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"The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which
it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor. They have been tricked
into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are
belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been
told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows.
It is a disgrace to our imperial record and may soon be too inflamed for any
ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster. Our unfortunate troops,
Indian and British, under hard conditions of climate and supply are policing
an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong
policy of the civil administration in Baghdad but the responsibility, in
this case, is not on the army which has acted only upon the request of the
civil authorities."
T.E. Lawrence, The Sunday Times, August 1920
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