THE WOMAN WHO DREW THE BOUNDARIES OF IRAQ
By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho
(ngier@uidaho.edu)
Those who forget history are doomed to repeat it.
--George Santayana
I just saw for the second time the movie Lawrence of Arabia. In 1963 it
won best picture and six other Academy Awards. It stars Peter O'Toole as
Lawrence; Omar Sharif as Sherif Ali; Alec Guiness as Prince Faisal; and Anthony
Quinn as Auda abu Tayi, whom Lawrence himself called the "greatest fighting man
in northern Arabia."
The absence of a leading woman in this picture is certainly not because there
were none to portray. On the contrary, the screenwriter ignored the remarkable
Gertrude Bell, daughter of a British steel magnate, who, during many trips to
the Middle East, fell in love with Arab culture.
In 1909 Lawrence and Bell met for the first time as they worked as archeologists
at Carchemish. In 1915 they were back together in Cairo where they worked as
intelligence agents, and they soon became avid supporters of Arab nationalism.
The movie portrays Lawrence dashing back and forth across Arabia, forging an
alliance between Faisal and Auda, blowing up Turkish trains, and executing a
daring capture of Aqaba, a Red Sea port. The movie could have at least had a
small part for Bell, because without her maps and intimate knowledge of desert
tribes Lawrence's incredible exploits would not have been possible.
Lawrence's experience was mainly with Faisal's and Auda's tribes, but Bell had
befriended more sheiks and mullahs than any other European of the time. Already
in 1905 she, against incredible odds, sought out and made friends the reclusive
and violent Druze Christians in Syria. Her book The Desert and the Sown
was widely praised, but many readers still could not believe that a woman could
have had such experiences.
In 1916 she arrived in Basra, Iraq, where her knowledge from previous trips to
that region allowed her to become the right hand woman to the British High
Commissioner in Baghdad. Speaking fluent Arabic, she traveled throughout the
country meeting tribal leaders—Kurds, Shias, and Sunnis—and surveying the land
for future borders. The Southeast border with Kuwait was always uncertain, and
Saddam Hussein capitalized on this in his fateful decision to invade that
country in August, 1991.
Lawrence led the Arab armies to victory over the Turks in Damascus, where Faisal
was crowned king. When the French dethroned him, Bell persuaded the British to
make him King of Iraq. With all his family in Mecca, the lonely Faisal, knowing
virtually nothing about his new kingdom, took Bell as his most intimate adviser,
and some hailed her as the uncrowned Queen of Iraq.
Although she fervently believed in the Arab cause, she still thought that Great
Britain had to play a parental role. Reflecting the biases of her day she said
that "the Oriental is like a very old child." Her biographer Janet Wallach
writes that Bell "had conceived Iraq and borne it as her own. She would raise it
in the best of British ways; . . . nannied by British advisers; mothered by
herself."
Traveling among the Arab tribes Bell was accepted as an honorary male among the
sheiks and mullahs. She did not find the Arab women's lives of much interest, at
least until she realized that Iraqi girls needed to be educated. Because of her
efforts, Iraq developed the best educational system for girls in the Middle
East.
British leaders initially rejected Bell's and Lawrence's call for Arab
self-determination, because they did not want to risk losing control of the
area's rich oil fields. The result was an insurgency in which tens of thousands
of Iraqis and thousands of British and Indian troops died. The British finally
agreed to hand over sovereignty to the people of Iraq.
Just as we were, the British were surprised by the stiff Iraqi resistance. Their
search and destroy tactics were not any more successful than American efforts in
Iraq today. There were heated debates back in England about the great expense
and loss of life in the Iraq campaign. Against the critics, Bell argued that if
the British left, there would be chaos. (Certainly without knowing of Bell's
precedent, George Bush repeated her belief that Iraq would become a model
country for the Middle East.) At the Cairo Conference in 1921, Sir Winston
Churchill argued that troops could be withdrawn and the air force could subdue
the insurgents alone. He got his way, but his policy failed just as most other
air force dominated campaigns have since then.
The French experience in Syria was much more like ours in Iraq. French officials
spoke no Arabic, made no Arab friends, and internal security was far worse than
in British occupied Iraq. Both Bell and the British High Commissioner were
fluent in Arabic, and Bell was close friends with most of the Sunni and Shiite
leaders. As one journalist said of Bell: "She carries the White Man's burden
without loss of feminine charms."
During his rule in Syria King Faisal enthusiastically endorsed the idea of a
Jewish homeland in Palestine. Most Arabs of course did not agree with Faisal and
Arab resistance to a Jewish presence is of course as firm as ever. In 1920 a
prominent Jew was appointed Iraqi's finance minister, and Baghdad's Jews and
Christians were invited to a reception when Faisal arrived in the summer of
1921. Faisal kissed a Torah that was presented to him and declared that in his
country "there is no distinction between Muslim, Christian, and Jew."
As Director of Antiquities, Bell arranged funding for an archeological museum in
Baghdad. She started it with 3,000 objects, which she herself had collected. The
collection grew to 170,000 antiquities from the cradle of human civilization.
Bell would have been shocked to learn that during the American invasion of 2003,
the oil ministry was well guarded, but her museum was left to be looted of
15,000 items.
Out of fear of a Shiite theocracy, Bell advised the Sunni Faisal to exclude the
majority Shias from government. As she said: "Final authority must be in the
hands of the Sunnis, otherwise you will have a theocratic state, which is the
very devil." Sunni dominated governments continued in Iraq until December, 2005,
when a Shiite coalition, with close ties to theocratic Iran, won over half the
seats in the new Iraqi Parliament.
As we overconfidently occupied South Vietnam in 1962, less that ten years after
the French defeat there, we were both naïve and arrogant. There is almost an 80
years gap between the British in Iraq and Bush's disastrous invasion, but there
was no excuse for us not to learn from the philosopher George Santayana, who
famously said that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it."
Nick Gier taught philosophy and religion at the University of Idaho for 31
years. He is heavily indebted Janet Wallach's Desert Queen for
information about Gertrude Bell.