Page 104 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

The Retreat from the Gulf ioi

serious detriment of all the Foreign Office’s patient efforts of the previous
months and years to placate them. Throughout 197° an<^ I97I the Foreign
Office had been at pains to demonstrate that it accepted these two monarchs at
their own valuation, as sagacious and redoubtable rulers who were fully
deserving and capable of assuming from Britain the guardianship of the Gulf’s

coasts and waters. Yet Luce himself, it may be recalled, had as recently as
October 1969 reiterated his view that ‘there is no country within the region
which is strong enough to take over control and ensure peace in the whole area’.
Much must have changed, evidently, in the succeeding eighteen months to
have persuaded his colleagues in the Foreign Office that Saudi Arabia and
Persia were now fit to become the joint legatees of Britain’s position in the Gulf

- that is, if they really were so persuaded. What was probably far more
influential in convincing the Foreign Office, and even more so the Cabinet, of
the expediency of pretending that a Saudi-Persian condominium over the Gulf
was both logical and practicable was the lure of arms and other contracts
dangled before them by the Saudi and Persian governments. All knew that the
actual award of these contracts was contingent upon a British withdrawal from
the Gulf on the date stipulated. So the date was kept and the suq bargain

completed.
For Britain to have allowed herself to be persuaded by such considerations to
retire from the Gulf when she did was a betrayal of all she had done and stood
for in the region for 150 years. Not only did she cease to restrain by her
presence the two local powers, Saudi Arabia and Persia, whose conduct and

ambitions had throughout that time constituted the principal threat to the
Gulf’s tranquillity, but she magnified her delinquency by immediately
embarking upon the sale of armaments to these states on a scale hitherto
unknown in this part of the world. The easy rationalizations advanced in
1970-71 to justify the manner and timing of Britain’s departure could not
conceal the cynicism and shabbiness of the British government’s behaviour.
Even if the assumption were valid that Britain could not, in the circumstances

prevailing in the Gulf in 1971, have continued to play the policeman there
much longer, it was no excuse for her degrading transformation overnight into
a pedlar of arms to the peoples among whom she had kept the peace for a
century and a half. That other Western powers have done the same - which is
the miserable reason usually offered in extenuation of Britain’s conduct - is

irrelevant: none of those powers has ever borne responsibility for the peace of
the Gulf, nor was it by their efforts that piracy and maritime warfare were
suppressed, the slave trade and the arms traffic put down, and the rule of law
extended to the peoples around its shores.
With opinion in the Foreign Office in 1970-71 almost unanimously in
favour of withdrawal, it was scarcely conceivable that the Cabinet would act
against it. Nor did it, for the simple and sufficient reason that its members - for
all their brave utterances since January 1968 about ‘honour’, ‘duty’ and