Whom do we have to hold responsible for the situation in Iraq? The same person who is responsible for the sheer fact of Iraq. That person is Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist, a poet and, most significantly, a British colonial servant. But she was a colonial servant who, like her colleague T.E. Lawrence, was intoxicated with the idea of Arab nationalism. Of course, this would be a nationalism that would forever be under the tutelage of the Crown. I've always thought that Captain Lawrence was the lesser figure in history and also the lesser figure in the intricate workings of the individual mind and spirit. He wasn't even more personally screwed up than Bell. But no one ever thought to make a movie about Gertrude Bell, who could now be played by Judi Dench or Helen Mirren and might have been played before by Deborah Kerr. Still, there are many books about Bell and many books by Bell, as well. In fact, in recent months, two biographies of this remarkable woman, by women, have appeared and they have been reviewed in the last days. The slighter volume is Gertrude Bell: Queen of the Desert, Shaper of Nations by Georgina Howell and published by Farrar Straus. The more serious and reliable volume, deep in historical understanding and deeper in its research into the vast archival materials available, is Quest in the Middle East: Gertrude Bell and the Making of Modern Iraq by Liora Lukitz, a distinguished Arabist at the Bar Ilan University in Israel, and published by Taurus in London. The first is available through our preferred book merchant, Powell's; the second through Barnes and Noble and also Amazon. The Queen of the Desert was reviewed in the Sun of April 11 by Midge Decter. Quest in the Middle East was reviewed in Ha'aretz of April 3 by Rami Ginat. After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Bell wanted Emir Faisal, a Hashemite and a descendant of the prophet, to rule the Arab provinces south and east of Turkey and she hoped he would rule as King of Damascus. The French sabotaged this design by instigating riots against Faisal but really only to keep Syria and Lebanon under the control of Paris. Bell plowed ahead with the favorite vessel of her dreams, installing Faisal in Baghdad. She wanted the Sunnis to govern, and govern brutally they did, not least upon the majority Shi'a population, the more numerous Kurds and various Christian sects. And, of course, the Jews who constituted a plurality in Baghdad until roughly 1948. The only remnant of this design is the Hashemite monarchy in Jordan. Faisal's brother was compensated for his lost ambitions in Saudi Arabia (whose lands Lawrence gave to the Al Saud) by being given the land west of the Jordan River which the Balfour Declaration had promised the Jews as it was more than half of Palestine. Amman then was a tiny town with about 10,000 inhabitants, and that was the core of the first Abdullah's desert kingdom. Monarchical Iraq fell in 1958 in a savage rising by army officers. The even more savage Ba'ath soon came to power, a republic of sorts with its people utterly without rights. Except the rights of the Sunnis to lord it over everyone else. Where did the Jews of Baghdad go? To Israel which was not in Gertrude Bell's imagination or her stubborn designs. We are now living with the consequences of these designs, a historic tragedy...fit for a film, a truly great film.