Charles Glass

Lloyd George wished to acquire two provinces above all: Palestine, on behalf of Jewish Zionists from Europe . . . and Mesopotamia – with Baghdad at its heart – for its oil and its positionas the Arab world’s frontier with Persia, Afghanistan and India . . . Britain would divide Syria, and unite Iraq.

An invisible frontier cuts across the North of Iraq for hundreds of miles, from Syria in the west to Iran in the east. This border doesn’t conform to legal, ethnic or tribal boundaries; it ignores mountains, rivers and other natural barriers; it is not even a straight line, like the 36th parallel. The United States likes straight lines, but down on the ground, there aren’t any....

“This weakened force is holding back the combined weight of the United States and Britain the way Yasir Arafat’s few thousand commandos kept the Israeli Army out of Beirut for nearly three months in 1982. I remember the words of a Palestinian activist in Beirut that year: ‘All the real fighting is done with Kalashnikovs. Everything else is fireworks.’”

I foresee that man will resign himself each day to more atrocious undertakings; soon there will be no one but soldiers and bandits.

Jorge Luis Borges, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’

John Bagot Glubb, a young lieutenant bearing wounds from the war in France, arrived in Mesopotamia in 1920. His assignment was to command armed patrols through the desert of what would become, under...

“Iraq has become an American protectorate, and America has told Syria that it must, like a rare breed of bird, adapt to the new environment or die. The Syrian Army and Intelligence Services are playing their own imperial game in Lebanon, but their presence there has become as vulnerable to American subversion as America’s forces are to indigenous resistance – with or without Syrian and Iranian encouragement – in Iraq.”