If the British hoped things would go smoothly after the passage of the Anglo-Iraqi Treaty, they were to be sorely disappointed. Indeed, British and American war planners of 2003 would have found many relevant lessons to be learned from British experiences in the 1920s. Divisions quickly emerged between the different regions and communities of the new Iraqi state, which had been forged from three very different Ottoman provinces. The problem was immediately apparent in the formation of a national army, one of the key institutions of independent sovereign states. King Faysal was surrounded by military men who had served with him in the Arab Revolt and were keen to establish an army in Iraq that would unite Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites through national military service. The project foundered in the face of active opposition from the Shiite and Kurdish communities, however, who objected to conscription as to any government initiative they believed gave disproportionate power to the minority Sunni Arab community. The Kurds presented a particular challenge to the integrity and identity of the Iraqi state. Unlike the Sunnis and Shiites, the Kurds are not ethnic Arabs and they resented government efforts to cast Iraq as an Arab state. They believed this denied the Kurds their distinct ethnic identity. Some in the Kurdish community did not resist Iraqi claims to Arabness but used this as a pretext to demand greater autonomy in those parts of northern Iraq in which they represented an absolute majority. At times it seemed that the only thing uniting the people of Iraq was their opposition to the British presence. King Faysal himself despaired of his subjects. Shortly before his death in 1933, the first king of Iraq observed in a confidential memo that ?there is still?and I say this with a heart full of sorrow?no Iraqi people but unimaginable masses of human beings, devoid of any patriotic idea, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.?²⁷ For the British, the cost of maintaining order soon began to exceed the benefits of perpetuating the mandate in Iraq. By 1930 the British reassessed their position. They had secured their interests in Mesopotamian oil through the 1928 Red Line Agreement, which awarded Britain a 47.5 percent share in the Turkish (Iraq) Petroleum Company—the French and Americans had only secured 23.75 percent of the shares each. They had established a friendly and dependent government in Iraq, headed by a “reliable” king, to protect British interests. British officials in Iraq increasingly came to the view that they would better assure their strategic interests by treaty than by continued direct control. In June 1930, the British government concluded a new agreement to replace the controversial Anglo-Iraqi Treaty of 1922. The terms of the new pact stipulated that Britain’s ambassador would enjoy preeminence among foreign representatives in Iraq. The Royal Air Force would retain two air bases in the country, and British troops would be assured transit rights through Iraq. The Iraqi military would be reliant on Britain for its training and provision of arms and ammunition. This still was not full independence, but it was enough to secure the country’s admission to the League of Nations. It also satisfied one of the main demands of Iraqi nationalists, who hoped the treaty would prove a first step toward independence. Upon ratification of the 1930 Treaty of Preferential Alliance, the British and Iraqis agreed to the termination of the mandate. On October 3, 1932, Iraq was admitted to the League of Nations as an independent, sovereign state. Yet it was an ambiguous independence in which British civil and military officials continued to exercise more influence than was compatible with true Iraqi sovereignty. Such informal British controls would undermine the legitimacy of the Hashemite monarchy until its ultimate overthrow in 1958.

Egyptian nationalists looked on Iraq’s accomplishments with great envy. Though the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Treaty was not so different in content from Egypt’s 1922 treaty with Britain (which conceded nominal independence to Egypt), the Iraqis had secured Britain’s nomination for admission to that exclusive club of independent states, the League of Nations. This became the benchmark of success by which nationalists in other Arab countries would measure their own accomplishments. As the Arab country with the longest tradition of nationalist activity, Egypt should have led the way toward independence from European colonial rule?or so thought the political elite. In the course of the 1930s, the Wafd, Egypt?s leading nationalist party, came under growing public pressure to secure independence from Britain. During the interwar years, Egypt achieved the highest degree of multiparty democracy in the modern history of the Arab world. The Constitution of 1923 introduced political pluralism, regular elections to a two-chamber legislature, full male suffrage, and a free press. A number of new parties emerged on the political stage. Elections attracted massive turnout at the polls. Journalists plied their trade with remarkable liberty. This liberal era is remembered more for its divisive factionalism than as a golden age of Egyptian politics. Three distinct authorities sought preeminence in Egypt: the British, the monarchy, and, through Parliament, the Wafd. The rivalry between these three proved very disruptive to politics in Egypt. In his efforts to protect the monarchy from parliamentary scrutiny, King Fuad (r. 1917–1936) tended to oppose the nationalist Wafd party even more than the British. The Wafd, for their part, alternated between fighting the British for independence and promoting the powers of Parliament over the monarchy. The British alternately worked with the king to undermine the Wafd when they were in power, and with the Parliament to undermine the king when the Wafd was out of power. The political elites were a fractious bunch whose internecine squabbles played into the hands of both the king and the British. Under the circumstances, it is not surprising that little progress was made in securing Egypt’s independence from Britain. Egyptians first went to the polls in 1924. Sa’d Zaghlul (1859–1927), hero of the nationalist movement of 1919, led his Wafd party to a sweeping victory and took 90 percent of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies. King Fuad named Zaghlul prime minister and invited him to form a government, which took office in March 1924. Buoyed by the public mandate of his election returns, Zaghlul immediately entered into negotiations with the British to secure Egypt’s complete independence, compromised only by the four “reserved points” of the 1922 treaty: British control over the Suez Canal, the right to base British troops in Egypt, preservation of the foreign legal privileges known as the Capitulations, and British dominance in Sudan. Sudan was a particular sticking point. The Egyptians had first conquered Sudan during the reign of Muhammad ’Ali in the 1820s. Driven from the territory by the Mahdi’s Revolt (1881–1885), the Egyptians joined forces with the British to reconquer Sudan in the late 1890s. In 1899 Lord Cromer devised a novel form of colonialism called a “condominium,” which allowed Britain to add Sudan to its empire in collaboration with the Egyptians. Since then, both Britain and Egypt claimed Sudan was actually their own. Egyptian nationalists rejected Britain’s claim to absolute discretion over Sudan in the 1922 treaty and demanded preservation of the ?unity of the Nile Valley.? This issue, more than any other of the four reserved points, provoked greatest tension between the Egyptians and the British. Tensions led to violence on November 19, 1924, when a band of Egyptian nationalists shot and killed the governor-general of Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Sir Lee Stack, as he drove through downtown Cairo. The stunned British government nonetheless used the assassination to secure their objectives in Sudan. Egypt’s high commissioner, Lord Allenby, presented Prime Minister Zaghlul with a punitive seven-point ultimatum, including changes to the status quo in Sudan. When Zaghlul refused to comply with British demands in Sudan (to withdraw all Egyptian soldiers and to allow Nile irrigation for a British agricultural scheme), Allenby gave orders to the Sudan government to implement Britain’s demands over the Egyptian prime minister’s objections. Zaghlul’s position was untenable, and he tendered his resignation on November 24. King Fuad named a royalist to form the next government and dissolved the Parliament, effectively sidelining the nationalists in the Wafd. As Zaghlul watched the British and the king enhance their powers at the Wafd’s expense, he famously remarked: “The bullets that were fired were not targeted at the chest of Sir Lee Stack; they were targeted at mine.”²⁸ In fact, Zaghlul never did return to power, dying on August 23, 1927, at the age of sixty-eight. Zaghlul would be replaced by lesser men, whose factionalism and in-fighting eroded public confidence in their political leaders.