Promises and betrayals (Fisk re: T E Lawrence)

[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

[Peace Patriot]

1. Ah, me, history's gyre just keeps turning, flipping us over and over and over,

until maybe, some day, we get it right.

We waste all our resources on war--not to mention the godawful destruction of that most precious and amazing evolutionary development, the human brain, and how it gets splattered all over by bombs and bullets, as if intelligence were shit or garbage. And for what? 60 years after defeating the Nazis we have become the Nazis. Every war since has had no justification whatsoever. War profiteer wars. Oil wars. And what have war profiteers and oil gotten us? Bankruptcy and a dying planet.

The little lessons, and the big lessons, keep coming back around. I DO think we learn. At the beginning of the war on Iraq, FIFTY-SIX PERCENT of the American people opposed it (NYT poll; other polls 54-55%). All those folks--the majority of Americans--HAD LEARNED "THE LESSONS OF VIETNAM." But what we hadn't learned--and have yet to learn--is how to hang onto our democracy. The gyre spins. We LEARN. And the malefactors among us find some OTHER way (for instance, electronic voting machines run on 'TRADE SECRET,' PROPRIETARY programming code, owned and controlled by rightwing Bushite corporations, with no audit-recount controls) to subvert the learned wisdom of the majority.

Now we have a whopping, epochal anti-war majority of 65-70%, and STILL we cannot get the will of the majority enforced--in a supposed democracy. A democracy in name only. A hijacked democracy run by Nazis. We've held onto it, and kept improving it, for 200 years. Now we have to learn that lesson all over again: how to achieve government that has the consent of the people?

That is a more important and overriding question that the tactics of war. There should be no war.

[TaffyMoon]

2. You Can Read Fisk at Independent..Co.UK - He's A Mideast Expert!

[struggle4progress]

3. Thanks for pointing that out! Here's his page at The Independent:

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/fisk/