Page 101 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

98 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

almost inevitable that the officials should be left largely to themselves to make
the running in the Gulf. They were not responsible, however, for the most
momentous decision taken in the post-war years - that of January 1968 to end
the British connexion with the Gulf in 1971. Many of the officials concerned

with Arabian affairs were strongly opposed to the decision, although at the
same time they conceded that Britain’s protectorate of the Gulf had to end
some day. Yet once the decision was taken they came round, almost without
exception, to the view that it could not subsequently be reversed; and as lime
passed the initial feeling of dismay which the decision had aroused was gradu­
ally replaced by a sense of relief - for reasons which (as Lord Gore-Booth, who
was the permanent under-secretary at the time, has since testified) were rather

less than incontestable. ‘. . . In the Office [so Gore-Booth records] there had
been some anxiety about an indefinite prolongation in the Gulf of a “special
position” which might involve us in internal struggles in the Arab world.’*
The Foreign Office had never really felt comfortable about its role in the
Gulf. It had inherited the custodianship of British interests there from the old

Indian political service when the British raj came to an end in 1947. The duties
and responsibilities which Britain shouldered in the Gulf were more of a
colonial than a diplomatic nature, a fact reflected in the designation of the
British representatives there by the titles of‘resident’ and ‘agent’ which used to
be current in the Indian political service. The functions of the political resident
in the Gulf, whose headquarters had been at Bushire on the Persian coast
until 1946, when they were transferred to Jufair on Bahrain, were as much

those of a colonial governor as they were those of an ambassador. He had under
his command the Trucial Oman Scouts, based at Sharjah, and there were units
of the Royal Navy, the Royal Air Force and (from the 1950s) the British Army
stationed in the Gulf to assist him if the need arose. His subordinates, the

political agents in Bahrain, Qatar, Dubai, Abu Dhabi and (up to 1961) Kuwait,
bore more than a passing resemblance to the collectors or district commis­
sioners of the former Indian Civil Service and the Colonial Service. Their roles.
in short, were of a kind which fitted the officers of the Indian political service
more readily and naturally than they did the diplomatists of the Foreign Office,
not merely because of the differences in their training and experience but also
because of a fundamental divergence in outlook between the two services.
Diplomacy of its nature is a process of bargaining, of the reconciliation 0

different and often opposing interests, a process in which the completion 0 a
negotiation is all too frequently considered of greater consequence than w a<t
transpires during it. In such circumstances, peoples and territories are apt to
regarded somewhat distantly, as concepts or symbols. Imperial or co om
rule, on the other hand, breeds a deep sense of responsibility towar s t e

peoples and lands ruled, along with a habit of authority over them, so t at t
is a natural resistance among imperial administrators to the notion t .at t

* Paul Gore-Booth, With Great Truth and Respect, London, 1974, P- 377.