'Colonel van Ormer has a forceful personality,' lamented Brigadier Lushington, head of the British Services Mission in Iraq, of his new American colleague in October 1954. 'I suspect that he has been "hand-picked". If he is to be believed, he is being given a very free hand indeed. He talks very big.' The aggrieved brigadier, charged with managing the operational end of what had been, since the creation of the state of Iraq at the conclusion of the First World War, an exclusive relationship between Britain and the Iraqi Armed Forces, was not disposed to 'belittle the seriousness of this American invasion'. This was a 'potential threat to British military influence'.

LRB 15 August 1991 | PDF Download