Lords of the Desert: Britain's Struggle with America to Dominate the Middle East by James Barr (review)

Having examined Anglo-French rivalry in the Middle East during and after the First World War,¹ James Barr, in his latest publication, has turned his attention to what he terms the "battle between the United States and Great Britain for supremacy" in the region. Focusing on the period from America's formal entry into World War II to Britain's pull-out from "East of Suez," Barr has produced an extended study of Anglo-American relations in the context of the modern Middle East.

Barr's narrative begins with an examination of Anglo-American rivalry over the region's oil resources, the US secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, warning President Franklin Roosevelt in early 1943 that the British "never overlooked the opportunity to get in where was oil" (quoted on p. 35). The president himself expressed concern that the British wished to "horn in on Saudi Arabian reserves" (quoted on p. 49). For his part Prime Minister Winston Churchill's resident minister in the Middle East, Walter Guinness, 1st Baron Moyne, grumbled that "the local American idea of cooperation is that we should do all the giving and they all the taking" (quoted on p. 57). Referring to Anglo-American differences over the troubled Palestine Mandate in the immediate postwar years, Churchill's successor, Clement Attlee, lamented that "The truth is the United States wants her interests at our expense" (quoted on p. 72). Attlee's foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, was even blunter. Against the background of claims that US policy toward Palestine was dictated by the domestic electoral concerns of the beleaguered US president Harry Truman, Bevin declared that he "could not settle things if his problem were made the subject of local elections" (quoted on p. 82).

Anglo-American tensions also surfaced following the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951, when US Secretary of State Dean Acheson dismissed British plans to reverse Iranian prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq's action as "sheer madness" (quoted on p. 134). While American objections proved decisive in preventing the landing of British forces in Iran in the early 1950s, Churchill's political heir, Anthony Eden, brought Anglo-American relations close to destruction by his decision to attempt to reverse the nationalization of the British- and French-owned Suez Canal Company in 1956 through military force. When President Eisenhower heard of the British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt, he expostulated, "I just cannot believe Britain would be dragged into this" (quoted on p. 239). For Barr the fall of the pro-British Iraqi monarchy in a bloody revolution in July 1958 marked something of a watershed since this "removed the last strong British ally in the northern Middle East and dealt a severe blow to British influence in that part of the region. There was, moreover, nothing that the British could do about it" (pp. 269–70). Thereafter Britain was pushed back to the shores of the Arabian Peninsula. Ironically the administration of Lyndon Johnson sought to persuade the British to remain East of Suez. As former British secretary of state for defence Denis Healey waspishly remarked, "The United States, after trying for thirty years to get Britain out of Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, was now trying desperately to keep us in; during the Vietnam war it did not want to be the only country killing coloured people on their own soil" (quoted on p. 385).

Barr has produced a readable and wide-ranging study. Nevertheless, the descriptive approach that he takes to his subject serves to compromise its academic value, as does his failure to engage in any recognizable way with the rich historiography on postwar Anglo-American relations in the Middle East. Indeed, Barr's book is largely a work of synthesis with little in the way of original analysis or interpretation. Much of the material presented, moreover, is familiar, while the brief epilogue...