How Iraqis view British occupation:

I imagine that the view held by many English people about Mesopotamia is that the local inhabitants will welcome us because we have saved them from the Turks, and that the country only needs developing to repay a large expenditure of English lives and money. Neither of these ideals will bear much examination. From the political point of view we are asking the Arab to exchange his pride and independence for a little Western civilization, the profits of which must be largely absorbed by the expenses of administration.

Correspondent of The Times, (London) September 1919, before the insurgency (see chapter four)

Lawrence on the truth about Iraq:

The people of England have been led into a trap in Mesopotamia, from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked into it with a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things are far worse than we have been told, our administration far more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.

 

T.E. Lawrence, August 1920, Sunday Times (London) article on the Iraqi insurgency (see chapter four)

Gertrude Bell’s Second Thoughts:

I suppose we have underestimated the fact that this country is really an inchoate mass of tribes that can’s as yet be reduced to any system. The Turks didn’t govern and we have tried to govern ... and failed. ... At the back of my mind there is the firm conviction that no people likes permanently to be governed by another. Now we’re trying to foster nationalism, but I am always ready to admit that nationalism, which is not at the same time anti-foreign is likely to be a plant of weak growth. [King] Faisal walking hand in hand with us will not be so romantic a figure as Faisal heading a jihad might be!

Gertrude Bell, letters to her father, 1921 (see chapter five)

On air power in Iraq:

A tribe that is out for trouble is well aware when the patience of Government has reached breaking point; and negotiations inevitably end in what is in effect an ultimatum of some form or other. Complete surprise is impossible and the real weight of air action lies in the daily interruption of normal life which it can inflict, if necessary for an indefinite period, while offering negligible chances of loot or of hitting back. It can knock the roofs of huts about and prevent their repair, a considerable inconvenience in winter-time. It can seriously interfere with ploughing or harvesting-- a vital matter; or burn up the stores of fuel laboriously piled up and garnered for the winter; by attack on livestock, which is the main form of capital and source wealth to the less settled tribes, it can impose in effect a considerable fine, or seriously interfere with the actual food source of the tribe--and in the end the tribesman finds it is much the best to obey Government.

British Air Staff Memorandum, 1924 (see chapter eight)

What about withdrawing?

What would happen if we withdrew? After the enormous expenditure which we have incurred in freeing this country from the withering despotism of the Turks, to hand it back to anarchy and confusion, and to take no responsibility would be an act of folly and quite indefensible.

Prime Minister David Lloyd George, to House of Commons, March 1920 (see chapter four)

Churchill on differences between Sunni and Shia:

Let me have a note in about three lines as to [Iraqi King] Faisal’s religious character. Is he a Sunni with Shaih (sic for Shia) sympathies, or a Shaih with Sunni sympathies, or how does he square it? ... Which is the aristocratic high church and which is the low church? What are the religious people at Kerbela? I always get mixed up between these two.

Colonial Secretary Winston Churchill to his chief aide, June 14, 1921, three months after the Cairo conference that enthroned Faisal (see chapter five)

Iraqi Views, a Decade Later:

Here in Iraq, we cannot breathe the words, we cannot accept the horrid fact, that we are unpopular, positively disliked, even hated. Our policy is framed on the assumption that our relationship with these people is warm and friendly. . . [it] is maintained that such hatred is not personal and that, in so far as political hatred exists, it is confined to the unimportant and frequently jobless section of the educated classes... An immense disharmony is the result.

Allan MacDonald, RAF intelligence officer posted to Iraq in the early 1930’s (see chapter five)

What Iranians Remember:

Every schoolchild in Iran knows about the C.I.A.-sponsored coup that toppled Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh. Even an Iranian with little interest in his or her past is conscious of how Iran throughout the 19th and 20th centuries served as a playground for the Great Game. . . Americans were ‘taken by surprise’ when an Islamic revolution toppled the Shah and transformed a country that seemed so friendly to the United States. But if Americans suffered from historical amnesia, for many Iranians, among them Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the thread of memory led from the Great Game to the Great Satan.

Abbas Amanat, “The Persian Complex,” New York Times, May 2006 (see chapter ten)

The CIA’s Syrian Game Plan:

The Arabs had every reason to fear the Soviets, and nothing to fear from us, and it was against nature for them not to welcome our offers of protection. Our oil companies were going to make them rich. They would be the principal beneficiaries of an ‘amicable settlement of the Palestine question’ such as only we could ensure. The refusal of their leaders to see it this was regarded as ample reason and justification for us to overthrow them – or rather, to enable their own people to overthrow them. If national leadership anywhere in the world was such as to benefit from our interference in their affairs, we thought, it was Arab leadership.

Miles Copeland, the CIA’s co-promoter of Syria’s regime change in 1949 (see chapter eleven)

On Philby:

Oh Philby, if anyone would offer me a million pounds. I would give him all the concessions he wanted.

King Ibn Saud to H.S.J. Philby, 1931, two years before a US oil firm received exclusive drilling rights in Saudi Arabia (see chapter seven)