A Style section article, but it reveals a great deal of info about how Iraq was created by the British back in the early 1900s to obtain an oil supply. So many of the names and information is familiar: liberation of the Iraqi people, Chalablis, Sadrs, the independence of Kuwait. Some things never change.
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The name of Gertrude Bell, the British woman who in 1918 drew the borders of his country from three disparate provinces of the former Ottoman empire, draws a shake of the grave keeper's head.
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In March 1917, Maude said: "Our armies do not come into your cities and lands as conquerors or enemies, but as liberators," a statement still famous among older Iraqis, at least. Maude was then head of a British army that was closing in on Baghdad and about to overthrow Ottoman rule here. The British saw Ottoman support of Germany in World War I as a threat to their own survival, and they needed Iraq's oil for their war effort.
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Bell sketched the boundaries of Iraq on tracing paper after careful consultation with Iraqi tribes, consideration of Britain's need for oil and her own idiosyncratic geopolitical beliefs.
"The truth is I'm becoming a Sunni myself; you know where you are with them, they are staunch and they are guided, according to their lights, by reason; whereas with the Shi'ahs, however well intentioned they may be, at any moment some ignorant fanatic of an alim may tell them that by the order of God and himself they are to think differently," she wrote home.
She and her allies gave the monarchy to the minority Sunnis, denied independence to the Kurds in order to keep northern oil fields for Britain and withheld from the Shiite majority the democracy of which she thought them incapable.http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/04/AR2006030401355.html
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