Middle East Strategy at Harvard

MESH invites selected authors to offer original first-person statements on their new books—why and how they wrote them, and what impact they hope and expect to achieve. Priya Satia is assistant professor of modern British history at Stanford University. Her new book is Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain’s Covert Empire in the Middle East.

From Priya Satia

There was something fittingly fateful about how I came to write Spies in Arabia. Exactly a year before the 9/11 attacks, when the war in Iraq was but a twinkle in George W.’s eye, I stumbled into the Mesopotamian quagmire from the east. While exploring British Indian efforts to “develop” that region during World War One, I came across frequent complaints by local British officials about their difficulty gathering information in the country.

I assumed their problems arose partly out of a cultural mindset that had long seen the Middle East, and the “Orient” more generally, as essentially unknowable, mysterious, inscrutable. Here, I thought, was a question worth pursuing further: How did long-circulating cultural representations about the Middle East influence the practical unfolding of empire on the ground? How did they shape military and intelligence operations? The question promised to inject new life into the somewhat tired subject of European perceptions of the Orient. And so, I embarked for the UK to research the history of British intelligence-gathering in the Middle East, without an inkling that the topic was about to seize center stage in American political debate.

My clever academic question soon acquired a more sinister and politically urgent aspect when the records of the Air Ministry revealed the true significance of the subject of British surveillance in the Middle East: After World War One, Iraq became the first colony policed from the air, bombardment forming a routine part of administration. The Royal Air Force’s obsessive emphasis on “ubiquity” of surveillance seemed in some way to be connected to those earlier complaints of blindness, a hypothesis I set about proving by tracing the culture of intelligence-gathering in the region before, during, and after the war. As I read official records alongside agents’ personal papers, contemporary fiction, scholarly journals, and the press, the extent to which secret histories—the history of espionage—can produce immense effects in politics and culture became increasingly and eerily apparent.

Then came September 11, 2001, and the book that I had launched for its apparent intellectual merits inexorably acquired a new purpose and an increasingly polemical subtext. The more I thought and wrote, the more I grew convinced that the contemporary echo of my historical topic was neither a coincidence, nor evidence of my political prescience, nor even the tragically farcical repetition of history; it was in fact the unfolding of a new chapter in that unfinished history. What came to be known as the “group think” of our intelligence community was, I found, partly a legacy of the British intelligence establishment’s earlier incursion in the region, as was the mentality guiding American counterinsurgency.

Intelligence, it turns out, is not simply the matter of collecting objectively true, but hidden facts. It depends on prior epistemological choices, as we are now painfully aware—and those are liable to be shaped by cultural understandings. If a certain Edwardian-era hankering after romance and fascination with Bedouin inspired the eccentric community of British Arabist agents (T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, St. John Philby, and John Glubb being among the most well-known) to volunteer to spy in the Middle East, that very “genius”—and their claim to such a genius—ensured that all that the British state did in the region was similarly inventive—and often with horrific consequences, as in the case of the aerial surveillance regime. The book’s purpose is partly to make sense of how those who claimed the greatest empathy with Arabs—those most committed to “Arab freedom”—became the most enthusiastic supporters of a regime they knew to be unprecedentedly lethal and highly error-prone: How it came to be, in George Orwell’s words, that “Defenceless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: [and] this is called pacification.”

Conversely, today’s events helped me understand the historical significance of the new imperial style ushered in with air control, what I call “covert empire.” At the very moment that Britain’s democracy became truly inclusive after the war, and began, somewhat self-consciously, to assert its right to check the power of the British state, particularly the extravagant expenditure and brutality in Iraq, those activities became increasingly hidden from public view; administrative and military power fell into the hands of unaccountable intelligence bodies. There was a lesson in here for us—about the perils of democracy, its fostering of a paranoid official secrecy simply by virtue of its insistent demand for openness. Somewhat counter-intuitively, when a democracy attempts imperial occupation, there is a lot of lying and a lot of unrecorded death. Indeed, today’s conversation about official secrecy about violence and corruption in Iraq seems almost to parody the parliamentary debates of 1920s Britain. Then, too, “spin,” euphemism, and spurious declarations of success accompanied the creation of an ethnically-ordered, militaristic, and corruptly developmentalist security state in Iraq.

The secrecy of British intervention was not lost on Iraqis. They too grew suspicious, indeed paranoid, about the extent of their independence once it was nominally granted in 1932, and even after the RAF finally departed in 1958—with good reason, since a mere two years later, the CIA made its first attempt to assassinate the Iraqi head of state. My hope is that Spies in Arabia will not only help us think about the follies of Britain’s imperial past (and dispel the myth of Britain’s success in Iraq) but will also remind us of the all-too-recent historical memory shaping reception to Western occupation in formerly colonized countries, however benevolent its stated objective; people simply can no longer swallow that much unfairness—or that much paternalism (except perhaps under UN auspices).

At a practical level, the lesson from the past is that the local spawn of covert empire is inevitably doomed: today’s blinkered conversation about why the Iraqi government is failing to step up so that we can stand down is founded on the fallacy that an only nominally independent government can ever have any legitimacy. Collaborationist regimes are, by their very nature, prone to paralysis and/or oppression. And making the U.S. presence more discreet—for instance, by replacing troops with airpower, as has been suggested—will only further compromise local authority. Iraq needs to belong fully and without reservation to the Iraqis; my own hunch is that if we depart, we will be pleasantly surprised by their possession of the heroic yet ordinary human capacity to avert the chaos that we claim to fear—and that we have in any case delivered to them.

Spies in Arabia has morphed into a rather different book from what I had foreseen. As much as it attempts to explain the past, it provides an unwitting but insistent comment on our present discontents. Flying in the face of our usual assumptions about the relatively benign and retiring nature of the inter-war British empire, it tacitly questions any modern government’s presumption of the oxymoronic role of peaceful empire.

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