History Strikes Again

Daughter of the Desert: The Remarkable Life of Gertrude Bell
By Georgina Howell

I was looking at the review for this book today and was struck by some of the history contained within it. It’s too bad those in power haven’t read it. Oh, what am I thinking? It really wouldn’t matter to the wise and powerful; it’s simply history and has nothing to do with today’s problems.

Let’s go back to the years right after the end of World War I; Gertrude Bell, a former intelligence officer*, was at the Paris Peace Conference and she wrote; “I think that there has seldom been such a series of hopeless blunders as the West has made about the East since the armistice.” It seems that Britain had promised self-determination for the Arabs in return for their cooperation against Turkey. (Turkey had fought on the side of Germany in WW I) But the British wanted Iraqi oil more than a little bit of fairness and so in the Sykes-Picot Agreement, the Arab world was parceled out into “Mandates” to be shared by the Western powers and Britain grabbed Iraq; installing King Faisal as the ruler. Faisal was not an Iraqi, but he was loyal to Britain and that was all that mattered.

The book is not available in the U.S. but I found another (Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell: Adventurer, Adviser to Kings, Ally of Lawrence of Arabia) and I found this note about Gertrude…

“A biography of the woman who, indirectly, was the catalyst for many of the troubles in the Middle East, including the Gulf War. In 1918, Gertrude Bell drew the region's proposed boundaries on a piece of tracing paper. Her qualifications for doing so were her extensive travel, her fluency in both Persian and Arabic, and her relationships with sheiks and tribal and religious leaders. She also possessed an ability to understand the subtle and indirect politeness of the culture, something many of her colonialist comrades were oblivious to. As a self-made statesman her sex was an asset, enabling her to bypass the ladder of protocol and dive into the business of building an Empire."

And we still wonder why the people of this region hate Westerners? I simply can’t imagine why.

*The first woman officer in the history of military intelligence