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these lands but by British and French civil and military officers.
    In the land between the two rivers this was a formula for disaster. On June 2, 1920, in a taste of things to come, Sunni nationalists in Baghdad and Shi’ite religious leaders in the south decided that asmuch as they hated each other, they hated the British occupiers even more. The ensuing jihad against British rule took nine months to suppress—at a cost of more than 2,200 British casualties and forty million pounds sterling.
    In the aftermath of the “Arab Revolt,” Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for colonial affairs, convened a conference in Cairo to determine the future of Britain’s Mesopotamian Mandate. Without consulting with a single person who lived between the Tigris and Euphrates, the participants, including T. E. Lawrence, redrew the borders once again, renamed the territory “Iraq,” and selected Faisal, the son of the sharif of Mecca, a Hashemite and a friend of Lawrence, for the throne of the newly minted “kingdom.”
    The British might have conceived of Faisal as their puppet, but they quickly learned that he had a few ideas of his own. Within months of his August 23, 1921, coronation, the new king convinced the British to send aircraft and motorized troops with machine guns to drive marauding Wahhabis back into Saudi Arabia. Though the operation required Faisal to acquiesce in yet another redrawing of the map—this time the creation of a “neutral zone” along the border of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Iraq—security in the south meant he could start consolidating his authority over his new kingdom. By 1923 Faisal had expelled the Shi’ite mullahs and imams from the holy cities of Najaf and Karbala and sent them packing to Iran. A year later he handed down what he called the Tribal Disputes Regulations, suborning the rural Shi’ite sheikhs to his Sunni-dominated administration in Baghdad. In March of 1925, the oil-rich Sunni Kurdish enclave of Mosul was annexed. The British helped to make this move official by supporting the so-called Organic Law, which gave Faisal the right to convene and adjourn the Iraqi Parliament.
    By 1930 the king had withstood an attempted coup and forged sufficient consensus among his fractious, multi-ethnic, multi-communalpeople to permit suffrage for men, implement universal public education, create a national army, institute a system of law, and commence a program of rural electrification. The 1930 Anglo-Iraq Treaty, granting independence and commonwealth status to the kingdom in 1932, reflected not just British fatigue and the effects of the Great Depression, but the Hashemite king’s skills as an administrator as well. And though the treaty granted the British rights to military bases in Iraq, it made Faisal the first head of state of a sovereign Arab country and a member of the League of Nations. He didn’t live to enjoy the fruits of his labor. A heart attack felled Faisal in September 1933.
    The day after Iraq’s first monarch was laid in his grave, his twenty-one-year-old son, Ghazi Ibn Faisal (meaning “victorious son of Faisal”), assumed the throne. The playboy-turned-potentate proved predictably inept and virulently anti-British. When the Shi’ites in southern Iraq complained, he ignored them. When they rebelled in 1935 and 1936, Ghazi sent the Sunni-led army to brutally repress the uprising.
    As London warily watched Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and Stalin’s purges in Russia, Ghazi began making regular radio broadcasts laced with anti-British propaganda. In 1936, with the monarch’s acquiescence, Bakr Sidqi, an army commander with a reputation for cruelty, led a coup against the pro-British elected government.
    For the next two years, the regime in Baghdad conducted a quiet flirtation with Axis fascism, inviting emissaries from Rome and Berlin to Baghdad. By the time Ghazi killed himself in a