LAWRENCE IN ARABIA; VETERAN WAR CORRESPONDENT SCOTT ANDERSON TRACES THE INVOLVEMENT OF T.E. LAWRENCE AND THREE OTHER WESTERNERS DURING A CRITICAL AND TURBULENT PERIOD IN THE MIDDLE EAST
The Christian Science Monitor
August 7, 2013 Wednesday
by Nick Romeo Contributor
SECTION: Books
For most of World War I, the American intelligence presence in the
Middle East consisted of a 29-year-old man named William Yale, an
employee of an oil company who had approached the State Department
to see if he could avoid the draft by parlaying his experience in
the region into an overseas posting. He’d observed the positions of
Turkish military bases while traveling in the Ottoman Empire before
America joined the war, but he was largely innocent of deeper knowledge
of the region.
As he later wrote, “I lacked a historical knowledge of the background
of the problems I was studying. I had … very little understanding
of the fundamental nature and function of the [regional] economic
and social system.” Undeterred by his lack of expertise, the State
Department arranged for Yale to return to the Middle East as a
special agent.
Yale is one of a quartet of scheming characters in Scott Anderson’s
new book Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the
Making of the Modern Middle East, which seeks to remedy some of the
American ignorance of Middle Eastern history that Yale represents.
Shortly after arriving in Cairo to begin his new posting, Yale managed
to get access to a weekly British report called the “Arab Bulletin”
that summarized sensitive intelligence gathered from around the Middle
East. Yale, who was still receiving half of his former salary from
the Standard Oil Company of New York, scanned the report for any
references to oil.
He also broke his word to the British by communicating its contents
to the US State Department. He justified his behavior by invoking
the corrupting influence of living and working among “European and
Oriental officials.”
Despite a penchant for deception and bigotry, Yale isn’t necessarily
the most repugnant character in Anderson’s book. Another strong
contender is Aaron Aaronsohn, a botanist, anti-Ottoman spy, and
ardent Zionist. These diverse roles were often complementary. He
helped design and run a British-supervised spy ring in Palestine in
part because the British were receptive to his dreams of a Jewish
state in Palestine after the war.
His interest in agriculture was also political: to build a Jewish
state in the desert would require an intimate knowledge of the soil
conditions and crop varieties that could sustain a large population.
Some Jews in the early 20th century saw Zionism as an anti-Semitic
ruse, an attempt to suggest that Jews of various nationalities lacked
loyalty to their homelands. Others envisioned Zionism as a peaceful
mingling of Jews, Christians, and Muslims.
Aaronsohn, however, wanted to expel the “squalid, superstitious,
ignorant” Palestinian serfs known as fellaheen to create a Jewish
state. To promote this end, he and his British handlers launched a
propaganda campaign. After both Jewish and non-Jewish residents of
the town of Jaffa were evacuated by the Ottomans prior to an attack,
Aaronsohn and the British disseminated alarmist accounts hinting
darkly that Jews were the targets of atrocities. The attempt to
rouse international panic and bolster the Zionist movement worked,
though it also deflected attention from the hundreds of thousands of
Armenians facing a Turkish genocide.
A third schemer of the period was the German spy Curt Prufer, who
engineered elaborate plots to spark anti-British revolts in the Arab
world. The idea of inflaming Arab tribes also appealed to the French
and British. Suffering enormous losses on the Western front, they saw
in the Middle Eastern theater the chance to win a desperately needed
victory against the Ottoman Empire by inciting an Arab revolt.
But the agendas of two of Europe’s most rapacious colonial powers
aligned only imperfectly with the interests of Arab tribesmen.
British officials actually referred to the Ottoman Empire as “the
Great Loot,” and well before the war had ended, France and Britain
had already carved up the Middle East for themselves in the infamous
Sykes-Picot Agreement. But in the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence,
Britain had promised some of the same lands to Emir Hussein, the
leader of the Bedouin tribes in the Hejaz region of western Arabia.
One of the few members of the British military elite who considered
this duplicity a problem was a young colonel named Thomas Edward
Lawrence. Unlike Peter O’Toole, who played Lawrence in David Lean’s
1962 epic film “Lawrence of Arabia,” the actual Lawrence was 5 feet
3 inches tall and had an uncannily youthful appearance: Those meeting
him for the first time often thought he was a teenager.
Even before World War I, Lawrence lacked the colonial hauteur
typical of his generation. After living and working in Carchemish
as an archaeologist, he complained of the arrogance of Europeans
in the Middle East. “The foreigners come out here always to teach,
whereas they had much better learn.”
Once the war began, Lawrence left a desk job in Cairo to undertake a
variety of missions throughout the Middle East. His views of colonial
ambition were only solidified by the experience of war. Reflecting
on the heavy casualties he witnessed in Iraq in 1916, Lawrence
later wrote: “All our subject provinces to me were not worth one
dead Englishman.”
To British military commanders, however, even the semblance of victory
was worth a great many dead Englishmen. At the Battle of Passchendaele,
for instance, the 70,000 British casualties represented one dead man
for every two inches of ground wrested from the Germans.
Lawrence fought a style of war very different from the entrenched
exchanges that caused such carnage on the Western Front. Leading small,
mobile units of camel-mounted tribesmen, he sabotaged Turkish garrisons
and supply lines throughout the Middle East. Anderson suggests that
one reason Lawrence quickly became a legend was the shattered British
public’s desperate need to find some trace of grandeur and romance
amid the desolate slaughter of the war.
He also emphasizes Lawrence’s courage in defying the colonial policies
of his superiors. Lawrence had a convenient way of “not receiving”
cables with orders contrary to his own plans, and when he learned
that the British promises to Emir Hussein of an independent Arab
nation were outright lies, he took the arguably treasonous step of
revealing the contents of Sykes-Picot to Hussein’s son Faisal.
Anderson interweaves the stories of Lawrence, Prufer, Aaronsohn, and
Yale to create a rich and detailed account of European machinations in
the Middle East during a critical and turbulent period. The subtitle
of Lawrence’s sprawling autobiography “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” is
“A Triumph,” but it’s hard not to feel that his story is closer to a
tragedy. After the war ended, Lawrence was sidelined at the 1919 Paris
Peace Conference as Britain and France lived out their fantasies of
a “Great Loot,” dividing up the Middle East and ignoring their own
promises as well as innumerable religious and political subtleties
in the region.
Anderson’s narrative clarifies the origins of some of the seemingly
intractable struggles that still beset the Middle East. It might
seem surprising that contemporary American military leaders would
appreciate Lawrence’s insights, but in 2006, General David Petraeus
ordered his senior staff to read Lawrence’s “Twenty-Seven Articles,”
a short treatise offering advice on working with the Bedouin.
What Petraeus missed, apparently, was Lawrence’s reminder that his
advice applied only to the Bedouin, and the non-Bedouins, who represent
nearly 98% of the Iraqi population, would require “totally different
treatment.” William Yale would have been proud.
Nick Romeo is a regular contributor to the Monitor’s Books section.