Rory Stewart is a bright young Scotsman now engaged with rebuilding Afghanistan. But though he is not yet 40, he also lists on his resume a term as a coalition governor in the Iraqi provinces of Maysan and Dhi Qar. In the latest issue of The New York Review of Books, Stewart reviews a series of books about Gertrude Bell, a British administrator in the 1920s in what was then called Mesopotamia but would later, of course, become Iraq.
Stewart sees in Bell's experience much of what he himself experienced while serving in Iraq. He quotes from Bell's own letters, written in 1920, in which she speaks about the attempts to establish a modern, secular Iraqi state. Again — this is from 1920:
No one knows exactly what they do want, least of all themselves, except that they don't want us.
…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 being blind.
Later in his review essay, Stewart writes:
In 1920, Sunni nationalists, Shia ayatollahs, and tribal sheikhs rose against the British. Their revolution, although suppressed, revealed to the British public as much as to Iraqis that there could be no sustainable British colony in Iraq. T.E. Lawrence was typically the first to acknowledge this:
We say we are in [Iraq] to develop it for the benefit of the world…. How long will we permit millions of pounds, thousands of imperial troops and tens of thousands of Arabs to be sacrificed on behalf of a form of colonial administration which can benefit nobody but the administrators?
And he closes his essay with this passage:
Bell is thus both the model of a policymaker and an example of the inescapable frailty and ineptitude on the part of Western powers in the face of all that is chaotic and uncertain in the fashion for “nation-building.” Despite the prejudices of her culture and the contortions of her bureaucratic environment, she was highly intelligent, articulate, and courageous. Her colleagues were talented, creative, well informed, and determined to succeed. They had an imperial confidence. They were not unduly constrained by the press or by their own bureaucracies. They were dealing with a simpler Iraq: a smaller, more rural population at a time when Arab national-ism and political Islam were yet to develop their modern strength and appeal.
But their task was still impossible. Iraqis refused to permit foreign political officers to play at founding their new nation. T.E. Lawrence was right to demand the withdrawal of every British soldier and no stronger link between Britain and Iraq than existed between Britain and Canada. For the same reason, more language training and contact with the tribes, more troops and better counterinsurgency tactics—in short a more considered imperial approach—are equally unlikely to allow the US today to build a state in Iraq, in southern Afghanistan, or Iran. If Bell is a heroine, it is not as a visionary but as a witness to the absurdity and horror of building nations for peoples with other loyalties, models, and priorities.