ABSTRACT
The evolution of Britain's World War I Mesopotamia policy was summarized in the 1915 report of the de Bunsen Committee established by Prime Minister Asquith to determine the future of the Ottoman Empire after the assumed British victory. This chapter focuses on the last two phases of British and German involvement in what became Iraq, beginning in 1914 and ending in 1932. For hundreds of years, Britain's traditional European enemy had been France, which, until Germany's rise to power after the Franco-Prussian war, had been the only European power that threatened the hegemony of the colonial British Empire. Britain's Mesopotamian policy during the war years was just as informal and subject to change as it had been throughout the previous decade. As soon as the war started, the Allied Powers of Great Britain, France, and Russia began talks about the best way to divide the Ottoman Empire between the three of them.
