The Ironies of T. E. Lawrence’s Relevance and Reputation (History)

The Ironies of T. E. Lawrence’s Relevance and Reputation Abstract: T. E. Lawrence’s reputation as, first, hero, then, fraud takes on new meaning in light of the American experience in counter-insurgency in Iraq. His views of guerilla warfare and handling of Iraqi politics have been adopted under General David H. Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan C. Crocker. At the same time, popular understanding of the mysterious, complex, masochistic Anglo-Arabian figure of the First World War is largely derived from Sam Spiegel and David Lean’s classic movie Lawrence of Arabia. That work in the hands of screen writer Robert Bolt, was based in part on Richard Aldington’s vicious 1950s biography. Yet the film succeeded in combining both the heroic and the psychologically wounded aspects of the British figure to create a compelling depiction. Actor Peter O’Toole’s rendition remains the popular image and understanding of who Lawrence was. The Turk was stupid and would believe that rebellion was absolute, like war, and deal with it on the analogy of absolute warfare. Analogy is fudge, anyhow, and to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife. T. E. Lawrence, “The Evolution of a Revolt” (1920) No figure in twentieth-century Anglo-American history is so mysterious, intriguing, and charismatic as Thomas Edward Lawrence of Arabia. Nearly every aspect of his rather short life has aroused contention. Yet, he surely belongs in the company of Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee in America and Winston Churchill in England as a major iconic hero, all of whom have 1 had their posthumous reputations subjected to harsh revision. Many more books have been written about these others. To be sure, though, T. E. Lawrence has his impressive share--from the journalist Lowell Thomas and Lawrence’s close friend, the poet and novelist Robert Graves, to the more recent biographers, Jeremy Wilson and John Mack. Most of these writers have been positive or even reverential in their treatment. Some, notably the English poet and biographer Richard Aldington, were distinctly negative, and lately the analyses of Lawrence’s war efforts and personality have made Aldington’s accusations appear especially egregious and unjust. Whether favorable or hostile, however, most of those who dealt with the Lawrence story were themselves, like Lawrence, deeply affected by their own war experiences and approached their subject accordingly. The question arises, why should a subject so long worked over still engage interest? There are several reasons. The first is the very quality of Lawrence’s mind, literary skill, and influence on other thinkers, both literary and military. His two major works, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926) and The Mint (1955) are both classics in their own right. He was not prolific, but his surmounting of Victorian convention and adopting of modern, psychologically rich insight affirm that his art as belongs among the best twentieth-century examples. Space does not permit elaboration of this aspect of his capabilities. 1 Instead, the concentration will, be devoted to his military relevance followed by analysis of his reputational complexity. Lawrence as Strategist for our Time Most significant is Lawrence’s relevance to events in the Middle East today. The American military is dealing with a people whose concept of honor differs entirely from its own. Tribal, face-to-face societies consider the preservation of high status and respect in the eyes of 2 others, near and far, the prime means of upholding familial and self esteem. To be disrespected in such a black and white culture is to be rendered vulnerable, impotent, until only revenge can redress the insult or wrong. The Middle Eastern expert Raphael Patai observes that the many shapes in which honor is molded, envelop “the Arab ego like a coat of armor.” Lawrence would have heartily agreed. 2 The late John Mack, Lawrence’s chief biographer, writes, “He became thoroughly conversant with the intricacies of their tribal and family jealousies, rivalries and taboos.” He had, the biographer observes, “the capacity for enabling.” He understood and appreciated the ethic of honor by which the Arabs, then and now, judged their place in society and protected the integrity of their clan, tribe, family, and personal identity. Also, he learned from the British surrender at Kut in 1916 the futility and peril for all Middle Easterners of a western power’s pursuit of national goals without regard for local custom and their feelings of helplessness. Consequently, Lawrence could handle disputes and grievances among the Arabs by showing them marks of respect and adherence to the protocols of the desert people. “Troubles seem to get settled magically” in his hands, Mack concludes. 3 Lawrence understood and appreciated the ethic of honor by which the Arabs, then and now, judged their place in society and protected the integrity of their clan, tribe, family, and personal identity. In contrast, only after five years of fighting a costly, devastating engagement have the U.S. armed services just begun to redraw counterinsurgency plans. According to the New York Times, the new doctrine at last incorporates the insights of such “classic texts” as T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. 4 One military expert has written that he “should stand as a model for military officers as they prepare intellectually and emotionally to face the challenges of the twenty-first century.” General David L. Petraeus would concur, being an avid student of 3 Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom. Petraeus is the co-author of a forthcoming book with Lt. Col. John A. Nagl, entitled, after Lawrence’s famous statement in the epigraph above, “Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife.” 5 Ambassador Ryan Crocker has been likewise astute, and one headline gave him this title: “Crocker: A Modern ‘Lawrence of Arabia.’” 6 Moreover, Lawrence’s “Twenty-Seven Articles” for fighting insurgencies has become something of a bible for a few current American military experts dealing with the problems of Iraq. 7 In fact, according to one source, Lawrence earned the compliment of being plagiarized without adequate attribution in the famous U.S. Army field manual for counter-insurgency. 8 As early as 1920, Lawrence had written about the British occupation of Baghdad and Iraq. His words have obvious pertinence to more recent events: “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. 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.” 9 Lawrence went on to protest, “Our unfortunate troops. . .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.” The Turks killed only 200 Arabs a year to maintain their control, but in a summer campaign, the British, Lawrence complained, have slaughtered some ten thousand. Nation-building, supposedly “for the benefit of the world” as well as the Arabs, Lawrence implied, was a cruel falsehood.10 Honor cultures change so slowly in the Near East that Lawrence’s perceptions so long ago come back to haunt us. 4 Lawrence formed a successful Bedouin alliance by winning the loyalty of these honor-immersed warriors. Robert Graves remarked that the Arabs, in Lawrence’s experience, saw “the world as a hard pattern of black and white (of luxury or poverty, saintliness or sin, honour or disgrace).”11 The key elements in gaining trust, Lawrence proposed, were to show sincere respect, follow custom, and to defer to the local sheiks as often as it was appropriate. It was their country, their mistakes and successes to make, he reasoned. Above all, he advised, show no arrogant commitment to alien ideologies. Moreover, it was always best to let the Arabs act autonomously, even if westerners could do it better. Nonetheless, Lawrence was skeptical that Iraq could ever become “an autonomous state.” That notion was “unnecessary” and hopeless to try, he wrote General Headquarters in Cairo in 1915.12 With regard to Baghdad, he confided to Charlotte Shaw in 1927 that his friend and ally King Feisel was doing his best. “I don’t think,” however, his government in Iraq “yet walks very well. Nor can any hand save it from making its messes: there is a point where coddling becomes wicked. All my experience of the Arabs was of the ex god-father role, and that can only do so much. The Iraqis can only create a modern state by virtue of their own desire and excellence.”13 No matter how solid the plans of the occupiers might be “victory will rest with the insurgents.”14 All “men dream,” Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars. Those who dream in daylight and not at night, though, “are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes” with disastrous, bloody results.15 By contrast, in Iraq, Jay Garner and, still worse, Paul Bremer, the successive Coalition Provisional Authorities, smugly issued orders to impose their freeenterprise schemes and American ways of doing things. Bremer placed Bush campaign cronies 5 in power rather than find Farsi and Arab-speaking professionals. The CPA functionaries seldom consulted local leaders. They hired an insufficient number of translators, and luxuriously barricaded themselves in the so-called Emerald City, the Green Zone, Baghdad.16 Lawrence would have recoiled in dismay to watch this debacle unfold. Among the few to see the ignorance of the U. S. Military hierarchy, George S. Gawrych, who serves at the General Staff College, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, argues, “In the spectrum of twenty-first century conflict, from conventional to unconventional warfare and peacekeeping operations, Lawrence offers a military theory that effectively addresses the nature of guerilla warfare.”17 Following the tactics of Belisarius, the Byzantine general, whose career he knew well, Lawrence practiced and refined the tactics best suited to an irregular force. Again in contrast to military leaders nowadays, Lawrence had long studied and criticized the works of the great military theorists--Maurice Comte de Saxe, Reveries, or, the Art of War, G. F. R. Henderson, Stonewall Jackson, Count Helmuth von Moltke, The Franco-German War of 1870-71; Carl von Clausewitz, On War, among many others. 18 Lawrence’s shrewdest maxim was this: know your enemy and know your allies thoroughly. One can only hope that military planners at the Pentagon have taken that message to heart, belated though it may be. “Thanks to this war,” Lawrence wrote his brother Arnold, “I know an incredible lot about the Near East.”19 Away from the western front, he could see how both the Allies and the Germans in the First World War had tragically adopted all the wrong lessons about modern warfare and allowed the Great War to be fought incompetently. “The men were often gallant fighters,” he remarked bitterly, “but their generals as often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.”20 In contrast to the frontal assaults on the Western Front, he employed small groups who bluffed 6 the enemy and moved swiftly, using light machine guns. Rejecting von Clausewitz with his doctrine of assaults en masse, he had concluded that his Bedouins were not culturally prepared to serve in disciplined, large-scale armies. It was a fact of life that the coalition forces in Iraq lately come to recognize. The unhappy consequences of Prime Minister Maliki’s recent en masse assault at Basra might not have surprised Lawrence. “Irregulars,” the Arabist explained, “would not attack [fixed] positions.” He argued that they could not be easily trained to the discipline of organized units, as in western armies. They fought best under their own tribal leaders since primary loyalty was--and is--tied to kinship and tribal allegiances. The eighteenth-century Marshall Comte de Saxe impressed Lawrence in particular. De Saxe stressed troop mobility, precise intelligence, surprise, and strict conservation of manpower. Lawrence successfully shunned outright battles. Given their few and scattered numbers, Bedouins could never welcome battles that led to high casualties. “Our tactics were tip and run, not pushes, but strokes,” the expert theorist taught.21 Thus, Lawrence concentrated on raids against magazines, depots, and trains. Insurgents have done the same in Iraq, blowing up gasoline stations, storehouses, and truck convoys, an effective irregular warfare technique. Though needing 600,000 troops to cover the Ottoman territories--some 140,000 square miles or more--the Turks had only 100,000. Against Lawrence’s inspired Arab revolt, the Turkish army simply lacked the manpower needed to subdue the seemingly limitless span from Sinai to Damascus or Aleppo to the north. Lawrence’s nomadic tribesmen, like the Viet Cong, for instance, were used to deprivation. He explained, “We had nothing material to lose , so we were to defend nothing and to shoot nothing.” Being volunteers, the tribesmen could come and go as they pleased. Yet, Lawrence added, “Our only contract was honour.” That desert ethic 7 held the unit together but not as in a regular army. In modern armed services, Lawrence explained, “The aim is to render the unit a unit, and the man a type, in order that their effort shall be calculable, their collective output even in grain and in bulk.” Countless blood feuds taught the Bedouins how to conduct their kind of war. It was a style which westerners could never fully grasp.22 As a result of Lawrence’s diversionary tactics, the regular British troops were freed by this move to head north and east from Egypt into Palestine and Syria. The Englishman, Feisal, and the Bedouins attacked the Hejaz railroad and other sites in the desert. During the campaign, Faisal suggested that Lawrence wear the Arab outfit he had given him. The garment was made of white silk embroidered with gold, a conspicuous contrast to the brown and indigo-dyed apparel of the Bedouins. Lawrence wrote, however, that he had first adopted Arab dress on the archeological dig at Carchemish before the war.23 The robes strengthened his bonds with his Bedouin troops and lent him considerable prestige in that status-conscious society More important, it strengthened his bonds with the Arab people. But it certainly made him an odd figure–wearing flowing white Sherifian robes, crimson head-ropes, a golden dagger at the waist-but clean-shaven when all the Arabs were bearded. His almost teenage love of flamboyant overdressing was part of his magnetic acting. He even spoke of how he exploited the Bedouins with his fakery. Someone like himself, he wrote, “may imitate them so well that they spuriously imitate him back again. Then he is giving away his own environment: pretending to theirs.” It was, he remarked, a conscious deception, “hollow, worthless.”24 But it paid off handsomely for the war effort. The scattered but valuable Middle Eastern engagements, in which Lawrence, Feisal, and their Bedouins took part, ended in stunning victories with relatively little loss of British lives. 8