Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq

Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq

'Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active and 98 per cent passively sympathetic'

Published: 14 July 2007

Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for "Guerrilla" in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read - and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage, for sending me TE's remarkable article - because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... 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..."

How typical of Lawrence to use the horror of gas warfare as a metaphor for insurgency. To control the land they occupied, he continued, 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 wills of all the local Arab people. They had 100,000 men available."

<snip>

"Rebellion must have an unassailable base ...

In the minds of men converted to its creed. It must have a sophisticated alien enemy, in the form of a disciplined army of occupation too small to fulfil the doctrine of acreage: too few to adjust number to space, in order to dominate the whole area effectively from fortified posts.

"It must have a friendly population, not actively friendly, but sympathetic to the point of not betraying rebel movements to the enemy. Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active in a striking force, and 98 per cent passively sympathetic ... Granted mobility, security ... time, and doctrine ... victory will rest with the insurgents, for the algebraical factors are in the end decisive, and against them perfections of means and spirit struggle quite in vain."

http://news.independent.co.uk/fisk/article2768261.ece

I mean, I've read Iraqi politicians and others take special pride in belittling and demeaning the man as a pretender with delusions of having learned the slightest thing from them, a dumbass Western interloper who did nothing but piggyback on a great Arab victory that had basically nothing to do with him.

And yet when I read anything the man wrote, he seems to be a person of rare insight indeed.

The reason I like open minded people is men like we have in the WH right now. Second rate men who are sure they are right in every thing and will drag every one down to make it come true.

But it's that 98% figure we still have to work on.....