Gertrude Bell

This is interesting not only for the parallel Knight-Ridder is drawing, but also for the story of the woman herself. It also underscores how the present patriotic, masculine minds are shriveled, indecent paunches. Bet she could shoot straight too, when needed.

A senior British diplomat long ago figured out what has become one of the enduring dilemmas of the U.S. occupation of Iraq: that the presence of a foreign army can undermine efforts to establish a new government.

It's "difficult to be burning villages at one end of the country by means of an (occupation) Army, and assuring people at the other end that we really have handed over responsibility to native Ministers," the diplomat, Gertrude Bell, concluded.

Bell wrote that report 85 years ago, as what was then Mesopotamia was struggling to rebuild after World War I and create an independent state that the British would call Iraq...

Those difficulties have turned out to be nearly identical to problems faced today by U.S. and Iraqi leaders: religious and ethnic division, how to train a new Iraqi army, extremism and how to withdraw foreign forces quickly. Probably for that reason, Bell and her letters have attracted renewed interest amid a nostalgic feeling among Iraqis that if the U.S.-led coalition only had someone who understood them like Bell did, the post-Saddam period might have turned out better....