Page 253 - Life of Gertrude Bell

Faisal’s Kingdom

The situation that confronted H.M. Government in Iraq at
the beginning of 1921 was a most unsatisfactory one.
Sir Winston Churchill,
The World Crisis: The After Math

In the aftermath of the rebellion and the intrigues of the year 1920,
Gertrude sat down and calmly wrote her finest political work,
Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia. It was a monu­
mental document and if Churchill, when he took over the respon­
sibility for the territory, sought inside guidance, he found it in
her brilliant summary of events. Made up of ten chapters, it was
in effect a resume of Britain’s role in the Persian Gulf and Eastern
Arabia and of the events which led from die appearance of the
Indian Expeditionary Forces at the Shatt al Arab under cover of
naval guns on November 6th, 1914 to the return of Sir Percy Cox
in October 1920 as High Commissioner. She began:
In the spring of 1910, Ottoman rule in Mesopotamia was
epitomised by a singularly competent observer, Mr J. G.
Lorimer, British Resident in Baghdad, in words which cannot
be bettered. ‘The universal Turkish system of administration,’
he wrote in the Political Diary for the month of March, ‘is in
almost every respect unsuitable to Iraq. The Turks themselves
must recognise that it is a failure here, but probably few of
them appreciate the cause, though it is sufficiently obvious.
Iraq is not an integral part of the Ottoman Empire, but a foreign
dependency ... I had no idea before coming to Baghdad of the
extent to which Turkey is a country of red tape and blind and
dumb officialdom, or of the degree in which the Turkish