The meeting had gone on for five grueling days with no compromise in sight. So one night in late November 1922, Cox, Britain’s representative in Baghdad, summoned to his tent Sheik Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud, soon to become ruler of Saudi Arabia, to explain the facts of life as the British carved up the remnants of the defeated Ottoman empire.
“It was astonishing to see [ibn Saud] being reprimanded like a naughty schoolboy by His Majesty’s High Commissioner and being told sharply that he, Sir Percy Cox, would himself decide the type and general line of the frontier,” recalled Harold Dickson, the British military attaché to the region, in his memoirs. “This ended the impasse. Ibn Saud almost broke down and pathetically remarked that Sir Percy was his father and mother who made him and raised him from nothing to the position he held and that he would surrender half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered.”
Within two days, the deal was done. The modern borders of Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and Kuwait were established by British Imperial fiat at what became known as the Uqauir Conference. – Journalist Glenn Franke
