Gertrude of Arabia, the Woman Who Invented Iraq
Clive Irving writes in The Daily Beast about the life of Gertrude Bell, a British spy in the Middle East who helped the British Empire draw Iraq’s borders in the 1920s. Bell was not a public figure, but her intelligence work helped create Iraq’s short-lived monarchy, which was destroyed by a military regime that eventually morphed into that of Saddam Hussein. “As much as anyone can be, Gertrude Bell could be said to have devised the country that nobody can make work as a country for very long—no more so than now,” Irving writes.