Papers of the Interdepartmental Conference on Middle Eastern Affairs [‎91v] (182/290)

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provincial, municipal, and district councils, which had been approved
by the Conference. This scheme was only a modification of existing
forms of British administration in so far as it provided for Arab
advice to British authorities. Idle problem now before His Majesty’s
Government was the conversion of this system into one which
provided for British advice to Arab authorities. It appeared from
the Acting Civil Commissioner’s telegram of the 29th October
(LD.C.E.-3440) that none of the five provincial councils sanctioned
by the Conference on the 17th April had yet been formed. As to
the municipal councils, the position was not clear. Of the sixteen
district councils which had been contemplated by Colonel Wilson,
four had struggled into existence, and it was hoped that five more
would be constituted before the end of the year. Of the four
which were now in existence, it might perhaps be said that one or
two at the most were in full working order. Meanwhile the
administration was being criticised from various quarters; firstly,
we had to reckop with King Hussein, with his pan-Arab ideas;
secondly, there was Feisal, who was, broadly speaking, still loyal to
His Majesty’s Government, but was quite capable, in the course of
his quarrel with the French, of taking steps to embarrass us in
Mesopotamia with the object of bringing pressure to bear on the
krench to meet his wishes in Syria; thirdly, there were the French
themsejves, who were insisting on the exact parallelism between
Mesopotamia and Syria, and who showed signs of protesting against
our doing any more towards direct administration in Mesopotamia
than w r e would allow them to do in Syria ; fourthly, there were
the Mesopotamian officers of Feisal’s military administration in
Syria, who were sometimes disparaged and sometimes extolled,
but who, whatever their true importance might be, and to whatever
extent they might be actuated by motives of self-interest rather than
patriotism, w’ere undoubtedly a factor which we could not afford
to ignore; fifthly, there were the existence and growth in
Mesopotamia itself of bodies and leagues protesting against British
administration; lastly, there were the formidable criticisms of
<jertain of our own officials and advisers who w^ere best qualified to
speak with authority on the nature of our administration. There
was general concurrence of testimony that the present regime was
-on the wrong lines, and that the only man to put it straight was Sir
Percy Cox. He had recently received a private letter from Sir
Percy Cox, in which he had ^ expressed his readiness to return to
Mesopotamia. He had mentioned among other things that he was
not prepared to return in his old capacity of Civil Commissioner, in
which he was subordinate to the military authorities, but considered
that he should only return after the mandate had been given, as
High Commissioner in unrestricted charge of the interests of His
Majesty’s Government in Mesopotamia. This brought up the whole
question of mandates, and of the date by which it would be possible
for His Majesty’s Government to appoint a High Commissioner who
should be independent of the military authorities.
I le feared that there was little prospect of the question of
mandates being discussed apart from the general question of the
settlement with 1 urkey. Fven if certain proposals which had been
put forward were accepted, he doubted whether this settlement
could be arrived at before January at the earliest, and it was
possible that the discussion would drag on until March or April.
There were three main points which he thought the Conference
should discuss—(i) What steps could be taken to emphasise the
civil rather than the military character of the administration, or even
to bring the latter to an end altogether ; (ii) Would it be politic to
issue some further declaration on the lines proposed in the India
Office Memorandum (I.D.C.E.-3430) ? He was rather doubtful of
this course. Our experience in the past had been that declarations
of this nature usually caused embarrassment. He could not at the
moment recollect a single declaration which had not been used at a