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of the United States, Iraq of the Soviet Union - while the third, Persia, which
until the close of 1978 was in a client relationship to the United States, has
experienced so much domestic turmoil of late as to cast a cloud of uncertainty
over her future role in the politics of the Gulf.
Iraq and Persia, for the most part, lie beyond the province of this book.
What will be said about them here, therefore, will be confined in the main to
those aspects of their internal affairs and their relations with each other which
bear upon their activities and influence in the Gulf. A rigid dividing line,
obviously, cannot be drawn in these matters, which makes such a treatment
unsatisfactory in more respects than one. To attempt anything more, however,
would be to exceed not only the appropriate limits of this study but also the
competence of its author.

Iraq has never in modern times wielded the power and influence in the Gulf to
which her position as the second most populous of the littoral states would
appear to entitle her. To a considerable extent this failure has been due to her
lack of maritime power, the possession of which has more often than not in the
past determined political supremacy in the Gulf. During the period of Otto­
man rule in Iraq, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century, control of the
Gulf’s waters was exercised and contested primarily by the maritime powers of
Europe or the petty states of the Arabian shore. It was not until the closing
decades of the nineteenth century, when the building of the Suez Canal
facilitated the dispatch of ships from the Mediterranean into Arabian waters,
that the Sublime Porte made a serious bid to extend its influence along rhe
Arabian littoral of the Gulf. Although it succeeded in bringing the coastal
region of al-Hasa under its control after 1871, and in imposing a tenuous
suzerainty over Kuwait and the Qatar peninsula, the Porte was incapable by
itself of posing an effective challenge to the preponderance enjoyed by Britain
in the Gulf as a whole.

Turkish sovereignty over Iraq ended with the defeat of the Ottoman empire
in the First World War, and Turkish suzerainty over Kuwait, Hasa and Qatar
lapsed with it. The common boundaries of Iraq, Kuwait and the sultanate of
Najd, as we have seen, were defined in a series of agreements drawn up in the
1920s on the initiative of Britain as the mandatory power in Iraq and the
protecting power in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. In the same decade the western
and northern frontiers of Iraq - those with the amirate of Transjordan, the
French mandate of Syria and the new Turkish republic - were defined in
engagements concluded between Britain, France and Turkey and in the man­
datory instruments issued by the League of Nations. The frontier of Iraq with
Persia had been laid down three-quarters of a century earlier, in the treaty of
Erzerum between the Ottoman and Persian empires concluded in 1847 under
British and Russian auspices. The actual demarcation of the frontier, however,
was not completed until the eve of war in 1914.