Abstract
Only four weeks after Pearl Harbor, an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) operative warned from Cairo: “The Near East is wide open and ripe for plucking.”3 This warning referred mostly to the possible threat of Axis intervention, but it was also interpreted in Washington as an opportunity for the expansion of American influence. A few months later, in May 1942, the British field marshal and South African prime minister, Jan Smuts, alerted President Roosevelt to the crucial strategic importance of the Middle East. “The imperiling of the position in the Middle East must be prevented at all costs,” Smuts warned.4
The Middle East consists of a kind of island embracing Egypt, Arabia, the Levant and Iraq—and perhaps one might add the oil fields of Iran—where we have the problem of maintaining our position as best we can in the face of formidable difficulties.
British Foreign Office Assessment, June 1940.1
Is Great Britain going to take care of her own commitments, or is someone else going to take care of them for her.
Isaiah Bowman to the Postwar Planning Committee, August 1942.2
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Lloyd Gardner, “FDR and the Colonial Question,” in David Woolner, Warren Kimball, and David Reynolds, eds. FDR’s World: War, Peace, and Legacies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008);
William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978);
Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain, and the War against Japan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979);
Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin D. Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
Rashid Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire: Western Footprints and America’s Perilous Path in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2004);
D. K. Fieldhouse, Western Imperialism in the Middle East, 1914–1958 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006);
see also David Ryan and Victor Pungong, eds. The United States and Decolonization: Power and Freedom (London: Macmillan, 2000).
Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq: Contriving King and Country (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007);
Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
Toby Dodge, Inventing Iraq: The Failure of Nation Building and History Denied (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003);
David Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East (New York: Owl Books, 1989).
Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Glen Balfour-Paul, “Brita in’s Informal Empire in the Middle East,” in Judith Brown and Wm. Roger Louis, eds. The Oxford History of the British Empire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). American views of this indirect British system are revealed in “Machinery by which Great Britain Maintains Control over, or Exerts Influence in, Various Phases of Iraqi National Life,” by Loy Henderson, March 13, 1944, Central Files, 890G.00/695, NARA; and “British Controls in Iraq,” by Richard E. Gnade, February 25, 1944, Central Files, 890G.00/695, NARA.
Foreign Office File: “Possible Use of Bribery in Iraq,” November 1940, FO 371/24558; “Funds for the Regent,” April 17, 1941, FO 371/27066; Cornwallis to Foreign Office, April 21, 1941, no. 369, FO 371/27066; Khalidi, Resurrecting Empire; Salt, The Unmaking of the Middle East. For accounts of British efforts to crush Arab nationalism in Palestine, see Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete: Jews and Arabs Under the British Mandate (New York: Owl Books, 1999);
Naomi Shepherd, Ploughing Sand: British Rule in Palestine (London: John Murray, 1999).
Francis Robinson, “The British Empire in the Muslim World,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire; Timothy J. Paris, Britain, The Hashemites and Arab Rule, 1920–1925 (London: Frank Cass, 2003).
Copyright information
© 2012 Christopher D. O’Sullivan
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
O’Sullivan, C.D. (2012). FDR and the End of Empire in the Middle East. In: FDR and the End of Empire. The World of the Roosevelts. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025258_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137025258_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-43885-3
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-02525-8
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)