And Yet... (22 page)

She was given this distinction because her extraordinary prewar travels and researches in Arabia Deserta had suddenly acquired strategic importance. In the film version of
The English Patient
, some British soldiers are scrutinizing a map when one asks, “But can we get through those mountains?” Another replies, “The Bell maps show a
way,” to which the response comes, “Let's hope he was right.” This is a pardonable mistake, perhaps, because even now it is extraordinary to read of the solitary woman who explored and charted a great swath of Arabia, from remotest Syria to the waters of the Persian Gulf, just when Wilhelmine Germany was planning a Berlin-to-Baghdad railway. John Buchan and Erskine Childers both wrote important fiction about the impending clash of civilizations, but if anyone's work should have been titled
The Riddle of the Sands
, it is Gertrude Bell's.

Reading about Bell, one is struck not just by her ability to master the Arabic language and to revere and appreciate the history and culture of the Arabs, but by her political acuity. Where others saw only squabbles between nomads, she was able to discern the emergence of two great rival forces—the Wahhabis of Ibn Saud and the Hashemites of Faisal—and she stored away the knowledge for future reference. Georgina Howell occasionally overdoes the speculative and the fanciful, writing “she must have” when she lacks precise information, but she also considers questions other narratives tend to skip, such as, What does an Englishwoman in the desert, surrounded by inquisitive and hostile Turks, do when it is imperative that she relieve herself? (The answer: Take care to have a stout Arab servant who will interpose his body, then reward and nurture him for the rest of his life.) The title of the book may seem exorbitant in its flattery—and depressing in its echo of poor, mad Lady Hester Stanhope—but Bell's bearing was such that many of the desert dwellers truly believed a queen had come to visit them.

Bell's own more pragmatic search was for a credible king. Mesopotamia—-or the former Ottoman vilayets of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul—had rid itself of the Turks by 1918, more as a consequence of the arrival of British and Indian troops than as a result of local efforts. The new colonial authorities borrowed a term—
“Al Iraq,”
or “the Iraq,” from the verb meaning “to be deeply rooted”—that Arabs had formerly used to describe the southern portion of the territory. Much else about their rule was provisional and improvised. Bell saw the truth of a Baghdad newspaper's observation that London had
promised an Arab government with British advisers, but had imposed a British government with Arab advisers. Her immediate superior, A. T. Wilson, believed in strict British imperial control. The colonial leadership in India, which tended to think of Delhi as the capital through which relations with the Gulf states were maintained, was also staunchly opposed to any sentimental talk of Arab independence. As if to further fragment the jigsaw of difficulties, the British government issued the Balfour Declaration into this milieu, awarding a national home in Palestine to the Zionist movement, and the new Bolshevik regime in Russia had the brilliant idea of publishing the terms of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which had fallen into its hands. The disclosure of this covert wartime pact between czarist Russia and the British and French empires to carve up the region had the effect of hugely increasing Arab suspicion of British intentions. It also had the effect of spurring President Wilson to issue his Fourteen Points, which proposed a grant of self-determination to all colonial subjects. But at the subsequent Paris peace talks, the Arabs and the Kurds, along with the Armenians, were to be the orphans of this process. Even the imperialist A. T. Wilson found himself sympathizing with Bell at that dismal conclave:

The very existence of a Shi'ah majority in Iraq was blandly denied as a figment of my imagination by one “expert” with an international reputation, and Miss Bell and I found it impossible to convince either the Military or the Foreign Office Delegations that Kurds in the Mosul vilayet were numerous and likely to be troublesome, [or] that Ibn Saud was a power seriously to be reckoned with.

These are not the only echoes that come resounding down the years. Official British policy hoped to please all parties and square all circles, with just a hint of traditional divide-and-rule. Bell believed that a state could be created on the foundation of mutual respect, and she was rather partial to the Kurds and the Shiites. She was also very
critical of the Zionist idea, which she thought could only increase Arab antipathy and endanger the large Jewish community in Baghdad. As to the prejudices of Sir Mark Sykes, coauthor of the secret deal with France and Russia, she had acquired an early warning. They had met in Haifa as early as 1905, where he had appalled her with his talk of Arabs as “animals” who were “cowardly,” “diseased,” and “idle.” She had also been several steps ahead of him on an expedition to the Druze fastnesses of Lebanon and Syria, and he always attributed her head start to foul play. As he complained fairly comprehensively in a letter to his wife: “Confound the silly chattering windbag of conceited, gushing, flat-chested, man-woman, globetrotting, rump-wagging, blethering ass!” There seems to have been a hint of fascination in the midst of this disgust. If so, it would have fit with the general predilections of the British, who were fixated on androgyny in the most alarming way. (Their slang word for Arabs was “Frocks,” a means of feminizing the colonial subject that was not quite congruent with the manly skills they were otherwise demanding from the desert warriors.)

Determined to disprove and outlast the Sykeses of the world, Bell made Baghdad her permanent home, helped to organize elections and write a constitution, drew some rather wobbly borders with Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, founded the Iraqi national museum, and wrote a study, “A Review of the Civil Administration of Mesopotamia,” that compares well with the best of the Victorian “blue books.” She also nurtured and cajoled King Faisal, who founded a constitutional monarchy that lasted from 1921 until 1958—impressive by regional standards. (Faisal was of course a Sunni Arab; the Kurds and the Shiites had both proved too turbulent to be trusted with stewardship.) So, was all her effort at nation building a romantic waste? T. E. Lawrence, who was perhaps envious, partly thought so. After learning of her death, he wrote:

That Irak [sic] state is a fine monument; even if it only lasts a few more years, as I often fear and sometimes hope. It seems such a very doubtful benefit—government—to give a people who have long done without.

That might stand as a cynical judgment for the ages, but one can still think of Gertrude Bell in the same company as Wilfred Blunt, R. B. Cunninghame Graham, Edward Thompson, and indeed Lawrence himself—English people who thought other peoples, too, deserved their place in the sun.

(
The Atlantic
, June 2007)

M
AKE ANY PRESUMPTION
of innocence that you like, and it still looks as if the latest cell of religious would-be murderers in Britain is made up of members of the medical profession. When I was growing up, the expression “Doctors' Plot” was a chilling one, expressing the paranoia of Stalin about his Jewish physicians and their evil conspiracy; a paranoia that was on the verge of unleashing an official pogrom in Moscow before the old brute succumbed to death by natural causes just in time. Now it seems that there really was a doctors' plot in London and Glasgow and that its members were so hungry for death that they rushed from one aborted crime scene to another in their eagerness to take the lives of strangers.

The normal human reaction to this is one of profound shock, because of the Hippocratic principles that are supposed to draw certain people toward the noble practice and high calling of medicine. Not only does one want to be able to count on this in the case of any physician consulted by oneself, but one also has the slight expectation that a doctor involved in politics will tend to be actuated by humanitarian motives. Certainly, this used to be true on the left: one of the most powerful magnets drawing members of the middle class toward socialism used to be the experience of doctors in the slums, forced
to confront the raw injustice and maldistribution that dominated the life-and-death question of health care. The hero of Graham Greene's
Stamboul Train
is such a one, impelled into action by the realization that his patients cannot afford the care they desperately need. Mao Zedong wrote a paean to the Canadian physician Norman Bethune, inventor of the battlefield blood transfusion, who gave up a promising career to help the revolutionary forces in the Spanish and Chinese civil wars. Salvador Allende in Chile, Vassos Lyssarides in Cyprus—these are only among the better-known names of party leaders who won the admiration of the poor by trying to practice what they preached in Hippocratic terms.

Medicine is hierarchic as a profession but democratic in essence: in principle, a doctor may not refuse to treat anyone and must always use his or her best efforts to save life and ward off disease. When we read of doctors who cheat their patients, or who poison them in order to get their property or just for the fun of it, we feel outraged more, perhaps, than we would feel if a lawyer had tried to fleece a client. It seems a deeper betrayal. A doctor as a perpetrator of random murder is a nightmarish figure who has violated a trust.

Yet the dark side of the medical profession is also well-known to folklore. Messrs. Burke and Hare, not always willing to wait for corpses to sell to an anatomy professor, killed to provide the cadavers. A columnist in the
Financial Times
recently mentioned the names of Josef Mengele and Che Guevara, two physicians who were capable of extreme cruelty. I didn't think the comparison was fair: Mengele was a sadist in his capacity as a doctor; while Guevara, willing enough to slay what he thought of as the class enemy, did not prostitute his gifts as a doctor in order to do so. Nonetheless, the nasty fact must be faced: torture regimes have always been able to find doctors to advise on torture and even to participate in it, and the experience of Nazism taught us that the profession contains enough perverts who desire the license to conduct ghastly experiments on human subjects and (as with H. G. Wells's Dr. Moreau) satisfy an obscene curiosity
as to how far they can go. Mengele is not the only evidence that such depraved characters also relish the idea of “practicing” on women and even children.

Still, the aberrant and the sadistic don't seem to explain the resort to murder in the present case. Nothing was to be gained by it from an experimental point of view, and the opportunities for a gloating vivisection are slim when your bag of instruments is a car full of propane and nails. So, we must look elsewhere for the explanation. Why have doctors apparently become killers in this instance? That's easy.
Because of religion.

You may recall the case of Dr. Baruch Goldstein. On February 25, 1994, this Israeli army physician stalked into the so-called Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron, unslung his automatic weapon, and fired into the crowd of Muslim worshippers, killing twenty-nine people of all ages and both sexes before being killed himself. It took no time at all to establish that Goldstein, no mere loner or psycho, had given ample warning of his character and intentions. Army sources reported that he had consistently refused to treat Arab or Druze or any other “Gentile” patients, citing as his authority the halachic law that excuses a pious Jew from coming to the aid of a non-Jew. (The whole appalling story is told in chapter 6 of
Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel
, by Israel Shahak and Norton Mezvinsky.) In Goldstein's view, Hippocratic precepts were overridden by Orthodox teaching, and there were a number of rabbis ready to support his stand on the matter. There were also a number of rabbis who decided to consecrate his tomb as a shrine to a brave Jewish martyr, and the children of ultra-Orthodox settlers were seen wearing buttons reading, “Dr. Goldstein cured Israel's ills.” Now it seems that an Iraqi physician, in the old and famous university town of Cambridge, was so diseased by his own faith that he advocated even the murder of rival Muslims and showed videos of decapitation to housemates who were so profane as to play musical instruments.

Remember that Stalinism itself was self-defined as “a great experiment” on the human being and that fascists loved to say that they
were cutting out the tumors of society and extirpating the “bacilli” that caused disorders in (another revealing phrase) “the body politic.” Even our metaphors of healing can be turned into horrible negations. What is more probable than that the oldest and latest form of totalitarianism, religious mania, will come to infect doctors as well?

(
Slate
, July 9, 2007)