Ormuz and Ind
The Persian Gulf in the Twentieth Century. By John Marlowe. (Cresset, 30s.)
1 HAVE long considered John Marlowe our best writer on Middle Eastern politics, unsurpassed in clarity and pith, and standing head and shoulders above the chaos of controversy by reason of the ironic impartiality with which he considers a singularly confused scene. His new book on the Persian Gulf was badly needed. The complex relationships of that area, united as it is by geography and petrol and divided by race and political boundaries, need the patience of an exceptionally lucid historian if they are to be explained, and Mr. Marlowe succeeds as well with this somewhat scattered subject-matter as he has in previous books on the Middle East.
The story is roughly that of the rise, con- tinuance and decline of the British Empire. The possession of India brought about an effective British suzerainty over the Persian Gulf area which came to include Iraq and Saudi Arabia And might have included Persia had the Anglo- Persian treaty of August, 1919, been ratified. Up to twenty years ago that suzerainty was un- challenged—even` in July, 1946, the British Labour Government could still react to what looked like a Russian take-over bid in Persia by the time-honoured gesture of sending troops from India to Basra—but the granting of independence to India and Pakistan cut away the military foundations on which British influence in the Middle East rested (much of our military planning since has been a fruitless attempt to restore them). In 1951-52 Dr. Mossadeq's suc- cessful defiance of the British Government broke a spell which had lasted nearly 200 years.
It was fitting that it should be broken by the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. For, while the establishment of British influence in the Persian Gulf was due primarily to the existence of the Indian Empire, its maintenance of recent years has been moti- vated by the desire to keep control over the main source of an essential raw material. The nightmare which has haunted British statesmen for two decades, and led them into a good deal of political sleepwalking, has been the vision of an interruption of oil supplies either on the part of the producers or through the cutting of pipelines and the blocking of the Suez Canal. Now the situation has eased: there is a buyer's market in oil, and a frantic effort to find oilfields nearer Western Europe than the Gulf has lessened Our dependence on the Middle East. Correspondingly, our defence of British interests in the Persian Gulf has become wiser in con- ception and less agitated in execution. The recent Kuwait crisis was a conspicuous success for the Foreign Office's new Arab policy.
Mr. Marlowe is especially good when un- ravelling the intricacies of oil politics, but he also provides illuminating comment on subjects ranging from Dr. Mossadeq (whom he considers the last of the old school of Middle Eastern nationalists—i.e., politically Right-wing and sup- ported by elements opposed to reform) to President Nasser's influence in the Gulf, which he considers as having passed its peak at the moment of the overthrow of Nun i es-Said. Mr. Marlowe is something of a moralist, and his irony loses none of its edge when exercised on a section of history containing so many examples of the purest of power politics. His account of the Iranian elections of 1947 is typical:
In the event troops were dispatched in Decem- ber [to Azerbaijan], not to supervise the elections, but to overthrow the Provincial Gov- ernment, which they did without difficulty. Pishevari fled to the Soviet Union. At the same time the Kurdish People's Republic was liquidated and its leaders brought to Teheran and hanged. Mass arrests were made of Tudeh Party leaders and supporters throughout the country. After these electoral preparations had been completed, elections were held in January and February.
Mr. Marlowe excels at making a point with the minimum of moralising and without cant.
ANTHONY HARTLEY
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