Page 71 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

68 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

tary of state for India and by the personal intervention of the viceroy. Still the
Foreign Office was undismayed, and early in April 1939 it marshalled its
arguments once more in an endeavour to overcome what it regarded as the
India Office’s wilful and unjustifiable obduracy. The nub of the Foreign

Office’s complaint against the India Office and the government of India was
that they should ever have recognized Abu Dhabi’s title to the Khaur al-Udaid,
let alone have guaranteed her rights there. It was ludicrous, so the Foreign
Office thought, that trifles such as recognitions and guarantees dating from the

previous century should be allowed to stand in the way of reaching an amicable
understanding with Ibn Saud concerning matters of much wider interest and
importance. The sentiments were very much in keeping with the times:
indeed, they were expressed only three weeks after the extinction of Czecho­
slovakia’s independence, and a matter of days after the giving of the British

guarantee to Poland on 31 March 1939.
The reply from the India Office to the Foreign Office’s latest submissions
said all that needed to be said on the subject. On the practical plane, it was
pointed out, the calculation which had led the Foreign Office to propose the

cession of Khaur al-Udaid to Ibn Saud, viz. the desirability of securing his
friendship and possible co-operation in view of the troubled state of the Middle
East, might prove to be ill-founded. What if Khaur al-Udaid were given to Ibn
Saud and he then proved unwilling or unable to make any positive return?
What if he merely used the cession of Khaur al-Udaid as an excuse to demand

further territory? If the safeguarding of British interests in the Middle East was
the decisive reason for seeking to win over Ibn Saud, what effect did the
Foreign Office think the use of compulsion upon the ruler of Abu Dhabi to
hand over Khaur al-Udaid would have upon Britain’s standing and reputation

in the Middle East? Presumably the effect would be as deplorable as that
which, according to the Foreign Office, British policy in Palestine was having
upon Arab opinion, and which had led the Foreign Office in the first place to
propose the cession of Khaur al-Udaid to appease Ibn Saud. The India Office
considered the whole idea of alienating the territory of one of the Gulf shaikh-

doms, to which Britain had stood in a tutelary relationship for more than a
century, to gain some advantage in Palestine or in the Middle East at large
equally repugnant and unprincipled. It was also self-defeating. Any advantage
that might be gained in Palestine or elsewhere was bound to be transient: the
mere passage of time would see to that. But the damage done in the Gulf would

be permanent; and the same passage of time would act to perpetuate the
memory of the injustice, to the certain and ultimate detriment of Britain s
position there.
War intervened in the late summer to bring discussion of the frontier
question to a close. It. was not raised again for another decade, by which ume

the India Office had vanished into oblivion, along with the Indian empire.
When the war ended the exploratory activities of the oil companies in eastern