The remarkable life of early-twentieth-century British adventurer Gertrude Bell has been well documented through her biographies and numerous travel books. Bell’s role as a grand strategist for the British government in the Middle East during World War I and the postwar period, however, is surprisingly understudied. Investigating Gertrude Bell as both a military strategist and a grand strategist offers important insights into how Great Britain devised its military strategy in the Middle East during World War I—particularly, Britain’s efforts to work through saboteurs and secret societies to undermine the Ottoman Empire during the war and the country’s attempts to stabilize the region after the war through the creation of the modern state of Iraq. As importantly, studying the life and work of Bell offers a glimpse into how this unique woman was able to become one of the principal architects of British strategy at this time and the extraordinary set of skills and perspectives she brought to these efforts—particularly, her ability to make and maintain relationships with key individuals. Bell’s life and work offer insights into the roles women have played and continue to play as influencers of grand strategy.
Read the monograph here.
Episode Transcript: On The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq
Stephanie Crider (Host)
You’re listening to Conversations on Strategy. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are those of the authors and are not necessarily those of the Department of the Army, the US Army War College, or any other agency of the US government.
Conversations on Strategy welcomes doctors Heather Gregg and Jim Scudieri. Gregg is a professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security and the author of The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq.
Scudieri is the senior research historian at the Strategic Studies Institute. He’s an associate professor and historian at the US Army War College. He analyzes historical insights for today’s strategic issues.
Heather, Jim, thanks so much for being. Here I’m really excited to talk to you today.
Dr. Heather S. Gregg
It’s great to be here. Thank you so much.
Dr. James D. Scudieri
Likewise, thank you for taking the time to meet with us.
Host
What did the Middle East look like in the lead up to World War I? Who were the major players in the region?
Gregg
Unlike the Western Front, the war was very different in the Middle East. And I would say this was a big game of influence. And you had major European powers. You had a declining Ottoman Empire. You had the rise of Arab nationalism. And all of this kind of came into a very interesting confluence of events during World War I.
Scudieri
And complicating that amongst major players are … the British don’t have a unified position, so if you look at stakeholders, you need to distinguish between the British leaders in London, those in Cairo, and those in India.
Gregg
That’s a huge point that there is a great power struggle between these three entities over who should be controlling the Middle East and why. And this becomes important for the story of Gertrude Bell.
Host
The manuscript is divided into three periods—during World War I, the period of British military occupation of Mesopotamia, and Britain’s creation of the State of Iraq during the mandate era. Let’s discuss British military and grand strategy in each period. What was British military strategy in the Middle East during World War I?
Scudieri
So, there’s still a lot of historical debate on exactly what the strategy was. Some would say there wasn’t much of a strategy, but part of that is strategic games changed as the war progressed, and the war was not going well for the Allies in the early years. And even through 1917 there was a concern that they might lose. So those strategic objectives in the Middle East change as they determine that they will not lose. And not only that, but if you win, what do you want the post-war world to look like?
Gregg
So yeah, I would add to this that there were some really interesting constraints on Britain and other actors. They didn’t have the manpower to put into the Middle East because it was all being dedicated to the Western Front—or most of it was. They weren’t entirely sure, I would echo Jim’s comments here, about what the strategy should be, just that they wanted to frustrate and try to undermine Ottoman authority in the region. They devised a strategy that worked with and through the Arab population to try to undermine Ottoman authority. So, this is what we would call an unconventional warfare strategy today. But that was supposed to be cheaper and require less manpower than actually deploying British troops, and this is particularly true after what happened at Gallipoli, (which was) for all intents and purposes, a pretty colossal failure.
Host
So, this whole podcast is built on your monograph about Gertrude Bell. Let’s talk about her a little bit. How did Gertrude Bell contribute to the unconventional warfare strategy Britain created?
Gregg
Gertrude Bell is a fascinating individual. She was a British national. She was one of the first women to go to university at Oxford University. She got a First Class in modern history. She spoke languages. She traveled throughout the region. And she was hired first by the British Admiralty but then became part of a small group in Cairo called the Arab Bureau. And their job was to devise some sort of strategy to undermine Ottoman authority. And there she worked with someone we all know—T. E. Lawrence, known as Lawrence of Arabia. And together, with a small team of between 7 to 15 people, they helped devise this unconventional warfare strategy of working by, with, and through local Arab leaders to try to undermine Ottoman authority.
Scudieri
She’s a fascinating character because it reminds historians that you cannot predict the future. You cannot predict it with regard to strategy; you also can’t predict it, with regard to some individuals’ career paths.
Host
Why did the initial plan not succeed? How did they adjust it?
Gregg
So, there was this effort to work through the Sharif of Mecca. This was a family that was in charge of the two holy sites in Mecca and Medina. The father’s name was Hussein, and he had two sons that were very active in trying to foment an uprising within the Ottoman military with Arab officers. Hussein promised that there were hundreds and hundreds of Arab officers that were part of secret societies that he could encourage to rise up against the Ottoman Empire. And it ended up that this just wasn’t true. He over promised what he could achieve. The strategy was largely unsuccessful, this initial strategy.
Scudieri
This experience highlights how nothing is easy, and things are hard.
Host
So true.
Scudieri
The ability to have British support brings not only weapons and equipment, but it brings lots of money.
Gregg
And with that, the potential for corruption, making promises to get money to get weapons. And Britain promised, in a series of correspondence between McMahon and Hussein that he would have his own independent Arab state after the war in exchange for this uprising, which, in about a year’s time, did not succeed.
So, the second approach was T. E. Lawrence and Hussein’s son decided to engage in basically sabotage against lines of communication, particularly railway lines. And this is what the famous movie Lawrence of Arabia captures. And this was more successful in combination with other things that were dragging down the Ottoman Empire.
Scudieri
The success of the strategy underlines how sometimes a better approach is counterintuitive because by focusing on the sabotage, they wanted to starve the Turkish forces in the area of resupply versus the more traditional trying to focus on annihilating the enemy army, which they did not have the power to do.
Gregg
A really interesting observation. And a lesson that still holds today.
Host
The British military successfully captured Baghdad in March of 1917, along with Basra, which it captured in 1914. It put two of the three Ottoman vilayets of Mesopotamia under its control. How did Belle help shape British military strategy to address this reality?
Gregg
So, I would like to echo back Jim’s point that, fascinatingly enough, it seemed that Britain had not devised a strategy for military occupation, even though this became their goal—to take Baghdad. And then they already had Basra. And so, Bell, together with someone named Percy Cox, had to very quickly devise a strategy of, essentially, occupation. And this also didn’t go necessarily well, and I think it forced them (until the mandate era) to really try to keep things in line rather than make things prosper. I don’t know, Jim, what your thoughts are on that.
Scudieri
So, mine would be very similar. It’s interesting in some of the primary sources we can see how relatively rapidly the British put together an occupation plan and also tried to pool available talent. And they get by in the course of the war. But the challenges associated with long-term occupation and that transition to mandate, and then some missteps, really blow up after the war.
Host
What were some of the challenges and opportunities in this period?
Gregg
I would say some of the really interesting challenges were also opportunities that might have been missed. So, there was some local leadership and local talent that I think could have been very useful had the British reached out and engaged some of that leadership. From my read of Gertrude Bell, she was rather suspicious of the Shia population and Shia leaders. So, there were some missed opportunities to try to engage the Shia population, which was a good chunk of the population that they controlled. And so, for me, both the big challenge and the missed opportunity was what to do with the local population (and) how to engage the local population and harness local leadership.
Scudieri
There’s also some confusion associated with thinking in terms of Arab kingdoms because there’s no unitary Arab nationalism right now. The Kingdoms of British support in the post-war period are really Hashemite. And that doesn’t take account of a very conflicting sense of loyalty to various different tribes and ethnicities, and so on and so forth. And perhaps the biggest one is a difference between the Hashemites and the House of Saud.
Gregg
Just to build on this, and this is an excellent point . . . this was a really interesting decision that Gertrude Bell and T. E. Lawrence actually made, which was to engage Faisal, who was the son of Hussein. And to promote him to be the first king of Iraq. And as Jim just mentioned, he was a Hashemite. He had never actually been to Iraq and was given this leadership position. The British gave him that, and this ended up being a really difficult thing . . . so bypassing local leadership and choosing to engage the leaders they knew as opposed to the leaders, the local people knew.
Scudieri
The British also confronted a major problem in the post-war discussions, and that was as they now win the war, and they’re trying to come up with these friendly kingdoms, they have big issues with what are those borders going to look like with France. Their long wartime ally is now going to be a post-war if not adversary, there’s some major post-war disagreements, and you can see that by looking at the documents that talk about (1) The Mosul vilayet, which had unclear borders. At first it wasn’t even clear if that area would be part of Iraq, and if so, where the border would end. And likewise with the borders with Palestine.
Gregg
This is a really excellent point because then you had the birth of the Republic of Turkey and Atatürk, who also made claim to Mosul. So, you add a really interesting scramble over borders. Over territory. Overlapping claims and rights to it. This was a huge mess that took, in many cases, decades to sort out. Some would argue some of this is still being sorted out.
Scudieri
A good example of what kind of a wicked problem all of this became was most folks will talk about the Treaty of Versailles, but it took five treaties to end the First World War and it took two with Turkey because Turkey refused to sign the first one.
Gregg
I think this is a fascinating story, too, that you had the collapse of four empires in World War One, right? The Ottoman Empire was just one that collapsed. You had the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian, the Hapsburg, and the Prussian empires all collapsed as a result of World War I. And Europe was left trying to sort out what to do with all these lands and their colonies. And it was a huge challenge.
Scudieri
And some of the Allied discussions included Russia, and Russia is now off the table because of the Bolshevik revolution.
Host
Let’s talk about the third period from the monograph. The war ends in 1918 and the 1919 Paris Conference and Versailles Accords created the mandate system, which required European powers to transition most former colonies and territories of the Ottoman Empire into self-ruled states. How did Gertrude Bell help shape Britain’s vision for transitioning Mesopotamia into the state of Iraq?
Scudieri
I would suggest that using the term vision might be a bit premature given how quickly events change from trying not to lose the war to figuring out how to win the war and then trying to sort out what the post-war world would look like. But Gertrude Bell is an especially fascinating individual case study because she immersed herself in the culture, in the local conditions, and tried to translate that into the strategic vision for Iraq, which was a very unclear path, in large measure, because of the disagreements between the French and the British, and what that post-war world would look like in the region.
Gregg
I think for me, the thing that was so puzzling about what Gertrude did in this period was, I believe she cared deeply about the people and the region. And you know, she ends up dying in Iraq. She’s buried there to this day. And I believe she cared about the people in the region. However, some of the decisions she made in this period just seem very counterintuitive to me. And the biggest one was creating a Kingdom and putting a foreign individual on the throne as the king. And this was against many Shia leaders wishes. There was an individual named Sayyid Talib (al Naqib). He was deported to Ceylon, which is Sri Lanka today. They got rid of him because he didn’t agree with this decision, and I think, at the end of the day, Gertrude Bell had to weigh, on the one hand, what it meant to be a British national and serve British interests, and, on the other, what was in Iraq’s interest. And I think being a British national was what won in the end.
Scudieri
And for us to understand that I think we should avoid a clear black-and-white dichotomy because it was a lot more complicated than that. And I would return to the post-war competition between Britain and France because that Arab Kingdom was supposed to be in Syria. But the French dug their heels in.
Gregg
They actually were able to create a kingdom, but it lasted less than a year in Damascus. And then Faisal was deposed by the French and then the British. And it’s, I think, this is a big question of debate, but the British then embraced him to be the king of Iraq.
Host
What were the priorities? What was at stake.
Gregg
So there’s a big debate on this, too, a big, hot debate on this, that I’ve learned. In the primary source documents, I identified two or three big things at stake. The first is military bases. Britain wanted a seaport, but also wanted air bases. The British Air Force was created in 1918. The first Air Force. They needed a land route in which to get from the Middle East to India, and the bases in Iraq seemed to matter a lot. This came up a lot in discussions. The second thing I would add, and this is the controversial thing, is that I believe oil was a big concern. Britain converted its naval fleet from coal to oil before World War I, and they were coal rich but had no oil. So, the pursuit of oil and securing oil mattered. Everyone was fighting over Mosul because they suspected there was oil. There and that proved to be true. But oil became a major concern. There’s a third argument, which is that markets mattered and being able to have yet more people that could be markets for the British Empire seem to matter. Last, but not least, and I think this is the one piece, hopefully, maybe Jim and I will agree on, is that Britain was an empire and it managed to survive World War I, and it wanted influence in that region. A lot was at stake for Britain, just as an empire, and its ability to wield influence.
Scudieri
Heather’s made some interesting points there, because those RAF bases are part of having a system that goes hand-in-hand with friendly regimes because the mandate system aren’t going to become long-term colonies. They did understand that at the time. Oil is another interesting point about how priorities change. In 1914, oil wasn’t such a big deal, but the British already did have interest with the Anglo Persian oil company. But war sometimes accelerates change, and the First World War accelerated the importance of oil because the prewar British conversion of the Royal Navy to oil had barely begun . . . about 100 ships, none of the battleships in 1914, are fired on oil in the new class that will come in in 1915 and later will be the first ones that are oil-fired. But the explosion and the demands of oil because of not, just the Royal Navy conversion, but the motorization from horse transport, means oil will have a far more central role in the post war world than it did in the prewar. And even during the war.
Host
So let’s Fast forward a little bit. How did it unfold?
Gregg
Well, it didn’t go great. I think it’s fair to say, and, I think for me, this was a very humbling story about you can have good intentions, you can have experts, but this is extremely difficult to do. And obviously, as an American, in the back of my mind is always what happened between 2003 and 2011 and beyond and our efforts to try to stabilize Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. But you end up having a major uprising in Iraq that was actually put down by the persisting presence of the Royal Air Force. You have challenges to Faisal’s leadership. You end up, by 1958, the entire royal family is murdered, and Iraq becomes a Republic. You have lingering political instability and ethnic tensions that I think were not a done deal but got exacerbated. By a lot of the decisions made during this period.
Scudieri
All of this turmoil is on top of the turmoil going on in the rest of the world. Most people don’t realize how much fighting around the world continued after 1918. There’s still a lot of instability and unreconciled issues around the world. The US has gone largely isolationist. The French, who though determined that they would stay in Syria, if not Lebanon, are really focused on European security because they do not want to allow Germany to rise again. So that’s your primary concern—just trying to contemplate the sheer losses of the war and what came from it. And I’m not sure to what extent they could have forecast in that region, how Arab would be fighting Arab, such as between the Saudis and the kingdoms of Transjordan and/or Iraq.
Host
What are the takeaways? What can we learn from Bell and the British military and grand strategy during this period?
Gregg
I think there’s a lot of really, really valuable lessons here. Some of the positive things . . . I go back to the Arab Bureau; I appreciate that the British military was not afraid to bring in civilians and get a civilian voice. They built a really agile, small, and diverse team. They would bring experts in for certain questions and then send them home and bring other experts in. I think there’s a really interesting story there about team building and problem solving. I think that there are a lot of other very humbling lessons to learn. For me, an eerie similarity to, perhaps what the United States did, was not including the population enough in the stabilization process and in the postwar peace, I think that really undermined British efforts. And needing to work by with them through the population, not just during the war but after is deeply important.
Scudieri
I would echo Heather’s comments as well as the fact that Gertrude Bell is a fascinating case study in talent management. She had no specialization or training in terms of Mesopotamia, per se. She was brought in as an outsider based on some of her educational background that she might be able to help think through the problem set, and then she winds up becoming a subject matter expert on Iraq.
Gregg
Although I would add a little caveat to that, which is that she had traveled through the Middle East in 1911-12 time frame, and she had mapped the human terrain. This is something that we also tried to do in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And so, she had gained attention because she had made this trip. That doesn’t make her an expert, I agree. But she had some on-the-ground knowledge of the population’s tribal dynamics that no one else seemed to have. And then that was a great starting point from which then she built her expertise.
Scudieri
So that’s an interesting learning point on how, in the midst of war, you can still pull talent management to try to get the biggest bang for the buck and save some effort.
Gregg
That’s a great point. I love that.
Host
Absolutely. I’m just going to plug the monograph right here. You can download it at press.armywarcollege.edu/monographs. Thank you both so much. What a treat. I’m sorry we had so little time to cover such an expansive and interesting topic.
Gregg
Thank you so much for this opportunity. It was, it’s great to be with you both. Thank you, Jim for a wonderful conversation.
Scudieri
Well, Many thanks for the ability to share this time together.
Host
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About the authors:
Gregg is a professor of irregular warfare at the George C. Marshall European Center for Security and the author of The Grand Strategy of Gertrude Bell: From the Arab Bureau to the Creation of Iraq. Gregg earned a PhD in political science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a master’s degree in Islam from Harvard Divinity School, and a bachelor’s degree (with honors) in cultural anthropology from the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the author of Religious Terrorism (Cambridge University Press, 2020), “Religiously Motivated Violence” (Oxford University Press, 2018), Building the Nation: Missed Opportunities in Iraq and Afghanistan (University of Nebraska Press, 2018), and The Path to Salvation: Religious Violence from the Crusades to Jihad (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) and coeditor of The Three Circles of War: Understanding the Dynamics of Modern War in Iraq (Potomac Books, 2010).
Scudieri is the senior research historian at the Strategic Studies Institute. He’s an associate professor and historian at the US Army War College. He analyzes historical insights for today’s strategic issues. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in History from Saint Peter’s College, now University (1978); a Master of Arts degree in History from Hunter College, City University of New York (1980); a Master of Military Art and Science degree from the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (1995); and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in History from the Graduate School and University Center, City University of New York (1993).