Queen of Quagmire ... more lessons from the Brits

From The New York Review of Books:

"When the British needed a senior political officer in Basra during World War I, they appointed a forty-six-year-old woman" Gertrude Bell. From 1916 to 1926 she served there, helping create Iraq "in 1920 from the three Ottoman provinces of Baghdad, Basra, and Mosul, which were conquered and occupied by the British during World War I...."

She wrote almost as soon as she arrived in Basra in 1916: '...We rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme.' [And]

The wild drive of discontented nationalism...and of discontented Islam...might have proved too much for us however far-seeing we had been; but that doesn't excuse us for having been blind.

Bell is...both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for "nation-building."

T.E. Lawrence ["Lawrence of Arabia"] was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier [from Iraq] and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.

(Photo: Gertrude Bell's grave at the Anglican Cemetery in Baghdad.)