Page 235 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

232 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

Percy Cox, the British high commissioner in Iraq, told Ibn Saud that a
permanent frontier would have to be drawn between Najd and Iraq, regardless
of the unsuitability of the concept of a fixed frontier in a desert region
frequented only by nomadic tribes in their seasonal migrations in search of
grazing. At a meeting of Iraqi and Najdi representatives at Muhammarah in
May 1922 a treaty laying down the principles upon which the proposed frontier
was to be based was drawn up and signed under Cox’s supervision. Ibn Saud
refused to ratify it, alleging that its effect would be to allow his Hashimite rivals
- Sharif Husain in the Hijaz, Husain’s son, Abdullah, the amir of Transjordan,
and his other son, Faisal, the newly enthroned King of Iraq - to hem him in. It
was rather like the wolf expressing apprehension of the sheep grazing around
him.
At the end of November 1922 Cox summoned Ibn Saud to a meeting at
Uqair, on the Hasa coast south of Bahrain, to settle once and for all the question

of the Kuwait and Iraq frontiers. Cox was accompanied by an Iraqi delegation
and by the British political agents from Kuwait and Bahrain. Ibn Saud argued
passionately against the idea of a fixed frontier, declaring magniloquently that
the boundaries of Najd had since antiquity been the furthermost points
reached in their wanderings by its Bedouin tribes - northern Syria and the edge
of the Anatolian plateau. The Iraqi delegation was equally extravagant in its
pretensions, claiming a western frontier on the Red Sea and a southern frontier
that reached, give or take a few leagues, as far as the Rub al-Khali. Exasperated
by all the rodomontade, Cox told Ibn Saud that he would simply have to
accept the frontier that he, Cox, would lay down. With that, Cox drew a line on
the map, beginning at Jabal Anaza, roughly 200 miles east of Amman in
Transjordan, and running, with occasional changes of course, in a south­
easterly direction to end at the western frontier of Kuwait as defined in the
Anglo-Ottoman convention of 1913. To the west of Kuwait Cox created a
rhomboid-shaped neutral zone over which Najd and Iraq would exercise joint
sovereignty, and where tribes from both sides would enjoy freedom of move­
ment and grazing rights. To the south of Kuwait he created another neutral
zone under joint Nadj-Kuwait sovereignty, his object being equally to com­
pensate Ibn Saud for those stretches of territory he claimed he was being forced
to cede to Iraq, and to penalize Kuwait for her equivocal behaviour towards the

Turks during the war.
It has never been entirely clear why Cox thought it necessary to compensate
Ibn Saud for the alleged sacrifice of his territorial rights in the vicinity of the
new Najd-Iraq frontier by assigning him a half-share in territory which Cox
himself, at the time of the conclusion of the Anglo-Ottoman convention of
1913, when he was political resident in the Gulf, had acknowledged to lie

within Kuwait’s orbit. The truth is that Ibn Saud had no historic title to the
districts he was forfeiting to Iraq, and the frontier that Cox awarded him was as
generous as historical and political reality could sustain. These considerauons