In 1920, as ‘insurrection’ spread through the mainly Shia holy cities of the country and the efforts of Britain’s Civil Administration to find a future for the newly conceived Iraq began to look both fanciful and costly, Gertrude Bell wrote over the head of her titular chief, Sir Arnold Wilson, to old friends in high places, such as Lord Robert Cecil at the Foreign and  Edwin Montagu the Secretary of State at the India Office. Her purpose was to tell them of ‘the sort of government we ought to set up here’, in direct contradiction of the policies that Wilson had recently proposed to Whitehall. And she wrote of the dangers inherent in elections that might have the ‘unimaginable’ consequence of a Shia led fundamentalist government. ‘I have never heard anyone seriously propose a government without strong Sunni representation’, she wrote. Montagu was taken aback to receive an unofficial approach at this time, even from the woman at the centre of events in Iraq with whom he had enjoyed many a convivial dinner table conversation. He gently wrapped her over the knuckles: ‘I hope you will understand that in the present critical state of affairs of Mesopotamia when the future of the country hangs in the balance we should all pull together. If you have views which you wish us to consider, I should be glad if you would either ask the Civil Commissioner to communicate them or apply for leave and come home and represent them. You may always be sure of consideration of your views… Your remarks are however a useful warning.’

            Miss Bell’s warnings constituted an eye-witness account of the hazards confronting an occupying force since she arrived in Baghdad in 1917 in the backwash of the Kut al Armara debacle and the idiotic proclamation that Mark Sykes and the FO had put in the mouth of the GOC-in Chief, Sir Stanley Maude: ‘O! people of Baghdad. Remember that for 26 generations you have suffered under strange tyrants who have ever endeavoured to set one Arab house against another in order that they might profit by your dissentions…’. Arabs far and wide were invited to join with Great Britain in ‘realising the aspirations of your race’.  Many then and in years to come would ask, ‘Who are these Arabs?’ and ‘Where and what is the Arab race?’ Others, like Edwin Montagu, would see a sinister likeness in the habit of speaking of the ‘Jewish’ race as ‘the Semites’ as if the term belonged to them rather than the kindred races of the desert lands, the Habiru and the Arab. Such terms effectively cut across inconvenient acknowledgement of Palestinian or Syrian or Iraqi race and patriotism. Indeed, in the first year of the war when she contributed to Hogarth’s secret Arabian Report, Bell had laid down one of her markers.

Men who have kept the tradition of a personal independence, which was limited only by their own customs, entirely ignorant of a world which lay outside their swamps and pastures, and as entirely indifferent to  its interests as to the opportunities that it offers, will not in a day fall into step with European ambitions, nor welcome European methods…

Then in 1918 as she recuperated from sickness in the Shia heartland of Karbala she wrote to Hardinge in Paris, of the ‘progress’ that the administration had made towards ‘ordered government’; to her father figure Valentine Chirol, once foreign editor of The Times, of her pronounced  ‘hatred’ of ‘Mr Balfour’s Zionist pronouncement’, and of ‘a charming expedition’ with her new landlord in Baghdad, Musa Chalabi, whose family would carry on a long tradition of misplaced Anglophilia; of the implicit advice in her massively authoritative Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia issued as a government White Paper in 1921, that her own country should not imitate Turkey’s ‘impossible attempt’ to govern Iraq as ‘foreign dependency’; of her account of the new Electoral Law amended in the last days of 1920 to include the tribes, ‘The suggestion met with considerable opposition at the bottom of which lay the rooted objection of the propertied and conservative classes to admit the tribesmen who are regarded as little removed from savages, to share in the councils of State’; of the insurrection of the tribes that boiled over into 1921, an event Gertrude and her friend Aylmer Haldane, the CinC, brushed asid at the cost of many lives. Such warnings were cast aside again with cavalier abandon in 2001. This time the cost in lives, civil and military, was to prove greater still. In March 2004, ten bombs exploded aboard four trains in Madrid with the loss of hundreds of commuters' lives. A few days later Spanish voters rejected the right-wing  pro-American government led by Jose Aznar’s Popular Party in favour of the Socialists of Jose Zapatero who promptly took Spanish troops out of  Iraq. 

The writer's biography of Gertrude Bell is published in English and Arabic by Barzan. More excerpts will follow along with historical commentary on today's disasters.