As for the country, it is said to be very fertile wherever properly
irrigated. At present the water is distributed about as badly as it
could be. The annual rise of the river makes vast feverish swamps,
and the rest of the country is waterless. Any stray Bedouin tribe that
feels like growing a crop can go and cut a hole in the bank and
irrigate a patch for one season and then leave it; and these cuts form
new channels which as often as not lose themselves in a swamp.
Meanwhile this haphazard draining off of the water is seriously
impairing the main streams, especially that of the Euphrates, which is
now almost unnavigable in the low water season. To develop the country
therefore means (1) a comprehensive irrigation and drainage scheme.
Willcock's scheme I believe is only for irrigation. I don't know how
much the extreme flatness of the country would hamper such a scheme.
Here we are 200 miles by river from the sea and only 28ft. above
sea-level. It follows (2) that we must control the country and the
nomad tribes from the highest _barrage_ continuously down to the sea.
(3) We must have security that the Turks don't interfere with the
rivers above our barrage, or even neglect the river banks.

All this seems to me to point to a repetition of our Egyptian
experience. We shall be drawn, whether we like it or not, into a
virtual protectorate at least as far up as the line Kut-Nasiryah,
along the Shatt-al-Hai, and that will have to extend laterally on the
east to the Persian frontier and on the west to the Arabian tableland.
I don't see how we can hope to get off with less: and that being so, I
believe it would be better to take on the whole at once. North of the
Shatt-al-Hai line (_i.e_. Kut-Nasiryah) it would be very exhausting to
go, and very awkward politically, as you soon get among the holy
places of the Shiahs, especially Karbala, which is their Mecca. But
it's no use blinking the fact that a river is a continuous whole, and
experience shows that the power which controls the mouth is sooner or
later forced to climb to its source, especially when its up-stream
neighbours are hostile and not civilised. And what power of
Government will be left to Turkey after the war? It looks as if she
will be as bankrupt, both financially and politically, as Persia; and
I see no real hope of avoiding a partition a la Persia into British
and Russian spheres of interest. In that case it seems to me the
British sphere should go to th