Those who have made a study of war in the Middle East can hardly fail to spot some well defined danger zones. For example, Central Arabia was just too hot for most of the year to permit occupation even by Egyptians and Turks who were accustomed to sub-tropical heat. Iraq proved inhospitable territory for Alexander the Great and even for the mass murderer Hulagu Khan.

Today, Mr Bush's and Mr Blair's aircraft may begin an offensive with overwhelming force. But ground troops have to eat, sleep and move around when they are sent in to make good the depredations of aerial attack.

A small piece of potted history may make salutary reading for the strategic planners in the Pentagon and Whitehall.

It is eighty-six years since British troops set out in 1916 to wrest Baghdad from the Turkish army under the hero of the Franco-Prussian war, Field Marshal von der Goltz, and General Khalil Pasha. Thus was set in motion a train of events that would bring humiliating defeat to the British Expeditionary Force 'D', cause a retreat to a township by the name of Kut al-Amara at a bend in the river Tigris that would result in the longest siege suffered till that time by a British army. The eventual defeat and surrender of Field Marshal Townshend and his army of fighting men such as the Dorsets, Gurkhas, Mahrattas and Punjabis, whom the press at home named the 'Invincibles', had long-lasting repercussions for the political and military elite. When the chickens came home to roost after the war, the three men principally to blame, Lloyd George, Kitchener and Winston Churchill, the 'Easterners', were invulnerable. The latter had returned to office in the post-war coalition, though the Tories had refused to serve in any war Cabinet of which he was part; Kitchener was dead; and Lloyd George was Prime Minister.

The CinC India was threatened with dismissal. Lord Hardinge, senior Under Secretary at the Foreign Office and Viceroy of India, had opposed the plan to march on Baghdad but when political recrimination is rife nobody worries about small things like documentary evidence; he was called on by Parliament to resign his post when a Parliamentary Commission condemned him as one of the 'guilty' men. He was absolved when he demanded that he be 'put on trial' in a criminal court so that he could defend himself openly. Whitehall did not think much of that idea. He was sent instead to Paris as ambassador.

In the end, the Turks were defeated, the British administration moved to Baghdad, a new Iraqi state was created out of the Mesopotamia of the Greeks, and a new royalist regime was instituted by the High Commissioner and his right-hand assistant, Oriental Secretary Gertrude Bell, whom the Arabs called Al Khatun, the Lady. Gertrude was close to the new King, Faisal I, son of the Sharif of Mecca, keeper of the holiest places of Islam. And she was befriended by one of the wealthiest of Iraqis, Hajji Naji, who owned large plantations and much property. He was an unshakeable Anglophile and Gertrude spent the rest of her life to 1926 in the charming cottage he gave her in the suburbs of Baghdad.

Though it has undergone many changes, the Iraq of the present owes its existence to Britain, even if it is rightly sceptical of some British versions of its history. To this day, an admirer of the English is known in Iraq as a 'Hajji Naji'. Mr Blair has ensured that there aren't too many of them.

Ends

8 September 02; revised 10/04/04