Yesterday and Today

The story of Gertrude Bell, the Lady of Iraq, and the attempt by Britain and America to create congenial government in Baghdad by HVF Winstone, whose biography, first published by Cape in 1978, was  re-issued in2004 in an updated Anglo-Arab edition published by Barzan

Yesterday and

Today

'I’ve gone back now to the wild feeling of joy in existence – I’m happy in feeling that I’ve got the love and confidence of a whole nation, a very wonderful and absorbing thing – almost too absorbing perhaps.' Thus wrote Gertrude Bell to her father on16 February, 1922, less than a year after she had played the role of midwife in the birth of modern Iraq.

Twenty-five years after my biography of Gertrude was first published, seventy-five years after she was buried in the Christian cemetery in Baghdad, I find myself writing a new introduction to a revised version of the book in the knowledge that the most massive and powerful armed force in history is crossing the frontier she drew in the cause of what is described as 'regime change'.

Her life's work suddenly seems more relevant than ever. Her words and deeds are carried across the best part of a century on some irresistible chariot of history; impinging almost imperceptibly on generations that are largely ignorant of her purpose and, even in the highest echelons of government, uncomprehending of its consequences. American armed forces, closely followed by their British allies, are engaged in a campaign in Iraq that seems to have learnt nothing from a past of prodigious administrative effort, military disaster and unrealised political ambition.

In this year 2003 the aim, shared by a minority of people in the country and in the world at large, is regime change. Then, in 1921, an imperial British occupation force in which Gertrude Bell, the English Lady of the Baghdad court, played a critical role, took it upon itself to impose an unpopular constitutional monarchy on a country with no experience of constitutions or monarchies.

At that time too, there was an almighty row. The Civil Commissioner in the newly conquered country was Sir Arnold Wilson, 'AT' to the men of the Civil Administration. He and Gertrude were at loggerheads. In opposition to her view that a 'logical scheme' of democratic government was possible and desirable in a 'new sovereign Mohammadan state', he argued that the sentiments of the population were against the idea; the 'warlike Kurds...will never accept an Arab ruler'; the Shi'a would never accept Sunni domination, 'and no form of government has yet been envisaged which does not involve Sunni domination'. He threatened to resign if her view prevailed in Whitehall. It did and he resigned.

The whirlwind Winston Churchill in his last Liberal days as Lloyd George's Colonial Secretary, took over the task of making sense of irreconcilable wartime promises to Arab princes and nationalists, Zionist pretenders to Palestine, and the French and Russian allies; a task for which the foreign office under Balfour and Curzon had neither the stomach nor the energy.

The world recognised Gertrude well then. Pictures of her, camel-mounted, with Churchill and Clementine in the Egyptian desert, and sitting in the sand with Lawrence, had conveyed her aquiline features and her injudicious choice of hats to millions who, till that moment, knew little of her or Iraq.

Advised by Gertrude and her friend T.E. Lawrence, her 'beloved boy', Churchill decided to offer the throne of Iraq to one of the sons of the Sharif Husain of Mecca. The Colonial Secretary thought Faisal, the third son, 'an ideal candidate', though Lawrence and Gertrude at first suggested that he should take the throne of French mandated Syria leaving Iraq open to another of the Meccan princes. Anticipating the future perhaps, the French rejected the offer out of hand and so he landed up in Baghdad, crowned in the old Turkish Serai on the bank of the Tigris on 23 August 1921.

A plebiscite claiming 96 percent support among the disparate Iraqi peoples, was cited in support of the policy of the time. The precursort was tribal rebellion, and the end result the murder of Britain's proteges in a bloodbath of revenge and score settling. The defining belief then as now was one of moral imperative. To fail to realise promises made in the heat of war was unthinkable. To fail to give the oppressed, victimised peoples of Iraq the benefits of democratic government such as we enjoyed would be unforgivable. The views and desires of a predominantly Moslem population that knew then, and still knows, little of popular suffrage and cares nothing for the assertions of political messiahs, were beside the point. The consequences of the latest attempt at international do-goodery, somewhere along a well-trodden road, will almost certainly be the same again.

The Arab lands in general and Iraq in particular, remain politically and culturally beyond the ken of public and politicians in the West.

Then, in the 1920s, Britain rushed to make a settlement for three reasons. First, because it saw a friendly Iraq alongside Kuwait as the guardian of the overland route to India and of its vital oil possessions in Persia. Second, it offered an opportunity to realise in part at least its wartime promises. More importantly, perhaps, the British public, egged on by a sympathetic press, decided that it no longer wished to pay taxes to maintain governments of one sort and another in territories that it had laboured through four dire years of war to liberate.

It was seventy years on from the Hashemite solution as it came to be called, almost to the day, when space-age war of pin-point prosecution was visited on the Gulf region in 1991.

Saddam Husain al-Takriti decided to repeat the familiar claim of Iraqi leaders past and present to its diminutive neighbour Kuwait, on the ground that is was of old a dependency of the Ottoman vilayat of Basra and therefore, since modern Iraq incorporated that province, belongs to them. There is some truth in the argument. A foreign office memo described it as a 'legitimate but insubstantial' claim. Indeed, Lord Lansdowne, the Foreign Secretary of 1902, had described its Shaikh, Mubarak the Great to Kuwaitis, as a 'savage'.

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.

Before and 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. But that was not to be the end of the matter. It has festered throughout the eighty-year history of modern Iraq and will almost certainly continue to do so whatever administrations hold sway in Baghdad. It is tempting to wonder what the arguments will be on both sides when the 'new, prosperous and democratic Iraq' of Anglo-American making renews its historical claim

Gertrude's other vital contribution to the political climate of the region was in the realm of mapmaking. She it was who sketched in the detail of the frontiers of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and southern Iraq, consulting 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, that might keep future claimants from savaging each other). Her chief, 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.

Gertrude loved Iraq and its people. She chose to die in it and to be buried in its sandy ground. Ever since Iraqis have fought among themselves and her fellow countrymen and their American allies have fought over and around her body. As a second invasion of the sovereign state of Iraq takes place within a space of ten years I can hardly do better than repeat the words that I wrote at the beginning of the last paperback edition of the book published in 1993:

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