Never trust a Brit

Where I'm at, which is about the Versailles negotiations, the Brits have been hedging their bets in Arabia. Before the War they were trying to keep the Ottomans afloat against Russia and the German-Austrian axis both. When the Sauds ousted the Rashids from Riyad, this weakened the Ottomans along the Persian Gulf. The Brits were, at first, like... well so what. But they needed to fill that vacuum in case the Russians got there - and the Russians were allied with the French.

The Russians made themselves irrelevant by losing to the Japanese, and then the French got caught with their hands in the Omani slave-trade, like damned fools. So from 1905ish on, the Brits had a clear-ish field in the Gulf, give or take the odd Dane or Dutchman.

Then oil was discovered. Uh oh.

In between fighting each other, the Sauds' man-who-would-be-king found his way to conquering the Hasa. That's familiar to old-Arabian scriptologists for "Hasaitic"; it's the Arabian coast south of Kuwait. The Brits were already negotiating a series of treaties with Gulf emirates like the aforementioned Kuwait and also Muscat (now Oman), and I believe they even had a post in Bahrayn. The Turks' writ didn't extend too far past Baghdad anymore. So, now the Brits had another non-Turkish emirate to handle.

But the Brits didn't want to upset those Turks - who now were starting to get into rail, for instance connecting Damascus with al-Madina.

Events (dear boy) intervened, when the Turks united with the Germans and Austrians along that other rail, the more-famous Orient Express. The Brits got the Sauds on their side, as far as I can tell, mainly to ensure the Arabs didn't interfere with the British takeover of Basra.

Over 1916, when the Sauds had united ... the Sauds, the Brits figured they were in position to make a play for Baghdad. I didn't know about this little adventure but, I learn, they failed hard. As in, Gallipoli-hard. It was a fiasco.

That's about where, I think, the Brits start looking west, at the Hashimis now ruling al-Madina. Seems that the Sharif let slip to a few interested ears that he'd not complain if a few bribes came his way.

Britain, by now desperate, gave the Sharif just about everything he wanted, more-or-less ignoring the Sauds from then on. But then, Britain was promising stuff to the Jews too. Hell, they were even drawing lines on the map with the French.

How any Arab could take any of the British promises seriously is beyond me. The Sharif seems mainly to have been using the British funding to build up his own Near Eastern pan-Arab empire. Good luck with that.