Quotes of the Day

The week leading up to the Iraqi vote was tense. No one knew what to expect in a nation with such a stunted democratic tradition, but the voters came out anyway, and support for a national government was robust in most areas. Once the new Iraqi government "has been in existence a year ? people will begin not only to believe in it, but to be proud of being 'Iraqis,'" predicted one senior official.

This story could have been plucked from last month's newspapers, but it happened in the summer of 1921, when Iraq, then under British occupation, was in the process of forming its first national government. The parallels between the two eras — stark and instructive — are clearly drawn in Gertrude Bell (Barzan Publishing; 417 pages), H.V.F. Winstone's newly republished biography of the British Oriental Secretary who co-founded modern Iraq.

First published in 1978, this is the tale of an Arabist, archaeologist, imperialist and snob — one of the handful of Britons whose opinions, values and judgements dictated the order of the Middle East, for good or ill. Throughout the interwar period Bell played a leading role in Iraq's transformation from Ottoman domain to British mandate to a new sovereign nation. "We shall, I trust, make it a center of Arab civilization and prosperity," she enthused in 1917, as British troops poured into Baghdad, driving out its defeated Ottoman rulers. Three years later, the country was convulsed by an uprising against the British occupation. "Things look so black now... the fact that we cannot abandon this country to its fate needs insisting upon," wrote Bell.

Winstone, an author and biographer, is painfully aware of the contemporary parallels. "The mistakes of the past are being repeated with an astonishing disregard for history," he told Time. Still, for all his eye on the modern, he sidesteps the snare which entangles so many biographers of great women and resists the urge to wave a feminist flag over Bell's achievements. Her life is allowed to speak for itself.

Born to a wealthy, well-connected industrial family, Bell stunned those around her with her energy, intelligence and enthusiasm. Early in life she circled the globe twice and distinguished herself as an author, Alpine mountaineer and scholarly translator of 14th century Iranian lyric poetry. Her translations of Hafiz are considered definitive to this day.

Having joined British Military Intelligence's Arab Bureau in 1916, Bell quickly rose through its ranks; she was moved from Cairo to Basra and was finally promoted to Oriental Secretary of the British administration in Baghdad in 1917. Empowered by her knowledge of the Bedouin tribes, she carved out the border still shared by Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. "I think," she wrote on completion, "I've succeeded in compiling a reasonable frontier."

It would be her most lasting contribution. The constitutional monarchy she constructed with King Faisal, the Hashemite scion she helped elevate to the Iraqi throne, was wiped out in 1958 in a bloody coup. Her archaeological legacy — she was the nation's first director of antiquities, and helped create the Baghdad Museum — is now in jeopardy. And her colonialist beliefs — the idea that distant peoples would be enlightened by a British presence — have since been discredited. But she was fervent in her adoration of the country she called her second native land. "My heart is in it," she wrote to her father in 1924. "I live and die for it." Indeed, Bell infuriated superiors by siding with the Iraqi government when it refused to accept the British mandate in 1922, arguing that it must be free of foreign interference in order to be legitimate. Her bosses responded by phasing her out of the Iraqi administration.

That devastated her. Bell was never as happy as she was successful; her romantic attachments, almost all with married men, were heartbreaking, and she never found the domestic contentment she craved. Deprived of her mission, she responded with a fatal overdose of sleeping pills in 1926.

Winstone's admirable investigation of this remarkable woman is marred by a distracting introductory diatribe against the "sinister" American-Israeli presence in the region. "The motives of these modern campaigns," he writes, "the erosion of Palestinian rights and the determination to immobilize Iraq, are all too clear." Alas, those motives are not so clear — especially after an election in which millions of Iraqis voted for a new national government. Once again Iraq and the West face a turning point. Let's hope that history doesn't again repeat itself.

• Lillian Kennett