From Gertrude Bell’s letters, in Iraq, in 1916:
We rushed into the business with our usual disregard for a comprehensive political scheme. We treated Mesop[otamia] as if it were an isolated unit, instead of which it is part of Arabia…. When people talk of our muddling through it throws me into a passion. Muddle through! why yes, so we do—wading through blood and tears that need never have been shed.
And four years later:
We are largely suffering from circumstances over which we couldn’t have had any control. 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.
No one knows exactly what [the Iraqis] do want, least of all themselves, except that they don’t want us.
[In talking to an Arab nationalist leader] I said complete independence was what we ultimately wished to give. "My lady" he answered—we were speaking Arabic —"complete independence is never given; it is always taken."
Rory Stewart’s essay in the NYRB is a must-read. It firms up both my own remorse at being so bloody ahistorical before the war; and my inclination to believe we need to get every last American out of there, before we’re stuck for ever.
The Dish 