Michael Luo reports in this morning's New York Times that as many as 100,000 Christians have abandoned their homes in Iraq during the last three years. And, that the exodus has accelerated since the speech in Germany by Pope Benedict XVI. The troubles may have calmed down elsewhere, Luo reports. But they have intensified in Iraq. Churches have been bombed and believers have been murdered. Apparently, it was better for Christians under Saddam Hussein. Maybe he was too busy killing Shia and Kurds. Still, the lot of Christians in modern Iraq has not been at all happy. By modern, moreover, I don't mean only yesterday. Instead, I mean ever since the British created an Iraqi state out of the fallen Ottoman Empire in the early twenties. There was a counterpart to Lawrence of Arabia in the north. She was Gertrude Bell, whom the Arabs called "the daughter of the desert." She was truly the creator of Iraq. There are many biographies of her, and even more published books by her. She was a dynamo and also a scholar. In any case, I've wandered off a bit. What I was going to tell you about is a splendid essay, a truly brilliant piece of history, about the rise of modern Iraq until just before the "republican" revolution of 1958. It is by Elie Kedourie and called "The Kingdom of Iraq: A Retrospect." It is included in Kedourie's masterful collection, The Chatham House Version and Other Middle Eastern Studies, newly republished with an introduction by David Pryce-Jones. Reading any of his writings will be extremely rewarding. And now, please allow me to do some more wanderings in history. I've read a decent amount by Wilfred Thesiger, the great British explorer and soldier, who lived among the Arabs for many years and died at the age of 93 in 2003. You won't be able to read just one book of his. But the one I would suggest is The Marsh Arabs, published in 2004. It is about those Shia of Iraq, with whom he lived and who lived precisely in a marsh culture. It was they whom Saddam Hussein rooted out and then deported or killed. Iraq has never been a kind place, though Baghdad was for nearly two millennia a truly cosmopolitan city. Until 1949, the Jews were a plurality in Baghdad. It was mostly there that the Babylonian Talmud was created some 1700 years ago. Now, the Jews are gone (mostly to Israel). And the Chaldeans and Assyrians, mostly murdered or, as Pat Moynihan once observed, living in Chicago. Aside from some 800,000 Christians, what is left are the Muslims, slaughtering each other day after day, divided by what occurred in what was not yet Iraq thirteen centuries before our time. An example of "the one Arab people," split asunder, not by nation because there aren't any, but by sect and sectarian hatred.