The Press Monday, September 7, 1925. Mandates and Frontiers.

Press, Volume LXI, Issue 18480, 7 September 1925, Page 8

The Press Monday, September 7, 1925. Mandates and Frontiers.

The suggestion that Britain ''should "continue co-operation with the Iraq " Government" after the existing Treaty expires has aroused a storm in the newspapers which Dominion readers may find it hard to understand. It is, however, necessary to try to understand the extent and nature of the Empire's obligations even when we are not in a position to influence them, and the obligation to Iraq happens to be j one of quite grave possibilities. lor better or for worse we are an Eastern Empire almost more than we arc an Empire of the West. If it is just and wise to hold India it is necessary to retain at least the friendship of some of the peoples occupying the landbridge to India—apart altogether from questions of race and religion. But there is of course no such thing as a handling of Eastern problems in a racial or religious vacuum, and we simply have to remember the affinities of the Arabs with some millions of people East and West of them- It is broadly true at present that the Arab is almost as necessary to Britain as Britain is to him, and yet that many things have happened recently—in Palestine, for example —which have led him to criticise the sincerity of Britain's friendship. Some of the recent cables j on the subject would convey the impres- j sion that the only question at issue is the control of one of the world's richest! oil-fields. Actually the broad lines of our Arab policy would be the same if oil had never been discovered in the j East, though the presence of oil necessarily makes the carrying out of that policy very much more difficult internationally. And yet it is not the international complications that are exciting the Homeland's newspapers. The " Daily Mail" " demands " the summoning of Parliament to decide, not whether the Colonial Office shall pursue a policy annoying to Turkey, Persia, or America, but whether it shall go on adding to the burdens of the British taxpayer. And of course that is a very, grave question even if it is a fact, as the Colonial Office promises, that the expenditure will not increase, and may begin soon to " show a steady, downward trend." It is very difficult to know whether Britain can go on carrying such frontier burdens as she has assumed during the last two or three generations, all or nearly all in the East. Many earnest students who are by no means Radicals, Pacifists, or " Little Englanders" think that the time has come to recast her frontier policy a little drastically, and that if it would be dangerous suddenly to withdraw the frontiers themselves, withdrawal when and where possible should be a general Imperial aim- So far as Iraq is concerned we entered Mosul not as a war measure, but since the Armistice, and it requires more faith than we can derive from the history «f past wars to believe that if a major conflict came again it would be an advantage to us to have stations so far from any possible base. It seems to be admitted now that it was not an advantage, but a very grave disadvantage, that our Indian frontier was the passes of Afghanistan. «u.(i the Chitral, i and our reward for pushing so far into Mesopotamia was the grayest military disaster of a hundred years. It is true that laymen are very dangerous strategists, and that our position in Iraq must be determined in part by soldiers. But it is equally true that soldiers are very dangerous economists and statesmen, and if it were not a little absurd to express an opinion in Christchurch we should have to say that if the War Office cannot show that a Mesopotamian Mandate would be a bulwark to the Empire in the day of storm the Government should Usten to its critics and call Parliament together.