January 1, 1970

Introduced by Richard M. Langworth

For better or worse, it was Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill who chaired the 1921 Cairo Conference which created the Middle East borders we still know today. What was Churchill’s thinking? What mistakes did he make? How, if at all, have conditions changed in the near-century since?

Churchill’s task was not easy, writes Professor Freeman. He arrived in Cairo to shouts from an Arab crowd chanting, ‘Down with Churchill.’ In Gaza, he and his wife found a different Arab crowd, divided between ‘Cheers for the Minister!’ and ‘Down with the Jews’. Ever the optimist, Churchill believed Arabs and Zionists could learn to get along. But he became increasingly exasperated with the Iraqi king he had installed in Baghdad. ‘We are paying eight millions a year,’ he wrote to Lloyd George, ‘for the privilege of living on an ungrateful volcano out of which we are in no circumstances to get anything worth having’. Cynics might say that little has changed.

Read the full article here: ‘Churchill and the Making of Iraq’ by David Freeman, Finest Hour 132, Autumn 2006, scroll to page 26.