LAWRENCE AS AMERICAN STRATEGIST

Submitted by DANIEL REDMOND (United States), Jan 21, 2010 at 04:36

Having read the Seven Pillars of Wisdom many years ago, I am well aware of the perspective that Thomas Edward Lawrence had developed as it relates to Bedouin tribes in the Middle East and to the tribalism of the region. Lawrence was unique in that he was first and foremost an intellectual with a deep commitment to the people of the Middle East, and secondly an effective military strategist whose concepts were rooted in a deep understanding of the culture and terrain he found there. With this in mind, I praise General Petraeus for his study of Lawrence's conclusions on warfare.

However, reading the above article I could not help but realize how we have belatedly come to learn the very things that perhaps Saddam Hussein himself was all too aware of when we finally conclude that "tribalism rules the region." Although I had at first supported the invasion of Iraq on the grounds of Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction, I had to reconsider this viewpoint when we suffered the humiliating realization that there were no weapons there to be found.

So in this fiasco of misguided foreign policy we have invaded another nation to search for non-existent weapons, deposed a leader who had fully understood the tribalism of the area and maintained control with an iron fist, come to understand that the violence found in Arab societies is directly related to this tribalism, and finally resorted to the corrupt concept of outright bribery (a form of favoritism, as was practiced by Saddam himself) in order to gain the cooperation we needed from local leaders. ["Patraeus used lavish distributions of money as the lubricant of good relations with the Iraqi tribesmen."]

Saddam Hussein was not the first dictator whose effectiveness at maintaining some semblance of order in a volatile region was only belatedly appreciated by the rest of the world. Tito was often criticized during his regime for his iron grip on the former Yugoslavia, but when he died the region became a seething cauldron of hatred and ethnic violence, as if the lid had suddenly been lifted from a pressure cooker. Yes, there is much that can be learned from Lawrence on the subject of military intervention in the Middle East. But perhaps our greatest lesson should be that an inept strategy based upon inaccurate intelligence is the most dangerous game of all; and that is a lesson we can learn from our own mistakes right now in the 21st Century.

- DANIEL REDMOND

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