Part Two: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War

Robert is joined again by Margaret Killjoy to continue our series on Lawrence of Arabia.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Also media, what's murdering my everyone's I'm Robert Evans, and
right now I'm thinking about murdering everyone because yesterday I
got stuck in traffic for Sophie six minutes.

Speaker 2 (00:17):
I d have a giant truck. You shouldn't have to
get stuck in traffic.

Speaker 1 (00:20):
That's exactly what I thought. But every time you drive
it over other people, suddenly there's all sorts of crimes
that are being committed, you know, uh huh, well by
the people interest. I did have a lady back into
me yesterday and hit my front end, but like it
did no damage to Oh my god, I felt so bad.

(00:40):
She was like sobbing, and I was like, look, ma'am,
I'm not going to call the cops. Like your back
bumper is a little cracked, but like, if you don't
want to report this to insurance, I don't give a fuck.

Speaker 2 (00:52):
Also because the insurance will take her side if she
decided it was your fault. There's even though she backed
into you.

Speaker 1 (00:58):
I mean, yeah, I don't think there was much of
a chance of that. Like I was twenty feet back.
She just pulled straight out of a parking space. Like
I saw her backing up. I gave her room. She
just she just just straight into me like it was like, what, lady,
you had a lot of chances to recognize that you
were making a mistake here, but I don't know. I

(01:20):
see somebody cry like I'm not gonna One of my
favorite things is whenever you see someone get upset because
they've hit you, and you get to be like, hey,
I'm not calling calling anybody over this. Oh it's such
a good feeling.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
But one time someone rear ended me and I was like, look,
I'm not calling everyone over like a twenty dollars centsor
in the back of my terrible car. And then the
kid it was a teenager. Her mom wrote me and
was like, great, can I get you to sign something
saying that you will not like sue or ask for
money later? And I was like no, if there's paperwork involved,

(01:54):
it goes O.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
That's a real different situation, ma'am.

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Like you want some more it's coming from insurance company.

Speaker 3 (02:02):
Why is everybody so unchill late? Just calm down.

Speaker 1 (02:05):
Everyone's lost their mind. You know who didn't lose their mind?
Unlike in the future when you are all listening to this.
Because I think America is about to be really chill
started next week. We are we are electing a new
president who, instead of Kamala or Trump, I think is
going to be a being of pure light who is
incapable of sin.

Speaker 4 (02:27):
So and I'm sure, I'm sure, I'm sure in like
two years we will have murdered them, because a being
of pure light will not get very far as a
precedent in this country.

Speaker 2 (02:38):
We all get to wear those hats that say, be
thou not afraid.

Speaker 1 (02:41):
Yeah, oh no, that part's going to be great. That's
the new maga. Is be thou not afraid?

Speaker 2 (02:47):
Yeah?

Speaker 1 (02:52):
Are you a Magan? No, I'm button. Yeah. Anyway, let's
talk about Lawrence of Arabia. All t e.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
Okay, but Edward and Lawrence of Arabia. Is he particularly religious?

Speaker 1 (03:16):
Not as an adult, as a kid, he is as
an adult, he's just kind of like vaguely spiritual, but
not like particularly religious. I think he's just kind of
too much of a thinker to be particularly devout.

Speaker 2 (03:31):
And it makes the good sense when you're traveling around
in a part of the world that has a different
religion than what you were raised in.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
He very clearly is not someone who's like, well, all
these people are going to hell, right, he does not
believe that at all. Yeah. Through Dome and his experience
traveling the Arab and Kurdish regions of the world, Lawrence
began to develop an understanding of the brutality of the
Ottoman Empire as well as it's incompetence.

Speaker 3 (03:55):
Now.

Speaker 1 (03:55):
During the years leading up to the Big Dub Dub Uno,
there was a general that's World War one for all
of you people who hate me every time I do
this bit. There was a general sense among Arabs that
the Turks were at least their best bet at protection
from Western imperialism, right, that like, well, we don't really
like being ruled by the Ottomans, but we see what
you Westerners are doing to the rest of the world,

(04:16):
and we don't want that either. At Least these people
are Muslim, Right. The British had occupied Egypt in eighteen
eighty two and had fought a very bloody war there
against an enemy who was seen in the West not
dissimilarly from how Isis was depicted in the twenty first century.
So there's a lot of anger towards the West. In
nineteen oh eight, just before Lawrence began his explorations, the

(04:36):
Young Turks had taken the reins of the Ottoman government.
They'd turned the Caliph into a figurehead and ignited a
period of conflict over who would rule the dying empire.
The Young Turks were comparatively secular, they were Western aligned,
and this amped up the internal imperialism in the Ottoman
Empire substantially, because that is not how most of the
people in these like Arab and Kurdish and other regions

(04:59):
of the Empire really are. The Young Turks created the
Committee of Union and Progress to try and spread some
of their sexy new ideas among the people they ruled.
And the most significant idea they wanted to push was
called pan Turanism. And this is key to understanding Tayaprassip
Erdowin and the current Turkish government. It's genocide against the

(05:21):
Kurds in Syria and against in southern Turkey. This is
a very pan Turanism is a very important imperialist concept.

Speaker 2 (05:29):
This is that runs all the way up to like Finland.

Speaker 1 (05:33):
Yeah it's yeah, well, let's let me just explain it.
Go ahead. This is the Turkic version of the Pan
Germanic racial theories that would spread after World War One.
Doctor Kave Faroch, an expert on ancient Iran, describes Pan
Turanism as an ideology that aims at creating a Turkic
super state stretching from the Balkans in Europe eastwards across Turkey, Iran,

(05:56):
the Caucasus, Central Asia up to and including northwest China.
Now you will recognize, if you know much about the world,
that most of those areas are not Turkish. Yeah, Iran
not Turkish, Northwest China very much not Turkish. You know,
Central Asia not really Turkish, the Balkans not Turkish. Turkish

(06:17):
influence in some of those places, of course, you know,
go to Sarajevo, you'll see that, but not Turks. Now,
this very much a historical belief is justified by the
claim that all the real indigenous peoples of those regions
speak Turkish, or at least in their natural state spoke Turkish,

(06:37):
and thus should belong to the same state. Quote. Hungarian
Pan turanianist activists even go further. They have proposed that
the entire Eurasian land mass between Hungary and Norway and
Europe to Japan and Korea was once an empire known
as Turania. Apart from non scholastic websites, no linguist and
no linguistic anthropological and archaeological evidence for such an empire exists.

(07:02):
Pan Tirranean racialists and historians would beg to differ. They
are impervious to logical explanations even in the face of
heart evidence. I love this shit. Everything was Turks. Yeah,
in the un shit past, it was all Turks all
the way down. I just love that shit. What a
batshit Like, No, everything wasn't Turkish. I'm sorry it wasn't.

(07:25):
That's like everything was fucking It's like the Germans being like,
are you know, like the root of our the Aryan
race is these guys living in Nepal, you know, uh
and and and also the same as like our dreams
of you know, rebreeding this like Aryan perfect race. I mean,
they are Aryans in Nepal, but that's not what Aryan means,
you know. So this belief forms the core of a

(07:50):
lot of current fascist theory in Turkey and underpins, for example,
the genocidal acts of the Turkish state towards Kurdish rebels
in the south and across the border in Rajava. Now
all this a lot less settled in Lawrence's day it's
just kind of gearing up. But he is watching the
early stages of this thing that's going to end in genocide,
and he recognizes this has a bad end, right, anything

(08:11):
anything like this is going to not end well. And
as the Young Turks, one of the ways in which
they push these pan Tyrannian ideas is by disseminating anti
Arab propaganda. They are arguing at this point in time
that like, instead of you know, Arabs existing in all
these regions, like all of them, all of these different

(08:31):
peoples are descendants of like Genghis Khan, who is the
progenitor of the nation. This kisses people off, and there
are counter revolutions starting in nineteen oh nine, the year
before Lorenz goes on his first dig. Now that revolution
had been sparked by army officers and angry students at
a religious school, but the crackdown afterwards bred hatred among

(08:52):
locals of Armenian Christians who they saw as supporting the
hated Young Turk government. Thirty thousand of these Christians were
butchered and massacres that would prove an ugly prelude to
the looming genocide. Lawrence arrived in the wake of all
this chaos, and while he was living in Ottoman territory
in nineteen eleven, Italy invaded and conquered Libya. All of

(09:13):
this provoked a surge in Arab nationalism, which we should
rightly see as not disconnected from the swells of nationalism
across the Austro Hungarian Empire and elsewhere in Europe. There's
a direct line between this Arab revolt that's going to
brew and like Serbian nationalism, right these are all part
of like a broader cultural movement around the world. Now,

(09:33):
there are two different but not entirely contradictory explanations for
what motivated Lawrence ultimately to support an Arab uprising against
the Ottomans. The most sympathetic reason and the one that
paints him in the best light, is related to his
relationship with Dome, Lawrence's friend later in life. I. M.
Forster argues that Lawrence was intimate and passionately devoted to Doome,

(09:56):
although they never consummated the relationship, and given lawrence dide
of virgin he likely had no idea to do so.
Satine Who's Satin, whose biography of young Lawrence gives the
best texture on the Man's Life describes the relationship as
something intense but fundamentally unknowable to people reading today. However,
he cites with clear textual evidence that, however we define

(10:17):
this relationship, it inspired Lawrence's actions during World War One.
In nineteen nineteen, Lawrence admitted in a letter to a
friend that he had joined the Arab revolt because I
liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that
freedom for the race would be an acceptable present. And
that is both profoundly orientalist and also so romantic. I know,

(10:39):
I'm going to free your people because like I like you,
Like that's such a not even romantic. That's so because
like I don't think this was a romantic relationship. That's
so sweet.

Speaker 2 (10:51):
Yeah, one is like I also love Okay. It reminds
me a little bit about how okay, so Sam and
frodok because I have to bring one of the rings
into this somehow. I don't have a relationship that when
Tolkien talks about like Tlkien talks about it, and it's like, yeah,
it's the relationship between brothers in arms and war, right, Yeah,
And it's the kind of relationship that now that like

(11:12):
heterosexuality and homosexuality are much more like defined doesn't translate
to anything, Like the modern world has no way of
understanding this relationship you're describing.

Speaker 1 (11:25):
Yeah, it's just.

Speaker 2 (11:26):
Interesting because romantic is probably the closest word. But there's
his connotations that aren't meant.

Speaker 1 (11:33):
That aren't meant, and that like make this seem like,
for one thing is something like much more problematic than
I think it was, right and man, it is just
like yeah the whole Like, I like this guy so much,
I am going to like free his people from imperial bondage.
Like personally is kind of pretty pretty cool, know.

Speaker 2 (11:53):
With no background as a soldier as far as id with.

Speaker 1 (11:56):
No military background at this point, just the experience of
like makeing chain mail and learning how to sword fight
with the sprints. Yeah. Now, in a more artful bit
of writing, Lawrence Laurence, this is I want to quote
from a poem that Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Islam,
which Satin argues is a poem that he is. He

(12:16):
doesn't explicitly say this is a poem about Dome, but
Satin argues this is a poem written for Dome after
Dome's death. Quote, I love you, I loved you, so
I drew these tides of men into my hands and
wrote my will across the sky in stars.

Speaker 2 (12:32):
Damn Jesus.

Speaker 1 (12:34):
Yeah, that's a line that's bars right there.

Speaker 2 (12:38):
That is beyond romance, like pale.

Speaker 1 (12:41):
Yeah, I wrote my will across the sky and stars.
He's just a good writer, you know. Yeah. So in
this conception, if we take this is the reason why
Lawrence ultimately back the air revolt, and I will I'll
tell you right now, it can't be all of why, right, Yeah,
there are less romantic reasons that his country, Great Britain,

(13:03):
gets involved. You know. Obviously they're not doing it because
some random British dude like an Arab kid.

Speaker 2 (13:09):
You know.

Speaker 1 (13:10):
As I noted last episode, the Germans had started making
inroads with the Ottomans after the British pulled back their
support of the Sultan zik Kaiser, who had thrown away
Germany's alliance with Russia because he was a dumb shit,
needed the Ottomans because once he's like fuck you Russia,
he also realizes like, oh my god, there's no one
watching our ASTs, right, so we kind of have to
have the Ottomans now, right, And he also the Kaiser's

(13:32):
convinced himself that well, if I get the Sultan in
my back pocket, if we ever have a big fight
with Great Britain, I can incite a jihad against the
British Empire in India and that'll solve all my British
people problems.

Speaker 2 (13:42):
Yeah, all Muslims are definitely in power in India.

Speaker 1 (13:46):
Yes, always, yes, yes, yes, that is a clear fact
that you know. I mean, if you're the Kaiser, I
guess I'm just kind of proud he knows enough about
India to know there are Muslims there. Yes, that's more
knowledge than I would have credited kaiserville Elm with. Yeah. Now,
a further complication here was the recent construction of the
j Jas railway, which connected the Arab Peninsula to the

(14:09):
rest of modern day Saudi Arabia. This is a railway
that goes from like, you know, the the Ottoman heartland
and the Arab world all the way down through what
is modern day Saudi Arabia to like Omen and Yemen.
I think, right, like that's the Hjas is this massive
desert peninsula, right and this is you know, the Ottomans.
Once that Great Britain had gotten the sus Canal going.

(14:30):
The Ottomans had become dependent on Great Britain to move
goods to a lot of parts of the world, and
this railway was not only supposed to connect a lot
of these backwaters of the Empire, these tiny, little off
the map places that were really completely separate from the
rest of the world. It was also supposed to be
this like economic lifeline to the Empire that reduced their
dependence on Great Britain. The railway was so crucial not

(14:54):
just to the Ottomans, but in a lot of eyes
to the to Islam right that it had been funded
by do nations from Muslims all over the world, including
a huge number of Indian Muslims. And the fact that
so many Indian Muslims had donated to fund the Jjas
Railway was seen by a lot of like British observers
as evidence that like, oh, we really do need to
be worried that the caliph could spark a rebellion right now.

(15:17):
This ties back to Lawrence because during the years he
was digging, a realization had spread among the brass back
home in England that we might, you know's it's becoming
increasingly likely that we're going to have to scrap with
the Germans, and if that's the case, we probably have
to have a plan to deal with the Turks. Now,
Lord Kitchener, who is like the king shit of the

(15:39):
British military, you know, in the period leading up to
in the early stages of World War One, is the guy,
the man in power in the British military establishment who
is first like, hey, I am backing, Like I am
officially backing that we want to incite an air We're
looking into the possibility of inciting an Arab rebellion in Syria, right,
and support it enough to create a friendly state that

(16:02):
will fracture Ottoman power. Right Kitchener is like, he's not
the guy who originates the idea, but he's the first
guy in power who's like, I think we should explore
this as a potential official like policy move, Like.

Speaker 2 (16:14):
Is this the first time? Because this is this is
like the US's playbook. Right, is you back and uprising
in order to create a friendly state to the US?
Is this like are their previous examples?

Speaker 1 (16:28):
Oh yes, from the British right. I don't the US
is doing much of this. I mean it done. You know,
you could look at some aspects of our history. But
like we get it either way from the Brits, right,
they do this in Africa, they do this all over the.

Speaker 2 (16:41):
Place, So it's an existing playbook.

Speaker 1 (16:43):
Yeah, yeah, it is definitely an existing playbook. Right. This
is always how the British Empire's playbook is always, you know,
although it's usually a bit different because like this is
we are trying to disrupt an enemy by doing this.
Usually it's more we have this area we control that
we are native too, and we're going to find a
warrior people and we're going to both back them but

(17:04):
also kind of incite conflicts between them and other peoples
in order to take the pressure off of us.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Right.

Speaker 1 (17:09):
But you can see how like that playbook, you can
you can translate that directly to what's being done here
with the elements, right.

Speaker 2 (17:15):
Well, everyone likes doing that. The Tzar did that with
the cosmics.

Speaker 1 (17:19):
Yes, yes, it's a very old old playbook.

Speaker 3 (17:22):
Right.

Speaker 1 (17:24):
So in September of nineteen thirteen, the coming war between
European powers was both something that like everyone knew it
was happening, right that there was some sort of general
European conflict probably and also nobody really expected it to
happen right, not when it happened right. It's one of
those things where it's like, well, this will happen one day,
but probably not tomorrow, until eventually tomorrow comes.

Speaker 3 (17:45):
Right.

Speaker 2 (17:46):
This is impression for when this comes out.

Speaker 1 (17:48):
Pressure for any number of things. Now, Kitchener, being a
bit smarter than a lot of people in the British Empire,
is not just like, well, we'll probably have a war
one of these days, but not tomorrow. Kitchener's it's like, well,
he's probably ready, Like, if we're going to wind up
fighting the Germans and the Ottomans, we probably have a
plan for how to like incite this rebellion that might
get the Ottomans, you know, off of our fucking backs.

(18:10):
So he sends operatives to Palestine to gather information on
Ottoman military facilities there. Now, since the Ottomans weren't just
about to okay, like spy of bes, oh, you want
to send some spies the Holy that absolutely, it was
suggested that they send some local boys, some local like
English boys who were already in the Ottoman Empire playing
at archaeology, right, And that is how Te Lawrence and

(18:33):
his friend Ced L. Wooley find themselves called upon to
act as spies for the mother country. Lawrence was described
by his mentor to the Shell organization created to execute
this expedition as someone who quote gets on very well
with the natives. He has I think more the instincts
of an explorer, but is very shy. Right, that's like
the the what gets him this job. As like, you know,

(18:56):
he's kind of doing some James Bond shit. You know
six am I five doesn't exist then, but like that,
that's very much what he's doing here, right, He's being
brought in by the state to help provide cover to
an espionage operation.

Speaker 2 (19:09):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:10):
Now, he and Woolley insist that Dome be hired as
a photographer and general assistant to the team. They are
carrying out a real historical survey, but that survey is
also cover to this group of actual spies that are
being sent like as assistants, but are there to do
their actual like spy work. Right. Lawrence is aware of this,

(19:31):
and he writes back to his mom, we are obviously
meant as red herrings. Now the trips.

Speaker 2 (19:36):
Could trust the male so well back then, of course
nobody would look in the mail. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:44):
Now the trip was mostly uneventful for our purposes, save
that it marks the first time Lawrence found himself traveling
the Sinai and thinking about the military value of different
towns and forts along the way. One morning, he and
Woolley were late meeting up with their baggage men because
they were hunting a gazelle. Well, their camels, which had
bolted the night before, were found, and the Egyptian police

(20:04):
were contacted in a panic. Lawrence wrote home that quote.
The result was wild telephoning all over the frontier. The
Turks were wandering over their hills. About forty Arabs were
arrested and brought in his hostages for our reappearance. And
meanwhile we were sitting quietly wondering where in the world
our tents had got to. Now. To anyone else, this
would just be kind of like a funny moment, But Lawrence,

(20:25):
being very perceptive, takes something crucial from the experience. He writes, quote,
it shows how easily it is in an absolutely deserted
country to defy a government. And this is going to
lead him to one of the most important realizations of
the last one hundred and fifty years. After the expedition,
Lawrence and Woolly went back to their dig. Woolly left

(20:45):
around June, but as was usual, Lawrence stayed. He got
regular pushes to go back home, but in the last
eighteen months had spent just three weeks in England. Daoum
and another local friend of his, Hamoodi, had by this
point heard stories from Lawrence about and they'd repeatedly asked, hey,
can we would like to see You've spent so much
time in our home, we would like to see England, right,

(21:06):
And eventually, in nineteen thirteen, in the last summer before
the world went mad, Lawrence obliged them. Now they stayed
about ten days. He brings these two Arab friends of his,
and they stayed for ten days in Oxford. They are
mostly treated as like curiosities. They give like speeches and
stuff in public where people get to question them about
like their lives and their home. And for the most part,

(21:29):
you know, I think it's kind of interesting that this happened,
but it's not super relevant to like our question, you know,
where do we put this guy morally? There is one
anecdote here that I think is worth reciting to you,
and so I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's
book The Young te Lawrence, where he writes about a
story that Hamoodi told of this visit after Lawrence's death. Quote,

(21:50):
many wish to photograph us Hamoodi and Dome as we
sat with him, Lawrence in our customary clothes, And after
they took a picture, they would come and speak to him,
and always he said no, no.

Speaker 3 (22:00):
Oh.

Speaker 1 (22:00):
One day I asked why he was always saying no, no,
and he laughed and said, I will tell you. These
people wish to give you money, but for me you
would now be rich. Don't call yourself my friend. Hamoudi
shouted and say thus calmly, that you kept me from riches.
It was a rare moment of cultural division between them.
It also showed that the Syrians understood the wealth and
privilege of their young friend. Hamodi remembered that Lawrence had

(22:23):
laughed at his anger, and the more he laughed, the
angrier Hamoudi became. Then Lawrence said, yes, you might have
been rich, richer than any in Jurabulus. And I what
should I have been? I should have been the showman
of two monkeys. And suddenly Hamoudi admitted all my anger
died down within me.

Speaker 2 (22:42):
WHOA yeah, yeah, so he's thinking about what he's doing.

Speaker 1 (22:47):
Yes, he is attempting to not that he does it perfectly,
but he is trying to think ethically about the complexity
and the class dynamics and wealth dynamics and disparity of
his relationship with these guys.

Speaker 2 (23:00):
Fascinat because I was already thinking about how it's like, well,
when he goes there, they're not like putting him in
a on stage and being like, no, tell us about
the weird, racky, cold place you're from.

Speaker 1 (23:09):
You know, and that does happen here, and he's like
conscious and he's like, I don't want to turn this
into me prostituting these boys for orientalist reasons, right, yeah,
that seems bad to me.

Speaker 2 (23:23):
Right, And on the other hand, it probably could have been, like.

Speaker 1 (23:25):
He could have talked this out with them, right, There
is some of that paternalism here, you know.

Speaker 2 (23:29):
Right totally, because they could have been like, yeah, no,
let's get a rich fuck it.

Speaker 1 (23:32):
Yeah, yeah, exactly. They could have made that decision. And
he again, he's definitely paternalistic. He's older than them. You know,
this isn't unproblematic perfectly, but I also it's interesting to
me that he is really trying to think about this
in an ethical sense that somewhat comports with our modern ethics.

Speaker 2 (23:50):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (23:51):
You know what doesn't comport with our modern ethics, Margaret.

Speaker 2 (23:54):
Is it h our ads?

Speaker 1 (23:58):
They sure don't. But you know what I like being
able to pay my mortgage. Me too.

Speaker 2 (24:03):
Yeah, I'll just get to talk about it and then
they make decisions together.

Speaker 1 (24:06):
That's right, let's make some decisions together. Let's you and
me prostitute ourselves. Excellent.

Speaker 2 (24:13):
Yeah, that sounds great.

Speaker 1 (24:15):
That sounds great, and we're back. So when the war
broke out in August of nineteen fourteen, the time of
leisurely afternoons painting and reading with Dome were over. Based
on his work in Palestine the previous year, Lawrence was

(24:35):
offered a commission in the Army Intelligence Corps as a
second lieutenant. This landed Lawrence, who's now in kind of
like his mid to late twenties in Cairo, which is
where the movie begins to show us his story. Right,
this is where the nineteen sixty two film starts. I
think it's valuable that we have we've gone a little
bit back there by the time the fighting started. Kitchener's

(24:58):
interest in sparking an aerbravolt only deepened, and he'd had
several clandestine conversations with Prince Houssein ibn Ali, the Arab
nobleman charged with protecting the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.
Kitchener and his advisors believe that Prince Hussain could be
used to sever much of the Arab world from the
Ottomans and prevent them from functioning as an ally to Germany. Now,

(25:20):
Prince Husain was not the only potential game in town
for the Brits. Kitchener and his allies supported him as
the new Khaliph, while others backed a young chieftain from
Riad named Abdullah Aziz Aziz ibn Saud. Now did you
think about that last name, Saud for ahent as to
what his family's doing today? Yeah, well, yeah, they're doing

(25:43):
quite well. Some of the evilest people on planet Earth.
And Abdulla Ziz ibn Saud sucks ass too. Now so
does Prince Houssein. Both of these guys are huge dix
and a big part of why this Arab revolt doesn't
end in a better place for the Arab world. Know,
I would say overwhelmingly the blame is on the Ottomans
and the European powers. But a lot of it comes

(26:05):
down to the fact that the local leaders, you know,
the Arab leaders of this revolt are also assholes, right,
and that plays a role in the structures that get
set up, you know, at the end of this. All right, Yeah, Now,
Saud is Wahabi, right, which isn't a Puritan strain of
Islam that is also strongly anti idolatry. And Prince Hussein

(26:27):
is a guy. He is a real asshole about it.
He is super anti woman. He is a very strict
He's also a Puritan, right, He's the guy who like
bans drinking in Mecca, you know. But he is also
he's not a Wahabbist because the Wahabbies they're anti idolatry,
and Prince Hussein kind of wants to be worshiped almost
as much as Allah, right, like, and so he doesn't

(26:50):
like the anti idolatry stuff about Wahabism.

Speaker 2 (26:53):
He's like, humility, humility is no good.

Speaker 1 (26:55):
No, no, no, that's not my bag. I am a prince. Now,
the outbreak of World War One has been a disaster
for Mecca, right, which is tourism would be like kind
of the wrong way of saying. But it's like religious pilgrimage, right,
is like what the city does, that's where its money
comes from. People aren't doing as much of that. After

(27:18):
the whole war decides like what if we take all
these young men who were, you know, around to go
on pilgrimages to Mecca and the like, and instead we
feed them to each other's machine guns, you know, and
honestly a great this is a great time to be
a machine gun, bad time to be a young man.
So traffic to Mecca collapses and the economy follows with it.

(27:43):
And I'm going to quote from James Barr's book here.
Meccans were reduced to selling their furniture and the ornately
carved wooden doors and fretwork windows of their houses for
firewood to feed themselves. These screens shielded their women folk
indoors from prying eyes. It was a deeply humiliating resort
to have to take.

Speaker 2 (28:03):
Well.

Speaker 1 (28:04):
Yeah, So Prince Hussain blames the suffering and the war
itself on the secular modernizing of the Ottomans, which he
says violated the Koran by, for instance, allowing women to
work in the post office A major reason why Hussein
gets on board with being like the figurehead of an
Arab revolt against the Ottomans is he goes to Constantinople

(28:27):
a couple of years back and he sees women working
at the post office and he is it loses his mind.
He absolutely goes fucking batshit over like ladies in the
post office. This guy is the anti wokest of the
anti wokes. He describes lady post office workers as an
evil that will greatly injure us if it increases. Like

(28:48):
alost debate, why did this terrible war happen? Why are
we slaughtering each other? It's lady post office workers. He's
so out of his mind the words male man, mail man,
Oh god, damn it. Yeah, Prince Husain real piece of
shit in this story.

Speaker 2 (29:04):
Okay, debate, Nce is gonna end up backing anyway.

Speaker 1 (29:07):
This is this is who. This is who Lawrence in
England end up backing, although this is not who Lawrence
personally backs. Right, Whussain is the father of the guy
that Lawrence is really sees as being the great leader. Right,
So debate rages within sort of the British intelligence and
military establishment. It's very similar to how like during the
Syrian Civil War, you had like the US kind of

(29:29):
military intelligence back the Kurds, and you had like the
CIA back these kind of alliances of like rebel groups.
Well you have within you know, the military and the
intelligence arms of kind of the British state are backing
to Dit like Saud or Hussein, right, And there's a
lot of argument over like who is better, and this
is It's also worth noting that when we're parsing out

(29:51):
the morality of this, what what Great Britain is doing
here playing with these people's lives is evil. What Prince
Hussein is doing here try to get absolute power, make
himself into a khaliph is evil.

Speaker 2 (30:03):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:04):
The other Arabs, by the way, he wants to specifically
be king of this massive greater Arab state and like
wants to be ruling Iraq and Syria because that's prestigious
and the Hajahs is a backwater people. The Arabs in
Iraq and Syria don't want this guy ruling them, you know,
they don't like him more than they like the Ottomans
in some cases a lot less.

Speaker 2 (30:24):
Right.

Speaker 1 (30:25):
But also when we're talking about like the morality of this,
you know, what Great Britain is doing here is fucked up.
The Ottomans are actively doing a genocide. They are doing
the Armenian genocide in this period of time. So there's
not like a there's not like a ah. These are
the this is the shining bright side of this conflict.
To back, these guys were the real heroes here. Everyone's
an imperialist and everyone's a piece of shit.

Speaker 2 (30:46):
You know.

Speaker 1 (30:48):
Lawrence might have the most noble you know, kind of
alongside a lot of the like individual dudes who are
just like fighting because like it seems like the Ottomans suck.
But of the people with like power in this he's
at least less objectionable than some. So he spends the
first two years of his time as an intelligence agent
from fourteen to sixteen in Egypt in Cairo, writing intelligent

(31:11):
summaries from hundreds of sources across the region. Right other
people are bringing in data, he is like turning it
into briefings and sending it out right. And he becomes
as a result of this duty. He's a guy who
studies constantly. He's fascinated in the culture of the region,
and he becomes acquainted with the history of the Bedouins.
These are the nomadic peoples in the Hisjahs in this

(31:33):
in the Arab Peninsula, and they are primarily the way
everyone sees them, raiders and bandits, right. They fight a
lot within each other. They are a clannish tribal people,
and they make a lot of their living from like banditry, you.

Speaker 2 (31:48):
Know, comparable to the Kurds at the time.

Speaker 1 (31:50):
Maybe, Yeah, there's a lot of similarities. Yeah, yeah, I
mean you could definitely draw that in some ways, right,
And like, you know, you've got some of these guys
like Prince Hussein who have started to urban eye, but
you also have these people who like they very much
do live this nomadic existence except for the fact that
they have guns, not different from how they would have

(32:12):
lived seven hundred years ago, and like Muhammad was alive, right,
So the fact that Lawrence is starting to understand these
people and study them was going to prove crucial to
what comes next. But at the time, he's really frustrated
that he's like forced to just sit on his ass
and do nothing. In May of nineteen fifteen, less than
one year into the war, his brother Frank had been

(32:33):
killed in France. Four months later, his youngest son Will
was shot down and perished.

Speaker 2 (32:38):
Youngest brother.

Speaker 1 (32:39):
Yeah, youngest brother Will was shot down in Paris. So
he loses two brothers in the first two years of
the war. While he's sitting in this office in Cairo
being bored, and he is racked with survivor's guilt over this.
He and his brothers had been very close. In letters
home to his mother, he veered between shows of strength
in a time of such fearful stress in our country,
it is one's duty to watch every to watch very

(33:01):
carefully lest one of the weaker ones be offended. But
he also complained to her, we do nothing here except
sit and think out harassing schemes of Arabian policy. My
hair is getting very thin and gray. I'm going to
be in Cairo till I die. You know, he's an
emotional guy. He's going through a lot here. This is
a complex time to him, and his grief is compounded

(33:23):
by fury at the failed Allied invasion of Gallipoli, masterminded
by friend of the Pod Winston Churchill. This was a
vast invasion by sea of the Ottoman coast that ended
in just just the worst fuck up ever. Right, one
of the great disasters in military history, you know, pick, yeah,
just a calamitous fuck up. Now, Lawrence writes a report

(33:46):
on precisely why the campaign, which he termed a disgrace failed.
It was buried this report of his to protect the
people who'd planned it. Right, we can't have Winston Churchill
getting criticized, heres h. And it's a very good James
Schneider writes in his book Guerrilla Leader. He discovered then
the reality in modern war that the civilian population will

(34:07):
always suffer when a European power pursues its national interest
without regard to the culture and political aspirations of the
native populace. Right. And so this is kind of like
he makes a he makes a decision here that to
be different, that like, we have to be different, because
like if we're not, if we make these decisions but
purely on what we know and think of war without

(34:29):
any kind of like uh uh, you know, without any
sort of openness to the realities on the ground, we
wind up walking into disasters. Right. He is trying to
preach against Vietnam syndrome, right where you just like stumbling, well,
we're America, we know how to fight a war. This
is how you do it. I don't need to know
shit about this country, right, I'll just fight this the

(34:49):
way I fight every war. Ops turns out it's a
different part of the world that doesn't work here, you know.

Speaker 2 (34:55):
Yeah, And it wasn't a big thing, is that when
the Brits were trying to fight in the Ottoman Empire,
like because there just wasn't transportation and all this thing,
like the modern method of moving all of the arms
and all those things just like fell apart.

Speaker 1 (35:07):
Oh yeah, I mean a lot of its supply issues
and stuff. But this was also stuff. If there had
been more knowledge of the realities of the geography of
the era, they wouldn't have tried it. Right. With more
knowledge and less arrogance, you would just like, no, we
can't do this, we don't have the capacity.

Speaker 2 (35:24):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (35:25):
On June tenth, nineteen sixteen, Prince Hussein had been goaded
sufficiently into action that he used a small force of
fighters to lay siege the Turkish garrison at Mecca. They
took it after three days, but the rebellion lost steam
after that. Medina did not fall, and it was clear
to anyone with eyes that the Ottomans would soon exact
a punishment because their garrison and Medina is isolated, but

(35:47):
they've got this train that can get stuff down there,
so they had the ability. Eventually, we'll get enough guys
there that will crack down on this little rebellion. Now,
much of the internal debate in this period among the
British revolved around whether or not we should send our
own troops in to stop the Ottomans from like crushing
this rebellion, specifically from capturing a place called Rabigue, which

(36:08):
contained valuable wells that would allow resupply for an attack
on Mecca. The problem was twofold number one. If the
British sent in Christian soldiers, white guys, right, that would
infuriate soldiers because like Christians are not supposed to be
in the Holy Land, you know, and that would dry
up support for the rebellion if it's seen as like, oh,
this is really just a British thing, Oh, the British

(36:30):
are in this, you know, Like maybe people aren't going
to be willing to die if they're like, oh, so
we're just we're just fighting to become slaves of the
British Empire. Well I don't like that any better, right,
But at the same token, the British have this option.
We have all these Muslim soldiers right from Indie, India.
We could send in with modern guns and that they
would probably make a difference. But if we send in

(36:55):
Muslim soldiers, no one's going to believe that Prince Hussein
is backed by us. And that's also necessary because otherwise
why would you take him seriously if he doesn't have
the backing of a great power. Right, So it's just
like catch twenty two situation, you know of, like we
can't send in white guys, but nobody takes it as
seriously unless they see some white guys. And Lawrence is

(37:15):
on the side of arguing that we absolutely cannot send
in British soldiers, right, and he argues interestingly, he takes
the stance that not only should we not send in
British soldiers, they're not needed. The Bedouins can on their
own defeat the Ottomans in Hajas, so long as we
arm them properly. Right. His attitude is, we don't need
to send in troops. They can handle this. They just

(37:35):
need guns.

Speaker 2 (37:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (37:38):
Now he is also terrified. A big motivation for Lawrence
is that the French are poking around this situation. They
keep being like, oh, you guys don't want to send
in troops. We got troops, we can send in troops,
and then ends in maybe maybe's the Arab peninsula is
a French peninsula, you know, perhaps we wind up with
Siria I A. Yeah, like that is that is what

(37:59):
they're The French wants Syria in particular, right like they
see this as like natural French territory, Syria.

Speaker 2 (38:06):
Everywhere's natural French to everywhere is natural French territory.

Speaker 1 (38:10):
Yeah, right now, Lawrence, he's not just he's not just
doesn't like this because the British and the French don't
like each other traditionally. He is a man of the world,
and he is aware that the French when they took
Algeria immediately carried out a hideously brutal genocide. And he's like, well,
if they take Syria, they're going to do another genocide, right,

(38:30):
Like that's just how the French be. He argued in
letters meant to be read by other British officers that
supporting Prince Husain as the new caliph also would effectively
neuter Islam as a threat to the empire. Right, so
there's a very imperialist slight to this too. Although the
question is does he believe that, like, ah, we can
neuter Islam as a threat to our ambitions in India

(38:50):
or does he know that saying that will get people
to back his play back home.

Speaker 2 (38:56):
Because the hardest things when you look at history.

Speaker 1 (38:58):
Yes, yes, especially since Lawrence lies to his Arab allies,
and he lies to his British masters. He lies constantly
to them, So it is not he He is, you know,
deceitful to some of these Arabs that he claims to
care about, and he is deeply deceitful to all of
his superior officers. So the idea that he would just

(39:19):
be like, oh yeah, this will stop Islam from overthrowing
you know, the Indian subcontinent or whatever. Like, if he
thought that lie would work, he would say it. You know,
it's not necessary. It could be instead of Orientalism, just
him trying to manipulate his bosses, right, who he knows
are oriental who he knows are orientalists?

Speaker 4 (39:38):
Right?

Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah. Anyway, Lawrence kind of makes a name for himself
in all of these arguments, and he's also because of
some I'm not going to get into all of the
politicking within the British military establishment, but he winds up
getting to go along with like his boss, to the

(40:00):
Hjaws in order to meet some of these people because
the other guy who like should have gone in his
place was too controversial as a result of all these
arguments over who to back and whether or not to
send troops. So Lawrence gets to go. This is his
first time kind of going to the Jjaws, and over
the course of ten days he meets in befriends the
prince's son, Faisal Faisal Hussein, and Faisal is the guy,

(40:24):
He's the guy that you see in the movie, and
he's the guy that, like Lawrence, is actually going to
back as the leader of this future Arab state that
he wants to incite to rebellion and independence. Faisal and
him get along so well that Faisal kind of insists
that Lawrence become his appointed liaison to the British army,
and Lawrence, for his part, becomes convinced that Faisal is

(40:45):
the future of the revolt, writing back that Faisal has
quote leadership, not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but
the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire.
Thus the title of the Thus the title of Barr's book. Now,
the primary opponents of arming the rebellion countered Lawrence by

(41:06):
arguing that the Bedouin were, in one officer's words, untrained rabble,
most of whom have never fired a rifle. And this
is a complicated There's a lot of like back and
forth where like they'll be promised arms, Lawrence will kind
of say like, oh, I just got back from my boss.
His guns are coming in, so we need to carry
out this attack. But like the guns are coming, and
like the guns are not coming. Lawrence is lying to them.

(41:28):
He's pretending that this has been done, and he's doing
it because he wants to. He's trying to motivate them
to carry out attacks that he thinks that they can
succeed at, and they in fact do succeed at. Right,
But he is also lying to them, and also the Britis.
It's paternalism, right, It's the same thing, yeah, exactly. And
also separately, the British are just say agreeing to send arms,

(41:52):
and then there will be some like behind the scenes
fight and they'll be like, oh, actually we can't do that, right,
Although you know a lot of arms do wind up
getting to these rebels, right. So Lawrence knows that, you know,
in order to kind of secure support for Faisal to
get these arms, he has to make a case very
clearly to his very hesitant superiors that the Bedouins can

(42:13):
win this war. Right. Lawrence arrived shortly after the situation
in the southern Hejas had devolved into a stalemate, one
that favored the Turks. Faisal's men had worn out a
lot of their initial strength, failing to chew through the
defenses of Medina, but the Turks had made unexpected retreats
after rumors of an era of attack, which had allowed
Faisals men to capture the port of Rabigue in the

(42:34):
first place. This was confusing because they'd moved vastly superior
forces into the region. It was in analyzing their decisions
here like why all of this happened, that Lawrence would
make his first key realization, and here is how Schneider
describes it. Why did the Turks waiver? It occurred to
Lawrence that perhaps the virtue of irregulars lay in depth,

(42:55):
not in face, and that it had been the threat
of the attack by them on the Turkish northern flank
which had made the enemy hesitate so long the actual
Turkish flank ran from their front line at Rebeg their face,
in Lawrence's words, to Medina, a distance of some fifty miles.
But if we moved towards the Jjaz railway behind Medina,

(43:16):
we might stretch our threat and accordingly their flank as
far potentially as Damascus, eight hundred miles away to the north.
Such a move would force the Turks to the defensive,
and we might regain the initiative. Do you see what
he's saying here, Because this is the core of his
understanding of how to do an insurgent the struggle.

Speaker 2 (43:36):
You can present yourself as everywhere at once, and it
makes up a regular army.

Speaker 1 (43:40):
Exactly. We've got this like fifty mile front, and in
a conventional European war, that would be the threat area, right,
that would be the attack. That's the area that have
to worry about. But because we have all of these
tiny little units of guys on camel who are capable
of traveling for weeks at a time and then carrying
out insurgent attacks, actual area they have to defend is

(44:01):
eight hundred miles deep, and so they can't attack and
care and regain the initiative the way they otherwise would
be able to because they have to have forces split
off and be aware of all of these potential everywhere
is vulnerable, right and by doing that, we don't actually
even have to carry out all that many attacks. Just
the reality of our threat opens possibilities to us.

Speaker 3 (44:25):
Now.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
It's kind of like the Ira is a we only
have to be lucky ones. You have to be lucky
every time.

Speaker 1 (44:31):
Yes, yeah, that's what he is starting to realize here.
You know, the better Wins know the terrain much better
than the Turks, who are not locals, and they can
travel in small groups almost indefinitely with minimal need for resupply,
launching frontal attacks with these things, and there's not many
of them. The better Wines are not in numerous people.
These are you know, nomads are not a high population

(44:52):
group in the desert, so you don't want to use
them the way British officers instinctively wanted to use them,
by like sending them to run at guns until they
were all gone. That is kind of what a lot
of Lawrence's superior sye is like, Well, this is how
you fight a war, right, we just throw them at
guns and like, oh, they're not good at being thrown
at guns. There's there's this whole thing. The British like

(45:14):
really have this distaste for these these better win troops
because like they're scared of artillery. They don't like to
get blown up. It must like their religion tells them
they won't go become whole in heaven if they get
blown up, So like fools, they're scared of field guns.
This cowardly Arab terror at being exploded. Which is funny

(45:39):
because is it all.

Speaker 2 (45:40):
Of war changing after World War One, where we yes,
it should no one's good at running at machine gun nests.
Yeah it's a bad idea.

Speaker 1 (45:47):
But they still have it. The British have not really
figured this out yet. Some of them have, but like
a lot of a lot of people are still doing
the old ways. And yeah, there's like this whole Can
you believe these cowardly don't like to explode, not like
our good English boys they love blowing up in fields.
They can't blow up enough. It's so fucking funny to me.

(46:15):
They're just like looking at generations being wiped out in
the trenches for nothing, and like why don't the Muslims like.

Speaker 2 (46:22):
This, Yeah, totally.

Speaker 1 (46:23):
These primitive people hate dying. Oh, it's so funny. So
Lawrence is like, we don't we shouldn't be wasting them, right, Like,
there's not a lot of these guys, and they can
do so much more damage if we split them into
these tiny like fire teams and send them in behind

(46:43):
the lines to fuck shit up, right, And that will
open opportunities for us to carry out massed attacks in
areas when we have the advantage and when we can
actually sweep over them without taking nightmarish casualties, which is.

Speaker 2 (46:56):
The actual reality of guerrilla wars is not just these
isolated strike so you have to also work with the
like mass attacks.

Speaker 1 (47:02):
No, it is. It's what you call that. The modern
term is, it's a strategy of tension. If you keep
enough tension on the enemy to where they have this
massive flank that they have to defend, then they will
make mistakes. They will expose areas that you then can
take with more conventional attacks. Okay, yeah, Now, Lawrence advised

(47:23):
his allies to move troops away from prepared defenses and
towards operating a terrain that would let them strike at
the railway with one redeployment, Faisal's men went from threatening
a single city to two hundred miles of this railway.
Lawrence began to take part in raids on isolated Turkish units,
defending chunks of railway or on patrol. Over the course

(47:44):
of three months, he got a feel for his Bedouin troops.
Being largely composed of family units from a culture with
a low population, they had little stomach for casualties. At
one key battle in January nineteen seventeen, the Arab forces
overran Ottoman defenders in a town called Wash, alongside British
infantry and naval support. The Brits lost one man, the

(48:07):
Arab tribesmen lost twenty. Now, the British officers in charge
of this operation had all fought in France, and they
were like, fucking twenty one dudes to take a town,
this is great, right, Yeah. Lawrence had to caution them
that like, no, no, no, the Bedouin don't feel like
this is a great victory quote. Instead, he feared their
deaths might easily upset Arab morale. Our rebels were not

(48:29):
materials like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting in our leadership.
In his book, yeah I do love that like soldiers,
you know, they're just materials. They're trash basically, right. He's like, no, no,
these guys are our buddies and they don't like to
see their family die. Right, You're going to war with
your uncle. It's not just a casualty, right, Like that's

(48:51):
your uncle got killed. In his book, James Barr notes
that Lawrence later added this explanation, we were not in command, Nash,
but by invitation, and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives,
so that death was a personal sorrow to many in
the army.

Speaker 2 (49:09):
I mean that's a better way to run a I mean,
I guess it's probably bad, like strategically in some why war, Yeah,
because it makes them think more carefully and instead of
just throwing people in the machine gun us.

Speaker 1 (49:22):
Yeah, no, yeah, it is. It is the right and
it's why this this war that that is carried out
over the Arab revolt and in broader terms a lot
of because this isn't the only part of the war
in the Middle East, right, the British occurring out conventional
military actions trying to take the Holy Land in this period,
which had been disastrous up to this point. There's an
attempted invasion of Jerusalem. That's just a fucking catastrophe, you know.

(49:45):
But but there are more conventional attacks. But where they're
taking and like large chunks of land and like entire
influential cities and ports. And you're seeing, like two guys
died in this battle, right, two of our giants, right,
Like that is the thing where Lawrence is active, because
they are thinking smart.

Speaker 2 (50:03):
You know that. That's cool.

Speaker 1 (50:05):
Yeah, it's pretty cool. Now. One of the reasons why
the Europeans had not felt, as I said, that the
Bedouins could be good soldiers is that they're scared of
artillery and Lawrence. In these letters he's writing back to
like the British General staff argues this is they're not
scared of hardship itself. Like they're not scared of fighting.
They're not even scared of dying, you know. He writes

(50:27):
this in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In mass they were
not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline,
nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit, the better its performance.
A thousand were a mob ineffective against a company of
trained Turks, but three or four Arabs in their hills
would stop a dozen Turks. Napoleon remarked this of the Mamluks,

(50:49):
we were yet too breathless to turn our hasty practice
into principle. Our tactics. We're imperial snatchings, we're empirical snatchings
of the first means to escape difficulty. We were learning
like our men. This recognition that again, you know, just
thinking about modern times is like, well, if you get
a thousand these people together, it's just chaos, right, Like
everyone's fighting with each other. People don't really get along

(51:12):
very well. They certainly don't trust each other in battle.
But if you separate them into these three and four
man groups, then you can make them extremely effective, right,
and then maybe occasionally take the risk of having them
carry out larger actions.

Speaker 2 (51:25):
Yeah, I mean this is the way that I would
assume my friends would be useful.

Speaker 1 (51:29):
Yes, right, Yeah, So his first few months in theater,
we're too chaotic and violent for much in the way
of groundbreaking strategy. Overwhelt arcing strategy to occur to him, right,
He's kind of it's catches catch can. But later in March,
Lawrence gets lucky, by which I mean he nearly dies
from another one of his constant illnesses. He gets this

(51:50):
horrible mix of like boils and malaria and the shits
that malaria shit. Yeah, he spends ten days dying in
a tent. To distract himself from dying, he spends all
of the time kind of like hallucinating from dehydration and
writing out the most influential military theory of the century.

(52:11):
And he's consolidating here these years of military theory that
he had studied back in school and applying it to
his experiences thus far in the Hajahs. And as he's
trying to do this, his mind is drawn to an
Austrian general, Maurice de Sachs, who back in the early
seventeen hundred, had decided that the generals of his day
spent too much time worried about tactical details. How do

(52:33):
I move this unit in opposition to this unit right
in order to get a flight? How do I get
this unit of riflemen? How do I get cavalry around
their side to flank this one group of guys? Right,
that's a tactical problem, right, And Desas is like, really
the game is figuring out larger operational concerns what he
cal calls the higher problems of War Now. Interestingly enough,

(52:55):
Desacks had written his book, which is kind of the
precursor to Lawrence's groundbreaking work, while he was dying for
two weeks in a tent.

Speaker 2 (53:04):
I mean it makes sense.

Speaker 1 (53:04):
It's like, although you're a soldier, that's what you do. Yeah, yeah,
two things soldiers love cigarettes and dying intents.

Speaker 2 (53:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
So, Dsas had written a book about war that provided
the framework for Lawrence's understanding of how the Bedouins fought.
An article I found helpful in all this is t e.
Lawrence and the Art of War in the twenty first
Century by George GOWRICHI. He writes, Dessas offered a theory
of war based on the model of a general who
practiced the dictum that a war might be won without

(53:36):
fighting battles. Whether Lawrence was aware of this or not,
others had presented a similar ideal some twenty five hundred
years earlier. Sons sue the most famous Yeah exactly, Yeah,
soun Su has a quote about this, right, and he's
the guy. You'll see him recommended often today in the
reading of Instagram posts of guys who want to sell
you one regulated testosterone.

Speaker 2 (53:55):
I know, las still worth reading it's still.

Speaker 1 (53:58):
Worth reading, and Lawrence is going to he's not reading
Sun Sux here, but he's going to use Disacks who
saying a similar thing in a very useful way. It
has become clear to him that the Automan ability to
project power rested entirely on the Jjah's railway, which were
in the length of the peninsula and cut through this
infinity of desert. But the railway was incredibly vulnerable. It

(54:18):
is so long you can't have men stationed on every
inch of it, and Ottoman troops have very little ability
to maneuver outside of where the railway takes them. Now,
any fool with soldiers can tell you that if your
enemy has a train, blow it up. But Lawrence is
smarter than this. He's like, no, no, no, don't blow
it up. That's the worst thing to do. If you
destroy the train so it can't operate, your enemy has

(54:42):
to adapt and find a different way of getting troops
and supplies in theater. And when they adapt, that will
make them less vulnerable to you. If you just buck
with the railway constantly damaging bits and pieces of it,
they'll have to keep repairing it. They'll have to keep
sending troops to these different areas to repair it. They're
going to have their repair crews, they're going to be

(55:02):
like spending resources to do this. And every resource that
they scramble to defend and repair this railway is a
source that's not out there actually pressing the attack or
defending other territory. Right, you want to keep them on
the railway. You just want to fuck with it a
little bit, you know. Yeah. World military Yeah.

Speaker 2 (55:25):
Okay, Now, I'm like, yep, this is this man.

Speaker 1 (55:28):
This man is smart. This is a guy with some
stuff going on under the hood. Yeah. Now, world military
history is filled with insurgent movements. Alexander the Great dealt
with this shit, and he was not the first imperial
warlord to do so. What makes Laurence special is not
just his understanding of gorilla tactics, but how to marry
them to the larger greater power struggle. And here's Gowerchee again.

(55:51):
In developing his own theory of a regular war, Lawrence
identified three key elements for analysis, the algebraic, the biological,
and the psychological. The algebraic element of things refers to
the physical environment that has shaped warfare in the Hejahs.
For Lawrence, this was the decisive moment. Using simple math,
Lawrence calculate at the size of territory held by the

(56:13):
Arabs in relation to the number of Ottoman troops in theater.
The Ottomans, with only sixteen thousand troops in Arabia and
with a shortage of staunch Arab allies among the tribes,
lacked enough soldiers to establish effective control over one hundred
and forty thousand square miles of territory geogret geography. The
vast desert gave the Arab revolt sanctuaries that the Ottomans

(56:34):
could not seize and hold for any length of time.
As noted by Lawrence, to make more war upon rebellion
is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife.
I just love is writing.

Speaker 2 (56:46):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (56:47):
The Arabs possessed safe havens in the Vast Desert and
therefore had the time to conduct a protracted struggle. They
received critical assistance from the British Army, an army that
posed serious threat to Palestine. Consequently, the Ottoman high command
fell to could ill afford to spare additional troops to
quell the Arab uprising. Foreign assistance and a distracted enemy
proved a window of opportunity for the rebellious Arabs. So

(57:08):
key part of this it's not just that we're threatening
this whole area. We're threatening this train, and that diverts
Ottoman troops, the Great Power War, the British army that
hasn't succeeded in taking the Holy Land, but threatens it
also blocks troops away, and so he is looking at
Lawrence is looking at these very local, small unit actions

(57:29):
in the as part of this grander struggle, which is exactly,
by the way, what the Vietnamese are going to do, right.
They don't have this vast desert, but they have Lao
and Cambodia. They have these underground tunnels. This is their
safe haven, right. And what the viet Cong are doing
very much exists not just in concert with the greater
struggle being waged by other Vietnamese elements like the NVA,

(57:52):
this conventional army, but in the greater power struggle of
the Cold War, all of these different conflicts that have
an impact on who can and resources where and what
can be sent ware right and how much things can
be escalated.

Speaker 2 (58:04):
Right.

Speaker 1 (58:04):
Lawrence is the guy who was writing out this is
how you think about a conflict that is so broad
in scope it boggles your mind. Right, Yeah, that's where
a lot of his genius comes in.

Speaker 2 (58:16):
No, that makes sense because yeah, is that called grand
strategy or is that? Yeah?

Speaker 1 (58:22):
Definitely this is grand strategy, right.

Speaker 2 (58:25):
I think a lot of people are bad at that
because we're good at thinking about We all think about tactics, right,
and then we even sometimes think about strategic goals, but
we're rarely thinking about how that one strategic goal is
going to affect how a different political power is going
to be impacted and what they're going to do.

Speaker 1 (58:41):
Yeah, it's the mind of a don't where it's the
mind of you know, it's domino theory. It's almost he
almost thinks about war the way an electrician has to think, right,
where you can't just be thinking about where does this
problem in this circuit? But how does all of this
connect to this broader structure of like circuits and this
broader flow of power? Right, He's thinking about the flow
of power, right, very literal sense.

Speaker 2 (59:01):
Yeah, so that engineering.

Speaker 1 (59:03):
Yeah, he is an he is an engineer of war.

Speaker 2 (59:06):
WHOA.

Speaker 1 (59:07):
Yeah, Well this is what elevates Lawrence is understanding beyond
being just another gorilla leader. These basic elements, this local
gorilla force, pinning down an undermanned opponent, retreating to a
safe haven backed by a foreign power its self, and
separate conflict or conflicts with the occupier. This is how
you would describe every great conflict of the last seventy
five years, right like, this is what this is what

(59:28):
everything is, right, this is there's a lot of Israel
Palestine in here, right in this conflict between You've got
Israel and the United States back and then you've got
Iran supporting you know, his Bellah and hamas. You know
these are This is the nature, the basic nature of
all modern conflict. Really yeah, In other words, I just
find this stuff cool. One of the many things that

(59:49):
sets Lawrence apart from his colleagues is that he also
has an understanding of his limitations. He knows, for example,
I'm a white guy. I cannot be the leader of
a grand erab revolt. That is not my place. But
he also knows how to fin leaders and craft propaganda
around them to turn them into heroes. And one of
these heroes is a guy who's one of the coolest
figures in this although he's also he's someone who does

(01:00:09):
a lot of back dealing and wheeling and dealing, but
Lawrence meets him in eighteen seven or in nineteen seventeen.
In April, Aouda Abu Tai of the Howitat tribe, a
passage from Schneider's book That I Loves gives you an
idea of like what a fucking almost yeah a storybook
character this you could hardly invent like a cooler sounding
protagonist centuries earlier, the Howitat arrived from the Hajahs, and

(01:00:33):
now their clans prided themselves on being true nomads in
the Bedouin manner. Aouda was a tribal archetype, a heroic
leader and warrior in the tradition of co chiefs, Geronimo,
crazy horse, sitting bull. His generosity made him poor, as
his growing legend made him ever richer in reputation. He
had taken twenty eight wives during his adult life. His
body bore the scars of thirteen wounds. He had seen

(01:00:56):
most of his relations slain in countless raids. Aouda had
slain seven five Arabs with his own hand. How many
turks Outa did not tally hit them, They simply did
not count His retinue, compromise, the fiercest men of the
tribe fighting about sides Auta with relentless courage. I've killed
seven personally in a hand to hand combat. It's killed
seventy five of the men that I consider men for

(01:01:19):
people who county, which is like, I mean, this guy
is also a monster, but you know you can't like
undeniably badass. Yeah, yeah. I think paragraphs like this help
make it clear. Also why Lawrence finds the Bedouin way
of war so much more intoxicating than say, the Western Front.
If you, if you're a drafty in the Western Front,
your combat leader's prior life experience was like competing with

(01:01:42):
other rich kids to molest underclassmen and eton, right, Whereas
if in this war, if you wind up under Auta,
it's this guy from like, yeah, from like a fucking
story book, right, Yeah, you know, a swashbuckling figure. And
Lawrence is a romantic, right, he is still enthralled with
medieval poems of knights and ladies. This is catnip to him, right,

(01:02:03):
Like there was no chance him not being on these
guys side once he starts to meet these people. Now,
at the time they met Aouda had about five hundred fighters,
half as many as he brought into the war. A
desert pirate, he was frustrated trying to fight a conventional war.
I woulda saw himself as an epic hero. Schneider notes,
this guy, in addition to everything I've said, refers to

(01:02:26):
himself exclusively in the third person.

Speaker 2 (01:02:28):
Yeah, of course he does.

Speaker 1 (01:02:29):
Of course he does. That's what you expect from a
man who has killed dozens of men in hand to
hand combat. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:02:35):
By the time he gets your tenth wound and your
seventieth man, who actually counts, you start referring to the person,
right right.

Speaker 1 (01:02:43):
Lawrence sat down with Faisal and Aouda and explained his
new theories about how the war should be run. He
built to a thrilling conclusion where he argued that rather
than being out numbered and out gunned, the far more
nobile Bedouins had a chance to attain superiority of men
in materiel where it mattered. Quote, but think of it
in regular terms. We are stronger than the Turks and

(01:03:04):
transport machine guns, cars and high explosives. At the decisive point,
we can deploy a highly mobile, lightly equipped, striking force
of the smallest size and use it successively. It distributed
points along the Turkish line to force them to strengthen
their posts beyond the usual twenty men. This will be
our shortcut to success. Right, This is this other recommendation.

(01:03:26):
War battles always go to who has the numbers, who
has the most men and guns. But that doesn't mean
who has the most men and guns in total. It
means where it matters, right, Yeah, I mean it matters
right exactly. You don't fight when you're gonna lose, exactly.
Lawrence assured auDA and Faisal that allowing the Ottomans to

(01:03:46):
keep Medina and the railway would work because it would
keep their forces bottled up trying to defend these things
while the Arabs took everything else. Quote. His stupidity will
be our ally, for he believes that his success depends
on holding as many of the older provinces is possible.
This pride in his imperial heritage will keep him in
his present absurd position. All flanks and no front. Now,

(01:04:10):
if you remember nothing else about the way empires think
and function from these episodes, remember this, all flanks and
no front. They can't really help themselves. That's just the
way they are anyway, This is fascinating.

Speaker 2 (01:04:27):
I like this stuff, Like I wonder how much I
wonder how much this still does or doesn't work, right,
because you know the idea of like oh and then
we disappear into the hills. I mean, I guess the
Taliban did that to the US and Afghanistan, so I
guess it is successfully.

Speaker 1 (01:04:44):
I mean, I think it does work. It just people
don't always get it right, you know, Like we're looking
right now at what's happening on a strategic level. I'm
not talking a moral level necessarily, but like in Gaza,
you know, with what Hamas you know, has been doing,
is this going to work out?

Speaker 3 (01:04:58):
Like?

Speaker 1 (01:04:59):
Was it a good strategy? Is this going to where
we did? We simply don't know, like good strategy in
terms of will they achieve ultimately their goals, that's unknown, right, Right,
we can look at what the Taliban did and say
they very successfully employed a version of this strategy and
it worked for them, right, And we can look at
we can look at to an extent Iran in Iraq, right,

(01:05:19):
an Iranian influence in Iraq and the degree of political
power that it's given them in the modern day state
and like the damage that they did to the United
States as another example of like, well, yeah, this is
the you know, they were fairly successful, not to the
same extent that Taliban was, but fairly successful with a
strategy like this, right when you also.

Speaker 2 (01:05:39):
Get into the sort of fourth generational warfare thing, right,
like those who control the hearts and minds of the
people are the people who control the people. Like so
it's like, which is why, I mean, it's why even
the right wing wants to do mutual a It is
like literally, whoever is feeding the people is if you
feed people, that that's where their allegiance, right, yeah, the

(01:06:01):
system that feeds them. And but it's interesting because in
a situation like this, it's just home territory. Yeah, and
the Ottomans haven't really I don't know enough about how
the Ottomans were exerting power in that region.

Speaker 1 (01:06:13):
Actually, yeah, I mean the same way empires generally did.

Speaker 2 (01:06:16):
Right, mostly attractively with some posts.

Speaker 1 (01:06:19):
Yes, yes, and they're not great at it right again,
this is the Ottomans are a failing empire, right Yeah, anyway,
cool stuff.

Speaker 3 (01:06:32):
Yep, Magpie, do you have a new book that people
can buy?

Speaker 2 (01:06:37):
I do have a new book that people can buy.
It's called The Sapling Cage. And if you like amazing
people running around who travel and do small scale conflict,
you might like this story about a young trans girl
who wants to go be a witch and learns how
to spear fight, because in my book, which is learn
how to spear fight before they learn how to use magic.

Speaker 1 (01:06:57):
And hey, maybe learn how to spear fight yourself. You know,
it's very What the Greeks always said about it is
that it kind of just comes naturally. There's very little
training really that you need. Poke a man with a spear.
It's surprisingly easy. That's what John Brown thought too.

Speaker 2 (01:07:14):
Or not goodbye, it didn't work out well for him.
But I'm like, actually it didn't work out, but yeah,
I mean strategic goals were successful.

Speaker 1 (01:07:21):
Right, yeah, I mean yes, all right, yeah, so anyway,
byey make a Spear.

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):
Behind the Bastards is a production of cool Zone Media.
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(01:07:52):
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