The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power

by Daniel Yergin

The British needed a monarch for Iraq, another new state, this one to be formed out of three former provinces of the Turkish empire. Political stability in the area was required not only by the prospect for oil, but also for the defense of the Persian Gulf and for the new imperial air route from Britain to India, Singapore, and Australia. The British did not want to rule the region directly; that would cost too much. Rather what Churchill, then the head of the Colonial Office, wanted was an Arab government, with a constitutional monarch, that would be “supported” by Britain under League of Nations mandate. It would be cheaper. So Churchill chose the out-of-work Faisal as his candidate. Summoned from exile, he was crowned King of Iraq in Baghdad in August 1921. Faisal’s brother Abdullah—originally destined for the Iraqi throne—was instead installed as king “of the vacant lot which the British christened the Amirate of Transjordan.” Faisal’s task was enormous; he had not inherited a well-defined nation, but rather a collection of diverse groups—Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs, Jews and Kurds and Yazidis—a territory with a few important cities, most of the countryside under the control of local sheikhs, and with little common political or cultural history, but with a rising Arab nationalism. The minority Sunni Arabs held political power, while the Shia Arabs were by far the most numerous. To complicate things further, the Jews were the largest single group among inhabitants of Bag...