Fernando Kallás

Lawrence da Arabia ensinando licoes aos americanos no Iraque.

Lessons of Arabia

By Thomas E. Ricks
Friday, November 26, 2004;
Washington Post - Page A39

It was being ambushed at midnight on the west bank of the Euphrates River in April that finally made me sit down and read through the memoirs of Lawrence of Arabia.

Over the years I'd tried several times to read T.E. Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," a great memoir of World War I in the Middle East. Each time I faltered and put the book down, put off by Lawrence's obscure vocabulary, baroque style and equally twisted personality.

But when I was embedded with the 1st Infantry Division in April, I spent a long day and longer night in a convoy that dodged its way across central Iraq, revising its planned route as bridges were damaged by insurgents. Around midnight, just after my Humvee crossed the Euphrates, three signal flares arced across the sky, and then we were bombed and machine-gunned by insurgents. One soldier was killed and two were wounded.

A few days later, outside Najaf, I saw Lawrence's book in a new light, as an account of Arab guerrillas attacking the supply lines of a modern, conventional Western military. That was what I had just experienced -- from the wrong end of the gun -- 80 years after Lawrence wrote.

As it happened, I had been carrying the book around in my backpack -- I always bring a thick paperback with me when embedded with a military unit, to sop up the endless waiting for action -- and when I took it out, it seemed like a different book. This time I whipped through its 656 pages.

Let me emphatically state here that I am not likening the cause of the Iraqi insurgents to that of Arab rebels against the Turks. I was reading this as a tactical manual of military operations against another military, not of terrorist attacks on civilians.

In those terms, the tactics employed by Lawrence and his Arab tribesmen were strikingly similar to those used against U.S. forces today in Iraq. American truck convoys constantly come under attack, sometimes by rocket-propelled grenades but most often by anonymous roadside bombs. Likewise, for most of his war, Lawrence wasn't interested in direct confrontations with the Turkish military. Rather, he strove to avoid the set-piece slugfests that Western militaries -- and Western journalists -- tend to think of as the essence of war, such as the recent battle in Fallujah. He relentlessly chipped away at the railroad that supplied Turkish forces deployed deep in what is now Jordan and Saudi Arabia, dropping rail bridges and blowing up locomotives.

"Ours should be a war of detachment, . . . of never engaging the enemy," he writes in explaining his concept of operations. At another point, he comments, "Ours were battles of minutes."

When I read his description of why he thought his outgunned, outmanned, unsophisticated force could prevail, a chill ran down my spine. His rebellion, he wrote, faced "a sophisticated alien enemy, disposed as an army of occupation in an area greater than could be dominated effectively from fortified posts." Meanwhile, his side was supported by "a friendly population, of which some two in the hundred were active, and the rest quietly sympathetic to the point of not betraying the movements of the minority."

He also came to understand that in waging or countering an insurgency, the prize is psychological, not physical. At one point, he notes in an aside, while waiting for reinforcements "we could do little but think -- yet that . . . was the essential process."

As I read that, I thought with regret that if the U.S. military had done more thinking and less fighting in Iraq in 2003, we probably would be in a better position there today. In recent months the Army and Marines have radically altered their tactics, abandoning many that alienated the Iraqi population. It remains to be seen whether those changes will be too little too late.

Some of Lawrence's asides touch directly on British operations in Iraq. His putdown of "Mesopotamian dourness" will resonate with anyone who has spent time in Baghdad. So will his observation that "the British in Mesopotamia remained substantially an alien force invading enemy territory, with the local people passively neutral or sullenly against them." Yet, for all his fluency in Arabic language and culture, Lawrence was stunned by the thoroughness of Arab looting. Near the end of his memoir, when Turkish forces are crumbling and retreating, Lawrence recounts what happened when he and his allies moved into a town for the first time.

"Men, women and children fought like dogs over every object," he recalled of the fall of Mezerib. "Doors and windows, door-frames and window-frames, even steps of the stairs, were carried off. . . . Tons were carried off. Yet more were strewn in wreckage on the ground." That paragraph could have been written about the fall of Baghdad nearly 20 months ago.

Since then the U.S. military has suffered more than 10,000 casualties, dead and wounded, and learned just how difficult it is to wage a counterinsurgency, especially while operating amid a proud Arab culture that is profoundly different from ours. "War upon rebellion was messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife," Lawrence cautions.

Lt. Col. John Nagl, an Army officer who served last year as the operations officer for a tank battalion based near Fallujah, took that phrase, "eating soup with a knife," as the subtitle of his own study of modern counterinsurgency, written as a doctoral dissertation at Oxford. Pentagon insiders say that the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, has distributed copies of Nagl's book to all Army generals. Whether they will learn Lawrence's lessons remains to be seen.

The writer, who covers the military for The Post, is working on a history of the U.S. military experience in Iraq.