Andrew North: Iraq presents a lesson from history

As the insurgency spread, the letters from the British diplomat in Baghdad grew bleaker.

"We are in the thick of violent agitation and we feel anxious… the underlying thought is out with the infidel."

And then:"The country between Diwaniyah and Samawah is abandoned to disorder. We haven't troops enough to tackle it at present."

A month later:"There's no getting out of the conclusion that we have made an immense failure here."

In fact, this insurgency was in 1920, the uprising against the British occupation of what was then still Mesopotamia.

The diplomat was Gertrude Bell, an energetic and passionate Arab expert who literally drew Iraq's borders."I had a well spent morning at the office making out the southern desert frontier of the Iraq," she wrote in late 1921. 'Mass of roses'

But read her letters and diaries and you can easily imagine she's describing events since 2003, as American and British forces lost control of the country they had invaded.

The latest unhappy chapter in Britain's involvement in Iraq is approaching its end, with the government likely to announce soon a plan to withdraw most of its forces over the course of next year.

There are plenty of parallels with 90 years ago, says Toby Dodge, the widely-respected Iraq expert at London University's Queen Mary College, but"in the run-up to the invasion, both in Downing Street and the Foreign Office, there was no sense of history whatsoever".

The hundreds of letters Bell wrote to her parents during her time in Iraq and other parts of the Middle East, complete with requests for supplies of" crinkly hairpins", are available to anyone via the internet.

Born in County Durham, her papers are now held by Newcastle University's Robinson library, which has been putting them online, together with her many photos.

It is a record of a unique person, who also managed to find time to be an enthusiastic Alpine mountaineer and accomplished archaeologist, her first passion.

But it was the creation of Iraq that would consume her most....