It had been about oil, my people, oil. Early in the twentieth century, Mosul, Baghdad and Basra were coveted for their legendary but unexploited oil. As the twentieth century began, Europe?s ?modern armies and navies demanded vast new supplies of fuel and petroleum by?products.? (pg. 114, BANKING ON BAGHDAD.)

In October of 1911, Winston Churchill had become First Lord of the British Admiralty. He found that some 189 vessels ? from torpedo boats to battleships, had been or were being built, all fueled by oil, not coal. Those ships, apart from the new ones envisioned, needed more than 200,000 tons of oil annually. Britain owned only a four-month reserve. Estimated consumption of oil for 1912 by the British Navy was 225 times that of a decade earlier.

For its oil requirements, Britain had decided to focus on the Persian Gulf, rather than Mexico or Poland. In May of 1908, an oil rig owned by Burmah Oil, a British controlled company, at the Masjid-i-Suleiman site in Persia unleashed an enormous oil gusher 75 feet into the sky. Burmah Oil became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. In London, all available shares were bought within 30 minutes. The promising Mosul and Baghdad oil fields were just miles away from Masjid-i-Suleiman.

Britain appeared to have secured abundant Persian Gulf petroleum. But oil politics and oil business are crazy stuff. There are really no accepted rules. Britain, Germany and Holland all wanted to control the new oil. The ruler of the Ottoman Empire which controlled the region, Sultan Abdulhamid, was a ?player.? In the words of Edwin Black (page 117), ?Mortgaging the future and selling off segments of the realm was the Ottoman way. Oil wealth was not something to develop as a national treasure, but to auction off to industrial others.? Those ?industrial others? included Anglo-Persian, Royal Dutch Shell (an amalgam of Angel Dutch and Shell Transport), the newly formed Turkish Petroleum Company, and a highly skilled oil industry broker by the name of C.S. Gulbenkian ? the legendary Mr. Five Percent.

In a sense, Persian Gulf oil had become, by 1912, two years before the first World War (8 million dead, 21 million wounded, 2 million missing in action, $180 billion spent), the key to the domination of the world as it was then known. In April of 1909, Abdulhamid (known as ?Abdul the Damned?) was overthrown by a group of so-called ?Young Turks.? On August 4, 1914, Britain declared war on Germany. Two months later, the Ottoman Empire entered the war on Germany?s side. So Britain was at war with Turkey itself.

The paradox of the situation was that Britain continued to negotiate for Mesopotamia oil with the Turkish Petroleum Company (amongst others), 25 percent of which was owned by Germany (the Deutsche Bank) – their principal enemies in the war.

The oil situation had become so desperate for London in 1913 that ?Whitehall policymakers debated whether they should return to the less militarily effective but more reliable realm of coal. Budget planners even calculated the cost of coal retro-version: ?150,000 per ship.?

One of the complaints of British Hondurans in Mesopotamia (and Egypt) was that they were not allowed to fight in actual combat. The colonial newspapers of British Honduras never reported on the time our people spent in Iraq as ?other colonial units.? It appeared that only soldiers from India and the Gurkhas were allowed to fight with the British, who invaded Mesopotamia shortly after World War I began, and made Basra the center of their occupation, the purpose being to protect the Anglo-Persian Oil Company?s recently completed refinery at Abadan, Persia. (Abadan is located directly downstream from Basra on the Shatt-al-Arab waterway at the head of the Persian Gulf.)

The British, in pursuance of their Mesopotamia oil agenda, became allies with a group of Arab nationalists who were opposed to Ottoman Turkish rule of the region.

In September of 1915, the British, under the command of Sir John Nixon, began a push from Basra to Baghdad, which, after some early successes, ended up costing them tens of thousands of lives. The British were violently turned back at Kut. ?Finally, on April 29, 1916, in a humiliating defeat, 13,309 British troops and noncombatant support elements destroyed their weapons and equipment, and surrendered to the Turks.? The Turks mercilessly marched them almost 100 miles from Kut to Baghdad.

Afterwards, the British brought in reinforcements. Kut was retaken, and ?the British entered Baghdad triumphantly on March 11, 1917, in columns of weary Tommies and turbaned Indians?? (BANKING ON BAGHDAD, page 190.)

There has been a custom amongst older Belizeans to refer to everyone from the Middle East and Eastern Europe as ?Turks.? Arabs are called ?Turks? by older Belizeans, but many Arabs in Mesopotamia were enemies of the real Turks. The situation in Basra, Kut, Baghdad and Mosul must have been confusing and discouraging to our men, what with the difference between Turks and Arabs, and the differences amongst Kurds, Sunni Muslims and Shiite Muslims.

Ninety years after our young British Hondurans? experiences in Mesopotamia (Iraq), the same commodity which caused the British to send Belizeans to a strange and dangerous land, has now been found in Belize. It appears that the British have brought in ?protection? for Belizean oil. The location has changed, but the game is the same.