After completing the translation draft of "Healing the enemy", I read more than several books on Iraq and Middle East, which I had hardly known about before reading Larry's work. Also, I was interested in Uday Hussain, and wanted to know and understand what kind of person he really was. 

The first book I picked up was "The foundation of Iraq" by Mr. Shigeo Abe (2004, Chuko Shinsho). It describes the international affairs around Iraq in details in early 20th century. Because the situations shaped by interests of the world powers were so complicated, it took me for a few days to sort out and understand. As it is subtitled "the origin of the impossible country", it considers the reasons why Iraq was not able to be a stable country, by featuring the life of Gertrude Bell (1868―1926), who had a decisive role in determining the Iraq boundary. 

Bell was an intelligence agent in the Middle East, similar to T. M. Lawrence, who became famous as Lawrence of Arabia. In those days, the British was attempting to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, by fomenting the Arab nationalism and supporting the Arab revolt for subverting the Ottoman rules. 

To Hussain bin Ali, Sharif of Mecca, the British promised to recognize the independence of Syria, Palestine, and Hejaz. But in secret the British had made the Sykes–Picot agreement with the French, to partition the Middle East. 

Although Bell fought for the promise with the Arabs, her effort was fruitless in the face of the great powers. Afterwards, many uprising continued in Iraq, by which the British army had suffered hundreds of casualties. 

To deal with the unrest, the UK held secret conference, where Bell insisted to combine the states of Baghdad (the area of Sunni), Mosul (of Kurds), and Basra (of Shia) to establish the mandate territories by the British. 

Lawrence proposed to separate the Kurds in Mosul, as he saw they were ethnically disparate. His proposal was defeated by Bell, and the result was a miserable. 

The Kurds continued the revolt against Iraq, a state of the Arabs. Mr. Abe says that the mandate was the root cause of internal wars in Iraq, for which people tolerated Saddam Hussein to constrain the Kurds revolts. Although Bell intended to make a state where ethnic groups of different backgrounds aligned and collaborate through the British support, it backfired so badly. According to the author Mr. Abe, the political confusion after the Iraq war and the deterioration of public order and security was not caused merely by influx of terrorists or poor administration, but has a deep root in the "impossible" constitution of Iraq.