Golden Warrior, The

by Lawrence, James

  So whatever its shortcomings as a play, A Dangerous Man was an important contribution to one aspect of the Lawrence legend. It was a reminder that the British have always been ambiguous towards the unconventional, especially when it is coupled with genius and a taste for self-advertisement. And yet such creatures have an enormous appeal, at least to the emotions, and one somehow knows that at heart they are right.

  A Dangerous Man is evidence that Lawrence is well on his way to becoming a central figure in a sort of twentieth-century equivalent to the Arthurian legend. Capable of interpretation in all sorts of ways, the Lawrence legend is now an inexhaustible quarry for playwrights and film-makers, the modern counterpart of troubadours. They may hew the rock face and then shape the material as they please to instruct and entertain. Their chisels have recently been sharpened by the psychological and historical insights provided by biographers.

  Even after sixty years, there may be fresh revelations about the historical Lawrence and what he did, and there certainly will be more re-examinations of the inner mainsprings behind his actions. The pedestal on which he had been set just after his death was fragile and bound to fall apart because it was largely an amalgam of hyperbole and misrepresentation. And yet Lawrence the man has survived the exposure of his peccadilloes and contradictions; indeed knowledge of his shortcomings and how he overcame them has added to his stature and the interest which he continues to command in the world at large. Ironically, the elaborate and often underhand attempts to preserve the old icon of Lawrence were unneccesary. Those who undertook them failed to realise that there could be no definitive Lawrence, for he was a man who had deliberately made his life into a work of art, capable of unending re-interpretation. As he once insisted, ‘There is no absolute.’

  EPILOGUE

  Lawrence and the Modern Middle East

  The 2003 invasion and still unfinished pacification of Iraq have been marked by an upsurge in the sales of The Seven Pillars of Wisdom in Britain and the United States. In both countries and thanks to the continued popularity of the film Lawrence of Arabia, Lawrence is still the most familiar figure from recent Middle Eastern history. Yet his direct influence in the region ceased in 1921 and its political and economic landscapes have been transformed in ways he could scarcely have imagined. Nevertheless, readers must hope for some insights into the character and habits of mind of its inhabitants. An outsider, Lawrence famously claimed that he had a peculiar capacity to penetrate the Arab mind. His memoirs might be a text which could enable others to do the same. This is a dangerous presumption: everything that Lawrence wrote about the Arab world was coloured by his own prejudices and at times was moulded to fit them. This is understood in the Arab world; one of its modern leaders observing that Lawrence had hijacked the early-twentieth century Arab renaissance and attached it to his own ego.1

  Lawrence does not offer a guide to the collective thinking of the Middle East, if such a thing ever existed, but he does provide an admittedly idiosyncratic view of the forces that would evolve to shape the region’s future. There is a tenuous thread linking his age with the present. Ideas were germinating which would, among other things, lead to the hijacking of the three airliners that were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in September 2001.

  The passions which generated that attack would have been recognised by Lawrence, even if as an enlightened European he would have dismissed them as a form of religious mania bordering on insanity. His wartime exertions had been concentrated on the frustration of a Muslim jihad against the British, French and Russian empires. British support for the Arab Revolt had been founded on the calculation that dynastic ambition and nationalism could dilute religious zeal, which they did. Yet, and those who take their history purely from The Seven Pillars of Wisdom can be forgiven for ignorance of this, a substantial number of Arabs stayed loyal to their sultan/caliph. Even so, the Arab Revolt contributed to the overthrow of the Ottoman empire.

  After the war, Lawrence assisted in its partition by the Allies. The last great Islamic power had been destroyed; another would not emerge until the close of the century when Pakistan tested atomic weaponry. Lawrence was also an accomplice in the Allied deposition of the Sultan and the abolition of the caliphate, depriving Sunni Muslims of their spiritual leader. This blow against Islam was widely deplored and resisted, most fiercely by the tribesmen of Afghanistan and the North-West Frontier who waged a holy war against Britain which dragged on until 1923. It included suicidal attacks by an elect of jihadic warriors seeking martyrdom and paradise.

  The pursuit of exemplary death in battles for the faith is a recurrent element in Islam. Lawrence had been chosen to mastermind the defence of Hejaz in 1919 when it was under threat from Ibn Saud’s Wahabbis, the forerunners of the sect that produced Osama Bin Laden. The attack did not materialise, but a few years later a large mounted force of Wahabbis invaded Jordan and was wiped out in what turned out to be a suicidal charge against a squadron of armoured cars.

  Like everyone else in the Colonial and Foreign Offices, Lawrence was anxious to create a Middle East where what was called Muslim ‘fanaticism’ could be suppressed or neutered. No one could be certain that the formidable British empire could survive in the face of aggressive, Pan-Islamic agitation in India and the Middle East. Concessions had to be made to Muslim sentiment, most notably the gradual acceptance of a Muslim polity (Pakistan) being created after Indian independence. In the Middle East, Lawrence helped engineer the creation of the kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan whose rulers had impeccable Islamic credentials, but who could be trusted to keep the lid on movements that threatened imperial interests. In return they received the protection of British motorised units and aircraft, which Lawrence, in tandem with his friend Trenchard, believed was a thoroughly modern way of policing Britain’s new sphere of influence without too much expense.

  Lawrence’s Middle Eastern political settlement was reminiscent of the arrangements made in India with native princes who ruled with British guidance and learned the ways of enlightened paternalism at British public schools and Oxford, Cambridge and Sandhurst. This was highly appropriate since the Middle East was India’s first line of defence and its stability was vital for the safety of the Suez Canal. As Churchill observed, Lawrence had remade the region without ‘sacrificing any interest of our empire’. Lawrence believed that he had balanced the interests of the empire and those of Arab nationalism. After the 1921 Cairo Conference, he was proud of the new dispensation in the Middle East; it was his ‘big achievement’ and a wholly laudable conclusion to his wartime career.

  Lawrence’s reconstruction of the Middle East involved a partnership with the forces of conservatism. Lawrence the medievalist had been mesmerised by what might be termed the Beduin aristocracy and all the hierarchical traditions it embodied. Entranced by the old order, he despised representatives of the new, whether Young Turk modernisers, or educated Arabs who wished to adopt Western notions of self-determination, personal liberty, equality and democracy. All were potentially inimical to imperial interests and were outside Lawrence’s scheme of things. Kurds who treated British forces as liberators in 1918 were denied their nationhood and corralled into Iraq. When they objected, as they did during the 1920s and early 1930s, Trenchard’s bombers were summoned to deliver chastisement.

  Neither Lawrence nor any other power broker could overcome the contradictions of liberal imperialism which became increasingly obvious as the twentieth century progressed. On the one hand there was the benevolent face of the empire as a force for moral and physical regeneration which satisfied the consciences of the public at home. On the other, there was the need for stability which meant coercion. Lawrence predicted that Iraq would become the first ‘brown dominion’–an Arab Canada or Australia. Yet he heartily endorsed condign air raids on tribesmen in Iraq and India who broke the imperial peace.

  The dilemma of Lawrence’s liberal imperialism was exposed during and after his lifetime as histori
c forces gathered momentum to challenge the validity of the right of one nation to control others. What Lawrence never wholly understood was that however benevolent, government from above ran against the grain among people who were discovering a sense of identity and imagined themselves best fitted to know what was for their good. Had he been appointed High Commissioner in Egypt, he would have been compelled to make concessions to the kind of nationalist politicians he despised. By 1928 Iraq had asserted a degree of independence from Britain and, in 1941, the nationalist prime minister Rashid Ali unsuccessfully attempted to take his country into Nazi Germany’s orbit. A British force installed a new government under Nuri es Said, Lawrence’s former companion-in-arms. In 1936, a year after Lawrence’s death, there was an Arab uprising in Palestine which took three years to suppress. The principal grievance was the sudden upsurge in Jewish immigration, a response to state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Germany and Eastern Europe, something that could never have been foreseen when Lawrence had been dictating the political geography of the Middle East.

  Lawrence’s settlement unravelled rapidly and bloodily after 1945. Britain abandoned the Palestine mandate in 1947 after a two-year Jewish terrorist campaign, and an Egyptian one accelerated withdrawal from bases around the Suez Canal in 1954. A reckless attempt to reassert Britain’s old supremacy came unstuck with the Suez fiasco of 1956 and within two years a revolution unseated the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq. Among the casualties was Nuri es Said. France had already backed out of the Lebanon and Syria. Only Hashemite Jordan survived the post-Suez upheavals.

  Within two decades of his death, Lawrence’s Middle Eastern order had been overturned. The ideas that had justified it remained. Just as in 1918 it was assumed that the departure of the Turks had created á vacuum that could only be filled by an outside power, so in the 1950s Britain’s eclipse was seen in Washington as a signal for the United States to assume regional overlordship. Unlike Britain, its objective was not the security of a territorial empire, but the protection of oil supplies from Soviet interference. An area that had once been India’s glacis was now the world’s petrol station.

  There was little in the Cold War Middle East that Lawrence would have recognised save the semi-feudal and semi-enlightened despotisms of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf emirates. Elsewhere, there were secular, authoritarian regimes often headed by young army officers such as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. If they professed any ideology, it was akin to that of the Young Turks, intensely nationalist and in favour of controlled modernisation. Until the implosion of the Soviet Union in 1989 these states were able to play Russia off against the United States.

  And then there was Israel that had successively defeated three Arab coalitions and thrust forward its frontiers, all of which had been achieved with American subsidies and diplomatic support. Palestinian Arabs within its old and new borders were expelled or squeezed into closely supervised reservations. They and some Israelis believe that the consequent impasse can only end with partition, but there has yet been no agreement as to where the boundaries are to be drawn.

  Despite misgivings (which were prophetic) about a land war between Jews and Arabs, Lawrence had welcomed the concept of a Jewish homeland. Like so many other Zionist sympathisers, he did not envisage the independent Jewish state created by the exodus of European and later Middle Eastern Jews between 1933 and 1948. Nor could he have imagined the Middle Eastern arms race, so reminiscent of that in Europe before the First World War, in which Israel secured an atomic arsenal and Iraq, Iran and Libya strove to do likewise.

  Regional powers were copying Britain and America in presuming that the Middle East was a region that needed to be permanently under the aegis of a single militarily dominant nation. In America, today’s so-called ‘neo-conservatives’ concur and use a lexicon of control and influence that would have been understood by the strategists and statesmen with whom Lawrence worked and whose policies he helped fulfil. Unlike them, the neo-conservatives have not developed a moral approach to imperial responsibilities.

  Outwardly the American supremacy resembled the British. It rests on a foundation of subsidies, local allies, including the existing dynastic elite in Saudi Arabia and the unofficial protectorate of Israel. This system received a severe jolt in 1990, when one client autocrat took a gamble and invaded the country of another. Saddam Hussein’s coup against Kuwait may also have been a bid to propel Iraq towards local supremacy, uniting all Arabs against Israel and America. If this was so, it was a miscalculation. The governments of the rest of the Middle Eastern states threw themselves behind the United Nations and supported its recovery of Kuwait. Many Arabs may have dreamt of a new Saladin emerging to unify them and expel their enemies, but their rulers judged that Saddam Hussein was not the man.

  American hegemony was preserved, as was Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. Other Arab leaders feared that his eviction and the occupation of Iraq might be the prelude to its partition. In other words, they faced and were repelled by the possibility of a repetition of the 1921 Cairo Conference with outside powers treating Iraq as another Ottoman empire to be divided for their own convenience. New states—the Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Egypt, Israel and Saudi Arabia—had evolved within the lines that Churchill, Lawrence and their collaborators had drawn in Cairo. The original frontiers may have ignored local ethnic and religious realities, but there was little general desire to see them adjusted, particularly under American and European pressure.

  American regional supremacy was challenged again in the late 1990s by a creature familiar to Lawrence’s age. Drawing on what he had learned in British intelligence, Lawrence’s future friend John Buchan created ‘Greenmantle’ in the eponymous novel of 1916. Greenmantle was a proto-Osama Bin Laden, an ascetic, messianic holy man whose charisma would unite Islam in a jihad against the Allies. It was a hidden conspiracy and all the more frightening for that. As the head of the secret service warns: ‘Once we know what the menace is we can meet it. As long as we are in the dark it works unchecked and we may be too late.’ He could have been speaking of al-Qaida.

  Older readers of Greenmantle (among them Lawrence’s superior, Sir Reginald Wingate) would have recalled the Mahdi of the Sudan who had died in 1885, a few months after his capture of Khartoum and the death of Gordon. Lawrence would certainly have been well aware of another miracle-working Islamic holy man, Sayyid Muhammad Abdullah ibn Hassan whom the British called the ‘Mad Mullah’. His war of attrition in Somaliland was well known to Cairo’s intelligence officers and lasted from 1899 to 1920.

  Like the Mahdi, Sayyid Muhammad preached a return to ancient Muslim purity and a ceaseless jihad to expel Europeans and their influence from Muslim lands. His followers were promised paradise if they died in battle, which may be why so many threw themselves into rifle and machine-gun fire. At the same time and like al-Qaida, both the Mahdi and Sayyid Muhammad turned Western technology against its inventors, capturing and deploying machine guns and artillery. Yet ultimately it was faith that would bring victory in a global struggle. Again like al-Qaida, the Mahdi, Sayyid Muhammad and the mullahs who led Pan-Islamic resistance on the North-West Frontier in the 1920s believed that Islam was in peril everywhere and could only be saved through the sacrifice of the truly devout.

  Al-Qaida’s tactics of terrorism would have been familiar to Lawrence, as they would have been to anyone brought up in late-Victorian and Edwardian England. This was the age when it was open season for anarchists to shoot and throw bombs at kings and presidents, and Bengali nationalists assassinated British officials in India and once in London. Even though undertaken as a legitimate tactic of war, derailing trains would have been regarded by the Turks and Germans as a form of terrorism, in so far as many engaged in these operations were irregulars who did not wear uniforms. This, together with the nature of the war they were waging, led to the brutal treatment of any Arab caught by the Turks. Paradoxically, similar arguments have been deployed by the United States government to justify torture and the extended imprisonment of Ta
liban suspects.

  The jihads of Lawrence’s time were never coordinated and relied heavily on guerrilla warfare in remote regions. They were checked by a mixture of bribery and main force, often ruthlessly applied. Lawrence favoured what was euphemistically called ‘aerial policing’, which was used extensively across the Middle East and in India. Paradoxically, Iraq had been one of the first testing grounds of what was always a controversial form of correction.

  Iraq received what was in effect an updated form of aerial coercion in the spring of 2003 as a prelude to the Anglo-American invasion. What followed was uncannily like the closing phases of the Mesopotamian campaign of 1914 to 1918. Then Anglo-Indian forces had been welcomed, but it was soon and painfully discovered that Iraqis had not expected their liberation to be a transfer of power from Turkish pashas to British proconsuls. The large-scale Iraqi insurrection in 1920 had been the reason why Churchill called on Lawrence to help find a solution to the regions and, for that matter, Britain’s problems.