Chapter 31 Churchill and the Arab Bureau under his leadership

In Cairo in March 1921, British Secretary of State for Colonial Affairs, Winston Churchill, convened some 40 leading experts on the Near East to discuss the eventual political partition of the newly acquired territory of the region.The people who attended this meeting included almost all first-class British experts on Arab issues, including Churchill's close friend Lawrence, Sir Percy Cox, Gertrude Bell and others. The result of this meeting was the establishment of British colonialism. Ministry of the Middle East Bureau, replacing the Arab Bureau established in 1916.According to plans drawn up in Cairo, Mesopotamia was renamed Iraq and ruled by Faisal Hussein, son of Hasmi Hussein Ali of Mecca.RAF aircraft were permanently stationed in Iraq, and the Iraqi government was placed under the effective control of Anglo-Persian Oil Company officials.

On April 21, 1921, the U.S. State Department officially issued a statement on behalf of the American Standard Oil Company, strongly demanding to participate in oil exploration in the Middle East. The Middle East under British control did not allow any American companies to drill for oil. The San Remo Agreement ignited a bitter battle between Britain and the United States for control of the world's oil that lasted for a full decade in the 1920s.This scramble played a decisive role in shaping the form of diplomatic and trade relations between the United States and Britain and the nascent Bolshevik regime in the USSR in the crucial early years, first under Lenin and later under Stalin .

The panicked American oil and banking groups worried that Britain was gradually gaining a global oil monopoly at the expense of the interests of the United States.Royal Dutch Shell, led by Deterding, controlled with an iron fist the huge oil rights in the Dutch East Indies, Persia, Mesopotamia and most of the postwar Middle East. After entering the 1920s, Latin America also became the focus of fierce competition between Britain and the United States.