Promises and betrayals (Fisk re: T E Lawrence) [View All]

[struggle4progress]

Robert Fisk
Published 01 May 2008

... When insurgents staged a rebellion against the postwar British occupation of Iraq in 1920, Lawrence dispensed advice in the pages of London newspapers that the Americans (and the departing British) should have read before they staged their illegal invasion of the same country in March 2003. Although on a far smaller scale, the 1920 insurgency was an almost fingerprint-perfect forerunner of the present Iraqi conflict. British troops that were assured they would be greeted as liberators found that their supposed beneficiaries were far from happy to see them; Arab-Ottoman soldiers who waited to join the Allied side were abused in prison camps. When the first British officer was killed outside Baghdad, the Brit ish army besieged the Sunni city of Fallujah with field guns and later surrounded the Shia city of Najaf, demanding the surrender of a militant Shia cleric. British intelligence in Baghdad informed the war department in London that insurgents were crossing the border into Iraq from Syria. And Lloyd George, the British prime minister, assured the House of Commons - at a time when the British were tired of sacrificing their soldiers in Meso potamia - that if UK and empire forces were to withdraw from Iraq, there would be civil war ...

Far more acerbic were his later comments in 1929 in an article he submitted under the entry of "Guerrilla" in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Writing of Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents, some of whom he led, ". . . suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour." Lawrence uses the horror of gas warfare here as a metaphor for insurgency, but who can disagree with his conclusions? To control the land they occupied, the Turks "would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the combined ill-will of the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available." The "fortified posts", of course, prefigure George W Bush's "surge", which needed 600,000 men to meet the combined ill-will of the Iraqi people but had only 150,000 available ...

... In the Sunday Times in 1920, Lawrence might have been addressing his words to George W Bush or Tony Blair. "The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour," he wrote. "They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiqués are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows . . . We are today not far from a disaster" ...

http://www.newstatesman.com/200805010042