Page 103 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

IOO Arabia, the Gulf and the West

the mood of disillusion with the imperial past (not to say revulsion against the
burden of empire) current in advanced intellectual and political circles in
Britain in the 1950s, the Foreign Office fully shared it. It was thus conditioned
to adopt a more pliant attitude towards Saudi Arabia and her ambitions than
the India Office had advocated twenty years earlier. It could also point, as it
had in the 1930s, to the difficulties which Britain faced elsewhere in the Middle

East to justify a conciliatory approach to the Saudis. The Suez crisis of 1956
and the failure of the Anglo-French intervention in Egypt - which, as they
were afterwards at pains to make known publicly, the majority of officials had
vehemently opposed - only confirmed the Foreign Office more deeply in its
defensive and apologetic posture; so much so that by 1970 it was prepared to

aid and abet Saudi Arabia’s designs upon Abu Dhabi’s territory for the sake of
an untroubled departure from the Gulf.
The mood was again evident in the exchanges in 1970-71 over the merger of
the Gulf shaikhdoms in the UAE. Here the chief sentiment evinced by the
Foreign Office was impatience - impatience that the negotiations were so
dilatory and protracted, impatience that the shaikhs seemingly could not

realize that the die was cast, that Britain was leaving and that the days of her
benign tutelage were over. Yet as Sir William Luce had himself publicly
pointed out in the Daily Telegraph only three years earlier,

We have taught the Rulers to rely on our support and protection, and they have
undoubtedly benefited from the relationship; but it would not be reasonable or just to
blame them now for sheltering under our umbrella when for generations we have
encouraged them to do so.

Yet even Luce, whose experience in the Sudan and later in Aden (where he had
brought the initial federation of Arab amirates into being) inclined him to view
the Gulf shaikhs’ misgivings and hesitations with sympathy, was before long
infected himself with the Foreign Office’s mood, so that he grew less forbear­
ing and more brusque with the shaikhs as their prevarications threatened to set

back the date of the British withdrawal. So anxious was the Foreign Office to be
gone that when, in the early summer of 1971, the hopelessness of creating a
federation of the nine shaikhdoms was finally admitted, it refused to explore
the possibility of some kind of federal link between the Trucial Shaikhdoms
and the sultanate of Oman to the east. The concept of ‘Greater Oman was by

no means new. Moreover, it was a more natural and logical political arrange
ment than a federation of the Trucial Shaikhdoms with Bahrain and Qatar, ut
to have initiated negotiations to this end, and, even more, to have persiste 1
them, would have delayed the British departure beyond I97L an<^ 1 1S

Foreign Office would not abide. .
What was equally distasteful to its officials was the reflection t a y

encouragement Britain might lend to the creation of a ‘Greater Oman
assuredly arouse the ire of both King Faisal and Muhammad Reza Shan, to