John Barrett Kelly

JB Kelly (Died 29 August 2009) was an 'Influential scholar of the Middle East' who despised Arab nationalism and yearned for a return to British imperial power.

According to an obituary in the Telegraph he 'was one of the foremost commentators on the Middle East, and noted for his independence of mind; along with Bernard Lewis, PJ Vatikiotis and Elie Kedourie he was one of the so-called "Gang of Four", pre-eminent scholars in the field who believed that Western policy towards the Arab world was distorted by sentimental illusions - notably, that it mistook the tyranny imposed by Arab nationalist regimes for progress.'

As such Kelly was occasionally accused of being pro-Zionist. That was a simple error. He was critical of both Arab and Israeli actions at different times. His real admiration was for the British imperial servants, generally in the India Office, who had brought stability and genuine progress to Arabia and the Gulf. His real contempt was for the British and American governments who had appeased weak anti-imperial challengers, betraying their own diplomats, their sheikhly regional allies, and the subjects of repressive Arab rulers in turn.

Despite his distaste for Arab nationalist dictators, he was no supporter of the recent Iraq War. In fact, he was a strong critic of both the military campaign and of Tony Blair's statesmanship in general.

He took the view that the war had been embarked on almost frivolously, with neither a clear justification in terms of British or Western interests nor a clear idea of how its outcome would advance them. He saw it as an expression of a messianic thoughtlessness on Blair's part - and, in some respects, as the fitting climax to decades of Western policies based on fanciful illusions about the Arab world.

He did at various times, however, have some measure of influence over those policies; first over British strategy in the Arabian peninsula in the 1950s and 1960s, and then, after a move to Washington, over American Middle Eastern policy in the 1980s.

That influence came after Kelly, a professional historian, published his second book - Britain and the Persian Gulf 1795-1880 (1968) - which established him as the leading academic authority on the history of the region. At that time his detailed knowledge of border disputes and maritime treaties in the Gulf led to his advice being sought both by the Foreign Office and local sheikhdoms.

But his robust belief that the Gulf benefited greatly from a stabilising British military and political presence ensured that he would exercise less and less influence over British policy as London relinquished its role east of Suez in the 1970s. For their part, however, local emirates continued to seek his advice and support and to relish his deep knowledge of their own histories.

Early life

According to the Telegraph:

John Barrett Kelly was born in Auckland, New Zealand, on April 5 1925, the son of a chemist. When John was two years old his father died, and he was brought up by a succession of nuns and aunts while his mother worked as a hotel receptionist. She scraped together enough money to send him to Sacred Heart College, the renowned local Catholic boys' school, where he showed early promise as a scholar. He went to University College, Auckland, aged 16, reading Geology before switching to History and Literature. In 1943, when he was 18, Kelly tried to enlist in the Royal New Zealand Air Force, but his poor eyesight let him down. He had asked a friend to memorise the eye chart, but when he went in for his medical and reeled off the letters before him, he was pronounced unfit. The doctor had switched the chart.

Instead Kelly spent his summers during the war working on the docks in Auckland and helping to build aerodrome hangars for the American Air Force, which had bases in northern New Zealand for its island-hopping campaign in the Pacific. After the war he qualified as a schoolteacher and taught until 1951 in schools in New Zealand, Queensland, England and Egypt. It was in Alexandria that he met and married Valda Elizabeth Pitt - he was teaching at the British Boys' School and she at the English Girls' College. His experience of Egypt at the end of King Farouk's reign sparked a lifelong interest in the Middle East. He would quote Talleyrand to describe life in postwar Alexandria - those who never experienced it had no idea of "la douceur de vivre.

Returning to England, and disillusioned with teaching, he decided to sit for a higher degree. Since the Auckland BA was not recognised by London University, he had to pass papers in Latin and Anglo-Saxon and Medieval History, under the stern but kindly eye of Professor Bindoff of Queen Mary's College, London, in order to qualify for a London University BA. He was then accepted by Professor William Norton Medlicott to take an MA at the LSE. Realising Kelly's potential, Medlicott encouraged him to do a PhD on Britain and the Persian Gulf, which was to become his field of expertise.

After receiving his doctorate in 1955, Kelly became a research fellow at the Institute of Colonial Studies at Oxford University until 1958, under the guidance of Sir Reader Bullard, British Ambassador to Iran during the Second World War, and a British minister to Saudi Arabia in the 1930s. It was with the encouragement of Bullard, who was to become his mentor, that Kelly made his first trip to the Gulf in 1957. He visited Iraq in the dying days of the Hashemite regime and then flew on to the Trucial Coast - known in the 19th century as the Pirate Coast, and now forming the United Arab Emirates. The only Europeans in Abu Dhabi at that time were either oil men, diplomats or soldiers.

The British political officer introduced him to Sheikh Shakhbut before taking him to see his brother, Sheikh Zayid. Kelly was to form a firm friendship with both men, which was to survive the political turmoil in Abu Dhabi in the following two decades. He paid a particularly instructive visit to Buraimi, Oman, from where British-officered Trucial Scouts had ejected an American-backed Saudi force (engaged on an oil-grabbing mission) in 1955. He and the political officer, Martin Buckmaster, soon picked up signs that the Saudis were retaliating by stirring up the tribes of inner Oman with arms and money. Kelly passed this information on to the British political resident in Bahrain, Sir Bernard Burrows, who discounted it, coming as it did from a Gulf novice.

Burrows returned on leave to London, only to be called back to the Gulf in a hurry in July 1957 when the Imamate rebellion broke out in Oman. Kelly's first publication, written for Chatham House, was a paper on the revolt. His growing expertise on the tribes of Eastern Arabia was soon in demand by the Foreign Office, which hired him to advise on the long-disputed boundaries between the Trucial sheikhdoms, Oman and Saudi Arabia. His first book, Eastern Arabian Frontiers (1964), was based on this work.

In the meantime he had left Oxford, partly out of distaste at the academic milieu of the newly-founded Middle East Centre at St Antony's College. After expressing concern at a dinner about the tenor of the reports on Middle Eastern politics from Kim Philby, the spy who was then The Economist's correspondent in Beirut, Kelly was told that "he was not fit to clean Philby's boots. He left for a series of teaching posts at Wesleyan College in Delaware, Ohio; the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; and the University of Wisconsin at Madison, where he became Professor of Imperial History and published his magnum opus, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880.

As Britain withdrew from Aden in 1967 and prepared to withdraw from the Gulf in 1971, Kelly left academia and became an adviser to Sheikh Zayid of Abu Dhabi on the issue of its disputed frontiers with Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Coming up against the increasingly pro-Saudi alignment of both Britain and America, Kelly fought hard to make the best case for Abu Dhabi's retention of the Khawr al-Udayd inlet on the marches of Qatar. This was coveted by the Saudis as an outlet to the lower Gulf. In addition, they sought to control the tract of desert south of the Liwa Oasis, which contained the newly-discovered Zarrara/Shaiba oilfield, then the largest strike in the world.

In the end Kelly was thwarted by the murky compromises of Arab and international politics. This experience left him more convinced than ever that Britain's hasty withdrawal from the Gulf had destabilised the region, leaving the smaller states prey to the territorial ambitions of their larger neighbours, Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Iran, and the West open to oil blackmail, a view later vindicated by events. This opinion was not popular in Whitehall or the City, where eyes could appear more firmly fixed on recycling the flow of petrodollars through arms sales and lavish infrastructure projects. But it seemed to find a ready audience with Margaret Thatcher, then leader of the opposition. Further encouraged by Elie Kedourie and David Pryce-Jones, Kelly outlined his stance in his most accessible book, Arabia, the Gulf and the West (1980).

This publication made a great impact in Washington, where the incoming Reagan administration was searching for a new, more robust policy in the Gulf. As a visiting research fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Centre and the Heritage Foundation in Washington in the early 1980s, Kelly's advice on the region was sought by administration officials, senators, congressmen, journalists and think-tanks. He was directly involved in lobbying against the sale of AWACs early-warning aircraft to Saudi Arabia, arguing that it would further destabilise the region. But as Saudi influence grew in Washington with Reagan's forging of an informal alliance with the kingdom, Kelly's influence inevitably declined. His prescient warnings that Saudi money was being used to establish an international network of Muslim fundamentalists were thus largely ignored.

Subsequently, he advised the government of Oman on its disputed frontiers with Saudi Arabia and South Yemen, paying trips to inner Oman, Dhofar and the Masandam Peninsula. When not advising governments, Kelly beavered away in the National Archives in Washington and the Public Record Office in London, collecting material for a book on Anglo-American relations with Saudi Arabia from 1926 to 1956, which he was never to complete.

Kelly left Washington in 1988 and the following year retired with his wife to south-western France. Although keeping up with events in the Middle East, and being asked on innumerable occasions to return to the Gulf and Washington, he preferred a quiet existence of reading and reflection. He kept himself fit playing tennis until his last years, despite his poor eyesight.