Hugh Fitzgerald: Lawrence of Arabia as an American Strategist? God Forbid
Ever since the "surge that worked," I've
been wondering about General Petraeus, and even more about those Leavenworth colonels, the ones of whom so much was made as the army's intellectuals. These were the people who, during the "surge," discovered and used lessons offered by previously overlooked "experts" on insurgency - David Galula, in the French campaign in Algeria, comes immediately to mind. They asserted that one could find general principles or laws that could apply to all insurgencies (which, they concluded, "on average last about ten years").
…Certainly Galula, who was a Jew born in Tunisia, and who later joined the French army, knew Arabic and knew the psychology of those with whom the French Army had to deal. But the French Army in Algeria was also dealing with a situation in which there were more than a million non-Muslims (French, along with Spanish, Italians, even Maltese) in Algeria, whose support could be called on. In Iraq, there was no such non-Muslim local presence (the terrified Assyrians and Chaldeans hardly count), and the "insurgency" was not easily identified (as in Algeria), because there were many different groups in Iraq -- Sunni Arabs, Shi'a Arabs, Kurds -- all of whom had their own interests. And all of these groups, at various times, could find it advantageous to make temporary common cause with the Infidel Americans - not in order to promote American or Infidel interests, but to promote their own sectarian or ethnic interests inside Iraq….
But until a few days ago, I was unaware that those colonels working under or for General Petraeus had also consulted not only an unknown officer in the French army - David Galula - but also someone else. And that someone turned out to be quite well known. He is someone whose baleful influence, whose mythomanic and pseudo-poetic memoirs, have done such damage to British (and Western) policy toward the Arabs (and, by extension, toward other Muslims). That guide to dealing with the Arabs, apparently much consulted by those Leavenworth colonels, turns out to be T. E. Lawrence, known to many - and especially to young Americans who first encounter him on the silver screen, in David Lean's entertaining fantasy, and then grow up to be officers in the American military - as "Lawrence of Arabia."
A new article, by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, recently published in The Journal of the Historical Society, titled "Lawrence of Arabia: Image and Reality" and brought to my attention in a piece by Daniel Pipes, maintains - according to Pipes' synopsis -- that T. E. Lawrence was the figure most consulted by some of the colonels who formed General Petraeus' celebrated brain trust. Wyatt-Brown maintains that Lawrence has served as a talismanic guide for these American strategists. In particular, they saw him as an expert who could provide them with the knowledge they would need, based on the vast wisdom he had presumably accumulated in organizing Arab (Bedouin) tribesman for that famous "Arab Revolt" we have all heard so much about, the one that some think really inflicted great damage on the Turks, and was - they think -- of such importance in the Allied war effort in the Middle East. They have been particularly impressed, Wyatt-Brown maintains, with a piece he wrote based on his dealings with the Arab sheikhs and tribesmen, called "Twenty-Seven Articles."
But before we get to those "Twenty-Seven Articles," let's remember Lawrence, the myth, and the man. T. E. Lawrence was an indifferent junior archaeologist at the Ashmolean, who arrived in the Middle East. There he managed to engage in activities whose military importance we shall discuss below, but who in the main spent his time creating a myth about himself, and his significance. That myth, tiny at first, grew and grew, when back in England, in a country hungry for heroes, and the more exotic their locale, the further away from the stench of the bloodsoaked trenches of World War I, the better. And here was T. E. Lawrence, with his stirring tales of Arabs riding their camels and fighting the Turks in the cause of their own liberation. And who organized them, who made them a fighting force of such importance? A slight Englishman, an intellectual, a writer, with a pseudo-poetic style that some found so winning - T. E. Lawrence, himself seemingly a learned man (he was to translate Homer), who "understood" the essence of that admirable thing, "The Arab," or rather, "The Bedu," the noble version of the Arab, the desert warrior, leather faced, hawk on hand, able to ride for days without stop or sustenance, and so on.
In England some well-known people welcomed the myth of Lawrence. George Bernard Shaw and Robert Graves were among them; Churchill was for a while taken in. But the "cool and skeptical" men who knew the Middle East, and knew Lawrence personally, never fell for this stuff….
Why does this matter? Why should we care? Well, if Colonel Nagl, and Colonel Kilcullen, and other unnamed colonels, if even General Petraeus himself, took - as Wyatt-Brown says they did -- the myth of Lawrence of Arabia seriously, if they did not know that that myth was exploded long ago, then they may have been deluded into thinking that Lawrence had something important to offer them, and that they, these modern day followers of Lawrence, could indeed do as he did, and "win over the Arab tribes" (he never did) and accomplish with them something of "great and lasting military significance" (he, and the Arabs whose loyalty and temporary cooperation he bought, never did). In their Anbar venture they might still think that they had somehow made a permanent difference, when all they did is rent, for a short time, the temporary loyalty of some Sunni tribes who had their own good and sufficient reasons for opposing Al Qaeda in Iraq. But that temporary overlapping of interests did not mean that the Sunnis, or any of the other Arab Muslims, could be, or should be thought of as being, true allies of the American Infidels.
But worse, by far, than the business with David Galula is the business, if Wyatt-Brown has it right, of American colonels and other officers taking seriously, as a guide to anything, the life and career of that self-promoting mythomane, whose military value was almost nil, T. E. Lawrence. It is a pity that those who took Lawrence seriously in the American army were unfamiliar with Richard Aldington's biography, or the meticulous work of J. B. Kelly and Elie Kedourie, and of many others. Apparently, young boys who then grew up to join the American military took David Lean's movie seriously, and they never checked to find out what the current reputation, among real scholars, of Lawrence is. General Allenby took the measure of Lawrence, and those who take a cool and skeptical view of things, not the naïve enthusiasts, should have prevailed.