If you remember the film “Lawrence of Arabia” then you remember the cataclysmic scene in Damascus in which feuding Arab tribes squabble over who had responsibility for what as they attempted to take control of the city and lands taken form the Ottoman Turks in their joint campaign with the British.
This is an imaginative depiction of what actually occurred when the Hussein family of the Hashemite clan attempted to create a monarchy in Syria, placing Prince Faisal on the throne. The French did not appreciate this and ejected the prince from his purported kingdom.
In fact, the British, came up with another role for the dethroned king in meetings with him in London presided over by the new British Colonial Secretary, none other than Winston Churchill. Yes, Churchill was back for another of his many second acts, his place in politics and government reclaimed from the disastrous defeat at Gallipoli, a military catastrophe history deservedly places at Churchill’s feet.
With T.E. Lawrence – “Lawrence of Arabia” – one of his key advisors, Churchill moved forward with a plan to make a new Kingdom of Iraq and to crown Faisal its first monarch.
There were minor details to overcome, like a revolt in the territory now incorporated in Iraq, the expense of tens of millions of pounds to suppress it, several hundred dead British soldiers and thousands of dead Iraqis. Does any of this sound familiar?
But, all of that aside, Churchill efficiently next gathered around him in Cairo a group familiar with the entire mess in the Middle East — the mess of competing colonial and native interests, the emerging problem of Zionist claims and ambitions in what were then called Palestine and Transjordan, tribal rivalries, nascent kingly ambitions and ancient and historic grievances.
Among those summoned to join Churchill, Lawrence and the others came only one woman, Gertrude Bell.
Miss Bell, as noted in a first part of this brief exposition, was born in 1868 so that by the time of the Cairo Conference she was 53 years old, a graduate of Oxford University at a time when few women attended. She had traveled for decades throughout the Middle East, first in Persia and then over and over again through Arab lands including Syria, Mesopotamia and Palestine. She spoke at least six languages besides English, including Turkish and Arabic. She became an archaeologist, wrote and contributed to books about Syria and antiquity.
Then came WWI. In 1915, she was called to Cairo to become part of a new British agency, the Arab Bureau, where she renewed acquaintance with Lawrence. Her assignments led to her being sent, essentially as England’s plenipotentiary there, to Basra in what is now southern Iraq and contributed mightily to the British taking Baghdad from the Turks early in 1917. Think of her as having had a job akin to that of American Paul Bremer 90 years later, except she brought encyclopedic knowledge about the place and spoke the language.
Essentially, Gertrude Bell employed her knowledge of the region and particularly of Mesopotamia to draw — literally – to draw boundaries around what then became the new nation of Iraq. In doing so she combined in this pretend new country Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south. Bell and the British knew the risks in putting this combination under one flag, but believed it could be managed from a center commanded by a king with their support.
The Cairo conference confirmed Faisal as King and Bell spend most of the next four years in Iraq as a sort of British overlord/viceroy. She returned to England in 1925 and died in 1926, whether by accident or design, of too many sleeping pills, nine years before Lawrence died in a motorcycle crash.
In 1933, King Faisal I of Iraq died. His son Ghazi reigned to 1939 when he died in the crash of a sports car he was driving and was in turn succeeded by his 3-year-old son Faisal II, who assumed the powers and duties of monarch in 1953 when he ended the regency of an uncle
In 1958 the Iraqi Army overthrew the monarchy. Faisal II, with his entire family, was machine gunned to death. Afterward his body was put on public display, hung from a lamppost, a scene some will recall repeated nearly 50 years later in Fallujah during the American occupation of Iraq.
Suffice it to say that after the Army mutiny by 1968, out of a stew of intrigue, shifting allegiances and power alignments, one man emerged in control of all of Iraq and all levers of power in the country — Saddam Hussein, who notwithstanding the name was no relation to the former royal family.
We know the rest: How we blundered out way into Iraq in 2002/2003, how we discovered that if you invade another country you own it and that if you own it you have to figure out what to do with it.
We also learned something the British could have told us and that their then prime minister, Tony Blair, leading cheerleader for President George W. Bush’s apparently uninformed campaign to invade Iraq, could have told his American friends.
Blair after all only had to know his own country’s role in creating the modern Middle East to have known enough to warn the United States never to send an army there.
Mr. Blair and Mr. Bush were some pair.
Tony Blair should have known what George W. Bush did not. He should have known that the Middle East is a tar pit — that once you become stuck in it no matter how you try to pull yourself out you are pulled in deeper to get stuck again and again and again – all the while making enemies of people about whose past, histories, hatreds, feuds and virulent relationships you know hardly anything or possibly even nothing.
Joe Biden traveled back and forth to Iraq for eight years as President Obama’s special messenger as they attempted to reduce and extricate the United States from the mess we had made of Iraq.
They mostly succeeded though fools scoffed at the vice president when he said the best solution might be to separate Iraq into three nations, a Kurdish one in the north, a Sunni one in the center and a Shiite one in the south. That is effectively what has happened and probably should have happened in 1920.
But then to create an actual Kurdish Republic would be to invite war with Turkey and make a mess of our already fraught relationship with that country, which is now caught up in its own cathartic remaking from the secular democracy bequeathed by its modern founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, into a theocratic autocracy. That would be another battle with low percentages for success, because there is no length that Turkey will not go to, to stop a Kurdish nation from forming.
Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence have now each been dead nearly a century yet the Middle East that they and some of their friends constructed then seethes with rivalries, hatreds and mistrust that their empire’s ambitions sowed there from 1917 to 1921.
But now the Middle East is not a war spoil shared by France and England, but a place spoiled by chaotic wars in Iraq, Syria and Yemen: By the perpetual threat of war between Israel and Hezbollah in Lebanon and/or between Hamas and Israel in Jordan and the ever-rising tensions from Israeli occupation of the West Bank; and more and worse — always more and worse.
Into all this, President Trump has sent real estate developer Jared Kushner to walk in the deep furrows of the historic paths of Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence.
President Trump’s anointed Middle East viceroy would do well to read a lot of history before he travels there again and perhaps ought to try to explain some small part of it to his father-in-law.
Peeling the Onion 