Tactically, Lawrence realized that it was just not possible to overwhelm positions, or to keep a large force supplied (something that, by contrast, Gen. Giap did brilliantly). Instead, he decided that guerrilla warfare required three tactics: attacking neither the strongest nor the weakest points but rather the most accessible; nearly perfect intelligence; and finding just one aspect in which the guerrilla forces were stronger, even if this meant that in all other respects his Arab forces were vastly inferior. This mix of lightweight forces, strong intelligence, and ad hoc technical means, however inferior in traditional battles, provided Lawrence with one of the greatest tactical advantages:

"The decision of what was critical would always be ours."

For the convoy no longer supported by Bradley fighting vehicles and Cobra escorts, a rocket-propelled grenade will do just fine -- or a .23-caliber machine gun mounted to one of the Toyotas used by nearly every Bedouin shepherd, just the sort of "technical" vehicle that took out two Abrams tanks by firing through the rear grills. The Russian-made Koronets may yet prove deadly, however, since they are easily smuggled at just 63 pounds. For a small, opportunistic group, perfect intelligence will be easily obtained once we become an occupying and not a highly mobile liberating force. How many tanks will we need to lose per week until we decide we've had enough? How many U.S. administration personnel assassinated? And then?

And then we arrive at the crux of Lawrence's genius, the psychological aspect of guerrilla warfare and its relation to the strategic and tactical. He began with doubts about the ideological basis for Faisal's rebellion, and whether it would spread to the other Bedouin tribes:

"Abdulla's words were definite. He contrasted his hearer's present independence with their past servitude to Turkey, and roundly said that talk of Turkish heresy, or the immoral doctrine of Yeni-Turan, or the illegitimate Caliphate was beside the point. It was Arab country, and the Turks were in it: that was the one issue."

This necessary but insufficient condition had to overcome the obstacle of death, however, as man who is already free, such as the Bedouin, gains little by rebellion and even less by death. Lawrence did not anticipate the urbanization of the Arabs, their long desperation, or their intense conflict with Israel. The idea of the suicide bomber would surely have shocked him, though he would have recognized its use as an extension of this theories. What he did know, even then, was that he needed only one or two in a hundred to be active -- the rest could be merely passive -- and that the minds of all must be taken to battle beyond their initial passions:

"We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own men's minds, though naturally they came first. We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals looking on; circle beyond circle.

"There were many humiliating material limits, but no moral impossibilities; so that the scope of our activities was unbounded."

This moral element, requiring not so much action as mere apprehension, except for the few who would carry the fight, is why Bush's failure to get U.N. approval could prove to be so devastating, especially in the wake of the largest war protests in the history of the world. It is why it doesn't matter if the people in the United States and Great Britain aren't galled that our coalition was made up of such minor partners as the Solomon Islands and Guam -- and not the U.N. Security Council, or G8 nations such as France, Germany, Russia and Canada. We are fighting a new kind of war here, and it's not the one on the ground in Iraq we should be worried about. Of his new guerrilla war fighting, Lawrence wrote:

"We kindergarten soldiers were beginning our art of war in the atmosphere of the twentieth century, receiving our weapons without prejudice."

Well, there is no longer any prejudice in the world's armed forces against guerrilla warfare and the politics of a people's war -- by the time the long and bloody 20th century had played out, the world's dispossessed had earned their Ph.D.'s at Bay of Pigs College and Dien Bien Phu U. If any of this rings true, then it is not Saddam's tactics or Baath party thugs we should be looking around for, but Osama bin Laden -- or his successors. It is not the increasingly comic -- and now silenced -- rants of Iraq's minister of information, Mohammed Said al-Sahaf, we should fear, but the stern warning of Egypt's moderate president, Hosni Mubarak: that we are going to create "a hundred bin Ladens."

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