Page 102 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf 99

of these peoples and lands is to be bandied about in transactions in far-off
capitals. When the Foreign Office assumed charge of Britain’s interests and

obligations in the Gulf from the India Office and the Indian empire, it did not
inherit along with it the spirit and outlook of the Indian Civil Service. Herein
lay the essential difference between the two services in their approach to the
Gulf, a region where Britain had always played an imperial rather than a

diplomatic role.
This difference of approach manifested itself clearly in the controversy over
the location of the eastern frontier of Saudi Arabia and in the negotiations
for the establishment of the United Arab Emirates. As we have seen, the
Foreign Office was prepared in the 1930s to give away part of Abu Dhabi
shaikhdom to appease Ibn Saud in the furtherance of British interests else­
where in the Middle East, particularly in Palestine. It was only prevented from
doing so by the India Office, which was opposed on the grounds of principle to

the giving away of territory which was not Britain’s to give, territory which,
furthermore, had previously been recognized as rightly belonging to Abu
Dhabi. The India Office was also opposed on the grounds of policy to the
perpetration of an injustice in one area of British responsibility (an injustice
which would continue to rankle for years to come to the detriment of Britain’s
relations with the minor Gulf states) in the hope of securing what would

doubtless prove to be a transitory advantage in another - if, indeed, such an
advantage was actually secured in the first place. The spirit of appeasement in
the conduct of British relations with Saudi Arabia persisted in the Foreign
Office in the post-war years, even though it was masked, and even for a time
subdued, by the firmer political control of Britain’s Middle-Eastern policy
exercised during the years of Sir Anthony Eden’s foreign secretaryship and
premiership. Hence the resolute rejection in those years of Saudi Arabia’s more
extreme territorial claims and the willingness to follow up this rejection with
forceful action.

Among the permanent officials, however, there was a disposition to tread
softly, a disposition which expressed itself, for example, in the willingness to
compromise Abu Dhabi’s rights and those of the Iraq Petroleum Company by
agreeing to the Saudi demands in 1951 and again in 1954 for a ban upon all oil

operations in the disputed areas for the duration of the frontier negotiations
and the subsequent arbitration. The officials concerned had read through the
files of the 1930s negotiations in their own archives, and had been impressed by
the arguments put up by their predecessors in favour of accommodating the
audis. They paid less attention to the cogent counter-arguments advanced by
the India Office at the time, partly because there was no longer an India Office
10 press them, but even more because they were considered to represent an
outmoded way of thinking, the product of beliefs and principles that had no

validity or relevance now that the British raj was no more and the retreat from
empire was under way in every quarter of the globe. Far from being immune to