Iraq Must Go!

Charles Glass considers the history of ‘regime change’ in the Gulf

There is a dry wind blowing through the East, and the parched grasses wait the spark.
John Buchan, Greenmantle (1916)

As Lloyd George’s wartime Director of Information, John Buchan urged Britain to support an incomprehensible Eastern war with the cry: ‘The Turk must go!’ At the beginning of 1916, the Turk was not going anywhere: he held fast at Gallipoli, driving off the Allied landings in January, and accepted the surrender of a British Mesopotamian invasion force at Kut, south of Baghdad, in April. The Turkish war was both unsuccessful and unpopular. In the view of the new Imperial General Staff that Lloyd George created, it was also unnecessary. The generals preferred to concentrate their forces against the Hun and didn’t give a damn about Johnny Turk. As for the public, they had difficulty setting aside a century’s propaganda to the effect that the Ottoman Empire was a vital British interest – that the Turk, in other words, must stay.