The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

J A N U A R Y 2 0 0 5 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 43 hough she is remembered today mainly by Middle East scholars and travel writers, there has recently been a modest revival of interest in Gertrude Bell (1868-1926) because of the key role she played in the cre- ation of modern Iraq in the early 1920s. She was involved not only in putting King Faisal, son of the Hashemite Sharif of Mecca, on the throne in Baghdad, but helped draw the new country’s borders and mobilized its tribes and religious groups to support the new nation-state. Gertrude Bell traveled all over the Middle East and lived for years in Mesopotamia (as Iraq was then known), where she arguably knew more about what was happening on the ground among the local tribes than anyone else at that time. She was always in the thick of things, before and after the birth of Iraq in 1921, with innumerable con- tacts and confidants — both among local people and the British administrators, who feuded with each other and with London almost as much as the Iraqis themselves. Above all, starting in her 20s and continuing until her death nearly 40 years later, she always found time to write — letters, diaries, travel accounts, intelligence reports, scholarly articles and books (when in England), as well as major policy papers for the British government. One of Bell’s policy papers, for instance, pled the cause of Mesopotamia during the Paris Peace Conference of 1919. A scholar, writer, linguist, Arabist, mountain climber, archaeologist, photographer, explorer and founder of the Iraqi National Museum, Bell was, to use the old cliche, larger than life. The recent paperback edition of a biog- raphy by Janet Wallach, Desert Queen (Anchor Books, 1999), which is being reissued in 2005, as well as the pub- lication of Bell’s Arabian Diaries, 1913-14 (Syracuse University Press, 2001) and a new edition of her The Desert and the Sown (Cooper Square Publishers, 2001) have generated renewed interest in this remarkable woman. But by far the most fascinating window on her extraor- dinary life, because of the lively style and sense of deja vu one gets, are Bell’s own letters, edited and published after Bell’s death in 1927 by her stepmother ( The Letters of Gertrude Bell , selected and edited by Lady Bell, D.B.E., London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1927). This Week’s Headline To read her copious letters from Baghdad during the 1920s is like scanning this week’s headlines: many of the issues she confronted are the same ones the U.S. adminis- trators and the new Iraqi government are dealing with today. For example, in a 1922 letter to her father, Bell describes Iraqi skirmishes with the Saudis on the southern border, and the difficulty of negotiating a border treaty after the Saudis had conquered a large swath of north- central Arabia. Faisal had sent a camel corps to defend G ERTRUDE B ELL AND I RAQ : D EJA V U A LL O VER A GAIN T HE EXTRAORDINARY E NGLISHWOMAN WHO PLAYED A KEY ROLE IN THE BIRTH OF MODERN I RAQ CONFRONTED MANY OF THE SAME ISSUES THE U.S. AND THE NEW I RAQI GOVERNMENT FACE TODAY . B Y B ARBARA F URST Barbara Furst worked at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi as a secretary from 1957 to 1959. She later completed a degree in cultural anthropology at American University and a diploma in social anthropology at Oxford University. She married a Foreign Service officer, with whom she lived in Pakistan in the late 1960s. There she did field work in a Punjabi village in an attempt to discern the social and eco- nomic factors that affect fertility. Later she worked as a contractor in health programs in developing countries for USAID. More recently, she has written travel articles for the Boston Globe and other New England newspapers. T