arabian peninsula or
in a minority as in Iraq. Other minorities, com-
munities of Kurds, Christians and Jews, were left
to the mercy of the Sunnis, as were some major-
ity groups, such as the Shia Muslims of Iraq. The
Iraqi Shiites were not reconciled to alien or Sunni
rule and rose in revolt in 1920. The British helped
to suppress the rising, the Royal Air Force bru-
tally bombing the rebels into submission. The
British then proceeded to install the Amir Faisal
as king, but Iraq remained an unstable kingdom,
with an ineffective and corrupt parliament. A few
years later, in 1933, the Iraqi army carried out a
horrifying massacre of Christian Assyrians. The
British did not intervene; good relations with Iraq
took priority.
The monarchy set up by the British did not
prove a strong stabilising influence. After Faisal’s
death in 1933, his playboy son succeeded, only
to be killed six years later in one of his many
sports cars. As in all the newly independent but
politically underdeveloped states, the indigenous
army played an increasingly important role. By
the 1930s Iraqi independence was internationally
recognised; Britain appeared to have fulfilled its
task and preserved its interests in the form of a
treaty signed in 1930 with a nominally inde-
pendent Iraq. But internally Iraq remained as
unstable as before, and in 1936 a successful coup
saw the start of a series of military interventions
in government.
At the start of the Second World War the
German National Socialists seemed to many Iraqis
to be natural allies; not only were they at war with
the hated British, but they were enforcing a pro-
gramme of anti-Jewish racial policies and were
apparently ready to allow the Arabs their own way
in Palestine. Germany’s victories in 1940 and
1941 proved even more persuasive in turning Iraq
away from the Allies. It now looked likely that
Britain’s dominance of the Middle East would be
broken. Although, Iraq was bound to Britain by
special treaty, the country became a centre for
anti-British Arab activity, and in the spring of
1941 a pro-German coup drove out the Regent
and his government. For Britain the situation was
very dangerous. With vital British interests,
including the continued flow of oil from the
Kirkuk wells, at stake, Churchill ordered the