Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

I have been stung by T. E. Lawrence's legend, myth and enigma ever since my Father bundled myself, Brother and Mother together explaining that he had just seen the newly opened film Lawrence of Arabia while on a business trip. That very next weekend we went down to Hollywood to see the three plus hour movie (I was bored to tears). Being surprised and seeing my Father's enthusiasm I began to read more about Lawrence and World War One and the Arab Revolt. I saw the film several more times over that year and began what has been a lifelong hobby as I have collected books, articles and research on LAWRENCE. So anytime there is a new Lawrence biography I am pleased in the expectation that others too will discover this unique, flawed and mysterious man. This month we have the release of Scott Anderson's new book LAWRENCE IN ARABIA which for some reason felt it important to replace the word OF with the word IN. And although I have some concerns with some of Anderson's characterizations and his depiction of Lawrence especially in his post war life I think the book is a tremendously good read that takes on a much broader scope than just being a Lawrence biography. Anderson gives us a broader picture of how the Arab Revolt and Lawrence's roll tied into other World War I campaigns. There is a good section on how Lawrence and others proposed early in the war that the British attack the Ottoman Empire (who controlled the Middle East) at Alexandretta (near Aleppo which is much in the news today). But instead Winston Chruchill and the British war planners attacked Gallipoli resulting and a lost opportunity and a crushing defeat. If Alexandretta had been captured and the Ottoman Empire split in two there may have been no need for an Arab revolt. The book tries to be a biography of Lawrence asking how did Lawrence do it (answer no one was looking) and three others: Curt Prufer a German spy who tries to get Arabs to attack the Suez Canal, Aaron Aaronsohn the Jewish Zionist who along with his sister set up pro-British spy ring in Palestine, and William Yale who working for Standard Oil traveled the Middle East. The problem with these three other individuals with the possible exception of Aaronsohn is that they are at best interesting footnotes except that they do help expand the readers understanding of people and events beyond the scope of the Lawrence story. And although I liked Anderson's structure I thought the Aaronsohn story was better told in Ronald Florence's 2007 book LAWRENCE AND AARONSOHN, T.E. Lawrence, Aaron Aaronshon, and the Seeds of the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Anderson quotes Florence in several of the Aaronshon sections). As to Prufer and Yale I don't recall ever hearing about them before this book. Anderson's book justifiably spends a lot of time discussing the Sykes/Picot treaty between Britain and France and the person of Mark Sykes who was a major political player and is a major character in the book. Much more so than even Aaronshon. His personal and political story really is what the book's subtitle is about.... Deceit... Imperial Folly... and the making of the modern Middle East. Add Sykes/Picot with the Balfour Declaration and you have the unbelievable colonialism arrogance that Lawrence opposed in his support of an independent Arab nation. What the Arab's hoped to gain by their revolt. This brings me to a point in Anderson's book that really disturbed me when I read it. The fact that Anderson calls Lawrence out as a TRAITOR. This on pages 270-271, "....in any wartime army at any point in history - The divulging of a secret treaty to a third party was considered a consummate act of treason, one sure to win the offender a long prison sentence if not an appointment with a firing squad. Yet a some point during those early days of February in Wejh, Lawrence took Faisal aside and did precisely that, revealing to him both the existence and salient details of Sykes-Picot." No one doubts that Lawrence at this time knew of the treaty but I am hard pressed to see any evidence that Lawrence was a traitor. There are many other numerous explanations about how and when Faisal first found out about the treaty. If Lawrence was in fact a traitor I would have thought the French at the very least would have pressed the point with their British allies. I don't believe any other biographer has made a point of this issue. Anderson then even ends his book in the Epilogue by saying, "Everything T.E. Lawrence had fought for, schemed for, arguably betrayed his country for, turned to ashes....." This is a heavy handed indictment. The interesting thing about Lawrence is that many things about him are elusive and will always remain a matter of conjecture. But I for one feel Anderson has gone over the top on this claim. (Much the way prior biographers have made the point that Lawrence was a homosexual. No one will really know for sure but then does it matter.) Lastly, I take exception to Anderson's brief depiction of Lawrence in the Epilogue diagnosing Lawrence as having had Post-traumatic stress disorder. Anderson further says, " ...it is hard to escape the image of a sad and reclusive man, his circle of friends and acquaintances steadily dwindling to a mere handful...". No doubt Lawrence had a unique and difficult personality to understand. How many Britain's would turn away from being knighted by their King during the actual ceremony? None before Lawrence. John Mack in his Pulitzer Prize winning book, THE PRINCE OF OUR DISORDER: The Life of T.E. Lawrence (1976) devoted a whole book to doing a psychological study of Lawrence (One of the best books on Lawrence). In Michael Korda's recent book, HERO: The Life and Legend of Lawrence of Arabia (2010) Korda paints a more convincing picture than PTSD where Lawrence having sought fame, having become a celebrity as big as say Diana today, found he did not like living with fame. Rather than leverage his fame like most people would be expected to do Lawrence hid from it. I always thought the fact that he grew up keeping the secret that he was illegitimate in class contentious Britain that he was a pretender. The work Lawrence did after the war was never going to be heroic...the stuff of headlines.... But he was an intellectual who wrote two books and translated others. The letters he wrote were long and interesting and send to a wide circle of acquaintances yielding who collections of text. Yes, Lawrence was not like the rest of us... and that is why his legend, myth and enigma endure. In Anderson's Acknowledgments at the end of his book Anderson gives high recognition to Jeremy Wilson whose authorized biography, LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1990) and says, "While I respectfully disagree with Mr. Wilson on several aspects of Lawrence's actions in Arabia. I am deeply indebted to the astounding amount of scholarly research he has done on Lawrence......" If you're a fan of all things Lawrence you no doubt know that Jeremy Wilson and his wife Nichole own Castle Hill Press. They have been publishing fine collector quality books by Lawrence for some twenty years. I own several of these the two most recent being THE MINT and BOATS FOR THE RAF 1929 - 1935. I recommend the Wilson's work to you as well as Wilson's T.E. Lawrence Studies page on internet. (Here he also does a good power point presentation covering the historical accuracy of the movie.) For those who like and collect things Lawrence I want to also mention a book I found very well published and presented. It is in part what one might term a small coffee table book. It is Joseph Berton's T.E. LAWRENCE AND THE ARAB REVOLT (2011. Lawrence is now but a drifting bit of sand blowing across the landscape of a land and people he loved that today is fractured by human intolerance. He became the medieval knight he dreamed of becoming. And I think that is what drew my Father to Lawrence.

Thorough and well researched coverage of events in the middle-east front of WW1. TE Lawrence is of course the main character, but there is also a dizzying array of other characters - maybe a dozen or so that have starring roles in the book. Pros: Well researched, with plenty of footnotes and references. Polished writing for the most part - and easy to read. Fascinating storyline of course, with all sorts of intrigue and still unanswered questions that the author is not shy to address. For a story that is historically hazy and whose main character is enigmatic, the author does a nice job disclosing assumptions or personal positions when discussing the hazy aspects of Lawrence's story - so it seems to have integrity. Excellent primer on how and why the mid-east geopolitical landscape is what it is today - the relevance is still obvious even a century after the war. Cons: Tedious in parts and the story sometimes drags. The connection and locus amongst some of the main characters (e.g., Prufer, Yale, etc) is weak and sometimes seems contrived. For the most part, each character just seems to have a separate life with no connection to the other main characters - except that they happen to be participants in the same big war. Yale in particular comes across as somebody who was mostly irrelevant and had no real impact on the outcome, with his only claim-to-fame being that he apparently served as the sole representative for a country (the US) that seemed to had little interest in the campaign. Ultimately, Yale came across as a non-player or minor player at best ... so not sure why he got such a prominent role in the book except to appeal to US readers. Finally, events in the book cover a vast geographic area - with names and places that are probably unfamiliar to most readers. Hard to keep track of where the story is geographically. Maps and visuals probably help address this challenge in the hardcopy book (I assume), but if reading on a Kindle Paperwhite the maps are unreadable and next to useless ... not a knock on the book - but rather on the Amazon Kindle.

Das Buch erzählt die Geschichte des Nahen Ostens im 1. Weltkrieg aus interessanter Perspektive. Nämlich jener von Akteuren der mittleren Führungsebene, die aufgrund der damaligen Kommunikationstechnologie heute kaum vorstellbaren Spielraum hatten. Zentrale Figur ist natürlich T. E. Lawrence. Weiters wird das Wirken des deutschen Agenten Dr. Curt Prüfer, des Standard Oil Angestellten und Diplomaten William Yale sowie des zionistischen Aktivisten bzw. britischen Spions Aaron Aaronsohn geschildert. Gelungene Verküpfung von politischer, Kriegs- und Diplomatiegeschichte, welche die heutigen Probleme in der Region verstehen hilft. Kernpunkte dieser Ursachengeschichte sind das kolonialistische Sykes–Picot Abkommen sowie die Balfour Deklaration. Erschütternd ist die Schilderung des Versagens der britischen Generäle und das damit verbundene Verheizen der Empire Truppen im Kampf gegen eine militärisch drittklassige Macht, das Osmanische Reich. Die britischen Rückschläge auf dem Schlachtfeld machten die Unterstützung des arabischen Aufstands unabdingbar. Gut geschriebenes Buch in ebenso gut verständlichem Englisch. Kaufempfehlung für jeden, der sich für die Biographie Lawrence' oder die Geschichte der Region interessiert.

The subtitle says it all: 'War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East'. The war was World War 1. The deceit and imperial folly marked the behaviour of the many empires fighting each other, and plotting against enemies and allies alike, across the Middle East. The Ottomans in Turkey, the French, the Russians but above all the British were being as devious as they were violent (and often incompetent) in the fighting. Long before the war was won, Britain was negotiating the distribution of the Arab territories the Ottomans would lose if they were beaten. They promised the Arabs a single, unified, independent Arab nation extending from the bottom of the Arabian peninsula to the borders of present-day Turkey. At the same time, they crew up the Sykes-Picot agreement with the French to divide up the northern end of that region, giving Jordan, Palestine and Iraq to Britain, Syria and Lebanon to France. And, finally, they promised Palestine to the Zionists for a Jewish homeland. Three promises made in secret to three different parties, incompatible with each other. And the seeds were sown of the terrible conflicts that beset the region to this day. But Scott Anderson doesn’t limit himself to the great powers fighting each other. In particular, he focuses on four extraordinary characters: T E Lawrence, the man we’ve come to know as ‘Lawrence of Arabia’ and who is the Lawrence of the book’s main title. His story is exceptional: an archaeologist fascinated by the region, an excellent linguist who mastered Arabic as he became an admirer of the Arabs, and a man without military training who transformed himself into an outstanding solider – but Anderson shows how he became increasingly disgusted about what war meant, and what he was doing in it, leaving him deeply depressed in his post-war years. Though it wasn’t just the fighting that left him traumatised, it was also the duplicity of the British Empire he was fighting for in what he came to think of as ‘the great loot’. Alongside Lawrence, we read about the German anthropologist and spy Curt Prüfer, who worked with the Turks and one of whose first agents (and sometime mistress) was Minna Weizmann, sister of the Zionist who would later become the first President of Israel. He, Chaim Weizmann, had to work with the support and opposition of Aaron Aaronson, brilliant agronomist, surprisingly effective spy, and a Zionist who slipped into the racist thinking that taints Israel today at its worst. And there was even an American, William Yale – and, yes, the name comes from the family that founded the university – an oilman and spy working first for Middle Eastern interests of the Standard Oil of New York, but later for the US State Department. And there is a superb cast of other characters. Djemal Pasha, the Turkish governor of Palestine, who could be both cruel and merciful, who could outmanoeuvre the British or fall for their simplest frauds. The Hashemite family from Mecca, who fought alongside Lawrence and believed British promises only to be betrayed by them later. And even Mark Sykes, of the Sykes-Picot agreement that carved up the Middle East, one of the least principled and most self-serving politicians it has been my pleasure to read about. Scott Anderson has a background in journalism. The book feels that way, pacy and compelling, a real page-turner. As entertaining as it’s informative. Well worth reading.

Take a bow Scott Anderson. Mandatory reading for any middle east history buff. First book on Lawrence of Arabia and very satiating. Couldn't have been done better.

An amazing detailed history written with great words and story.

El origen de la actual división territorial en Oriente próximo explicado a través de personajes reales (espías) que influyeron esencialmente en las decisiones inglesas, francesas, alemanas, turcas y norteamericanas. Se lee con interés y no está exclusivamente centrado en Lawrence aunque hay mucha información sobre él. Interesante para quienes quieran informarse sobre el final del imperio otomano y el origen de Siria, Jordania, Líbano, Israel. Muy crítico con la dirección inglesa de la guerra, en general, y con el papel de Francia y Estados Unidos (Standard Oil en particular) en la solución a la rebelión árabe. Interesante en todo caso.