The Foreign Service Journal, January 2005

several local men, each with a dirty and flea-ridden animal — one of the dogs was selected when Bell returned for lunch carrying a handful of flowers for the luncheon table. The other dogs were sent away, and orders given to de-flea and shampoo the one remaining. Bell later took her to tea with the king, and Sackville-West writes, “I watched them both— the Arab prince and the Englishwoman who were try- ing to build up a new Mesopotamia between them. ‘You see,’ she had said to me, ‘we feel here that we are trying to do something worthwhile, some- thing creative and constructive.’ [A]nd despite her deference to his roy- alty, there could be very little doubt as to which of the two was the real genius of Iraq.” A few months later, on July 11, 1926, Bell went to her bedroom after dinner. She asked her maid to wake her at six the next morning, then took an overdose of sleeping pills and never woke up. She was three days short of her 58th birthday. She was buried the next day — before a huge crowd that gathered along the cortege route to pay their last respects — in the British cemetery of the city she loved. Coda Political strife in Iraq did not settle down after the coronation. In 1923 Shia divines in the south began to stir up trouble and were shipped off to Persia. The areas east of Erbil, Kifri and Kirkuk were causing headaches for the adminis- trators in Baghdad. The Kurds in the north were kicking up trouble. And, finally, the Turks were ejected along the northern border later that year. But the reign of the Hashemites lasted until 1958, when Faisal’s grandson and family were assassinated. Today, almost 80 years later, Cox’s words, written shortly after Bell’s death and bound into a volume of her letters, come back to haunt us: “The Kingdom of Iraq has been placed on its feet, and its frontiers defined; its future prosperity and progress rest with the Iraqis them- selves.”  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 53 “The Kingdom of Iraq has been placed on its feet, ... its future prosperity and progress rest with the Iraqis themselves.” — Percy Cox