Introduction

to new and revised edition of GERTRUDE BELL by HVF Winstone, published by Barzan, October 2004, first published by Jonathan Cape 1978

‘We shall, I trust, make it a centre of Arab civilisation and prosperity … ’. Gertrude Bell to her father as British troops entered Baghdad, March 1917

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They called her Al Khatun, ‘the Lady’, in the land she adopted with maternal devotion. She loved Iraq and its people. She chose to die in Baghdad and to be buried in its soil, though some eighty years after her death occupation troops wander past her grave in the Christian cemetery largely unaware of the woman whose remains lie within its stone envelope. They and the politicians who demand their presence know little of her legacy or of the history of the land she helped to fashion out of the remnants of war and empire.

A new edition of my biography of Gertrude Bell enables me to reappraise her work and achievements in the light of major political and military events in the Iraq she helped so decisively to fashion from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire in the aftermath of the First World War

For Gertrude, Iraq was the place where east and west came together in creative partnership. She was in a very real sense the midwife at the birth of the modern nation. She established the first libraries and academic institutions which would house and translate the incalculable texts and artefacts that lay buried beneath its surface. Her last recorded act was to leave funds to that end. She created the country’s first museum and with the aid of the foremost archaeologists of her day she filled it with the most representative and splendid objects of a past that goes back 5000 years to the empires of Sumer and Akkad, to the primordial images of the Old Testament and beyond to the legendary period of King Gilgamesh and the royal graves of biblical Ur, and into the mists of pre-history. Her life's work is more relevant today than ever, carried across time on some irresistible chariot of history; impinging however imperceptibly on generations that are largely ignorant of its purpose and, in the highest echelons of government, uncomprehending of its lessons.

As I write this introduction to a third major edition, Iraq once again lies desolate. The USA and Britain are in illegal occupation of the country, the fourth such foreign presence since 1918. The lessons that were visited on Britain in that first occupation, which ended in 1932 when Iraq was formally received into the League of Nations, were well documented, not least in Gertrude’s letters and official communications of the 1920s, but they did not impose on President Bush or Prime Minister Blair in 2003. Past events were repeated with sinister exactness and their consequences largely ignored.

In the chaos of the Gulf war of 2003, the museum that was the climax of my subject’s life and work was one of many victims of vandalism and theft in a land that houses a disproportionate part of civilisation’s heritage. As its founding mother and Iraq's first director of antiquities, she had every cause to take pride in her offspring. Though she did not live to see the inscription that the King of her making, Faisal I, ordered to be placed in its principal gallery, she would most surely have prized the words: ‘With wonderful knowledge and devotion she assembled the most precious objects in it, and through the heat of the summer worked on them until the day of her death on 12th July, 1926.’

The portrait bust with its bronze plaque that bore those words, designed by the sculptor Anne Acheson, was dedicated in 1929 and was removed from the museum in an upsurge of nationalism soon after the murder of the country's royal family and its old-guard politicians in 1958. A history of corporate theft and thuggery which began with Hulagu Khan in the 13^th century AD was completed in 2003 when many of the establishment's possessions were looted, though the foresight of the museum director and his staff had ensured that the most valuable items were safely hidden.

The subsequent claim of impotence by the invading force was challenged by Gertrude's bequest, the British School of Archaeology in Iraq, in a statement issued soon after the Anglo-American attack: 'The School was approached by... the American military and asked for information on sites and monuments which might be at risk in the event of war. We were also asked what precautions the military should take to avoid "collateral damage"'. In response to these requests an excellent website was set up by Professor Postgate and Dr Robson answering these queries… We also advised that all museums and sites must be guarded, and warned of the very real danger of looting’. Similar warnings were given by American museums and universities. Almost a year later, in December 2003, the BSAI was asking its members in all parts of the world to keep a lookout for suspicious artefacts being taken through airport terminals, while a list of experts was compiled to assist Customs and Excise and the police in the identification of stolen antiquities. If few customs officials were likely to recognise any but the most obvious of missing objects, it is just as true that few non-specialist archaeologists would stand a chance of doing so, for in a land as rich in antiquity as Iraq there are at any one time hundreds of objects awaiting identification and accurate cataloguing. The cost of the invasion in terms of the world's cultural loss may never be accurately determined.

Gertrude's other vital contribution to the future political climate of the region was in the realm of mapmaking. The words of her letter of 4 December 1921, spring irresistibly to mind: ‘I think I’ve succeeded in compiling a reasonable frontier.’ In the absence of anyone else with comparable knowledge of the region, she sketched the common frontiers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and southern Iraq. She consulted with the great sheikhs of the desert – ‘they are the people I love, I know every Tribal Chief of any importance throughout the whole length and breadth of Iraq and I think them the backbone of the country’ – to ensure that the drinking wells of one were not given to another, that oil fields just coming into prominence were apportioned so as to make conflict less likely (and a neutral buffer zone, about which no one spoke in time of war, might keep future claimants from savaging each other). Her chief, High Commissioner Sir Percy Cox, sold the package, geographical and political, to the new Iraq, the Shaikh of Kuwait and the desert princes of Arabia in November 1922. This more than any of her contributions to the new Iraq bore the mark of the colonialist, of the imperial regime that, however noble its intention, left a stain on the West’s relations with the Middle East that has had its severest repercussions in recent times. From the outset those frontiers were open to question, especially with regard to Iraq's legitimate desire for proper access to the Persian Gulf, and not a few Arab commentators have doubted their wisdom.

Her contribution as an explorer to the map of the Arabian peninsula was not specially significant, despite the efforts of some of her more sentimental protagonists to prove otherwise, but of her courage and the sensitivity of her observation there can be little doubt, as her books Amurath to Amurath and The Desert and the Sown, still in print after nearly a century, testify. The titles she has been given by some admirers smack of ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ mythology and do no service to the recipient. Still, few would dissent from the verdict of a distinguished English traveller of the following generation, Wilfrid Thesiger, who when asked to compare Gertrude with her successor Freya Stark, replied, ‘If any one woman was to be thought of as a serious traveller, it had to be Gertrude Bell’.

It was, however, in the political field that her contribution to the very foundation of the Iraq state was most significant. Not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, Iraq was occupied in her day by a foreign power that could not disguise its assumption of superior political and social judgement. That foreign power was Britain and then at least it had the excuse of victory in war. Gertrude was ambivalent in her attitude, always insistent on Iraq’s sovereignty but, equally, maternalistic and to that extent patronising, liable at the height of her influence to support at one moment and oppose the next the imperial objectives of ministers and immediate chiefs, the army commander and the civil commissioner; to change direction in her support for this Arab leader or that. But it is unlikely that she would have taken kindly to the crass presumption of fellow countrymen and Americans who followed in her wake nearly a century later. Like all champions of other people's causes, she was often given to error, dangerous error, but her words and actions were those of a friend, sincere in the pursuit of Iraqi independence, and above all in her determination to preserve the heritage of the cradle of civilisation.

She espoused many political causes as her letters to leading figures of the Whitehall establishment such as Lord Robert Cecil and Lord Hardinge of Penshurst demonstrate, but on no issue was she as consistent or forthright as in her opposition to Zionism and her government’s determination to offer Palestine to the Jews as a sop to an American presidency that was reluctant to enter the First World War in its final devastating year. Like many of her prominent Jewish friends, the chief of whom was Edwin Montagu, Lloyd George’s Secretary of State for India, she was vehemently anti-Zionist, a bitter opponent of the Balfour Declaration. Her letter of protest was read to the Lloyd George Cabinet in 1917 in a last ditch effort by Montagu to prevent the adoption of that fateful declaration. Both wished it ill.

Gertrude would have had little difficulty in condemning American-backed support for Israel’s claim to military priority in the region. The joint menace of Israeli dominion and the west’s unquenchable thirst for oil had begun to influence events in the Middle East long before they became the underlying causes of two Gulf wars at the end of the 20th century. Indeed, it is unlikely that she would have hesitated to append her signature to the letter sent by 52 of the most distinguished of Britain’s diplomatic emissaries to the world press on the 26^th April 2004. The central theme of that letter was that in it support of American policy in Iraq Britain had abandoned the Middle East strategy that had been the one real hope of peace and security in the modern world; a strategy that had come to be known as a ‘road map’ for the settlement of the Israel/Palestine conflict, even though that diplomatic initiative had little appeal for the Palestinians whose homeland had been seized. With unprecedented unanimity among so many of the officials who helped to formulate British policies in the region, the letter spoke of the need to ‘resolve a problem which, more than any other, has for decades poisoned relations between the West and the Islamic and Arab worlds’. They described policies that Israel and America had foisted on the international community as ‘one-sided and illegal’. They declared that those policies were doomed to failure. And they went on: ‘This abandonment of principle comes at a time when, rightly or wrongly, we [Britain] are portrayed throughout the Arab and Muslim world as partners in and illegal and brutal occupation in Iraq’. The diplomatic world had given expression to its pent up sense of frustration and disbelief, and in doing so it described a repetition of the scene that Gertrude had been a culpable part of in the previous century. She too had mistaken the strength of Iraq’s sense of nationality, its religious pride and its patriotism. Her own loyalties were tested severely in the tribal uprisings of 1919-20. But she had the grace in the end to admit her mistake and to apologise for it. The scene in 2003/4 was sadly reminiscent of events that had plagued Britain at the tail-end of empire, events that might have warned thinking politicians of the dangers inherent in unilateral action.

The motives of these modern crusades, the erosion of Palestinian rights and hopes and the determination to immobilise Iraq, are all too clear. They were set out when Israeli planes flew in sovereign skies with American approval to bomb an Iraqi nuclear plant while they, the Israelis, developed their own massive nuclear arsenal. They have sent a message out to the world that only one nation's policies will henceforth be allowed to prevail in the region, a sinister American-Israeli claim to hegemony that was classically portrayed by an American diplomat - oderint dum metuant; 'let them hate, so long as they fear'.

With the second American invasion of the Gulf, images entered the collective mind by way of electronic gadgetry that opened up the prospect of war as a source of live domestic entertainment, purveyed through the medium of a censored and predetermined script. When news came of the looting of the National Museum of Baghdad, it was clear that while most oil fields had been protected and preserved, a treasure house of international importance had been abandoned to its fate and ransacked. My subject's life work was in a very real sense savaged by an act of undeclared war based on the false premise of immediate danger posed to neighbours and the world at large. The status quo has been destroyed and it cannot be revived. Indeed, the emergence of a brash new imperial power in the Middle East is the main reasons for an urgent revision and re-issue of this work. In the bitter aftermath of the disgracefully named campaign ‘Shock and Awe’, and the iron-fist policy that followed, leading members of the British government resigned in protest, the honesty and integrity of an American president and a British prime minister were impugned by their own words and actions, a British government scientist died, thousands of Iraqis and hundreds of servicemen, American and British, lost their lives in a war that history suggested would serve no useful purpose. A theatre critic reviewing a performance of Henry V at the National Theatre in London, commented presciently, 'Rarely has the closing promise of the play – that England will "bleed" for what has been done – seemed so foreboding'.

Much had been done in earlier centuries to make the world at large welcome in Iraq. Gertrude’s pioneering work in this and other parts of the Middle East had been preceded by centuries of massive accomplishment by the likes of the Italian Pietro della Valle, the Dane Carsten Niebuhr, Englishmen Claudius Rich, Henry Layard and Henry Rawlinson, the Frenchman Paul-Emile Botta, men of many nationalities whose enterprise and labour filled the museums of Europe almost to capacity with the wall reliefs and sculptures of Sumer and Akkad, of Nineveh, Nimrud, Assur and Khorsobad, of Persepolis and Babylon. Her contemporaries – German, French, British and American – brought increasingly meticulous methods of digging and increasingly scientific methods of investigation to the hundreds of mounds that betrayed the existence of Sumerian, Babylonian and Assyrian occupation. She had championed German methods of excavation, but she made it her business to ensure that all who played a part in the truly international and interdenominational achievements of Iraqi archaeology, including Iraq itself, received a fair share of its fruits. She insisted in the course of her supervision of the spoils of Ur and other sites that Iraq must keep the best of the finds, even though her insistence sometimes broke the hearts of Woolley and Langdon and many other diggers.

Gertrude herself wrote in highly specialist branches of ecclesiastical history and archaeology, and yet was capable of producing works on travel and desert life that were classics of their time. Some are still in print. Newcastle University, the repository of virtually all the Bell papers, is in the process of setting up a comprehensive on-line archive of documents and photographs. Since this book was first published in 1978 there have been three paperback editions. Other biographies have followed in the wake of mine. But it seems that the Arab lands in general and Iraq in particular remain politically and culturally beyond the ken of governments and the large majority of people in the West. Even in the perspective of almost incessant political intervention and warfare, a romantic, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ mentality seems to prevail in British institutions.

A few further words of introduction are called for in view of the political and military turmoil that has superseded the first edition. In 1991 Saddam Husain al-Tikriti decided to repeat the familiar claim of Iraqi leaders past and present to its diminutive neighbour Kuwait. The claim is ambivalent, based on the proposition that it was of old a dependency of the Ottoman vilayet of Basra and therefore, since modern Iraq incorporated that province, belongs to them. I note in the new text, however, that it is a view that was shared at the beginning of the 20th century by the British government. A Foreign Office memo of 1902, commenting on the Ottoman claim, described it in characteristically obtuse language as 'legitimate but insubstantial'. But by the same token, the Mosul region which Britain tacked on to the old Iraq despite Turkish and French objections, was for centuries an integral part of Turkey proper and owed no past allegiance to its new parent. It is noteworthy that the Sykes-Picot agreement signed by the three chief allied powers in 1916 included Mosul in the French 'sphere of Arab Confederation'. After the formation of the administrations in which Gertrude played a formative part, Britain resisted the claim to Kuwait and in 1913, Britain and Turkey signed a Convention in which the Turkish demand was withdrawn, while Britain in turn recognised the Turkish claim that Najd, the central Arabian province ruled by Ibn Saud of Riyadh and roughly equal in area to two-thirds that of the sub-continent of India, was part of the Basra vilayet. But that was not to be the end of the matter. The claim to Kuwait has festered throughout the existence of modern Iraq and will almost certainly continue to do so whatever administrations hold sway in Baghdad. It is worth mentioning in the same context that islands off the Shatt-al-Arab between Iraq and the Bay of Kuwait which Gertrude’s map assigned to the latter are regarded by most independent observers as rightfully belonging, geographically and politically, to Iraq. America and Britain are still learning about the intractability of the 'Kurdish dispute' and the conflicts of interest that have ever bedevilled a border region that is shared by Turkey, Iraq and Iran.

In the aftermath of the 1991 Gulf War, words in my original work that had seemed of no special importance assumed for me, and perhaps for others, a more vivid significance. As I learned from television news of a pre-programmed missile launched from a warship making its way impudently along al-Rashid Street towards its target, I turned afresh in my astonishment to the letters which my subject wrote to political friends and doting family at the moment of Iraq’s rebirth as a constitutional monarchy three generations before. I contemplated over again a story that began in innocence and hope, and brought revolution, violent ambition, and armed intervention in its train, until Britain’s politicians, faced with a taxpayers’ rebellion at the ballot box, eventually gave up the unequal struggle. Words of premonition and warning seemed to leap from the pages of the complex political essay woven by Gertrude’s letters. It seemed to me, and to others, that a revised edition of my biography with some small additions to those chapters which deal with the creation of the Iraqi state, might usefully be considered. Several such changes were incorporated in the paperback edition published by Constable in 1993. Now I am able to weave them more systematically, and perhaps more sympathetically, into the general context of the book.

In order to help the reader to digest the arcane detail of Gertrude's work and disputes within the civil administration of Iraq in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, as well as the archaeological work that gave rise to many of the treasures of the world's museums, and the subsequent Gulf wars, I have included as an appendix to this edition a chronological history of the country which begins in the pre-historic era and terminates with the Anglo-American invasion of 2003. I have used footnotes to indicate sources of significant additional information and have expanded the existing chapter notes at the end of the book to embrace political debate as well as the bare facts of the lives and deaths of relatives.

Finally, on the vexed question of Arabic transliteration, I confess to the impossibility of achieving a perfect consistency between my own text and quotations. Arabic is virtually two languages, the written and the spoken, and the two seldom come together since, as a Semitic language, Arabic does not have vowels of definite weight or value. Every writer develops his own conventions. In my case, the most obvious nonconformity is the use of the word Badawin as opposed to the Anglo-French Bedouin, which I have retained from the original edition. In fact, Badawin is the correct literal translation of the spoken plural form; strictly, Badawi is singular but I have resisted its use. Occasionally I have allowed Badu, the collective noun. Otherwise, I have taken the small liberty, even in quotation, of opting for consistency in the spelling of common words such as shaikh rather than sheikh, amir not emir, Iraq not Irak, wadi not wady, etc, for which one spelling is as good as another. The use of the apostrophe before some words such as 'Iraq, indicates a glottal sound somewhere between 'a' and 'u' that does not exist in non-Semitic languages, and which results in variations such as Iraq and Uruk (and Erech in the case of the Old Testament) for, more or less, the same place. Gertrude liked to use it thus and always referred, correctly if pedantically, to ‘The ‘Iraq’, A wholly arbitrary consistency makes life easier for the reader and I have tried, where possible, to achieve it. I seek no other justification. I have included a glossary of commonly used Arabic words and phrases as an appendix to the text.

HVFW, January 2004