© The Daily Beast
The story of the British intelligence agent who rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, drew new borders - and gave us today's ungovernable country.
She came into Baghdad after months in one of the world's most forbidding deserts, a stoic, diminutive 45-year-old English woman with her small band of men. She had been through lawless lands, held at gunpoint by robbers, taken prisoner in a city that no Westerner had seen for 20 years.
It was a hundred years ago, a few months before the outbreak of World War I. Baghdad was under a regime loyal to the Ottoman Turks. The Turkish authorities in Constantinople had reluctantly given the persistent woman permission to embark on her desert odyssey, believing her to be an archaeologist and Arab scholar, as well as being a species of lunatic English explorer that they had seen before.
She was, in fact, a spy and her British masters had told her that if she got into trouble they would disclaim responsibility for her. Less than 10 years later Gertrude Bell would be back in Baghdad, having rigged an election, installed a king loyal to the British, re-organized the government, and fixed the borders on the map of a new Iraq. 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.
Comment: Three Israeli teenagers disappear and 200 people are arrested. Were 200 people needed to kidnap three boys? If any of the arrested were involved, why haven't they found the disappeared already? Why have the kidnappers not claimed the act and announced their terms? And why is Israel so certain that Hamas is behind this when they cannot provide any evidence?
For all we know, these teenagers were never kidnapped, and if they were, it was by someone who wants to see hundreds of Palestinians in jail.
Israel is not happy that the Palestinians have formed a unity government between Fatah and Hamas. 'Divide and conquer' is the key strategy of occupying forces, so a little chaos is in order. All that was needed was an excuse.