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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Lawrence of Arabia's brilliant memoir reminds us that the hard part is not defeating Iraq, but occupying it.
Apr 15, 2003 | The war with Iraq's military is over. Saddam's Republican Guard and fedayeen paramilitaries are scattered, captured or dead. Donald Rumsfeld has a slight cheer to his avuncular growls, slyly reminding us that in our more nervous editorials, the words "Vietnam" and "Grozny" and "Lebanon" were briefly hushed before being set aside by our romps into downtown Basra and Baghdad. We even, briefly, raised a few American flags in the cradle of civilization.
Still, the speculative unease persists even as the statues are being toppled, and there's a very curious roundabout to it all. We may as well track it backward as it arose, through our experience in Vietnam. Or that of Israel (and our own Marine Corps) in Lebanon. In Vietnam, it was Ho Chi Minh's left-hand military man, Gen. Vo Nguyen Giap -- more than Ho Chi Minh himself -- who devised the logistical and political mastery of war that caused us so much trouble. The general, whose own papers are now studied at West Point and Annapolis, learned his tactics from, above all, T.E. Lawrence. "My fighting gospel is T.E. Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom,'" he said. "I am never without it."
For all the attention to books by Bernard Lewis and Kenneth Pollack, and all the caffeinated hyperactivity of the retired generals with their plastic tanks and linoleum geographies, it's surprising that no one mentions Lawrence and his masterpiece. It's especially surprising given his striking role in this conflict's provenance: As aide to Winston Churchill, and friend to Prince Faisal Hussein, T.E. Lawrence was one of the creators of Iraq, and Prince Faisal the first ruler. It was Lawrence who helped channel the Arab nationalism led by Hussein and his forces into a coherent fighting doctrine, a doctrine of a people's guerrilla war -- a doctrine whose first followers ruled all the states of the Middle East upon their creation after World War I. Laid out in Chapter 33 of his famous book, Lawrence's ideas are a more coherent (and deeply thought) analysis of the coming battles for the future of Iraq than any offered by our talking heads.
Let's start with a plain fact: The standing military of Saddam Hussein was no match for our forces. In 1991, it was a freshly supplied, well-maintained force -- the fourth largest in the world. In 2003, it was a ragtag band of conscripts running broken-down equipment. The United States has suffered fewer combat casualties in four weeks of this conflict than we did in four days of ground fighting during the war in Kuwait. We are not done -- and our casualty tally is almost certain to grow before we are finished -- but the conventional military outcome of our march into Iraq was never really in doubt. Indeed, several embedded reporters have mentioned the guilt felt by the young soldiers and Marines: the guilt of human slaughter.
Lawrence, knowing well what was happening on the western front and having seen first-hand what happened to the Arab forces when they ran up against the mechanized Turkish forces, had a strong distaste for the kind of industrial war we are wrapping up in Tikrit:
"To me [absolute] war seemed only an exterminative variety, no more absolute than another," he wrote. "One could as explicably call it 'murder war.'"
Rather than fight on such gruesome terms, Lawrence devised a war-fighting strategy that supposed the enemy was allowed to occupy territory -- as much as possible, in fact. In such a scenario, the true battle for Iraq starts once Saddam's forces are defeated: the twin battles, actually, of our occupation -- one to establish immediate order and humane conditions in Iraq, and another to create a stable government that the Iraqis and the rest of the Arab people feel is genuinely their own. We cannot fail at either, for it is against just such an unwelcome occupation that Lawrence's theories are meant to work.
The logic is impeccable. Lawrence estimated that the Turkish-occupied Hejaz was approximately 140,000 square miles (Iraq, by comparison, is 168,000), then asked:
"And how would the Turks defend all that? No doubt by a trench line 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?"
This was the first realization on Lawrence's way to formulating guerrilla war fighting: You don't need to win the war but merely make it unwinnable. Lawrence figured the Turks would need 600,000 -- an impossibility -- to put down his revolt. For our present campaign, the Army Chief of Staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, wanted 200,000 troops to hold and police Iraq. There aren't even that many fighting. Invading Syria would not, in this view, decrease the threat but increase it, by expanding the geography of our defense. It might also help to remember that the group that actually attacked us on 9/11, al-Qaida, attacked us three other times, none of which occurred on our soil, but rather that of Kenya, Tanzania, and Yemen.
