Lawrence in Arabia

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

T. E. Lawrence was not only an original--smart, rebellious, relentless--but he also championed the Arabs in the Middle East during WWI. It was so interesting to be introduced to this idealistic man have to take on the responsibility and horrors of war and watch him change into a dervish of war, manipulating commanders and wreaking havoc and violence in order to achieve his objective. Having read tons of books about WWII and the Civil War, I truly learned so much about WWI. Not only did Anderson chronicle Lawrence's life but he also introduced and followed several other key players in the Middle East during WWI. Somehow through all this Anderson related all the pertinent information without getting muddled in minutiae. I also appreciated how he pointed out parts of the movie that were fictionalized for drama, and even called into question several passages from Lawrence's own memoir, with evidence to explain the discrepancies. This was definitely worth the time to read.

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In war, language itself often becomes a weapon, and that was certainly true in the Middle Eastern theater of World War I.

Part of this may have stemmed from a common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades—no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer—but

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE have been occasions when a vastly superior military force has managed, against all odds, to snatch defeat from all but certain victory. The phenomenon usually has root in one of three causes: arrogance, such a blinding belief in one’s own military or cultural superiority as to fail to take the enemy seriously; political interference; or tunnel vision, that curious tendency among war planners and generals to believe a flawed approach might be rectified simply by pouring more men and firepower into the fray.

“No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? … Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy by the silent threat of a vast unknown desert, not disclosing ourselves till we attacked.”

The proper strategy going forward, in Lawrence’s new estimation, was to keep the Turks settled into Medina almost indefinitely. To do that, it didn’t mean shutting down the Hejaz Railway altogether, as the British were hoping to do, but rather allowing that supply line to operate at just enough capacity to keep the Turkish garrison on life support. Sustained enough to survive, but too weak to withdraw or go on the offensive, that garrison would then essentially become prisoners—even better than prisoners because the burden of sustaining them would continue to fall on the enemy.

Of course, the best way to avoid having one’s ideas shot down is to never explicitly voice them.