Lawrence of Arabia (T. E. Lawrence) And His Legacy

[Music] I returned recently to Iraq I've been here before in 2003 working as a British diplomat and as the deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces talking to American soldiers I've been intrigued to find that before their play stood - the Middle East officers are made to study one of my boyhood heroes in World War one Lawrence of Arabia United feuding Arab tribes into a formidable army which helped to topple the Ottoman Turkish Empire his experience of defeating a foreign military occupation of leading an insurgency has led to him being held up as the man who cranked fighting in the Middle East so today his writings and sort have become a guide to the US military and its allies fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan [Music] one of the key things that need to take away from car launches he had an appreciation and knew the people there's just incredible invaluable lessons that we have taken from that but for me Lawrence has a much darker message Lawrence might have one of war but the politics that followed fatally undermined his success he aimed he said to write his will across the skies and build a new independent Arab nation but in these two films I want to show how Lawrence felt his dream ended in catastrophe and shame and I believe that if our generals and politicians now could see what Lawrence saw we would not be in the mess that we're in today [Music] for three years I've been based in Afghanistan working with a community to save and restore part of the old city of Kabul but at the same time not far south of the capital this war between the Taliban and Western armies I struggle to reconcile discomfort with all that I find so positive and entrancing about the cultures the Middle East all that I've seen in the last ten years that I've spent living and working in this region and in Lawrence I found a man who experienced and understood many of these same issues reading Lawrence has taught me much about risks and challenges of trying to intervene in a culture that is so alien to your own Lawrence the warrior hero started life a long way from the deserts of Arabia born in 1888 in a middle-class suburb of Oxford he eventually went to Oxford University when I myself at Oxford I often thought about Lawrence about how a shy reserved boy began before the age of 18 to prepare himself to be a leader you have to think yourself back to that period when Britain was an imperial power when young middle-class Englishmen and upper-class Anderson were being brought up to run the Empire Jeremy Wilson is T Lawrence's authorized biographer he had a very very profound sense of right and wrong I think that just says it throws through everything he does I think that aspect of Lawrence must have formed really quite early on [Music] Lawrence had certain gifts he was able to manipulate people extraordinarily well and to manipulate people with extraordinary well you must have an ability to size them up almost instantly but it's gift that business of being able to put people in your pocket it's a mixture of charm it's a mixture of analysis of hunch for me there's another vital clue in Lawrence's early years that hints at his desire to change history Lawrence seemed to his schoolteachers a relatively ordinary of eccentric bookish boy but there was something very strange about his interests he was obsessed with knights in shining armor he cycled around the country doing brass rubbings of crusading heroes because he wanted to emulate them he wanted to compete with them he wanted some of the glory of being a knight in shining armor [Music] Lawrence was not an accidental hero he was someone who set out quite deliberately to become a hero [Music] in 1909 when he was 20 21 Lawrence walked a thousand miles across Syria in the Middle East a tough and dangerous journey during which he studied Crusader castles for his university thesis he began in Constantinople then the capital of the Turkish Ottoman Empire and warped right down into Ottoman Syria was on this trip that Lawrence discovered the landscape than more importantly the people that came to dominate his life Lawrence spent a lot of time walking through the Middle East he was often doing 910 hours a day across the landscape of Syria and Palestine every night he was staying in a different village Hut sometimes in a Bedouin tent and they'd never take any payment for it he was a kind of wandering mascot I suppose who must have seemed to him this blond English boy in his formal British clothes sometimes he'd aim for a crusader castle but often he'd be sitting in a tent on a village floor listening to people talk about their lives talk about the government by the end of it and the shy young undergraduates in Oxford but found himself [Music] I can relate to Lawrence's experience and I walked from Turkey to Bangladesh when I was 26 which took me about 21 months and I walked about 6,000 miles and I stayed in about 500 village houses on the way these and random places that just happened to be 20 or 25 miles apart I walked across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban through villages ten days walk from the nearest road I had some difficult experiences the man on my right in this photograph tried to shoot me for a bet but afghans in their dignity taught me a great deal about how to live a meaningful life and they protected me i found when i returned to the government when i returned to working would be foreign office under the military in Iraq that I'd learnt an enormous amount the fact that these communities are extremely generous often very honor led but also surprisingly conservative religious and he foreign them I think there are elements of emotional spiritual motivation in this my sense that I'd left the line of footprints for six thousand miles behind me across Asia and also I think certainly for Lawrence walking through the Holy Land an echo of the Crusades of the disciples of Christ walking across the Holy Land [Music] [Applause] he arrived here in June 1909 the Syrian castle of crack the Chevalier which he called the greatest castle in the world [Music] when Lawrence comes here as a young man to get here at all he needs special passports and permissions coming from Istanbul and it's dangerous territory often the Ottoman police are stopping him from investigating things when he goes off on his own he gets beaten up [Music] this is contested territory even today a central strategic point for the Knights Lawrence's boyhood obsession who came to conquer and hold the Holy Land for Christianity it's a central link in a chain of castles stretching across Syria which for three centuries they held against the local Muslim population [Music] the size of the stones the tens of thousands of people building this building the amount of lives money energy fanaticism reported to this kind of occupation [Music] I mean you can sense here in crack the chevalier why the Crusades is such an astonishing phenomenon even today [Music] is crusade this war on terrorism is going to take a while and the governments of the West were responsible for what he called a crusader campaign against Muslims you can see why a summer bin Laden's obsessed with the cassettes where George Bush refers to the Crusades the scale of this occupation the amount of investment this isn't Porter cabins of barbed wire this is massive blocks of limestone tens of thousands of work when 75 years building this castle so Lauren says he's moving around putting himself into the mindset of the people who built this castle trying to understand how they defended themselves is already beginning to think about the link between occupation and local populations [Music] and the terrible tragedy the surreal weirdness of foreigners trying to cling on to an alien land [Music] in Lawrence's time of course Syria was under another form of occupation the rule of ottoman turks muslims but not arabs ruling despotically over a vast Arab Empire [Music] laurens saw a day-by-day the repression of Arab culture and sense the Arab longing for freedom but it was in his word only a dream because their spirits were shriveled under the numbing breath of a military government [Music] Laurence's first job after university was in syria where he worked in a remote area as an archaeologist archeology was very different in the Middle East then you had a small number of foreign archaeologists and a huge great native work force and Lawrence's job is to manage that workforce so he becomes an Arabist who learns the language is immersed in the culture he's learning about the Syrian tribes he comes to identify very strongly with the Arab world today this team of British archaeologists excavating the site of an old Ottoman Turkish garrison and listening that's a magic bullet so this is Turkish this is Turkish that is first world war munitions yeah we get lots of that amazing well Lawrence was digging ancient objects out of the ground Europe was hurtling towards the first world war the Ottoman soldiers that he met were not only controlling the Arab populations they were about to ally themselves with Germany against Britain and France we're looking at the Ottoman Empire a decaying empire an empire which is under attack from other empires other great powers and also looking at an empire which faces revolt from within [Music] this was a fork from which the ottomans tried to occupy a vast desert landscape and subdue the nomadic Bedouin tribes this is called baton al ghul in arabic which means the belly of the beast this is a place where you move from the relative safety of the uplands over there down into a bandit country where the possibility of Bedouin raiding becomes a real threat and I sometimes wonder what was going on in the minds of those ottoman boys or Turkish boys they found themselves in this very bleak landscape a long way from home they found that they were hated they were unwelcome it must have been as miserable as the Western Front Wars for British and German and French soldiers in a very different way you can see just watching these men how much Lawrence learnt from being an archeologist gaining a precise eye for detail for geology for topography the experience of years working alongside and managing hundreds of Arab laborers the landscape has the same effect on a soldier as it doesn't an archaeologist in some ways because it is 200 - a soldier comes from say Manchester or London or even from you know sort of Denver Colorado coming out here in is such an alien landscape and and the landscape teaches you know if you can either learn from the landscape where you can fail but if you do fail then you shouldn't be an archaeologist that's probably same thing with it with a soldier one of the exciting things about doing modern conflict archaeology in the Middle East is it resonates with the present and there's a sense in which you can see in Iraq and I think also in Afghanistan that a modern Empire the American Empire is facing insurgency and a kind of asymmetrical warfare which is just as difficult for the Americans in the British to deal with as the insurgency that the Ottoman Turks will face in ninety years ago dealing with the Arabs [Music] by 1914 Lawrence spoke good Arabic he'd done some remarkable journeys and he had a real empathy for Arabic culture and it was this that must have drawn the attention of certain departments of the British government a few months fought beginning the First World War Lawrence came down this narrow lane in Marylebone to call on the Palestine exploration fund an archaeological society that's virtually unchanged since Lawrence's day well this is the frontier between British Egypt and the Ottoman Empire that the British had this area mapped as well but in 1914 the Palestine exploration fund was also doing its bit on the side for British intelligence this is the map that results from the expedition this was the best map of its type for the region the British didn't have a decent map for the border between the Ottoman Empire and British Egypt this would be the front line if there was a war it protected the main lines to British India Allenby used this map here and the Suez Canal is absolutely the crucial factor Lawrence was selected for a small team that claimed to be looking for archaeological remains and the biblical exodus from Egypt but in fact the map served and military plans suddenly he finds himself involved in this why is he here what's he doing there was no doubt about it that this was intended as an undercover operation using an academic organization as a front and in fact Lawrence jokes about being a red herring we even have the letter that's referring to Lawrence as a young man who's quite shy but good at colloquial Arabic and gets on very well with the natives he has I think more of the instincts of the an explorer but is very shy so this is a sort of a precursor for what he's going to be doing in the revolt where you have small teams of a few British officers Arab supporters on the move being self-sufficient in the desert which is hostile I think without the survey Lawrence would not have been Lawrence of Arabia I feel that further [Music] Lawrence's map covers a section of the vast Negev desert an area that now straddles Egypt Israel and Jordan an error across which he would later launch his guerrilla raids [Music] as he worked he was undergoing a transformation I think that can be seen in his curious reaction to his first visit to the ancient site of Petra and it was this exactly that Laurence saw in 1914 came down the Scorch arrived in the soap and sweat and there in front of him the most astonishing 2000 year old temple the Corinthian columns at the top looking as though they were carved yesterday he'd been an archaeologist for four years he loved the ancient world he loved the Middle East and here in Petra you would have thought everything came together but strangely in his account it's not the temple he writes about but at this it's about the fact that you can only get one camel down this path he's beginning to think more like a general and less like a historian after all this time digging up old objects he was beginning to realize that it was people he was more interested in and in this part of the world specifically the Bedouins but secondly it's 1914 the first world war is coming and Lawrence isn't just an archaeologist anymore he's here on a new expedition financed by the Secret Service he's changing from being a historian into a spy [Music] Samak Allen is one of Britain's foremost Arabists he spent more than 30 years working for the British Diplomatic Service in the Middle East [Music] I asked them where the British government would take the risk of recruiting such an eccentric person I think when people being recruited for public service looking for conventional people who are we've got good formation good education then to behave themselves fit in but we all know the people like that can be a bit down and so there's another type that the magpie mind spots glittering in the hedge a slightly unconventional little bit eccentric maybe a bit too clever and Lawrence's indifference to hierarchy again would have been attractive because he would have seen the world the other way about and that would have been helpful to them his genius I think that's a fair word to use of Lawrence was to see but we wouldn't make much headway with dealing with the Arabs unless one crossed the street walked into the crowd and really made a self conscious attempt to understand how it looked to them I think Lawrence is remarkable in his ability to do that his commitment to doing that that made Lawrence very very unusual what do you think his analysis would have been of how good we are today that following through on those lessons he would have connected with American vision of trying to make the world a better place [Music] and I think that he would have wept with frustration but the way things are that these fine wonderful very brave very rich competent powerful people doesn't have the language or the experience to walk into the crowd [Music] when the first world war was declared Lawrence was initially given a job not in the infantry in the trenches working in the map office for British intelligence his particular focus was the Ottoman Empire this amazing combination of Islamic sentiment and a Prussian trained modern army Lawrence was soon despatched to the British Army's command center in Cairo the center of their operations against the Ottoman army and his job was to record carefully on maps the precise position of almost every Ottoman unit he began to understand their cap badges their specialisms their numbers it was almost no one in the British headquarters who could rival by this stage his knowledge of the tribal religious and racial mix of the Middle East [Music] one of the reasons why someone like Lawrence is so successful it's one of the only people who can describe the complexity of it you start with an Surya Muslims on the coast then moving inwards you've got Kurds next cut down you start from the border with Arab Circassians then you have person is miley's marinate and Greek Christians on the coast burst of Sunnis little Wally schirra and rice out on the edge of Mosul you have devil-worshiping Yazidis the great Ottoman Turkish Empire faced some serious problems it was nearly bankrupt its armies were weakened but the Ottoman Sultan was still the Caliph still the supreme leader of the Islamic world and when he called for jihad against the British he risked provoking not just a revolt in Arabia but among a hundred million Muslims in British India this threat of jihad or holy war is something we're familiar with today the deniz now the problem was how to respond Lawrence and his colleagues decided that the solution was to launch a counter jihad in order to do so the British allied themselves with sheriff Hussein of Mecca a descendant of the Prophet one of the few men with the charisma and authority to stand as a real rival to the Ottoman Sultan Hussein wanted a vast independent Arab Empire after the war and the British suggested that they would give it to him in return for his support [Music] the same took the British at face value and on the basis of what he thought was their promise launched his revolt his counter jihad against the Ottoman Turks however this revolt got off to a very bad start sheriff Hussein his family were beaten again and again by the modern Turkish army and in 1916 Lawrence was dispatched from Cairo to try to find out what was going wrong he was going to meet the family at the center of the Arab revolt the emir of mecca sheriff hussein and with him his sons ali abdullah faisal and Zayde he's going to try to identify which one of these men could be the leader and he was hoping that he could impress them enough to attach himself to them and at last engaged with the enemy finally fulfilling his dreams of doing something heroic in the deserts of Arabia [Music] which one do in that time okay Lawrence managed to get permission to travel far into the desert and he traveled by camel much more elegantly I hope than me you are used to this life you can go a very long way in the desert you don't need too much water you're very strong yes but for Lawrence it's new for him he doesn't and very very hard he come from a greater Britain yep to the desert a very big different very hard for him so what are the different commands for the camel for example if you want to go faster like that [Music] Laurens learned to travel astonishing distances on a camel he was very tough his camels were very strong and he could travel up to a hundred miles a day a difficult feat even for some of the Bedouin very good it's a nice camel horse it's more comfortable what is the problem with fighting here for you the Bedouins they know the area Turkish she didn't know haha he didn't know Bedouins he knows there is a waters there and he go and he looked for the water said he drinks and he will have autos Turkish she don't have uh-huh you didn't have this experience and also I think maybe the people in the towns do they support the better or they support the Osmo nein their support of the Midlands yes so they know each other yeah at last Lawrence was no longer stuck behind a desk in Cairo with his brothers fighting in the trenches instead he was on his own riding into the desert and beginning to get acquainted again with the land that he loved [Music] at the end of his journey was Sheriff Hussein's third son Faisal waiting for him but what he suffer [Music] and there in front of him is this man who isn't the kind of man that a British officer would expect to meet for such he's clad in these elaborate robes he has black slaves behind him he's smoking incessantly a hundred cigarettes a day he sits up to half past three or four in the morning I think it's Lawrence's cultural awareness which lets him see that although this man doesn't look like a British general this is exactly the kind of man who through his patience his gentleness and his family position is going to be able to effectively lead an Arab revolt Lawrence described it in storybook terms as love at first sight he wrote I felt at first glance that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek [Music] the next two years Lawrence spent almost all his life living in Bedouin tents and I'm spending a night with people whose fathers and grandfathers fought alongside Lawrence how about the zoo wider and the gsella bunny did does he remember anything of it Becker Shia and Hal Callahan Kalamata kulamish Eric over matic they are not overdone they're not one of the things that Lawrence says which is is something it's very difficult for me not to do it's that he believes that you shouldn't ask questions you should spend weeks or months sitting listening to people talking about their genealogy is talking about their families before you asked any questions Lawrence found the Bedouins for their courage their violence their hospitality their dignity their generosity to be about as close as he could come in the modern world to his dream of living with fighting with working with medieval knights we're sitting in the the modulus or the meeting place for grace shake and you can see in the center of the room the coffee pot which gathers people in the evening [Music] [Music] looking around this room you can see the kinds of issues he was dealing with every day you can see first having to navigate to the most senior people in the room are there are three shakes here from their respective tribes the different ways in which people sit not showing the cells their feet for example you can see some people running prayer beads through their hands which is generally a sign of piety there are five people here today who are wearing pistols and this was the kind of group that he would have been with night after night trying to judge by looking to people's eyes who is going to be reliable who's gonna want to fight with him it's a minefield out there when all of it represents why what Lawrence did was so uniquely difficult Muraki demolition our hosts father went with Lawrence to blow up a railway station about 200 meters from here what do people say about Lawrence as a man as his characters supervisor Flores bar of a new robot marathon Academy jolt oh yeah Mira was an English officer who served his country following period unless he has banana bananas he helped the Arabs in their revolt especially and in their bomb banks here in the area revolved Lawrence I wanna she ride your car so do kana Arab so Lawrence was a friend of the Arabs it's striking hell although many Arabs today as suspicious of Lawrence because of his colonial associations these men whose fathers and grandfathers fought with him have picked up from their ancestors a sense of respect the sense that he had a real sympathy for our people [Music] but reading Lawrence's account of this time it's also clear just how grueling he found these conditions it's a pretty difficult night if you're not used to sleeping in these kind of conditions got about 40 people sleeping the tent with E children coming and going it was so cold that on certain nights they'd wake up and find five or six people who had died from exposure during the night it's very very strange for Farnum because you can never fully relax because it's not your own culture and I think one of the reasons that Lawrence's nerves must have worn over a year or 18 months is that this tent is their home and they've got their wives and they've got the livestock they got their children and in the evenings they can go back to them where is he every night is working he's looking around the room thinking which one of you guys is going to come on a RAID with me tomorrow is this guy who I had an argument with yesterday is he gonna fall out but what exactly they're thinking I don't know this this sort of life and this is I suppose the end of its you can see with these clapped-out old carts and the verse bits of rubble scattered through the desert obviously that the life is changing quite dramatically but you feel really connection to history the whole question of how a westerner and you can operate in what will feel like a very alien environment how long can be in an Arab tent in robes drinking coffee dealing with a very difficult language with tribal structures all of the difficulty of that but also perhaps even there are months of that it's something that remains pressing 80 years later for American and British troops in Iraq so did they look quite nice them yeah yeah but this is not a Qin Arab tent this is a shipping container yeah this is the closest they get yeah for some of them to the to the real Arab world American soldiers fighting today in the Middle East are not living night after night alone and Bedouin tents they live a life which is both more protected and also more isolated from the local population the great challenge for them and the reason that they read Lawrence is to try to work out how to develop those forms of cultural sensitivity how to leave your own culture and enter an Arab one effectively as part of this American officers are still encouraged to read the 27 points which Lawrence rate is a guide for British officers 90 years ago thousands of US Army majors have learned the story of Lawrence and they're also shown clips from the great movie Lawrence of Arabia there's the scene of Lawrence sitting and faisal stent and of course his superior the British Colonel wants to get on with business and Lawrence is listening and he even finishes the recitation and surely the future shall be better for the youth and the past and in the end so your Lord be bounteous today it works really well I've seen many officers and NCOs who have been to Iraq and Afghanistan say after you turn off the clip say that was exactly like any number of meetings I had the interesting thing is that that discussion didn't happen in reality but it's okay the movie will work as sort of a device to get them to think about Lawrence I mean it's interesting I mean you you open this book with Lawrence's articles on the first page the American officer reading this is told learn all you can about your tribal name and better get to know their families clans and tribes friends and enemies Wells Hills roads bury yourself in Arab circles have no interests and no ideas except the work in hand search your brain is saturated with one thing only and you realize your part you don't think an American officer reading that you think what come on I mean you know I'm not gonna be able to do that none of them will ever be able to speak Arabic the way that Lawrence did but still I think the idea that Lawrence offers the example does resonate with some [Music] but there's another reason why the US military's study Lawrence he's not just a cultural anthropologist he was in a sense the first foreign insurgent he grasped instinctively how a local population could use its position and its landscape to defeat a foreign military occupation while his brothers were fighting on the Western Front Lawrence was immersing himself in an alien culture and learning how a very different form of religion and nationalism could be used to pioneer a new form of guerrilla warfare normally looking at a landscape like this you just give up because everything you would be taught at Staff College if you're a British officer would tell you that this landscapes a waste of time an army marches on its stomach you've got to supply it there's no way of getting food this far into the desert there's no water to keep people so what's remarkable about Lawrence is that he sees all those things all those negative things are in fact advantages because this is going to be a problem for the Turks but it's not going to be so much of a problem for the Bedouin the Bedouin have have lived here the Bedouins can move 200 miles through this without needing water [Music] this is of course the landscape that you can see in parts of Iraq in parts of southern Afghanistan and it's a landscape which is very very difficult for a large army to move through armies are very dependent on roads they're very dependent on rail networks you can patrol this desert but if you patrol in small numbers you can be ambushed and you can't garrison it because you can't resupply ourselves so in the end most of it is empty most of the time in an empty space on the map is a very dangerous space [Music] the Ottoman Empire extended deep into the deserts of Arabia the one thing that allowed them to supply their beleaguered garrison at Medina was their railway line this was the only way that they could bring reinforcements or supplies lawrence decided to move through that desert and not to attack the fortresses or the troops but instead to target precisely 1,100 miles fragile expensive line and engines in order to cut the spine of that empire Lawrence would have been carrying about 50 pounds of gel ignite which he needed to get up and under these rails without being seen that involved him digging out about 50 pounds of sand placing the fuse underneath and then trying to set the trigger now the trigger was usually a rifle which had been cut off at the barrel and as the train moves the train pulls the trigger at which point the barrel which has got a big bullet in it pointing down into the sand ignites the entire bunch of gel ignite [Music] these are the attacks which David Lean enacts so powerfully in his film [Music] your whole trains blown up you've no idea what the taking place machine gun fires coming in from that Ridge there you want to get behind here in order to take cover it's at that point that Lawrence is depending on his mortar fire which is going to come over the top and try to get them behind the Train but the whole thing is black smoke everywhere noise everywhere Pistons exploding people screaming trains falling off on either side and this whole area around us is littered with sick and dying and wounded soldiers it's complete carnage and all they Lawrence tries to put a brave face on it he writes to friends saying we had a good show we managed to get it it was just like the Wild West in another letter the friend he says I cannot bear the killing I cannot bear the sight of these dead men [Music] in many dangerous spots the Turks would send out patrols in front of their trains and they would walk 15 people in front of the Train to something from blowing it up it was a complete disaster understandably nobody wanted to get on this train anymore by the end of 1917 passengers on the Damascus Medina line are paying extra to sit in the third-class characters of the back of the Train rather than the first class carriages up near the engine and a lot of it was to do with tariffs in the terrace because they would put huge signs up in the train station Damascus anonymously at night saying no-good Arabs should get on this train if you get on this train will blow you up very very similar to what terrorists will do today in Iraq what we'll do today in Britain it's to do with trying to ensure not just that you do the damage but that you scare people into believing you're gonna do future damage [Music] Lawrence was an insurgent in today's language the texwood regarded him as a terrorist I think he was understood what the Taliban were up to instinctively and objectively uncounted his own experience we'll have any difficulty with that at all [Music] little wonder them that when the US military were trying to fight insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan they turn back to the writings of Lawrence and saw him as a voice for this kind of insurgency General David Patraeus who was the American commander in Iraq and is now the commander in Afghanistan devised a whole new counterinsurgency doctrine a new Field Manual a lot of which draws on Lawrence's writings one of the co-authors of this was John Naugle downloaded more than a million times in the first month after was published copies found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan so we know our enemies are reading it now we just have to get our guys to do it Lawrence was trying to SAP the strength of the Ottoman Empire he attacked their logistics he refused to provide them with with a set piece battle which he knew they would win and instead he would inflict the death of a thousand cuts and he actually felt sorry for the conventional army he fought he said he compared it to a plant and it's rooted firmly it has these long lines of supply it can't move rapidly and and by comparison an insurgent is a vapor an insurgent can disappear it will [Applause] is enormous ly difficult for a conventional army designed to to confront another conventional army to fight against an immaterial Bateman Lawrence actually was using guerrilla tactics and techniques to create a small army of guerrilla fighters to some extent in Afghanistan that the Taliban is following Lawrence's precepts more precisely we write that in this sense he's on the side of the enemy to succeed in this kind of war you need to be someone who thinks a little bit outside the box to use a horribly overused American phrase you have to be willing to connect with the people you are fighting who are also the people you're fighting with [Music] the fundamental challenge for the US forces and their allies in Iraq and Afghanistan are to work with local forces Lawrence was in the center of an Arab army he was building the capacity of local troops night after night as he crossed this stony wilderness he was trying to bring together feuding Arab tribes into a single national fighting force sir Lawrence stops here for the night on his way from Wadi Rum on an attack on a Turkish train station this is the carpet of brown Flint's that he describes over a lime scrag he started the day with about a hundred people and they're all fighting there's a zoo by de tribe does allamani tribe some Hawaiians have joined them he's running back and forth between these different groups discussing pay spoils who's gonna ride first come night they stopped and there are three little groups around tamarisk fires and he's delighted because the days started with ten different groups and he's managed to get them to combine into three but if he's really going to create a new arab nation he's got to get them into one Lawrence says military genius faced its greatest test at the beginning of 1917 his aim was to work with auda Abu tayi one of the most famous Bedouin warriors in Arabia a man who couldn't count the number of people that he'd killed together without her he decided without asking permission or even informing his bosses to head for Aqaba the Turkish Ottoman port that controlled the Red Sea it was an astonishing journey beginning with 17 or 18 people's through this remote area of desert all the skills his sense of insurgency his feeling for the tribes came together as historian Michael ashen who served in the SAS explained to me it was really the classic Special Forces operation because they made this incredible turning movement through the hardest desert in Arabia and there's one area called al hool which means the terror literally where there's you know not a single blade of grass of a single tree that even flies could live there the reason he did that was it was a feint if he'd made straight towards akka but the Turks would have realized immediately but that's that was his objective and just a handful of men only seventeen to start off with no heavy weapons they then said about recruiting local people whose the hearts and minds technique of Special Forces and they eventually became 500 all Special Forces really go back to a command to that operation [Music] the fighting which in David Lean's film takes place on the Aqaba beaches in fact took place 60 miles inland here at add the listen this was the key point the Turks here controlled the pass going down into the guerra plain so he who controlled the pass really controlled acaba but it was the topography that really was the key to the battle because the Turks were down in the depression that we can see here Lawrence's men were up on the high ground basically the the Arabs had been pinned down in this holler at the end of the day after sniping at them virtually the whole day Lawrence got a bit fed up with a Hawaii tap and he said to our DA vote aye how is it with the Hawaii at all talk and no work an alder who was very you know sensitive to these pricks against his honor turned absolutely pale he marched off and the next minute lawrence saw this horde of who attacked him horsemen charging down into the valley and he very quickly followed on his camel but just at the crucial moment he shot his own camel through the head with his pistol and ended up sailing through the air and hit the ground lost consciousness and when he came round the whole thing was over he'd won one of the most crucial ports in the Middle East and an instant this map maker from a desk at Cairo with his romantic army that created a legend and proved the worth of the Arab forces in the theory of the SAS is that if you get the right man you can do anything if you get people like Lawrence who can really understand the way Arabs think you know and really see the world as they see it then you could do it but of course it's very difficult to find those kind of people and that's why I think Lawrence was so special it wasn't enough for Lawrence to capture this important strategic port because of course British headquarters underestimated the Arabs he needed now to communicate their victory back to Kara there were no telephones no telegraph the only way to do it was to take the news personally by camel across the Sinai to Suez and then to Cairo now Lawrence had to do that himself because he realized that if he sent someone he wouldn't be no one would believe him because this wasn't an authorized operation nobody knew where Lawrence was where had he been for all these weeks nobody knew so if an Arab had turned up and said we've captured a cover no one would have believed in Lawrence knew had to do it in person so he set off it on this epic ride across cyanide [Music] when Lawrence had left Kara's six months early he'd been a junior British officer in British military uniform nobody had heard from him in two months and during his time at the Bedouins he'd changed into a very different person on that tough journey back across Sinai he was travelling back to the British military headquarters the headquarters in Cairo and a world which he must have forgotten when Lawrence staggered exhausted after that heroic ride into the edge of the British base in Cairo he somehow managed to get in to see general Allenby the contrast between Allenby a cavalry officer tall a product the Victorian army and his polished riding boots and as Lawrence says of himself a little silk robed barefooted man offering to hobble the enemy couldn't be more dramatic and yet it was a meeting of minds Allenby immediately decided to provide armored cars machine guns mortars and compasses to help the Arab cause [Music] allenby could see that a man like Lawrence was exactly the person who could form the right wing of his army lead them against the Ottoman Turks for Lawrence however a different kind of challenge was emerging he suddenly had two masters Allenby and Faisal he was hoping he could win a victory for general Allenby and for the British and for Faisal and independent Arab Kingdom [Music] all of this of course was going to depend on what was decided in Britain would the British government keep its promise to give the arms the independence and freedom to give the Arabs the respect and the autonomy that Lawrence felt they deserved [Music] while Lawrence was continuing his fight in the deserts of Arabia far away back in white school the British and the French should in fact secretly decided to betray the Arabs and instead of giving Faisal an independent Kingdom to divide Arabia up into British and French colonies the French negotiator in all of this was George pica the British negotiator was Samar Sykes together they decided to divide Arabia into two Imperial possessions I talked to historian James Barr about the significance of the sykes-picot agreement the reason Seitz was brought in as an expert was because he'd written a book on me the Ottoman Empire just before the war and if you look in the index of that but which Sykes wrote he has an entry for Arab character and it's an Arab character see also Treasury and that was Sykes his view it was a deal done to carve up the Middle East between these two empires between Britain and France what it did was divide the Middle East along a diagonal line that ran from the Mediterranean coast up to the Persian border from the e of acre to the last K in Kirkuk right which gives you this wonderful idea of you know how it was designed on a map there was no bore no relation to geography or to ethnicity or religion it was simply a line on the map it was a very complacent and arrogant thing to do it was dividing up a land that neither of them yet ran and one of the British officials in the War Office said it's a bit like being hunters who divided up the skin of the bear before we have killed it sir Lawrence knew that the British and French were actually planning to divide a river up into colonies how do you think this felt for Lawrence to have to be with the Arabs to promise them this kind of freedom while knowing that the same thing had been promised in other directions at the same time he's absolutely appalled and he writes a note to his commanding officer deep in that when he's deep in the desert saying we are getting them to fight for us on a lie and I can't stand it [Music] the sykes-picot agreement is the deal that seldom discussed in Britain today but the Arabs have certainly not forgotten it because it was a treaty that betrayed all the promises that Lawrence and the British government had made to the Arabs and worse something that was going to haunt Middle East's and politics for decades to come when a Salman bin Laden talks about the nature of his mission when he thinks about Lawrence of Arabia he thinks about the betrayal of sykes-picot and calls it in his words the dissection of the Islamic world into fragments next I want to show how Laurence tries to reverse the injustice of sykes-picot how he tries to use his fame and his military glory to win a fair settlement for the Arabs and how the legacy of that conflict destroyed both Lawrence and our future relations with a Middle East [Music] in this church in rural Dorset is one of my Harris a man on whose death Churchill said I fear whatever I need we shall not see his like again an Englishman will forever be connected to the deserts of Arabia Lawrence is best known from the Hollywood blockbuster where he's played by Peter O'Toole as an eccentric intense young blond Englishman leading an arab army in a first world war revolt against the ottoman turks [Music] today Lawrence has an extraordinary new relevance before American officers are posted to Iraq and Afghanistan on their own desert campaigns they're made to study Lawrence they see Lawrence as the man who cracked how to fight in the Middle East [Music] but there's another chapter of his life which we know much less about he returned from the battles in Arabia to a different kind of fight a fight in the Cabinet Room some Downing Street the palace of versaille lawrence called this his dogfight in the corridors of power but unlike his battles in arabia this was a fight he'd lost his political vision for Arabia was ignored and this is poisoned our relations with the Middle East ever since he was a man of vision unfortunately not many people you know were willing to listen to him after a 1918 had they were much of the crisis that we're facing today with a couple in this film I want to show how Lawrence's campaign to reshape the Middle East is the Forgotten chapter in his story it's failure ultimately destroyed him and it continues to haunt us in Iraq and Afghanistan today [Music] [Music] I first heard about Lawrence when I was about six I was living in Malaysia and when my father took me walking in the jungle every time I complained about being thirsty he'd say Lawrence for a via went for three days through the desert without food or water [Music] as I grew older I often thought about Lawrence as a warrior Eric then in 2003 after the invasion of Iraq I became the deputy governor of two Iraqi provinces I was living in Amara a town where Lawrence stayed ninety years earlier like him I was a young British official involved in another British occupation in Iraq then in a Muslim town but surrounded by foreign soldiers I began to read his journalism and letters I suddenly discovered Lawrence not there's some kind of desert warrior in a Hollywood movie but instead as a journalist criticizing the British government's intervention in Iran from 1920 in which he said the people of England have been led in Iraq into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor it's a disgrace to our Imperial record we are today not far from disaster [Music] he was writing about vents in rock in 1920 but to me he was describing the insanity and indignity of what I saw around me in 2003 [Music] before Lawrence comes to these conclusions on Britain's intervention in Iraq he's embroiled in a dramatic first world war military campaign Lawrence isn't fighting in the mud of Flanders but in the deserts of Arabia not in tanks but on camels Lawrence has been sent by the British to weld Arab tribes into an army capable of overthrowing their occupiers the Ottoman Turks who are now elide with the Germans and who threatened Britain's Empire in the east but gradually Lawrence finds he's serving two masters as a British officer he's pursuing the aims of the British Empire with British guns and British money but he's also living with and trying to serve Arabs whose only objective is a free independent Arabia whose capital is Damascus [Music] Damascus was central to Lawrence's vision for radio Damascus is the dream palace Damascus represents for him the great age of Arab independence one of the greatest cities of the world in his words one of the Seven Pillars of wisdom for Arab civilization the seat of the first great Arab Empire all of this and of course the wealth of the surrounding countryside was what made it essential for Lawrence and for the Arab movement to put Damascus at their heart to make this incredibly cosmopolitan sophisticated City the capital of their new empire rather than waste lands of desert Arabia Lawrence's allies are not a formal army they're insurgents one might almost say terrorists using propaganda the support of the local population to launch Swift and devastating raids their principal target was not the Ottoman soldiers but instead the fragile rail track which was the spine of the Ottoman Empire linking their headquarters at Damascus to their garrison of Medina this is a Ottoman Turkish railway station it's really a fortified block house two or three hundred Turkish soldiers would have been in this station defending the section the line there's something about this which is incredibly desperate somebody's just smashed through in order to create this spit hole because there's windows too dangerous I mean you can feel the list that the speed and the desperation that have gone into hacking in this to create your firing position Lawrence talks a lot about creeping up on these kinds of places as you get within about 300 yards according through the sand you can see coming through presumably windows like this the light of the cooking fires a man walks out to light his cigarette and the light briefly illuminates his face he sees it's a hollow faced pale faced young officer and as Lawrence says as long as he could keep those soldiers and the blockhouses poking their rifles out of those slits that was all they were ever going to command 150 yards around a station like this well the other hundred thousand square miles of desert stretching out here to Saudi Arabia was his [Music] the arab army moved across the gravel and the sands as though across a limitless ocean as lawrence said the arabs might be a vapor [Music] the Arabs were now the right wing of a massive British led advance the two forces were driving north through the Negev desert in parallel the Arabs on the right the British on the left by December 1917 they'd reached Jerusalem [Music] general Allenby commander of the British forces in the East invited Lawrence to march with the soldiers into the city Lawrence had been obsessed with Crusader Knights since he was a boy it was a moment of enormous significance the Holy Land reclaimed for the first time since the Crusades this is the Jaffa Gate the old city Jerusalem it's the conquerors gate so in general Allenby conquers the city the 1917 through this gate that he marches with Lawrence behind him Lawrence has swapped his Arab clothes for the correct uniform of a British officer British major and they're marching instead of riding horses because Christ walked into the old city Jerusalem it was for Lawrence the supreme moment of the war that's what he calls it so the British had won a glorious military victory but what did it mean what was their long-term plan where was this going who was gonna get Jerusalem who was gonna get Arabia Lawrence had heard that in a secret deal British and French politicians had created something called the sykes-picot agreement Lawrence had promised the Arabs that in return for their support they could have a fully independent Arab Kingdom but in fact the British and French had decided to carve Arabia up into colonies Lawrence had hoped that he could both be a good British officer and served the Arab cause but as he changed from his British uniform back into Arab dress these competing loyalties were tearing him apart [Music] this is Lawrence's bedroom the winter from 1917 to 1918 and he felt that this whole fort was imbued with memories as he walked through it he could feel in these lava stones memories the Roman legionaries for whom this was the outpost on the edge of the Great Desert that led to the Euphrates and the legends of all the later Arab kings their chivalry their crimes their wandering and he gathered here what was really a second medieval Court out in the courtyard prancing up and down day after day were different Bedouin tribes coming out of the hills bringing gifts laying out and silk ropes elaborately Schoenfeld carpets all of this and lavish reenactment of a court he's living a life like King Arthur in his court at Camelot [Music] he has his 30th birthday just near here [Music] people beginning to believe his own legend Allenby is believing it his British friends are believing it his family's believing it even the Arabs are beginning to believe that he's a world historical figure he's another Alexander the Great he however is aware of failure he feels like a fraud he's trying to sit here like a prophet in the desert sharing a creed of freedom but he's not a prophet and he doesn't have any freedom to offer at this period Lawrence's military actions become increasingly desperate and suicidal he leaves a note for his commanding officer saying we've asked them to fight on a lie and I can't stand it Lawrence concludes the only option is to rush the Arab army to Damascus meanwhile the British are advancing the Ottomans are fighting them back with increasing ferocity the Arabs are working their way around the Turkish troops there's brutality there are some horrendous massacres the race is on he wants the Arabs in Damascus before the British if the Arabs are gonna have any hope of claiming an independent Kingdom any hope of saying there's no need for a British colony here there's no need for a French colony here we've managed to grab Damascus [Music] Lawrence brick with his British masters and confessed to Faizal that the sykes-picot agreement would divide Arabia into colonies Lawrence raped faisel's escape would be to help the British so much that after the peace they would not be able for Shane to shoot him down by the autumn of 1918 faceless dream was tantalizingly close as the Turkish army fled Damascus Lawrence and the Arab army slipped into the city on the morning of October the 1st 1918 just before the British Army Lawrence arrives in Damascus wearing flowing Arab robes but riding in a British Rolls Royce so it's here that finally Lawrence achieves his victory and it's a moment of astonishing euphoria he comes into these crowded streets he estimates a hundred and fifty thousand people around the rose petals being thrown on the ground there shouting lawrence lawrence lawrence but it's also a moment of chaos the old regime was fled the water suppliers collapse the electricity subtracts the sewage has collapsed bodies are lying in the streets festering corpses in the hospitals this strange fragile european man and his white silk gowns is grabbing people in this market grabbing them and trying to stop them from looting trying to stop the gunfire which is rocketing up and down these roofs above here in this ottoman souk almost unchanged from the moment at which you can fit you can see both the bullet fire in the roof and the sense of that teeming hubbub of crowds which Lawrence travel-stained exhausted and his white robes is trying to move through and grab people and control the centuries Damascus had been under Ottoman control and suddenly it had collapsed it was a nation without law and government the province in which nice serves in Iraq just after the invasion literally every school had been stripped all the electricity pylons were done it was this frenzy of looting that everybody in 2003 thought was so unexpected the Americans claimed to be surprised by it that in fact we'd seen it again and again it's what caused Lawrence so in 1918 as the dusk finally fell in that first night in Damascus Laurence who'd slept maybe three hours and three days heard a man from a minaret begin to sing the call to prayer in a very soft sweet and gentle voice and he sang allow akbar allah la ilaha mohammed rasoolallah god is great there's no god but God and Muhammad is His Prophet and then he dropped his voice a couple of tones and very gently added and he is very good to us tonight o people of Damascus but for Laurence he was aware of all the compromises of sykes-picot he was aware that Syria was probably about to be sold out to the French and that what seemed to be to the people of Damascus the night of perfect freedom was maybe just a mirage [Music] Lawrence was gambling that once faceful was established in Damascus it would be impossible for the British and French to topple him or replace him for Syrian historian Sammy Moe beard facial was undoubtedly popular with the people Lawrence came in on October the first face aisle followed on October third he was hailed as a savior in a sense Lawrence's confidence in Faisal was vindicated his belief that this was an appropriate ruler was correct Faisal had legitimacy being a grandson of the Prophet Muhammad Faisal had his war medals having fought in the Arab revolt of 1916 Lawrence was able to witness the sense of revolution that he had inspired and ignited in the Arabs definitely these people were not gonna accept French rule so easily so what were the French doing I mean why did they want Syria I hate to say it it's pure colonial ambitions and reward for territory French blood had been spilled in World War one and there had to be a certain reward and there was still a strong sense of French and British colonialism and expansionist tendencies [Music] so it's the translation straight down from the translation somewhere in this bustling modern city of Damascus is the site of the Victoria Hotel where Lawrence held one of the most important meetings of his life saying it's not the one at the corner but it's rather more other very good I think with the translator to help me I tried to find the exact spot of this encounter this was the great hotel down from the Train session where Lawrence hosted a historic meeting between his two masters general Allenby and Prince Faisal Dr Victoria Arcadia building Victoria so we think roughly here where the bridge was it was an extraordinary scene the Turkish soldiers had vanished and suddenly the streets of Damascus were full of Arabs on horses and the British in armoured vehicles [Music] here the sights of the Hotel Victoria Lawrence's two lives came hurtling together rolling down the savin he came Alan being the commander of the British forces and Faisal the leader of the Arab revolt this was a moment that Lawrence must both have been looking forward to but also dreading he'd been spinning stories to both of them to Allenby he kept trying to convince him that working with the Arabs was going to be the way to defeat the Ottomans and ultimately contribute to defeating the Germans - Faisal he'd been suggesting that this was the way to win Arab freedom this great grand ambush where Lawrence is trying to be at Mahatma Gandhi he's trying to be a Mandela he shot him lead an independence movement and this is where he finds out whether it's gonna work what happened in that room we don't really know but what we do know is that Lawrence was asked to translate by Allenby the terms of a foreign office telegram that laid out the sykes-picot agreement end of the meeting the telegrams been read faisal walks out or according to some people storms out here at the side of the hotel Victoria perhaps fittingly now demolished was the beginning of most of the suspicions and recrimination between the Middle East and Britain that has plagued area for the next 90 years for Laurence Damascus was and should have been the capital of an independent Arab Empire but there in the hotel Victoria he'd seen that the British and the French wanted to create colonies he said to the French you can cling on for 20 years if you like pretending to have a colony but in the end you'll be thrown out with no gratitude from anyone the strain of this realization was immense one of the strangest things about what Lawrence does in Damascus on his very final day is that he has this portrait painted after all the chaos in the souk the bullets the politics with Faisal he sits in a chair for James forbade the Scottish portrait artist to describes watching him impassive as shake after shake comes then to kiss his hand in tears to say goodbye this should have been the great moment of victory this should be a portrait of a victorious general Sirte which you can see these sunken cheeks and actually he's already taken on an air but somebody who's haunted [Music] the following day Lawrence left Damascus [Music] he returned to London from the war shattered and weighing just seven stone above all he needed rest but instead he dedicated the next four years to another fight working in every way he could to establish the independence of Arabia when Lawrence came back to London in the winter 1918 he was in a completely different environment wasn't just the winter British weather he was dealing with men who were debating in the houses of parliament what must have seemed to them much bigger issues Bolshevik Russia the threat of communism the collapse of the austro-hungarian Empire compared to all of this the Middle East Lawrence's concerns must have seemed just like a a sideshow of a sideshow [Music] Lawrence's enemies suggested that he'd gone native that he cared only about Arab interests but in fact he grasped that colonies in Arabia would not suit Britain or France he saw that the West lacked the power the knowledge and legitimacy to control other people's countries he wrote my ambition is that the Arabs should be our first Brown Dominion not our last Brown colony he saw that Arabs could and should govern themselves I put this idea to historian James Bond Laurence seems to be saying let's not set up a colony here let's have a Dominion in other words let's try to treat your rapey risottos like Canada or Australia this sounds a bit ahead of its time it's completely ahead of its time Lourdes acknowledges there should be British influence which is when he's talking about the outs being our first Brown Dominion there is a relationship with the British and the British will provide advice you know when it wanted he sees the two as allies he thinks that he can achieve what Lloyd George wants which is a bridgehead in the Middle East but he can do so through the arrows being allies rather than being subjects [Music] in order to achieve his goal Lawrence uses all his reputation all his contacts to get Faizal a seat at the Paris Peace Conference at Versailles the chance to meet the most famous and influential statesman in the world a chance for facial to present his case and Lawrence was there with him all the time as his advisor [Music] Lawrence walks into the most extraordinary scene the great statesmen of Britain France in America have gathered essentially to carve up the world between them delegations are swarming in all the seeds in facts of the chaos in Europe for the next 60 years is being laid here in the Palace of Versailles and the Middle East is coming into a - he was probably the most colorful figure in the whole conference in his British Colonels uniform with his Arab headdress walking around with faisal he's been trying to convince the British and the Arabs that the best thing is to have an independent Arabian in suddenly he's dealing with the French so it's a little bit as though you were a British official in Iraq you don't have to only think about what the Iraqis want or what's the interest Britain you have to think about the United States today and for Lawrence the equivalent is the French a big superpower that's just come out of the first world war he's gambling that he can break the agreement that the British made with the French he can break the sykes-picot agreement he can convince the French that it doesn't make any sense for them to try to make a colony in Arabia it would better happen the independent state [Music] in a way I suppose the problem for Lawrence's he's there too late what he doesn't quite understand is that while all these minutes are being written and all the civil servants of fiddling on the details in the map the real thing that's happening is that come also the French leader has sat down with Lloyd George British Prime Minister and had a conversation that's lasted about an hour in which basically everything's been resolved a year before any agreements signed her mother says to Lloyd George what do you want and Lloyd George says I'd like Mosul in northern Iraq for the oil and I'd like pants light and clean also says done and in return Lloyd George basically says while the French can have what they want in Syria [Music] Lawrence calls his time in Paris the worst months of his life it's the first time he's really seen politics up front he was used to being a hero for two and a half years in the desert British officers British government officials saw him as this amazingly romantic figure suddenly it was all changing as he began to get involved in politics he became an embarrassment he couldn't get into meetings with ministers and suddenly telegrams are flying around saying Lawrence is out of control get him out of Paris at the bottom of all of it though is the sense that all his Gamble's have failed and in the middle of all this failure and all the shame which he must have felt very seriously he gets a very compassionate letter from Roger Kipling Kipling writes to him and says Lawrence if you don't do what they want you to do you will be considered from the Foreign Office point of view the worst kind of crook pretty soon I expect they will accuse you of having been motivated by finance in all that you did and then Kipling tries to encourage him he says but you'll stick with the game except for the necessary time to step aside and vomit because you are young and the men who are running Affairs are old cold of intolerable entrails and they'll drop out soon the judge demands of peace and security will be met [Applause] [Applause] [Music] the modern equivalent of the Versailles peace conference is this the General Assembly of the United Nations this is where the resolutions on Iraq and Afghanistan were debated and passed I've come here to meet con Ross who like Lawrence tried to challenge the policies the great poets Khan was the Iraq expert on the British delegation to the United Nations [Music] after the 2003 invasion Khan resigned believing that the evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction didn't justify the war Caan like Lawrence is an example of what can happen when a British official tries to point out that a policy is wrong here we were in the UN this this forum of the international community saying we're committed to a peaceful route committed to inspections as I was instructed to say for many years and in fact we were privately secretly preparing to do something entirely different [Music] and we will accept no outcome but victory to be frank I found a deeply disillusioning and embittering experience one that I'm still struggling with a country that I believed in in values that I believed in and when I saw that undermined I supposed to put it mildly I felt very lost and I think I was naive about it because I think states often behave in that way and ultimately my conclusion is is one of deep skepticism of the state system and indeed this place kiplyn rights Lawrence to consult him saying you're going to be attacked by the Foreign Office and you will be considered as the worst kind of crook they're going to accuse you of being motivated by venal incentives yeah I know all about that but you're young and you won't step out of the game except for the necessary moment to step aside and vomit get back in the game because these men are old cold and of intolerable entrails and you'll outlast them it's a reaction when you hear that kind of advice well I think it's remarkable that he said that because that's actually very perceptive of what it is I'm sure he felt that in some way he'd been used as part of a betrayal of people he felt passionately committed to and I suspect also he felt lost he must have been asking himself where where next what now [Music] the pain that come so clearly feels suggested to me what it must have felt like for Lawrence a sense that in breaking from the British government so many dreams and ideals had been destroyed the Lawrence was on the edge of a personal breakdown when Lawrence returns to Oxford his mother describes him sitting for hours at a time unmoving his face frozen staring at the ground hannah arendt great intellectual commenting on lawrence at this period says never again was the experiment of secret politics made more purely by a more decent man the imperialists destroyed Lawrence till nothing was left but some inexplicable decency [Music] [Applause] there was nowhere for Lawrence to hide because here at London's Covent Garden he was being transformed into a major star ironically at the very moment when Lawrence was being seen by his own colleagues as an unreliable uninformed man when he was feeling at Versailles that people no longer respected him he was being transformed into a major international celebrity Lowell Thomas an American journalist who'd been with him in the desert took to Covent Garden a show with Lawrence and Arabia which drew in over a million people in a few months [Music] Lawrence became basically the largest international celebrity Nepal Charlie Chaplin for a moment he thought he could use this that somehow this kind of fame would be something that would allow him to promote the hour of course and get freedom for Arabia what he learns and I think many celebrities have learned sense is that it's self consuming to really achieve anything political in the end it's celebrity Fame for famous sake [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] to counter this Lawrence felt compelled to produce his own accounts of that desert campaign he started work on what would eventually become the Seven Pillars of wisdom here at the body and library in Oxford I'm being allowed to look at the manuscripts of Lawrence's book was Richard Ovenden keeper of the Special Collections well this rather unusual object it is the final version in manuscript of the Seven Pillars the myth of Lawrence partly self-created has reached such a pitch and we know the literary world knows that this text is nascent and they want to read it there's a sense that this is a monument this is like leaving behind some great brass - yes how do you achieve that if you like immortality through your text and here you can see some of that almost my mind anguish laid out on the page in a way his prose is the weakest part of the whole thing he's obsessed with a certain kind of slushy late 19th century decadence poetry with cool hair and tranquil judgement impertinence the flight they oscillated from asymptotes to asymptotes no absolutely unclear to me what on earth is going on about when he talks about the asymptotes to hasn't it vanish all right Simon Says Lawrence he says you are as little to be trusted with a pen as a child with the torpedo as Lawrence was writing his book Britain was expanding its presence in the Middle East well the French was struggling to take control of Syria the British had moved into the oil-rich province of Iraq they're increasing occupation now faced an insurgency the tribes of the Euphrates were rising against them the British were dropping bombs and gas [Music] back in his London flat Lawrence was appalled by the hypocrisy the cruelty and the senselessness of the whole British occupation he began to use every element of his public Fame and to the fury of his colleagues wrote letters to the times denouncing the British occupation these are the letters that I came across when I moved to Iraq in 2003 as part of another British occupation I spent almost a year as the deputy governor of two provinces holding elections trying to bring some semblance of order and prepare the country for independence and [Music] yet outside the compound we were facing an insurgency thousands of Iraqis were demonstrating outside our buildings day after day I was under siege with rockets and mortar shells flying in initially I had thought that we could do some good but the longer I spent there the more I realized how little we knew how little we could do how little the Iraqis wanted us there and I began to see Lawrence as a prophet who had predicted this situation I admire Lawrence for his articles in the newspapers as a journalist where he reveals a much much more radical mind this is the Times Friday July 23rd 1920 this week's debate in the Commons of the Middle East a veteran house Express surprise the Arabs Mesopotamia were in arms against us despite our well made n't mandate so here we are in Iraq in 1920 and it's the same situation roughly that we have in 2003 people are complaining about Iraq they don't know how to get out they don't know what to do about it and Lawrence writes a letter a remedy question mark I can see a cure only in immediate change of policy I would make Arabic the government language I would make the Arabs do the work they can I would cause to leave the country every single British soldier and we should then hold of Mesopotamia exactly as much or as little as we hold of South Africa or Canada it's there it's these letters in which you see the grandeur of Lawrence's vision Lanson this letter seems to be saying get out you shouldn't be there [Music] that sentiment is exactly what took me back to Iraq in early 2009 I'm here with the US military but hoping to get a sense of what the Iraqi people feel will be the legacy of this foreign intervention we're gonna pop out and load weapons without further ado I mean you're free to talk to anyone you want so that's great then you don't really need to meditate on this road about a year ago there was a car bomb about 500 meters down that road and really up until about three three months ago you didn't see as many people out on these roof on this road the best thing is go out with my solders every day and see that there is a difference being made and how much in a sense the politics should be got there I don't have a great understanding of it and Eli for example who all these people are in this picture I don't know let's see if we can find somebody who wants to talk some of it apprehensive any let's look at this what would you like what do the people want in this area holy cannoli first this year US Army troops alone should leave and then things will get better what has been the cause of the violence for the last five years let me count the American the Americans what was the main reason for the resistance against the United States and Britain Tidy excellent so that's we're gonna do somebody capture your house the hots for Kenickie resistance is aiming for one goal [Music] I sense some frustration when there was this kind of guy standing in the market saying American troops out they've done nothing for us well I mean I think it is it is frustrating but the fact that he's able to do that is I think a sign that we've accomplished a great deal here ultimately we're not here for to get tears from the people anything like that American officers study Lawrence in order to learn how to deal with Arabs but Lawrence saw there's something fundamentally alien and unworkable about the relationship between foreign troops and a local population no matter the first motivations for an intervention Lawrence saw that for very deep reasons the sustained occupation like this cannot work the Lawrence says the foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia you know remember however friendly and informal your relations may seem to be the foundations are very sandy once I can understand what are you saying there I think it the heart of it is is well we'll never quite fit in here that I know where he's coming from and at the end of the day for two different type of people or two different cultures [Music] the clearly was a knot of people in the center of that desire who perceived this as an occupation and that I think was Lawrence's insight that however much you do to try to overcome these cultural divides in the end it's not your country you don't have the knowledge you don't have the power but most importantly of all you don't have the consent of the people [Music] I've come from the market to a private home in Baghdad to talk to Ali Alawi a famous Iraqi intellectual and Minister for trade and defense in the Iraqi government after the fall of Saddam maybe like you know any any person who doesn't really belong in your families or walks in and sits he may come and pick the house and you know fix the fix the bathrooms but he basically doesn't belong here but guests always they overstay their welcome they become unwelcome I think Lawrence would have appreciated that he would have understood that the West can only help guide point out advice well-meaning and well-intentioned but ultimately we have to come up with our with our own formula what would be the last thing from that's fine and I can focus next 20 minutes I fools rush in where angels fear to tread I don't think they embark on this for for a very long time it's not every day that you mobilize two hundred thousand people spending two three trillion dollars but all else being equal I think it will be seen as a as a curious episode with momentous consequences [Music] three years after the end of the first world war it was clear that foreign colonial occupation was not working the British were facing a revolution in Iraq the French had been forced to throw face'll out of Syria and were not sure what to do next Winston Churchill as colonial secretary asked Lawrence to advise him at a conference in Cairo Lawrence's advice was to give much more independence to the Arabs faisal who had been thrown out of Syria by the French was now imposed in Iraq as the king of a British supported State the British provided advises and some support for economic development nevertheless the whole situation for the Arabs was a humiliation the start of World War one they had been promised a vast independent Arab Kingdom with its capital at Damascus but by 1921 they were left with a patchwork of disparate new nations not technically British and French colonies but under British and French control nevertheless Lawrence claimed to be satisfied with the solution but I believe it was a pretty hollow claim and it showed how far his ambitions have been beaten down by the political process [Music] here in Jordan is the Masters Memorial Museum which celebrates the great Arab revolt but most ironically of all in that whole museum there's no mention of Lawrence at all and that's almost I think how he would have liked it in order for something to be left behind Lawrence believed it needed to feel Arab that the role of foreigners had to be concealed the Arabs had looked to Lawrence to deliver a mighty Arab Kingdom but what they were left with bore little resemblance to what Lawrence had promised this small country Jordan is almost the last surviving fragment of Lawrence's dream a stable pro-british Kingdom still ruled by faceless family but even here there's a reluctance to acknowledge Lawrence at all such is the lingering suspicion of his motives I discussed this with Camel Abu Jaffa the former foreign minister of Jordan in the capital Amman the history of the Arab world from that time on has been an agonized traumatized history yeah a history of a bitter people with a wounded nationalism yes okay and they sometimes it's like somebody you hit on the head with a very blunt instrument you can't see right from wrong with I think the Arabs are still in that stage and I am NOT anti Western or anti British or anything like that but the Western betrayal well it really still rankles in the Arab side until today this is the age where the Western countries succeeded and divine dividing the Arab world and in demolishing literally the the hopes of the Arabs [Music] across the border in Syria the animosity is even stronger Syria was Lawrence's nightmare his friend Faisal was expelled and the French contrary to all his advice embarked on 20 years of ultimately disastrous colonial rule all of this has affected Arab perceptions not only of sykes-picot but also of men that such as Lawrence I discussed this with Syrian historian Sally Moo Byatt Syria was the mother country that's where everything else was carved out of that's why it still has a major drain on people's minds generation after another has been taught from late school to know fully well about sykes-picot and to despise sykes-picot what's your reaction when I hear the name Lawrence I personally am not too fond of the character I think the character has his image has been inflated by historians romanticized by orientalists he was a British officer he was serving his nation's best interests he was in no way a hero or a champion for the Arabs but at the end of the day he was met one of the many foreigners who came to this part of the world who had their hallmark but he definitely does not deserve the entire homage that you see nowadays [Music] laurens then is rejected by the Arabs his legacy in Syria in Jerusalem in Jordan is one of suspicions of uncertainty he shows the limits of these kinds of foreign military occupation he was never forgiven by the Arabs and in a sense he never forgave himself in Fort Leavenworth Kansas the US Army Staff College however Lawrence is presented in a very different light every officer at this elite institution is made to read Lawrence I saw photographs of Lawrence behind officers desks and he is on their syllabus I've been invited here to reflect on my experience system at least and to discuss Lawrence's legacy I have the distinct privilege of introducing our speaker today the renowned Scottish author Rory Stewart I'm very interested in Lawrence because he seems to be finding a new kind of relevance now of course we're using Lawrence as a sort of poster boy of what might be involved in cross-cultural understanding or interaction with people he himself became increasingly skeptical as his life went on about what this actually meant by 1920 he was writing letters saying do not try to occupy Mesopotamia what Lawrence might be a emblem of is what it might be better not to try to do because things have changed since the time for example of Lawrence of Arabia well there any thoughts on that you know it's that old thing about well I'm doing it for your own good if the people aren't supporting you then you have to question how much good you're doing we're now in a situation in which the people on the ground they're not going to put up with you not necessarily because of what you're doing not necessary because you're bad at your job but simply because you're a farm I'm not sure here at Fort Leavenworth Kansas or even when speaking to British army officers that Lawrence's message really gets through they appear still to perceive him as a romantic figure as an inspiration for their work I put this to American historian Don Wright in the education provided to majors Lawrence is offered as an example of this success the the warrior and Lawrence's award there's no doubt about it that appeals that's the part that appeals to the American army officer they are doers there are men and women of action which don't get is the ambivalence that he had about what he was doing [Music] laurens never returned to Arabia again he lost contact with Faisal he separated himself from grand friends such as Churchill and turned his back on his past at Oxford [Music] he did not live out his life as a Bedouin Prince surrounded by the camels and the Warriors and the tents of desert Arabia instead of the grandeur of the cliffs of Wadi Rum he retired to a small cottage in Dorset probably the strangest thing about Lawrence for me at least is that when he returned from the war he chose to enlist as a private in the Air Force and originally his friends thought this was just a stunt that he was just going to keep it going for a few months it lasted for nearly 14 years during that period when people were expecting him to come back and if not become prime minister at least Governor colony or become a general he was performing menial tasks as a quartermaster orsa a telegraph operator it was a breakdown and there are many reasons for that breakdown perhaps most important is the political because Lawrence felt that his life was a failure and the lesson for us today lies in that he saw something horrifying about the encounter between countries like Britain in the United States and Arabia he would not have wanted his legacy today to be American or British officers running around with the Seven Pillars of wisdom thinking that behaving like Lawrence was the way to do these kinds of occupations better [Music] [Applause] [Music] Oh Lawrence didn't become a colonial officer didn't become a general because he realized that there was no way just by fiddling around by playing with the tactics we were gonna be able to make this into a successful operation I am from out of waters I have message for mr. post and mr. Tony Blair you are liars [Music] looking at Iraq and Afghanistan today I believe very strongly that Lawrence's message would have been not do it better do it more sensitively but don't do it at all [Music]

Channel: Ancient History Lover

Views: 515,934

Rating: 4.6527472 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: ZFxFTLtDCSA

Length: 116min 39sec (6999 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 18 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/ReginaldJohnston]

If the Allied arbitrators had included him in the border negotions in Versailles conference, we wouldn't be having the issues with Middle-east today.....

[u/Opinie]

Excellent documentary. Thanks for posting!

[u/mangulu]

This guy is the original roleplayer.