Setting the Desert on Fire

Reviews of A Line In The Sand

2011-08-13T11:27:00.004Z

All the reviews of my new book, A Line In The Sand, can be found here on my website.

www.jamesbarr.org.uk

2011-07-14T13:04:00.003Z

My next book comes out on 4 August, and I have set up a website where you can read the first chapter and find out when I am next speaking:

www.jamesbarr.org.uk

Featured on Reuters

2011-05-31T10:57:00.002Z

I did an interview for Reuters Insider a few weeks ago.

Here is the full programme it was used for.

Assad - not a reformer, or not in control

2011-04-27T23:17:00.002Z

I've never met him. But when I first visited Syria in 2002. not long after he took power, it was always said that he was a reformer surrounded by hardliners. I did meet Al-Sharaa, his foreign minister, whose erm, 'sneer of cold command' inclined me to believe this.

Today people are still saying Assad is a reformer surrounded by hard-liners.

But the facts show that either he is not a reformer, or he is not in charge.

Two views of Assad

2011-04-13T08:08:00.002Z

These two contrasting articles on Syria are very interesting.

Joblessness + Phone ownership = Unrest?

2011-03-07T08:41:00.006Z

Here is an interesting graph I pulled together in the course of a project I am working on. It uses data from the World Bank (for the phone subscriptions data) and the ILO and others for youth unemployment. It plots youth unemployment rates against mobile phone ownership (subscriptions per 100 people). Countries above the line have disproportionately high mobile phone ownership given their rate of unemployment: in other words their people are both jobless and well-connected: to one another and the outside world (A recent survey showed that 45% of people in the Middle East use their phones to access the internet).

When God Made Hell

2011-02-21T08:54:00.003Z

My review of Charles Townshend's When God Made Hell, published in the February issue of The London Magazine

When God Made Hell: The British Invasion of Mesopotamia and the Creation of Iraq, 1914-18, by Charles Townshend

Faber, £25, 591pp.

Serial inquiries into Britain’s embroilment in Iraq are nothing new, as Charles Townshend’s latest book reminds us. After a British force besieged at Kut, on the river Tigris, was forced to capitulate in 1916, the government was pressured into holding two inquiries.

The first was supposed to be a small-scale investigation of the lack of medical facilities available to the wounded during the expedition, which had been sanctioned by the government of India. But when the two men appointed to this task concluded that the appalling casualty clearing procedures were due to the fact that the force’s entire organisation was ‘manifestly inadequate’, the government felt obliged to sanction another, broader inquest.

The resulting Mesopotamia Commission, like the Chilcot Inquiry today, comprised a panel of five with a similarly wide-ranging brief. Charged with examining ‘the origin, inception and conduct of operations of war in Mesopotamia,’ it produced an excoriating report that blamed the government of India for failing to send properly trained or equipped troops, and for strangling military operations with ‘Gilbertian’ bureaucracy. Although the Delhi government had behaved as if it were an independent state, it was ultimately answerable to the India Office in London. There, the secretary of state for India, Austen Chamberlain accepted responsibility. Having described the report as ‘the saddest and most appalling document’ that he had ever read, he resigned.

Agreeably, Townshend leaves the reader to compare such conduct with that of more recent politicians in his book, which is the first major work on the Mesopotamian campaign since Arthur Barker’s A Neglected War of 1967. Despite his subtitle, only in the final ninety pages does Townshend gallop through the fascinating post-war consequences. Perhaps this explains why, after he credits his editor for the idea behind the book, he says he fears that the result does ‘not quite match’ his publisher’s original vision. But even so, he plaits politics, war and the voices of soldiers on the ground to make a fascinating book.

The story begins in 1914 when the government of India sent troops up the Persian Gulf following the outbreak of the First World War, but before the Ottomans joined in on the Germans’ side. Townshend rejects the traditional view that the reason why it did so was to secure Britain’s oil installations in Persia. Rather, he argues, it was British officials’ determination to impress the Arabs that encouraged them to weigh in, particularly when the Ottoman sultan commanded his reluctant Arab subjects to join a jihad against his enemies.

After the Ottomans declared war, the British landed in what is now Iraq, and the ease with which they captured Basra whetted their appetite for more. It was ‘difficult to see how we can well avoid taking over Bagdad’, said Sir Percy Cox, a political officer with the British force. ‘The very glamour attaching to so historic a city is in itself a temptation,’ admitted another official in the India Office.

The lure proved irresistible. At the end of 1914 Britain’s senior general in Mesopotamia, Sir John Nixon, charged a subordinate, Sir Charles Townshend, with capturing Baghdad. Townshend, to whom the author does not think he is related, was a keen student of military history, who once remarked that it was “always fatal in history if political reasons are allowed to interfere with military reasons.” Although, as this book demonstrates, the politics and war are never separate, events in Mesopotamia were to prove him right.

Once General Townshend had advanced far enough up the Tigris to secure the oil pipeline from neighbouring Persia, there was no military requirement for capturing Baghdad; the pressure was political. By then it was obvious that the Gallipoli landings had failed, and Arab loyalties continued to look uncertain. Keen for a victory that would restore British prestige, Nixon ignored warnings that more river transport and reinforcements were needed, arguing that Townshend should start immediately for Baghdad because the Turks were still tied up in the Dardanelles.

The British badly underestimated their opponents, the weather, and the logistics they would require. The Ottoman Army looked as if it would be a pushover – one of its officers complained that his soldiers had “bayonets tied on with string instead of belts” – but its men were sturdy masters of defence. The weather veered from spring deluge to summer drought. Most crucially, Townshend lacked the water transport to supply operations up-country. There was ‘too much water for the army, too little for the navy’, as one general put it, and Townshend’s needs fell between the two.

Having gone far beyond the point at which his men could be easily supplied, Townshend met catastrophe in a battle beside the ruins at Ctesiphon. His own Indian Muslim troops were reluctant to attack because the battlefield was reputedly the burial place of the barber of Muhammad, Salman Pak. The Turkish general, Nureddin, showed no such scruples. After Nureddin’s counterattack caused 3,500 British and Indian casualties, Townshend decided to withdraw to Kut, a squalid town of 7,000 Arabs on a tight bend in the Tigris, to rest and await reinforcements.

Professor Townshend argues that his namesake must have realised that he was unlikely to emerge victorious from a siege. But twenty years before, General Townshend had successfully withstood a siege at Chitral, on the North-West Frontier, and this must surely have distorted his judgement of the odds. Evoking that earlier success to reassure his men, he sent a pessimistic estimate of his food stocks back to Basra in a misjudged bid to hurry up his rescue. But when a hastily mustered relief force failed to break the siege, and with his food about to run out, in April 1916 he had no choice but to surrender. His soldiers were marched away into a terrible captivity. Unlike Barker, the author does not blame the Turks, who, as he points out, treated their own soldiers just as viciously. ‘Both sides’, he says, ‘fell victim to a grossly inadequate system.’

The War Office in London took control of the campaign. Nixon was removed and his replacement, Stanley Maude, was ordered to do nothing without London’s prior sanction. Maude used the ferociously hot summer of 1916 to improve the railway between the coast and his frontline. He equipped his force with additional machine guns and, for the first time, mortars. After finally receiving permission to advance late that year, and helped by long-range guns aboard the naval vessels that accompanied him up the Tigris, he reached Baghdad in April 1917.

The government of India envisaged Mesopotamia as a colony that might absorb part of India’s rapidly growing population. Until April 1917 it had no idea that the British government had already secretly offered parts of it to both Sharif Husein of Mecca and the French. The contradiction between these two promises required careful handling. As a consequence on his entry to Baghdad Maude was told to invite the residents of the city to assume the management of their civil affairs ‘in collaboration with the political representatives of Great Britain.’ Maude tortuously reassured them that they were ‘not to understand that it is the wish of the British Government to impose upon you alien institutions.’

The British changed their mind when, midway through 1918, they realised the strategic importance of the oil known to lie beneath northern Iraq. By then Maude had died of cholera; it was his successor, William Marshall, who was ordered to occupy Mosul after the war had ended. The city lay within the area Britain had offered to France; the last-minute dash to seize it ensured that the British were in a strong position to rewrite the promises they had made to Husein and the French.

Oil may not have been the reason why the British landed in Basra in 1914, but it explains why they stayed on in Baghdad after 1918. British officials did not believe that an Arab government would be acceptable to the investors needed to fund the exploitation of the country’s oil reserves. They took advantage of the confused international situation to impose a regime of their own, in which there was no Arab participation whatsoever.

The Arabs reacted angrily and in 1920 the British faced a series of uprisings across the country which it took the remainder of the year, and vast expense, to crush. Chastened, they realised that their new colony would need an Arab face. The following year they placed Sharif Husein’s pliable young son Feisal on the throne after he was endorsed by a plebiscite which they had rigged. The final shape of Iraq, as the new country became known, was ironed out by the League of Nations in 1926.

‘I came to the conclusion that he was in many ways hard done by’, writes Professor Townshend of General Townshend. Townshend the author appears to have been hard done by his publishers, too. For a military history the book has utterly inadequate maps and, oddly, Feisal is not depicted in the illustrations at all. But do not be put off. Supplemented by a decent map, this is still a fascinating, well-researched and elegantly written history of a resonant subject.

A man I saw

2010-02-26T08:32:00.005Z

In Diyarbakir, south-east Turkey, 2008

In the sticks

2010-01-23T15:35:00.008Z

Trying to write up the day's events before it gets too dark to see - in the desert west of Mudawarra, southern Jordan, 2004

Fortunately, I don't spend all my time hunting for information in the archives. It was a visit to Syria in 2002 to see the crusader castles that sparked my interest in T.E. Lawrence - and to complete the research for my book about the Arab Revolt, Setting the Desert on Fire, I then went to Jordan, and Saudi Arabia, going deep into the desert to see the places in the story for myself.

The photograph above was taken at the end of the first day of a two day trip to Mudawarra, which ninety years ago was a key railway station on the Hijaz Railway that Lawrence was anxious to destroy. Now close to the Jordan/Saudi border, the station lies in an area with abundant water supplies, and Lawrence believed that, if he could knock it out, the railway would become unusable, as the locomotives depended on water for steam.

Mudawarra lies on the Mecca road southeast of Maan, but by far the more interesting way to get there is just as Lawrence did, directly cross-country from Wadi Rum. Before I started writing the book I was keen to get more of an idea of the forty mile journey the raiders had to make to the railway, and the conditions they faced, so I organised a guide in Wadi Rum - Attayak Ali - and headed with him in a four wheel drive east out of the Wadi, and into the desert. Very quickly it feels very far from anywhere.

The desert east of Wadi Rum

With a generous stop for lunch, it took about half a day to drive there, bumping across the stony, Jordanian desert, leaving a wake of yellowy-grey dust behind us. The picture above shows why, following the capture of Aqaba in July 1917, the British shipped in armoured cars and tenders to mount operations against the railway: this is (mostly) ideal country for motorised hit-and-run attacks.

We reached Mudawarra by mid-afternoon. Much of the railway station - including its all-important water tanks - was finally demolished by the British in August 1918 and what remains is now occupied by the police, who offered us a cup of tea. Then we then turned back, southwest-wards, into the desert, to find a place to spend the night.

The campsite

Writing up the diary at the end of a long and hot day is invariably a chore, but it is well worth it in the long run. I find the diary reminds me far better of what the day was like than pictures I took, like the one above. It was the first time I had ventured into the desert and I was surprised by how much I had seen that day:

"The desert is not deserted. There are Bedu in their brown tents - hard to spot, and closer to the water sources in this dry season of the year [it was September]; camels loping across the desert; flies which swarm as soon as we stop; tracks of more camels, foxes, rabbits, snakes. Sand-coloured birds."

To see the debris of this forgotten battlefield you have to go much further south, however. That was why, the following year, I also went to Saudi Arabia.

In the archives at the Chateau

2010-01-19T12:19:00.006Z

One front page that caught my eye

I pushed open the heavy door and made my way into the grand, but slightly damp and cold hall of the Service Historique de l'Armee de Terre at the Chateau de Vincennes. A few minutes earlier I had been granted a pass giving me access to the archives of the French army, and I now had three days to find as much as possible.

Archives specialise in petty rules. You may need a document to corroborate your identity on arrival; to have booked an appointment in advance; have a letter of reference from a publisher. I have seen a grown man (he was a Turkish civil servant) reduced to the verge of tears by the access policy of one establishment. He had come all the way from Ankara and was on a tight deadline. He had no idea that the archive he had come to visit was only open for just over five hours a day, because of budgetary constraints.

All this means that I am always nervous when I arrive at an unfamiliar place, and all the more so if any conversation I have to have is in a foreign language.

The atmosphere upstairs at the chateau is a good deal more welcoming than the chilly entry hall. Although the temperature outside is sub-zero, large, tall windows, golden wooden panelling and generous use of central heating make my first stop in the archive a pleasant place to linger. However, I have to avoid this temptation. The first task is to locate the documents I want to look at, and get some ordered as fast as possible. The documents will take at least half an hour to be brought out of the archive for me, and there is already less than eight hours to go today. Time, therefore, is of the essence.

Archive catalogues in Britain are increasingly electronic, making the researcher's task quicker, since likely documents can be identified, ordered, and even viewed from home. The French are somewhat behind the curve however, and so my first task was to look through the paper catalogues filed in the search room. Fortunately there is some help online, making the job quicker on arrival. On this visit, I was particularly interested in records relating to the First World War, the 1925-28 period, and the Second World War. Picking a few to start with has a close resemblance to a lucky dip, but I was quickly on my way. Once into the reading room, I was able to give my list to the invigilator at the desk who types the numbers into the system. Then there is a wait.

My spoken and written French are perfectly good but slow, so a newish policy operated by the archive is going to be a major help. They will allow you to take photographs for personal use. So as well as a laptop, and a notebook and pencil (no pens, of course), I have brought my camera. Other researchers have gone further, bringing tripods to make the process of taking hundreds of photos as painless as possible. After a day spent looking over a desk holding up a heavy camera, I can see why they do. All I need is a seat nearish to a window.

My name is shouted by a French soldier in the corner of the room who is in charge of handing the boxes out to visitors, and I go to fetch a large, cold 'carton' of papers which has clearly come from somewhere that is not heated. They are frequently in a dreadful state. Wartime rationing means paper of poor quality, and many of these files have been kept for years in humid, hot conditions. Some of them are drilled by woodworm. The pins and tags that hold others together, have rusted through, and disintegrate in one's hands. I like these signs of age and neglect, however, because they imply that few people have bothered to look through them. A new paperclip, or the restorer's laminate on a fragile piece of paper suggests that others may already have been looking through them recently.

The job that follows is, I imagine, similar to a spy's. I need to skim the contents of these boxes, often containing several hundred sheets of fine paper, as rapidly as possible, assessing which look interesting, and photographing each of these. I have twenty four hours in all to do so. I take all the photos in black and white, since this means I can fit more on a memory card. Periodically, I download batches of two hundred or so photographs onto my computer.

The time limits on these trips requires an intense schedule. I tend to have as big a breakfast as possible, so that I do not need to stop for lunch. The day will normally bring up a handful of fascinating items, and to keep my interest up, I will sometimes stop to read a little. At Vincennes, one document that catches my eye is the record of an interrogation of a Druze leader who was wounded and captured in 1926, and makes some fascinating allegations about the British. Another is a reference to a man I have been hunting for several months, but interestingly, refers to his role as an intelligence officer in a controversial counter-insurgency operation outside Damascus years before. There will be a great deal more to say about this latter gentleman in the book.

Rory Stewart's Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia

2010-01-18T21:48:00.005Z

I had a walk-on part in Rory Stewart's two part documentary on T.E. Lawrence's legacy, which was broadcast on BBC2 on Saturday, and can be downloaded on Iplayer. The film is well worth watching, and Stewart does a very good job of linking Lawrence's pre-war travels as a student, then an archaeologist, then effectively a spy, with his wartime role. There's some superb footage of the southern Jordanian desert from the Batn al Ghul escarpment and overlooking the Gueira plain, just north of Aqaba.

Incidentally, the phrase that I used in my interview to describe the line that Sykes proposed, "from the E in Acre to the last K in Kirkuk" is Sykes's and not mine. These were the precise words that Sykes used when he explained his scheme for the partition of the Middle East with France, and they speak volumes about the manner of the British approach. Here is the extract from the minutes:

Source: TNA, CAB 24/1: Meeting held at Downing Street on Thursday, December 16, 1915 at 11.30am.

In the archives

2010-01-15T13:34:00.006Z

The Chateau de Vincennes, Paris, in early 2009

This year's snow reminded me of last year's - and how it nearly wrecked a research trip I had planned.

Original research forms the heart of my approach. I've spent the last two years in various archives gathering the information that I will use to write my current book. This is slow work. On some days I find nuggets, on others, none. There is always the temptation to cut corners. If I based my books on others' work, I could write more, and faster. As a consequence I might be better-known and richer. But I would always feel that I was an interpreter, rather than an explorer. I would not have the same feeling that I am bringing the reader something that is genuinely new. And the only way to do that is by going into the archives.

This new book, which covers the era between 1915 and 1948 when Britain and France divided and then ruled the Middle East between them, required several weeks' work in France. There were two places I had to visit: the Centre des Archives Diplomatiques, in the suburbs of the western city of Nantes, and the imposing Chateau de Vincennes, in east Paris. This time last year I was in Paris.

The Chateau is, as the name suggests, the best defended archive that I have ever visited. No other set of papers I have looked at is protected by a drawbridge. It is the home of the Service Historique de l'Armee de Terre - housing the French army's historical records. Like all things French, there is a certain amount of bureaucracy involved in getting in to look at them. You have to register with the archive when you first visit. You cannot order documents before your visit unless you have a registration card.

Last January I had booked my tickets to go to the Chateau in Paris. Then came the snow and on the day before I was due to take the train to Paris, on the website a notice appeared, warning visitors not to come unless they had already ordered documents. I had not ordered documents, because I was not registered. The choice was between writing off the Eurostar tickets, or pressing on regardless and hoping that the rules were flexible. I took the latter option.

Early on 7 January, I crossed the drawbridge and walked to the reception centre where I would apply for my ticket. I was apprehensive: this could turn out to be an expensive waste of time. My spoken French is also pretty slow. So I had rehearsed a few sentences explaining my predicament.

"Je suis historien anglais" turns out to be a very useful phrase.

The woman in charge of visitor registration initially caused my heart to sink. Had I not seen that the Chateau was shut today, because of the bad weather? I lied, saying I had not. I had come all the way from London and this was my first visit. Hence my predicament.

The atmosphere improved. Forms were produced for me to fill. A registration card was printed. My shoulders dropped at least an inch, and I left the hot office, crunching across the snow towards a forbidding looking Napoleonic barrack-block where, I was told, the archive was based.

The vital registration card

'Faces' from the Yemen No. 5

2010-01-08T14:30:00.004Z

Woman in traditional dress, Thulla

When I was in Yemen, three years ago, I commented on the colourful traditional dress that many Yemeni women wear, and got an interesting reaction. Traditional dress was dying out, a Yemeni man told me. Instead, he said, more and more women were wearing black abayas - influenced by Saudi habits to the north.

Woman in Saudi-influenced dress, Shibam

It struck me then, and much more now, that there is an important metaphor here. As local and international politicians seek to blame Yemen for the problems that are festering there, it would be useful to ask the question of where the influence that drives them comes from. The answer, as with fashion, is, from the fundamentalist state that lies directly north.

Faces from the Yemen No. 4

2010-01-07T12:10:00.005Z

Early evening, Sana'a

"The poorest nation in the Arab world struggles with 27% inflation, 40% unemployment and 46% child malnutrition. Half of its 22 million citizens are under sixteen and the population is set to double by 2035."

Ginny Hill, Yemen: Fear of Failure, Chatham House, December 2008

Faces from the Yemen No. 3

2010-01-06T09:33:00.002Z

At the juice bar, Seiyun, Wadi Hadramawt

After I took this man's photograph, he took one of me, using the camera on his mobile phone.

Faces from the Yemen No. 2

2010-01-05T10:24:00.005Z

A girl carrying fresh water in Hababa

Clean water supplies would free her to go to school.

Faces from the Yemen No.1

2010-01-04T21:40:00.003Z

In the capital, Sana'a

Yemen

2009-12-29T14:05:00.006Z

Wadi Hadramawt, in eastern Yemen: now a stronghold for Al Qaeda

With all eyes suddenly focused on Yemen, here are a couple of posts I wrote about the country in 2006 following a visit earlier in the year.

Various reports say that western governments are pledging military support to the regime in Yemen to help it tackle Al Qaeda. Certainly the Yemeni government needs help, but the fact that it is widely seen by the people it governs as hopelessly corrupt may mean that well-meaning efforts to prop it up have unintended consequences.

Fox shot

2009-11-11T13:01:00.006Z

My eye was caught yesterday by a quote in Rachel Sylvester's column yesterday in The Times. She quoted the opposition Conservative Party's defence spokesman, Dr Liam Fox, making the case for staying the course in Afghanistan. “Imagine if Churchill had said — ‘things aren’t going well in the opinion polls’,” he said. “If we are forced out that would be a shot in the arm to jihadists everywhere.”

But a vivid imagination is not necessary. Here is Churchill arguing the need to withdraw from Iraq, in a letter to the prime minister, Lloyd George, in August 1920.

There is “something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian entanglement” he wrote to Lloyd George. “It seems to me so gratuitous that after all the struggles of war, just when we want to get together our slender military resources and re-establish our finances and have a little in hand in case of danger here or there, we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts.”

“We have not got a single friend in the press on the subject, and there is no point of which they make more effective use to injure the Government. Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare…”

(CHAR 16/48, Churchill to Lloyd George, 31 August 1920)

Churchill was overruled. But the idea that he, like any other elected politician, did not pay close attention to public opinion, is risible.

Next speaking

2009-09-01T20:40:00.002Z

I'm speaking next Monday morning - on Lawrence of Arabia and World War One - at 9.15 am at this year's Christ Church Oxford Conflict conference, on the Making of the Modern Middle East. It's still possible to come for my talk, and any of the others - more details of how to do so can be found here.

Reinstate Michael Yon

2009-08-25T13:07:00.006Z

Michael Yon is a freelance journalist who has an excellent website and who has, up to yesterday, embedded with British forces in Helmand, Afghanistan. In his most recent report he describes in great detail the circumstances in which a number of British soldiers have been killed in the town of Sangin recently. The report has led the Ministry of Defence to cancel his placement: precisely why he does not say: is it the details of the deaths, or the description of the effect of them on the other soldiers, or the Google Earth images showing exactly where they happened?

Whatever, the MoD's decision is a bad one. Michael Yon should be reinstated.

UPDATE - 26 August: Defence of the Realm suggests that the reason why Yon's report stung the MoD was because the clearance of the road was in fact a relief operation, revealing just how far the situation in Sangin has deteriorated. The MoD has also published its version of events.

The source of the famous Churchill quote

2009-07-28T13:57:00.004Z

The quote, which seems to capture its author's reckless personality perfectly, has been misquoted and misattributed. There are a dozen variations of it across the internet. The questions I had were, which version is correct and where is it from?

If, like me, you guessed he said it in his younger years and bought the popular abridgement of his early works in a bid to find it, you will be disappointed, for that edition omits the passage that contains it altogether. Finally I have found the answer:

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."

Winston S Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, London 1898.

You can read the quote in context here: see page 107. It may be that, given that the book is based on a series of letters Churchill wrote to the Daily Telegraph to describe the fighting that in fact that newspaper was the first to print it.

The British Museum and national politics

2009-07-15T12:10:00.004Z

I listened last night as Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, was interviewed by Mark Lawson on BBC Radio Four. The conversation predictably turned to the perennial question of the Elgin Marbles, the reliefs from the Parthenon which are exhibited in the British Museum and which the Greek government desperately wants. Was it not the case, asked Lawson, that the Greeks, who have built a gallery to house the marbles, now had an unstoppable moral and practical case for their return? "The key thing", replied MacGregor (28 minutes in), "is whether or not you bring politics into culture. The British tradition of museums has been to separate politics, national politics, from cultural questions. The Greek tradition is a very different one."

What utter rubbish. Britain's museums and national politics have always been tightly intertwined. British rivalry with the French was an important stimulus in the building of a collection which was not an assembly of all things British, but an exhibition of Britain's power and global reach, in the capital of its empire. The dramatic growth of the museum's Egyptian collection followed the defeat, by the British, of the French at the battle of the Nile in 1799. And Elgin himself used his position as Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire to take away the marbles shortly afterwards.

The French behaved similarly. On 23 July 1850 The Times reported that the French were "determined to excel us in the exhibition of Assyrian works of art in order to compensate the comparative deficiency, which the Louvre is obliged to acknowledge as to the treasures it possesses in the other great catalogues."* French archaeologists used their diplomatic corps to assist them in the removal of the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace - to highlight two famous examples that grace the Louvre today - and to thwart the opposition. A set of permits to excavate made out by the Ottoman authorities to the British mysteriously disappeared at the French consulate in Tunis.

By 30 November 1861 the Illustrated London News believed that the British had regained the advantage. It celebrated the fact that "During the last few years the Foreign Office has shown a zeal in the service of archaeology not second to that of the continental governments and the National Collection has in consequence received priceless additions that would else have remained unnoticed or gone to enrich the museums of other countries."*

Personally I support Neil MacGregor's dogged refusal to surrender to Greek pressure, for reasons I've mentioned before. But the line that Britain is somehow different (and superior) as a nation is flimsy. If that is the best argument remaining, it will not be long before the marbles are back in Athens.

*Both the quotes come from Debbie Challis's fascinating book on archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus: British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1880, London 2008.

Was the Arab Revolt a proxy war?

2009-06-25T15:04:00.004Z

With the paperback Setting the Desert on Fire about to be published in the US, The Army Lawyer runs a detailed, generous review by Major Jennifer Clark. Scroll through to pages 62-68 to read it.

But eez bootik 'otel

2009-06-10T10:13:00.010Z

The Ziad Hotel in Deir ez Zor wins 2 UN Stars

I’ve written before about how useful an endorsement from the United Nations, whose staff are never known to rough it, is when picking hotels on the edges of conflict zones. The two shiny 4x4s of the UNHCR parked outside the Ziad Hotel in Deir ez Zor, in eastern Syria, showed promise. And so it proved. The Ziad offers clean, large, echoing rooms with air-conditioning in a newish block beside the canal and minutes’ walk from the centre of this bustling town on the Euphrates.

I’ve just returned from my first visit to Syria since 2002 and there are plenty of obvious changes. Tinny far-eastern cars have displaced the armada of elderly American automobiles, held together by solder and putty, which previously served as taxis. ATMs have arrived (though not always willing to dispense money), there is internet access of unexpected velocity, a dramatic increase in tourists and a rise in the number of hotels. With that last in mind I’m going to run through where I stayed on my anti-clockwise tour around the country.

Unlike in south-east Turkey last year, where I heard the phrase "but eez bootik 'otel", used repeatedly by hoteliers to justify an outrageous opening demand on the grounds that their tatty hotel has atmosphere, negotiating the price downwards in Syria is a rather less fraught process, and because the supply of beds still outstrips the number of intrepid tourists, it is possible to get discounts, even in the high tourist season.

Palmyra – the Tower Hotel. I had looked at the Heliopolis Hotel already, but it wanted about $70 for a small room with poor beds and proved unwilling to negotiate. The Tower, which is on the main street in the town, offered me a “suite” (you got space, not grandeur) for about £30, I think. It was clean enough and well-placed for the sights but nothing special. I ate across the road at a restaurant that does superb lemonade with mint by the half-litre jar.

Deir-ez-Zor - the Ziad Hotel. Two UN stars, as described above.

Aleppo – the Beit Wakil. $120 a night plus tourist tax. Despite one or two slightly buttery male reception staff who want to take your money up-front, air-conditioning that did not work and staff who shrugged when asked to fix it, which together give the impression it is coasting on its reputation, this is an atmospheric place to stay in the Armenian Jdeidah quarter, with a pretty shaded courtyard with flowers and a tinkling fountain. You can park on a meter in the nearby square, Saahat Hattab, while you dump your bags, and park overnight for 200 Syrian Pounds (ie about £3) a day in the carpark owned by the Dar al Zamaria round the corner. And the thickness of the walls at the hotel meant that the lack of air-conditioning in May was not a problem. There are many other boutique hotels appearing in the city, against whom the Beit Wakil will increasingly have to raise its game, or drop its prices. There are a growing number of good places to eat, many of them providing roof-top views across the city.

Lattakya – the Riviera Hotel. I checked in here after driving up the coast to the Meridien, where the manager wanted $185 for a room on a Friday night, but immediately came down to $134 when I laughed. I offered $70, which he would not accept, though he admitted that the hotel was only 45% occupied. The lifts have graffiti, the rooms smell of smoke. Avoid, as I did. By contrast the Riviera, on the unpromising main drag into the city, has pleasant staff and good clean rooms. They took $75 for a room. Finding it was oddly tricky, given that it is on the main road into the city: it is on the left, opposite the new looking tourist office, as the road bends round to the left. You can park on the street outside. Dinner not special.

Hama – the Orient House. I asked first at the Cairo Hotel, which is a basic but clean option in the centre of town, near the clock tower. The Cairo offers bargain rates but the rooms are not inspiring, and – I suspect – quite noisy from traffic into the night. But the same family owns other hotels in the town, one of which is the Orient House, a few minutes’ drive south – the Cairo’s owner sent his young nephew with me in my car to provide directions, including going the wrong way up a one-way street. The pleasant manager of the Orient House – brother of the manager of the Cairo – wanted $90 a night but took $75. This is a two courtyard old house with perfectly fine if slightly characterless rooms, and a pleasant courtyard dining area. It doesn’t serve alcohol, but the food was fine. The hotel was apparently the home of Akram al Hawrani, who was vice-president in the Nasser-dominated and short-lived union between Egypt and Syria, the UAR, which lasted between 1958 and 1961.

The sting in the tail of a visit to Syria is the exorbitant departure tax demanded by the Syrian government. This now stands at 1500 SP (£20); the guidebook, which was a recent edition, quoted 200 SP. Paying it left a briefly bitter taste; Syria remains a fascinating place.

Next speaking

2009-05-04T16:45:00.001Z

I'm speaking next Friday, 15 May, about British-French relations in the Middle East between the Wars, at St Antony's College, Oxford. The seminar starts at 5pm.

Al Hayat review

2009-04-02T09:37:00.002Z

Here's the first review I am aware of from the Arabic press - it was published in Al Hayat on Tuesday.

The lengths a tourist board will go to

2009-02-16T09:13:00.003Z

News that a Spanish tourist board on the Costa Brava has used a photograph taken in the Bahamas to promote its local beach reminds me of a poster I saw four years ago.

I was in a dark and tatty bureau de change in Leh, in the Indian Himalaya. On the wall there was a dog-eared poster. "Come to India", it beckoned, beneath a photograph of a range of saw-toothed snowy peaks. They looked familiar, I thought. Yet this was the first time I had been to India.

They were familiar: the view was of the spectacular scene at Concordia - across the Line of Control in Pakistani-occupied (and Indian claimed) Kashmir, which I had seen two years before.

Was this ignorance, over-enthusiastic marketing or a political statement? It was impossible to tell.

Another review

2009-02-16T09:12:00.002Z

A new review of Setting the Desert on Fire can be found here.

Next speaking...

2009-02-06T12:38:00.001Z

I'm speaking twice next week:

Wednesday 11 February - to the Barnes Literary Society
Friday 13 February - at St Antony's College, Oxford

Speaking too soon

2008-12-22T12:29:00.004Z

On 16 December, The Times, a newspaper that ardently supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, published a leader which argued that the lenient treatment given to the now famous shoe-thrower, Muntazer al-Zaidi, was a colourful illustration of Iraq's transformation. "Had a protester hurled shoes and shouted insults at Saddam Hussein during the visit of a world leader" the paper reflected, "the perpetrator and all his family would probably have been put to death." The editorial glibly ended: "Iraq is far from perfect, but at least its people have learnt to enjoy freedom of expression."

Freedom of expression can only be enjoyed if it is respected - and in al-Zaidi's instance this does not seem to have been the case. According to the New York Times, who interviewed al-Zaidi's brother, after his arrest the journalist was burned with a cigarette and beaten up in an effort to extract a confession from him. The BBC corroborated this report on Friday by talking to the judge investigating the case. With a furore now raging about the treatment of the journalist the judge has today backtracked somewhat, saying that al-Zaidi was bruised during his arrest, not from his treatment afterwards.

Al-Zaidi is due to be tried for "aggression against a foreign head of state" on 31 December. Presumably by then the prosecutors hope that his bruises will have healed.

New for 2009

2008-12-16T12:16:00.002Z

The paperback edition of Setting the Desert on Fire will be published in the US in April 2009.

How Rome linked Britain and the Arab world

2008-12-12T12:08:00.007Z

The grave stone of Cautronius, a troop standard bearer, at Tyre, southern Lebanon

We spent a few hours deciphering Roman inscriptions when I studied Latin at school, but unfortunately not long enough for any of what I learnt to stick. Which is a pity for they yield a lot of information. When I spotted the elegantly-lettered tombstone of Cautronius, a standard-bearer of the Italian troop [I think], when I visited Lebanon last year, I thought it worthy of a photograph.*

An inscription I saw in a museum in St Albans a while ago points to some interesting linkages across the Roman world, and hints at a tragic love story. It is dedicated to Regina, and reads:

D[is] M[anibus] Regina Liberta

et Coniuge Barates Palmyrenus

Natione Catuallauna An[nomum] XXX

To the spirits of the departed and to Regina his freedwoman

and wife, a Catavellaunian by tribe, aged 30

Barates of Palmyra set this up.

Barates, a Syrian from the eastern edge of Rome's empire found himself posted to its North-West Frontier. For the gravestone of his wife was found at Arbeia Roman Fort near South Shields, on Hadrian's Wall, where Barates served. Regina's tribe, the Catavellauni came from the area around St Albans.

As the almost tangible warmth of a photograph I took several years ago in Palmyra shows, South Shields is a long way off.

*The inscription mentions something about a "falca" - which appears to mean a scythe or sickle. Any help with translation gratefully received...

The Great Arab Revolt Project

2008-11-11T16:19:00.002Z

The Great Arab Revolt Project have spent two seasons digging in southern Jordan. They are about to return for a third, excavating at several Hijaz Railway stations for evidence that will give historians a much better idea of what life was like for the Ottoman soldiers guarding the track, and the guerrilla raids that targeted them.

The archaeologists will be blogging about what they find here and maintain a useful website here.

A shatter'd visage

2008-09-28T21:29:00.007Z

The fallen head of a statue on Nemrut Dagi, 2150m, south-east Turkey

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This shatter'd visage is fully visible, and stands 2,150m above sea-level, but it reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Shelley's evocation of hubris, Ozymandias. At the orders of King Antiochus, statues of himself and various gods were erected on the summit of Nemrut Dagi, a few decades before the birth of Christ. At some stage in the intervening 2,000 years, the heads of the statues have fallen off. Since righted, their torsoes lie broken on the ground behind them. But one wonders: would Antiochus be disappointed, or delighted, that his visage yet survives?

Where does the title come from?

2008-09-11T11:05:00.003Z

Anonymous, in a generous comment yesterday, asks where the title Setting the Desert on Fire comes from. It is taken from page 67 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935 edition). Here is the full quote in context below:

"The Sherif's rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months (standing still, which, with an irregular war, was the prelude to disaster), and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: notintellect, nor judgement, nor political wisdom, but the flame ofenthusiasm that would set the desert on fire."

Limited powers

2008-08-28T09:56:00.005Z

This article, in this morning's Financial Times, caught my eye. It details the efforts of the latest governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, to root out endemic corruption. Mangal, reports the writer, dresses up in disguise and goes out on his weekends looking for policemen seeking bribes. "If they are junior, I sack them on the spot," he is quoted as saying, proudly. Which begs a question - what if they are senior?

To be fair to Mangal, however, the article goes on to suggest that he is trying to break up the local opium trade which, UN figures published earlier this week showed, grew to new record levels in this year's springtime harvest. The UN focused on the fact that overall production in Afghanistan was down, but a drought appears significantly responsible for the fall.

Golda Meir: the Iron Lady of the Middle East

2008-08-09T16:42:00.003Z

Tomorrow's Sunday Times runs my review of Elinor Burkett's new biography of the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir. Here it is.

What's going on in Syria?

2008-08-05T13:36:00.004Z

It's been six years since I went to Syria, so I am not well qualified to talk with insight on the goings-on inside that state. But a report in this morning's Times that a senior Syrian general with links to Hizbollah was shot dead in the port of Tartous last Friday caught my eye. The Times has followed up the story today, quoting an analyst who says that the dead man, Mohammed Suleiman, was the liaison officer between the Syrian regime and the Lebanese political party/terror group/state within a state.* Interestingly, according to Haaretz, Syria's state-controlled media did not report the killing which, presumably, they might have done if they suspected a foreign hand at work.

Syria is being pulled in two different directions. The French, and quietly the British, have been making overtures to the British-educated President Assad (whose wife was brought up in Acton, west London), hoping to separate him from the Iranians. Syria has started talking to Israel, using Turkey as a mediator. On the other hand the President is surrounded by an older generation he inherited from his father, Hafiz, who built close ties with Iran in order to weaken neighbouring Iraq. Whether or not to maintain those ties is now the question. Assad appears to be trying to bridge the gap, saying in the Syrian newspaper Tishreen yesterday that on his trip to Teheran this past weekend he had not been acting as a go-between the West and President Ahmadinejad. On his visit he also met the Ayatollah, drawing attention to his own connection, as an Alawite, to the Shia branch of Islam. He is clearly anxious not to be seen as a puppet of the west.

The Times suggests that the assassination of Suleiman (who, judging by his home-town, is likely also to be an Alawite) is linked to internal tensions over tactics. The absence of comment on the murder in the Syrian press and my own, slightly unsettling, experience of meeting one or two the old guard six years ago make that sound eminently plausible.

* Delete as preferred

Speaking engagements

2008-07-31T09:12:00.003Z

Hear me speak about TE Lawrence and his impact:

28 September 2008 to the TE Lawrence Society Symposium, at St John's College Oxford.
27 January 2009 to history students taking the TE Lawrence/Gertrude Bell Special Subject at the University of Cambridge.
11 February 2009, to the Barnes Literary Society.
7 September 2009, at the Making of the Modern Middle East conference, at Christ Church, Oxford.

DFID in Afghanistan

2008-07-16T08:17:00.003Z

I've touched before on the UK Department for International Development's role in Afghanistan. Yesterday's Times ran an interesting article by Anthony Loyd on Britain's aid effort to date in Helmand, southern Afghanistan. Much of the aid Britain has squirted at the Afghans has gone, in Loyd's words, in "bungs, bribes and embezzlement". Given these inescapable facts of Afghan life, Britain's strategy of providing the security to enable the Afghans to resume business on their own terms, seems a better use of money.

American support for Israeli policy

2008-07-15T09:46:00.005Z

Last year John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused controversy with the publication of their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. They argued that groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have hijacked the foreign policy of the United States to the detriment of Americans' best interests, and included a lengthy study of US support for Israel's attempt to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 to advance their case.

Certainly, if you visit southern Lebanon today - driving past the billboards of bearded Iranian ayatollahs and soft-focus portraits of youthful 'martyrs' attached to street lamps - you will probably agree that Israel's invasion of the area two years ago has had the opposite effect to that intended. The roads have been patched up, farms repaired, and life has returned to normal. Far from being weaker, Hezbollah, which fixed the damage, is stronger than ever.

I have no doubt that Israel runs an impressive lobbying operation - I once benefited from a trip funded by the Israeli foreign office where I was able to meet many key Israeli politicians - but the question on why such lobbying strikes a chord, especially in the US is an interesting one. This month's Foreign Affairs contains a thoughtful article by Walter Russell Mead on the ideological origins and evolution of American support for an independent Jewish state, which is well worth reading in full. It starts with a striking quote from founding father John Adams, who hoped that "Once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted they [the Jews] would soon wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character and possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians".

The article is a gentle rebuttal of Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis, arguing that though liberal and conservative Americans have been sympathetic to Israel for completely different social and religious reasons, the combined weight of their votea has underpinned the benevolent US policy towards the state of Israel. He concludes that "In the future, as in the past, US policy toward the Middle East will, for better or worse, continue to be shaped primarily by the will of the American majority, not the machinations of any minority, however wealthy or engaged in the political process some of its members may be."

Maybe. George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War gives a vivid practical illustration of how baser economic considerations trump ideology in such democratic calculations. Crile describes how the Texan Congressman Wilson's enthusiasm for various foreign regimes was shaped by their decisions over arms procurement that could impact jobs on the General Dynamics plant in Texas that manufactured F-16 fighter jets. Israel was a notable purchaser of these. Mearsheimer and Walt explain the complex financial arrangements by which the United States supports Israel financially and in kind, so that US aid to Israel ultimately ends up keeping US workers in the defence industry in jobs. Mead's article does not touch on this, and how it might affect the US democratic process.

National Army Museum, Chelsea

2008-07-01T15:02:00.003Z

I'm speaking at the National Army Museum in Chelsea at 12.30pm on Thursday.

More details can be found here.

Another review

2008-06-16T18:55:00.001Z

Here.

Key dates in the formation of the modern Middle East

2008-05-22T07:05:00.004Z

A correspondent gets in touch to ask if I can supply "a chronological listing of events that resulted in the present disposition of territory" in the Middle East.

This is a framework which I needed to do in connection for my next book (on which more in due course). So I sketched out what I think are the key dates.

1915 August – British begin secret correspondence with Sharif Husein of Mecca, offering him large, vague empire encompassing Arabia.
1915 November – British begin secret negotiations with French for division of Middle East between them.
1916 May – Sykes-Picot agreement divides Middle East between France (northern part) and Britain (southern part).
1916 June – Arab revolt breaks out in Mecca: by the war’s end the Arabs, under Husein’s son Feisal, would take control of Damascus, a thousand miles to the north.
1917 April – Britain invades Palestine
1917 November – Britain issues Balfour Declaration offering sympathy with Zionist aspirations for a national home in Palestine
1918 October – War in Middle East ends: British troops occupy Palestine, Syria, and, after a post-armistice dash north, all of Iraq.
1918 December – Lloyd George and Clemenceau secretly agree Britain should have Palestine and Iraq.
1919 summer – Paris peace conference fails to resolve Middle Eastern matters, amid acrimony.
1919 November – Britain pulls troops out of Syria, leaving French in charge of coastal area and Arabs under Feisal in charge of inland towns.
1920 April – Allies finally agree on allocation of mandates at conference in San Remo, Italy. France to have Syria, Britain to have Iraq and Palestine. The borders are as yet undefined, and their definition would be a source of some friction in the years ahead.
1920 July – Britain transfers Palestine from military to civil control. It would rule Palestine until May 1948, trying and failing to keep both Arabs and Jews satisfied.
1920 July – Armed with the mandate for Syria, France issues an ultimatum to Feisal and shortly afterwards, throws him out of inland Syria. France ruled Syria until 1946.
1920 August – Allies force Treaty of Sèvres on Turkey. This confirms San Remo, and also recognises the Hijaz (western Arabia) and Armenia (eastern Anatolia). Other parts of the former Ottoman Empire are parcelled out between Italy and Greece. The treaty is wrecked by the Turkish nationalists, who fight to take control of Anatolia, and by the refusal of the United States to take on the mandate for Armenia.
1920 September – France creates State of Greater Lebanon. Lebanese Republic created on 1 September 1926. Lebanon became independent in November 1943 following a political crisis created by the Free French decision to kidnap the President and Prime Minister, whom they were forced by the British to release. French troops leave in 1946.
1921 March – Churchill offers Transjordan to Feisal’s older brother, Abdullah as a temporary arrangement. In September 1922 the League of Nations approves Britain’s request to administer Palestine and Transjordan separately. Britain recognises Transjordan as a state in 1923, and as a kingdom in March 1946. Abdullah was recognised as King soon after.
1921 August – British crown Feisal king of Iraq to try to appease Arab opinion in the country following the rebellion the previous year. In October 1922, Iraq agrees treaty with Britain formalising their relationship. Iraq became independent in 1932.
1924 July – The Treaty of Lausanne finally settled the borders of Turkey, in Anatolia and in Europe.

Are there others I have missed?

Latest review

2008-05-13T20:44:00.002Z

Another review - this time in the Washington Times.

Aerial reconnaissance in the Arab revolt

2008-04-23T18:12:00.008Z

Another interesting review, this time on Barnes and Noble's website. It usefully draws attention to a book I had not heard about before: Polly Mohs's Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt, published by Routledge in October last year.

According to the blurb (from Amazon) Mohs argues that "Modern intelligence techniques such as Sigint, Imint [aerial reconnaissance to you and me] and Humint were incorporated into strategic planning with greater expertise and consistency in Arabia than in any other theatre during the war, and their deployment as tactical support for the Arab forces was decisive."

Although the British overplayed the remoteness of the Hijaz, the jagged desert landscape where the revolt played out, there is no doubt that they had little to go by. A few brave explorers - most famously Richard Burton - had criss-crossed the area on foot before the war. The most recent was a young army officer named AJB Wavell who, like Burton, disguised himself as a Muslim to enter Mecca in 1909. Wavell was killed in East Africa during the First World War, before he might have been called in by the Arab Bureau to offer any assistance. The British were thus bereft of signficant first hand experience of the area. When I was doing my research, I was amused to find, in the corner of one British military map, this caveat: "This map is a collection of sketches by Egyptian pilgrimage officers and members of the Sherif's forces. An attempt has been made to control it by native information, but without success."

Until the advent of Google mapping and Google Earth a couple of years ago, maps of Saudi Arabia remained in short supply, and the one I did purchase before I visited in 2005 had few of the obscure places marked, like Wadi Safra and Hamra (where TE Lawrence first met Feisal), that I was keen to go and see. I found myself relying on copies of the same maps that the British officers had used 90 years before to guide their way.

Shortage breeds ingenuity, and the government in London's reluctance to commit forces, and the vastness of the Hijaz both encouraged the British locally to use aerial reconnaissance to make up by accurate information what they felt the Arabs lacked in numbers, weapons, organisation and tactics. After some delaying a flight was sent to Rabigh on the Arabian coast. Lawrence initially in fact dismissed the value of aerial photography - he probably saw it as a threat to his own ventures into the interior, but those reservations did not last long.

I see that an article I read some time ago, about the work of the Royal Flying Corps in the Arab Revolt, has now been joined by the text and maps from Thomas Henderson's first hand account of operations, which is kept in the Imperial War Museum in London. Both are well worth reading.

The British also successfully intercepted Turkish wireless communications. It was not until someway through my research that I discovered that a phrase dotting British telegrams concerning enemy plans - "from an absolutely reliable source" - was shorthand code for information gained from this traffic.

Anyway, since I did not give much specific thought to the role of intelligence in Setting the Desert on Fire, I am looking forward to reading Polly Mohs's book.

More reviews

2008-04-21T06:16:00.002Z

Two more reviews of Setting the Desert on Fire can be found here and here.

"The Sinews of War...

2008-03-12T17:17:00.009Z

Still the cheapest element in modern warfare

... are infinite money," said Cicero. And time hasn't proved him wrong.

A few weeks ago I came up with a figure of over $2,800 a second for the cost of modern warfare. It was a rough calculation based on data published by the US government on its war expenditure in Iraq to date, divided by the number of days since the US invasion in March 2003. I said it was rough.

A far more sophisticated estimate, including many other costs, can be found in Joseph Stiglitz's and Linda Bilmes's new book The Three Trillion Dollar War. I haven't, and won't have time to read it, so this book review by Sam Leith for the Daily Telegraph is useful.

The sentence that caught my eye was this one:

The operating costs of the war in Iraq are now $12.5 billion a month; which rises to $16 billion if you include Afghanistan.

By my arithmetic that works out at $4,760 per second. No wonder then that a committee of British MPs has just announced that it expects the costs of Britain's engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan to double.

The question is how long the British taxpayer will indulge this level of expenditure (and lack of evidence of results) - particularly as the UK's economic prospects worsen.

Iraq today - Lawrence of Arabia's advice from yesterday

2008-03-10T15:19:00.002Z

On February 18, 1921 T.E. Lawrence started work as an adviser to Winston Churchill, who had just been appointed Britain’s Colonial Secretary. With that job came responsibility for Iraq, the “ungrateful volcano” as Churchill dubbed the country, where the British had finally finished crushing a revolt against their rule.

Churchill knew that Iraq’s people were not the only people who opposed Britain’s three-year-old occupation. British taxpayers were outraged at the cost of Britain’s fractious colony; echoing their temper, the newspapers were demanding the withdrawal of British troops.

A keen student of the public mood, Churchill regarded the situation apprehensively. “I feel some misgivings”, he wrote, “about the political consequence to myself of taking on my shoulders the burden and the odium of the Mesopotamia entanglement.” Those words must reverberate with any of the presidential candidates today for, come January next year, they will find themselves in an uncannily similar position – stuck, as Churchill put it, with a baby, though he was “not the father”.

Churchill hoped that Lawrence could help extricate him from the mess in which he found himself. Lawrence understood insurgencies intimately because he had whipped up one himself, in Arabia against the Turks during the Great War. He knew more than anyone else alive about the Arabs, and guerrilla warfare. And eighty seven years on, his advice remains as resonant as ever.

As Lawrence vividly put it, “To make war on rebellion was messy and slow ... like eating soup with a knife.” So he would recognise the strategy behind the surge. He said that the Turks’ only answer to the uprising he had masterminded would have been to suffocate the area with troops – twenty for every four square miles was the figure he suggested.

Lawrence’s point was that it was beyond the Turks to provide so many men. The same fundamental problem confronts the far mightier United States today. A shortage of troops is why, in the north of Iraq, the US army has come to rely on the support of Sunni “awakening councils”, whose 80,000 vigilantes have dealt the insurgency a bitter blow.

But the Arabic word for awakening, al-nadha, carries important, political, connotations. It is used to refer to the rise of Arab nationalism a century ago and these “concerned citizens” are not simply interested in ending the violence that has blighted their lives. Suspicious of the Shia-dominated government in Baghdad, they want to restore the dominance they have historically enjoyed. Like the Shia, almost all of them say they want Iraq to remain a unitary state – but only so long as it is run by them.

This distrust has ever been the case. As Lawrence put it bluntly, in Iraq the “tribes and towns are irreconcilable.” He therefore advocated splitting the country into two states: a tribal, sparsely populated Sunni north and more urbanised Shia south – areas, he said that “should be kept quite separate”. When it became clear that, because of oil, the British government was set on creating one state that joined the oilfields in the north to the Persian Gulf, Lawrence argued that Iraq would need to be “buttressed by the men and material resources of a great foreign Power.” Then, that power was Britain; today it is America.

“What is going to happen when our influence is removed?” wondered Lawrence’s colleague, Kinahan Cornwallis ,as the British tried to disentangle themselves from Iraq. He predicted: “They will all fly at each other’s throats until someone strong enough to dominate the country emerges or, alternatively, until we have to step in and intervene.”

According to Lawrence the Arabs believed “in persons, not in institutions”. His and Churchill’s solution was to put Feisal, his wartime comrade-in-arms, on the throne in Baghdad in August 1921 – giving what was still fundamentally a British government colony an Arab front-man. Feisal, a Sunni whose claim to be descended from Muhammad was widely recognised, appeared able to bridge the thirteen hundred year old rift between Sunni and Shia. And for a while he did. But even Feisal never really understood the country he had been parachuted in to rule. Shortly before his death in 1933 he described his subjects as “devoid of any patriotic idea …prone to anarchy and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatever.”

Whoever wins in November’s poll faces an awkward choice. For the surge to work more troops are needed, at a time when the American taxpayer may be ill-inclined to finance them; to leave now must make civil war more likely in a country that is fundamentally divided. One thing is certain: he or she will find it difficult to shrug off the “burden and odium” of Iraq.

The Battlefields Trust

2008-03-06T11:59:00.004Z

Courtesy of the Battlefields Trust, I'm next speaking in Norwich on 26 April at the Assembly House about my book, and the research and travel that led to it. You can find further details here.

I'm also speaking at:

The National Army Museum, Chelsea - 3 July
The TE Lawrence Society Symposium, Oxford - 28 September

"an early version of Charlie Wilson's War"

2008-02-29T15:42:00.004Z

The Seattle Times has reviewed Setting the Desert on Fire. You can read it here.

No way to win the battle for hearts and minds

2008-02-22T15:50:00.005Z

This report from southern Afghanistan has been out for three days, and it provides powerful evidence that things are going badly there. The British, who are sending 16 Air Assault Brigade to Helmand in April just as the poppy harvest gets under way, are clearly gearing up for renewed hostilities in the spring. Although the Afghan winter is a harsh one, the lull that it imposes on the fighting in the region surely offers an opportunity for reconstruction work.

Instead as the report shows, there is still no improvement in electricity generation, and the locals are blaming the foreigners, and not the Taliban, for the lack of progress. The British do not seem to be winning the battle for hearts and minds vital to their success in this guerrilla war.

UPDATE: To add to Britain's problems in the south of Afghanistan, the Canadians have just announced that they will withdraw from Kandahar province, next-door, by 2011.

Is Lawrence my hero?

2008-02-20T11:38:00.008Z

Not worshipping but following Lawrence:

the author near Mudawwarah in southern Jordan

Two more contrasting reviews, in the New York Sun and Wall Street Journal, which are both well worth a read, both agree on one point: T.E. Lawrence is my hero. Rubbish.

When I started out writing the book I was determined to be controversial, picking holes in Lawrence's story and finding flaws in the man himself. As his many biographers have already pointed out, there are plenty of them. In particular I wanted to highlight that he was one of several British advisers to the Arab guerrilla forces in the First World War, men like Stewart Newcombe, Herbert Garland and Henry Hornby, all now largely forgotten. Knowing that the man had a reputation for lying, I went about my research in a very particular way. I did all my other research before I finally turned to Lawrence's own, later, account of what had happened. I wanted to know the story from contemporary accounts before I read Lawrence's version of events.

The evidence I found surprised me. First was how the perception of Lawrence changed among his colleagues during the war. In 1916 he was described as a too-clever-by-half "bumptious young ass" who needed "kicking, and kicking hard at that". Subsequent events forced Lawrence's colleagues to change their view. By midway through 1917 they admitted his indispensability as an adviser to Feisal - a position he had singlehandedly carved out. Lawrence was of "inestimable value," commented one colleague, prompting another to wish that he could find other officers to act in similar roles with Feisal's older brothers. As he admitted: "Such men, however, are extremely difficult to get". Finally, as news of Lawrence's exploits spread, there was outright praise for him. According to the Conservative politician and arch-imperialist George Lloyd, Lawrence had "done wonderfully good work and will some day be able to write a unique book. Generally the kind of men capable of these adventures lack the pen and the wit to record them adequately. Luckily Lawrence is specially gifted in both."

Lawrence's ability to write a compelling book (like Churchill's after him) has inevitably guaranteed him a central role in the story that I tell in Setting the Desert on Fire. But these comments from his contemporaries at the time (and long before it was clear how famous he would become), which I unearthed in the archives in London and Durham, suggest that this prominence is not undeserved. Even Colonel Cyril Wilson, the man who had labelled Lawrence a "bumptious young ass" would, less than a year later, write what Lawrence described as a "very kind note" to praise him for his achievements. It was hard to avoid the conclusion, based on the evidence that Lawrence - the awkward, devious, mendacious intelligence officer - had won the respect of his peers. That was what inclined me to portray him in a positive light, while still, I hope, showing that he would have been hell at times to work with.

I reached another conclusion after examining the contemporary evidence. The book that Lawrence wrote, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was largely accurate in its depiction of events, not least because it quoted extensively from his campaign notes. The emphasis was different, however, for by then Lawrence had realised that he faced a political battle to lobby "opinion formers" internationally that the Arabs deserved to be offered self-government. One of those he met, in Paris in 1919, was the US President, Woodrow Wilson. It was to make this case that he largely suppressed his wartime frustrations with the Arabs and instead put emphasis on their role in the First World War in the Middle East. Realising that the battle was for a favourable public perception of the Arabs, he had started doing this before the war was even over.

Few historians ever appreciate the reason why Lawrence's version of events does change over time, because they rely exclusively on Seven Pillars of Wisdom to tell the story of events that happened at least ten years before. And that inevitably leaves them open to allegations of favourable bias. I hope that the way that I went about researching Setting the Desert on Fire has made a book that provides a more nuanced analysis of why, eventually, he proved so popular a figure.

"Required reading" - New York Post

2008-02-18T14:37:00.002Z

From yesterday's New York Post:

"Barr has uncovered previously closed archives in Europe on the revolt stirred up by Lawrence of Arabia and traveled the paths of that Middle East turmoil, which resonates in the region's politics today. This fast-paced history book, filled with saber-rattling sheiks, soldiers from Britain and France, spies and courtly diplomats, is a thriller."

New reviews

2008-02-13T07:51:00.007Z

Extracts from two new reviews of the Norton edition:

"a compact, scrupulously accurate chronicle ... utilizing previously unavailable archival material and seamlessly interweaving the military narrative with the political maneuvers of the British and French governments". "An excellent general history of a widely misunderstood struggle that largely defined the shape of the modern Middle East."

Booklist (http://www.booklistonline.com/)

"A gripping tale ... Barr turns history into a drama, with bright writing and a fascinating cast of characters. ...His four years of searching archives in Europe and crossing the deserts of the Middle East allowed Barr to turn out a colourful slice of history."

Associated Press (see the full review reproduced here)

Extinguishing an insurgency

2008-02-12T21:11:00.000Z

Firefighters traditionally use a triangular diagram to illustrate how they attack a blaze. At the three corners are the three vital ingredients of a fire: heat, fuel and air. Remove any one of these three and the fire dies out. It struck me recently that the same diagram can be applied to counter-insurgency. An insurgency depends on three key ingredients: insurgents - to do the fighting; weapons - for them to fight with; and sympathy from the local population in which they operate. Take away any of them and the insurgency begins to dwindle.

We can see how this is happening in northern Iraq. The number of insurgents is apparently ebbing. The Times yesterday reported the contents of two letters that had been seized in recent raids, and have now been made public by the US military. If true, they point to a crisis within the insurgents' ranks caused by infighting, defections, and a lack of volunteers. This last factor, claims General Petraeus, is due to countries barring young men from flying to the Syrian cities of Damascus and Aleppo on one-way tickets.

Petraeus rather grudgingly acknowledged that the fifty per cent fall in foreign militants entering Iraq was partly due to Syrian intervention, presumably along the notoriously porous Syria/Iraq border, and this may have had an effect on the constant supply of weapons that the insurgents need to fight their guerrilla war, particularly if you count suicide bombers as a weapon, since half of these were estimated recently to come via Syria. The weapons used by the insurgents have come from two sources: the disbanded Iraqi army (the glut of AK47s was so large after the 2003 invasion that the price dropped to as little as $10 a rifle) and from Iraq's neighbours, Syria and Iran, both of whom have had a strong interest in seeing the United States bogged down since they were identified as likely future targets of American action. If Syria is now making some effort to stop the insurgency, that is likely to help deny the insurgents the weapons they need. It is interesting that there has been noticeably less criticism of Syria of late.

Finally there is some evidence that sympathy for the insurgents is diminishing. Sympathy, as TE Lawrence noted, is critical to the success of any insurgency. Across Anbar province, previously the most dangerous area outside Baghdad, "Awakening Councils" of local Sunni tribesmen have been springing up, fuelled by US money, and determined to root out the guerrillas whose indiscriminate tactics have caused widespread revulsion. As the despairing tone of the letters displayed by the US military suggest, this is perhaps the most important development. Note though, from the BBC's two polls in March and September last year, that Sunni opposition to the US presence simultaneously increased during this period.

New and improved

2008-02-04T09:18:00.002Z

Setting the Desert on Fire is published in the United States this month, over eighteen months after the British edition came out. "What took so long?", I keep being asked.

The short answer is that I rewrote great chunks of the book. The result is a tighter, punchier, more exciting read. T.E. Lawrence now arrives at the outset, and I have now explained more fully why he became involved in the Arab revolt. The diplomatic wrangling that surrounded his arrival in Arabia is now more clear. And, following the very positive feedback from readers of the UK edition, there's more for armchair travellers about my own journey through the region in Lawrence's footsteps, and more of the photographs that I took in the Middle East during my research.

Norton have done a fantastic job and the end result looks stunning. But then I'm biased. There have been a few early reviews so far. Publishers Weekly on November 26 last year described it as "exhaustively researched and vividly narrated." The review concluded: "Barr expertly navigates an intriguing landscape of shifting alliances and labyrinthine politics peopled with eccentric characters to demystify a fascinating legend." You can look here and here for more.

The cost of modern war: $2,800 a second

2008-01-28T18:49:00.001Z

The cheapest ingredient of modern warfare

Reuters is reporting that the US administration will put in a bid for $70 billion to finance the cost of military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan for part of 2009. Its report says in passing that the Congressional Budget Office reckons that $440bn has been spent on operations in Iraq so far. After some quick maths I think that works out at $2,848 per second since the invasion.

The latest on Iraq

2008-01-24T20:39:00.010Z

Something to smile about: a United States soldier plays paper, scissors and stone with an Iraqi boy

[Photo: courtesy of US Department of Defense]

It was interesting to hear the distinctly confident tone of Ambassador David Satterfield when he spoke on Iraq at a meeting organised by the Global Strategy Forum on Monday night. Satterfield advises Condoleezza Rice, and is the State Department's Coordinator for Iraq. He made a compelling case four nights ago that things are getting better - "by any metric", as he put it in his opening remarks. With the surge seemingly responsible for a demonstrable reduction in the violence in Iraq, he said that he was more confident about the future than he had been "ninety - or even twenty - days ago." To be fair to him, he described himself as "cautiously optimistic."

With Satterfield's impressive pitch a memory, re-reading my scribbled notes, it is the problems that stand out however. Although the violence was now dropping, the "laggard", as Satterfield admitted, was the national political process that the surge was designed to give space to breathe.
Although a law designed to rehabilitate some former Baath party officials has now gone through, other legislation setting out how Iraq's oil will be exploited and its proceeds shared out and, secondly, the balance between federal and provincial government has made little progress: and laws on both are vital if Iraq is to become a stable state.

Satterfield was scathing about the Iraqi government at times: it had to govern "more effectively and ... in a national manner", he warned, and he said that it had been "very slow" to respond to the challenges posed by the return of refugees from Syria and Jordan who found that their homes were now occupied by others.

Satterfield described the scale of Iran's diplomatic presence in Iraq as "not appropriate, not helpful", and said Syria was "the primary source of Al Qaeda's suicide bombers". In this respect, this recent report in The Times makes interesting reading.

Questioned about the "Anbar Awakening" - the effort by the Sunnis in Anbar province to root out foreign terrorism, he was categoric that the US government had provided "not a single weapon." "They were very well armed to begin with", he added, drily. He put the number of "concerned citizens" as the vigilantes have been dubbed, at 80,000. However, as this excellent short report from the New York Times shows, the denial, while technically true, is rather academic. Watch the brick of banknotes being passed to one local leader 1 min 37 seconds into the film. Who knows where that cash is going. The film makes it clear that the Sunni awakening poses its own particular problems. As Satterfield observed, "the challenge posed by all the armed elements ... is a considerable one."

Containing Iran

2008-01-21T11:43:00.000Z

This piece in Foreign Affairs is a superb article.

A warm welcome

2008-01-08T18:38:00.000Z

The BBC is reporting that a UN convoy has been hit by a roadside bomb in southern Lebanon. Earlier today it said that rockets fired from inside Lebanon had hit the Israeli coastal town of Shlomi. Luckily neither incident has caused serious injuries.

It may be that these two attacks are not connected with each other, but it looks as if the timing of both may be connected to the arrival of the US President, George W Bush in Israel tomorrow.

In the bleak midwinter

2007-12-24T10:48:00.000Z

Several years ago I visited the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. It was cold day in early February and the rain was pouring down. My most vivid memory is of Manger Square, the bland concourse in front of the church, empty and glistening wet. I had just met two organisers of Bethlehem 2000. They were glum men whose plans had been thrown askew by the beginning of the intifada five months earlier. On the way to Bethlehem there were signs of recent fighting. One house, which had been hit by a tank shell, bore a blackened hole in one wall. The overriding feeling was of emptiness.

After I had stooped to get through the Church's tiny door, the simple interior reinforced that impression. Apart from a couple of cleaners polishing the brass rail around the altar, it too was empty. I visited the basement cave where Jesus is supposed to have been born. Perhaps appropriately it seemed unremarkable. There was a lot of crimson velvet.

Bethlehem was then about fifteen minutes by car from Jerusalem, but the security wall erected by the Israelis has now made that journey take longer. What struck me most on that first visit to the Holy Land was just how small it is. My preconceived assumption about the grander scale of the place still intrigues me. It derives entirely from the significance that Christians and Muslims attach to the events that happened there just over two thousand years ago.

Read this then eat it?

2007-12-18T08:13:00.000Z

I discovered a review of Setting the Desert on Fire from an unexpected quarter yesterday - on the Central Intelligence Agency's website. You can read it here.

Listen to me speak at the Australian War Memorial

2007-12-17T09:32:00.000Z

The Australian War Memorial have made my recent talk there available as a download. With it you can see the slides I showed, which I refer to in the course of the talk.

I'd like to thank the Memorial again for making me so welcome.

Look up, look up

2007-12-11T08:03:00.001Z

The Temple of Jupiter, Baalbek

"Four hundred piastres for that room? Four hundred did you say? Good God! Away! Call the car. Three hundred and fifty? One hundred and fifty you mean. Three hundred? Are you deaf, can't you hear? I said a hundred and fifty. We must go. There are other hotels. Come, load the luggage. I doubt if we shall stay in Baalbek at all."

So starts Robert Byron's description of his arrival in Baalbek in his book The Road to Oxiana (1937). He secures the room eventually for two hundred piastres and sets out to view the ancient site, pursued, just as you are today, by hordes of souvenir sellers. His description of the ruins struck a chord when I re-read it yesterday. What hits you is the scale of the place and the size of the enormous stones it is built from. "Look up, look up; up this quarried flesh, these thrice enormous shafts, to the broken capitals and the cornice as big as a house." It is quite unlike any other Roman structure I have ever seen.

Hotel review

2007-12-07T20:44:00.000Z

The Al-Fanar Hotel in Tyre wins 3 UN stars

Someone wiser than me once told me that you can tell the quality of a hotel in a warzone by the number of United Nations 4x4 vehicles parked outside. They are like mobile Michelin stars - they show where the richest arrivals in the neighbourhood like to eat and stay. I first saw this phenomenon in Axum in Ethiopia (the Remhai Hotel, if you are interested), close to the contested border with Eritrea, where the car-park was a sea of blazing white. Just over a fortnight ago, I was reminded of its accuracy in southern Lebanon.

The British Foreign Office advice on going to southern Lebanon is unambiguous.

"We advise against all travel south of the Litani River. There remains a serious risk from unexploded bombs remaining from the 2006 conflict between Hizbollah and Israel [many of which were dropped in the final days of a war that the British government refused to condemn- JB] and a risk [of] violence near the Israel/Lebanon border (the Blue Line). You should heed local advice in areas that have not been declared safe from unexploded ordnance."

But I wouldn't let that put you off, unless you are a rambler wanting to assert the "right to roam". Ever since the Bali bombings in 2002, the Foreign Office has realised that its published advice hangs like a millstone round its neck. So, fearing being quoted in the newspapers, it has warmly embraced the precautionary principle and discouraged British travellers from going anywhere they might end up in trouble that it could conceivably have foreseen. My experience is that the roads in southern Lebanon are quite safe (barring the driving - still the most dangerous factor), and the people are wonderfully hospitable. Just do beware the Israeli drone that buzzes miles overhead.

The Al-Fanar hotel, next to the rusting lighthouse in Tyre, south of the Litani River, is delightfully quiet. Promisingly, outside, when I arrived, were three UN 4x4s. It is, quite simply, the most tranquil hotel that I have visited in the Middle East. It is bang on the seafront, as its name suggests (it's Arabic for lighthouse), and has large, simple rooms that look out over the Mediterranean. I can't remember the cost, but it was cheap. There's an excellent seafront bar, and you fall asleep to the waves lapping against the stony beach. It is just perfect. But please don't trust my judgement: rely on the photograph above.

The power behind the throne

2007-12-06T07:21:00.000Z

The Australian news channel ABC has broadcast some of the only wartime footage of T.E. Lawrence in his role as Feisal's adviser in Aqaba. You can see it here. Lawrence is the second from the right in the group shot which begins 21 seconds into the footage, in the white headdress and black woollen cloak and wearing a wristwatch. Feisal, wearing a black headdress, is seated right of centre.

It's worth watching this closely. Notice how Lawrence stands until Feisal bids him to sit down, and how Lawrence beckons another man round to sit between him and the camera, so that he is almost invisible, but still sitting closest to Feisal, who frequently turns to him. Notice how Lawrence deals directly with Feisal when he is translating, barely looking at Lowell Thomas, and keeps his back to the camera.

This film illuminates advice contained in the Twenty Seven Articles that Lawrence had written for the benefit of his colleagues about six months earlier, in August 1917. With the film in mind, here are some extracts:

(3) In matters of business deal only with the commander of the army, column, or party in which you serve. Never give orders to anyone at all, and reserve your directions or advice for the C.O., however great the temptation (for efficiency's sake) of dealing with his underlings. Your place is advisory, and your advice is due to the commander alone.

(4) Win and keep the confidence of your leader. Strengthen his prestige at your expense before others when you can.

(5) Remain in touch with your leader as constantly and unobtrusively as you can.

(7) Treat the sub-chiefs of your force quite easily and lightly.

(8) Your ideal position is when you are present and not noticed. Do not be too intimate, too prominent, or too earnest.

Lawrence's anonymity is probably accentuated by the black and white film: in reality the fair-skinned Lawrence would have stood out more. What is so interesting is the impression one gets that Lawrence is subservient to Feisal: partly this is due to their difference in height, partly to the obsequious mannerisms - watch the hand wringing - that Lawrence adopts, which reminds me of Harold Nicolson's later comment about him: "What an odd shifty charlatan that man is."

Lawrence knew that this was all pretence. "It’s a kind of foreign stage" he wrote to an old friend later in 1918, "on which one plays day and night, in fancy dress, in a strange language, with the price of failure on one’s head if the part is not well filled". In reality, as Lawrence privately admitted, he was the power behind the throne. Telling his boss Clayton how to send intelligence to Feisal he wrote: "Information had better come to me for him since I usually like to make up my mind before he does."

Hat-tip: Mal Booth

3 Para

2007-12-05T06:59:00.000Z

There's an interesting book review in this month's newsletter from the Frontline Club. Anthony Loyd, The Times's war correspondent, reviews Patrick Bishop's 3 Para, the story of the six month long Parachute Regiment deployment in Helmand last year. I've been reading 3 Para, and it's a good story, mixing the fruits of extensive interviews with the soldiers involved with a nice analysis of the problems that the battalion and its support units faced. The main of these was overstretch. The book's line is that the Paras coped admirably with the shortage - showing immense grit against the odds. I have no doubt that that is true, though the consequences of the force the soldiers used to protect themselves on the local population goes largely unremarked.

Loyd's take on the book is interesting. Seeing the guiding hand of the Ministry of Defence behind the cooperation of so many soldiers with the book, he points out that Bishop lays much of the blame with Mohammed Daoud, then governor of Helmand province. It was Daoud, according to Bishop, who urged the British to abandon their original inkspot strategy, which would have concentrated limited British resources on creating a safe zone near Lashkar Gah, the provincial capital, and instead deploy to isolated and vulnerable platoon houses the length of the province. Certainly this marks a departure from the original British view that Daoud was the best man available and the widespread disappointment when he was moved from Helmand by President Karzai a year ago, though the news took some days to get out. Daoud has, incidentally, since publicly criticised the speed of Britain's reconstruction effort in Helmand.

Perhaps the most interesting endnote to the book is the fact that 3 Para's commanding officer, Lt Col Stuart Tootal, recently resigned from the army, apparently in protest at the "shoddy" treatment of his men by the Ministry of Defence.

Before announcing his resignation, Tootal appeared at the Frontline Club, where he was interviewed by Bishop. That evening he stuck carefully to the script. I was sitting in the audience behind a couple of people who had evidently worked for the Department for International Development, whose work in Helmand has been widely criticised. Judging by the snippets of sotto voce whispering I heard, they too are capable of producing an account of Britain's engagement in southern Afghanistan which would differ from the version of events that Bishop was evidently encouraged to produce. A full account of the ongoing Helmand deployment, mixing the soldiers' views with those of other British government officials and the Afghans themselves, has yet to be written. It would make a fascinating and educational read.

The Australian War Memorial

2007-12-04T07:45:00.000Z

I spoke last Wednesday at the Australian War Memorial, in Canberra. The talk will be podcast in due course, and you should be able to hear it, and see the slides I showed, and I will post the link as soon as I have it.

I got a very warm welcome, thanks to the head of the research centre at the AWM, Mal Booth, and after speaking had a chance to look around the memorial. This commemorates the names of those who lost their lives serving their country in a central courtyard that sits over a museum explaining Australia's enormous contribution in two world wars, Vietnam, and more recent conflicts. It's extremely good: a mixture of well-lit exhibits, paintings, video and audio footage, and a superb aircraft hall. It was busy with school children when I was there on a mid-week lunchtime.

The AWM's exhibition about T.E. Lawrence begins on 7 December.

Helmand: progress report

2007-11-23T07:45:00.000Z

One of the aims of British policy in Afghanistan was to achieve sufficient security to make alternative livelihoods to growing opium poppies attractive. In the statement made by the then Defence Secretary (in the days before the post became a part-time job) announcing the original British deployment, eradication of poppy was a high priority.

This report then, which says that farmers in Helmand province are cutting down established fruit trees to grow more poppy, is a useful indicator of whether security has improved.

Unspoilt by progress

2007-11-21T08:03:00.001Z

Tyre

Since the discovery and exploitation of oil in the 1920s the Middle East has changed dramatically. Once flat skylines are now interrupted by towerblocks; cars and buses, rather than donkeys, are the usual form of transport. But now and then you spot ways of life that are utterly unchanged. That was the thought that made me take the photograph above, last Friday. It shows fisherman on the shore in the ancient city of Tyre, in southern Lebanon. Many of them carried on far after dark.

Archaeologists on the railway

2007-11-20T10:42:00.000Z

Earlier in the summer I highlighted a report by the Great War Archaeology Group on their excavations of Turkish defensive positions along the Hijaz railway in southern Jordan.

They have just completed a second season of digging in the area. Alarmingly, their finds included several live hand grenades. This is their blog of their unique exploit.

Tension in Lebanon

2007-11-19T15:13:00.002Z

Hezbollah's flag, flying high at the infamous Al-Khiam detention centre, near the Israeli border

Early this year I wrote a piece about the Kalashnikov Index: the changing price of an AK-47 depending on supply, and demand due to perceived changes to security. In Iraq, where security appears to be improving, the Index should be falling, though I have seen no recent price data.

One nearby country where the Index has surged is Lebanon. There, says this report, the cost of buying an AK-47 has recently trebled to $1,000 a weapon. Rising expectations of violence lie behind the rise. Lebanon's politicians are currently deadlocked over the choice of a successor to replace Emile Lahoud, the Syrian-backed president of the country. A replacement needs to be found by 23 November when Mr Lahoud's term ends, but as the Index suggests people are pessimistic that an acceptable compromise candidate will be found.

I got back from a short visit to Lebanon this morning, and my impression was that the country, though outwardly calm, is close to the abyss. Having given the Israeli army a bloody nose last year, Hezbollah is reputedly preparing for trouble. Its distinctive green on yellow flags (depicting a forearm clenching an AK-47) were flying everywhere that I went, south of the River Litani and up the Beqaa valley, where souvenir sellers offering Hezbollah t-shirts congregate outside the famous ruins at Baalbek. It is clear that the spectacular damage to the country's infrastructure done by Israel (and supported without demure by Britain and the United States) during last year's war, let alone the deaths the war caused, has only reinforced Hezbollah's support. And I watched a procession of cars of another pro-Syrian faction, streaming down the main road from the Syrian border towards Beirut, flapping their disconcerting, rather fascist-inspired, red, black and white banners from the windows. Despite the signs of wealth and renovation of Beirut's battered city-centre there seems to be a fatalism among the few Lebanese I spoke to about their ability to influence events, and even a certain ambivalence towards the current, if uneasy, peace. Perhaps this has always been the case. This was my first visit to Lebanon and I have nothing to compare it with.

The Balfour Declaration - ninety years on

2007-11-14T09:43:00.000Z

The 90th anniversary of the controversial Balfour Declaration passed without much notice earlier this month. The Declaration was a mealy-mouthed expression of sympathy by the British government for Zionist aspirations. It was issued at this time because of a mistaken (and in itself decidedly anti-Semitic) belief that the Jews together wielded enormous hidden influence worldwide, and especially in Russia. There, British government officials forlornly hoped, the Jews might be able to halt the rise of the Bolsheviks. But the same day that The Times published the Declaration, 9 November, it also carried news of Lenin's successful coup in St Petersburg.

The Declaration also anticipated the capture of Jerusalem by British forces one month later. What had started as an aggressive defence of the Suez Canal had evolved into a military campaign. The pressing need for a victory of some sort to counterbalance bad news on the western front, and the perceived prestige of running such a sacred land were both reasons why it had.

But it was the cold logic of imperial strategy that was the fundamental reason behind the British invasion, and it was this that the Declaration sought to camouflage with its invocation of a moral cause for British actions, to a world that was increasingly cynical about imperial ambitions. As the significance of airpower began to be appreciated, it was Palestine's strategic value, as a buffer east of the Suez Canal and as a stepping stone between Europe and India that made it attractive to the British.

The development of aircraft that could fly ever further rendered Palestine ineffective as a buffer and irrelevant as an airstrip. Woolier hopes, that Britain could bring "a new order" in the Holy Land, "founded on the ideals of righteousness and justice" (© The Times's leader on the day after the capture of Jerusalem was announced) proved illusory for as long as the legitimacy of British rule was tied to the promotion of the Zionists' ambitions. Bruised by experience, public support for Zionism in Britain, which was probably never more than lukewarm, cooled quickly after 1948.

Some reasons why are put forward in a discussion here. Though I don't agree with all the analysis, the summary makes an interesting read.

Remembrance Sunday

2007-11-11T11:56:00.001Z

A grave at Guillemont Road cemetery on the Somme

Apparently there are more marchers at the annual Remembrance Sunday parade on Whitehall this year than there have been for many years. Many people have expressed their surprise that, instead of withering as the two world wars grow ever more distant, the commemoration has only gathered strength.

Edward Marsh, Churchill's private secretary, described the first anniversary of the Armistice in 1919. At eleven o'clock in the morning - it was a Tuesday - everyone had halted where they stood, for two minutes, he said. "It was really solemn and impressive - everyone standing like statues, and the dead silence." Winning the war had cost Britain 723,000 lives, and a further 198,000 soldiers from the colonies had – willingly or otherwise – given theirs. Half a million more had been seriously wounded: nearly half of these were amputees. And sixty thousand men had shell-shock.

Marsh, however, had not fought in the war, and when I was researching Setting the Desert on Fire, I came across a surprising comment on the anniversary which made me wonder whether former combatants felt differently. It was made, some years later, by T.E. Lawrence. Writing to his confidante Charlotte Shaw (the wife of George Bernard Shaw) on 10 November 1927, he remarked: "Tomorrow … this horrible celebration of an armistice of long ago."

It would be interesting to know whether Lawrence's view was widely shared, or whether he was simply being provocative. It may be, though, that he did not appreciate the reminder. Like many former soldiers he must have suffered flashbacks to the violence he had witnessed. "It's like malarial bugs in the blood", he wrote later to his friend, the writer Robert Graves, "coming out months and years after in recurrent attacks." Perhaps too, as the years went by, while others continued to appreciate the sacrifice made on their behalf, Lawrence realised that the Great War had created more problems as it solved.

Australia

2007-11-09T11:12:00.000Z

Aba Naam bridge on the Hijaz Railway

The bridge was T.E. Lawrence's first sight of the railway in April 1917

I'm next speaking at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, on 27 November at 10.30am in the Telstra Theatre. I'll be talking about my travel in the Middle East (with some slides) and looking into the reasons behind the differing versions of key events in the campaign.

The AWM is about to open a major exhibition on Lawrence of Arabia and the Australian Light Horse Brigade, which played an important part in the 1917-18 Palestine offensive. Mal Booth, the curator, has been running a blog where you can find further useful information as well as details of my talk and the others that the Memorial has lined up to accompany the exhibition.

What would TE Lawrence had done in the Second World War, had he survived his motorbike crash?

2007-11-05T18:49:00.000Z

Patrick - friend, fellow (and much more frequent) blogger and occasional thoughtful commenter to this effort - has come up with an interesting question. "What would have happened", he asks me, "had TEL not gone for a motorbike ride in Dorset? What role may he have played during the Second World War?"

Normally I try to avoid counterfactual history, because I have a prejudice that dwelling on the what-might-have-beens is the preserve of fiction (and I have a feeling that a novel based on just this premise has been written at some stage; I've never read it). But I'm going to make an exception. I'm going to invite you into the dark and faintly mildewy tent of Mystic Barr, relieve you of a fiver, gaze into my crystal ball and ponder the question: what if Lawrence had been alive in 1939?

It seems likely that Lawrence would by then, or would soon, have been asked to help. In his resignation letter from the civil service in 1922, he wrote: "I need hardly say that I'm always at his [Churchill's] disposal if ever there is a crisis, or any job, small or big, for which he can convince me that I am necessary." Churchill replied, gratefully: "I feel I can count upon you at any time when a need may arise."

Churchill himself wondered what Lawrence might have done. "I had hoped to see him quit his retirement" he told reporters on the day that Lawrence died, "and take a commanding part in facing the dangers which now threaten the country". He added: "In Lawrence we have lost one of the greatest beings of our time."

Three broad options might have been open to Lawrence. A role within the military, within the Foreign Office, or at home within, or working for, the British government, especially after Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940.

By 1940 Lawrence was fifty-one years old- a tough and active man, for sure, but well above the upper age for volunteering for active service. The compelling possibility that Lawrence might have played an active military role during the Second World War, though attractive, therefore seems unlikely. But who knows? Lawrence was adept at bending rules. And others served in frontline roles: Lawrence's sometime opponent, the MP and former proconsul in Iraq, Sir Arnold Wilson, died serving as a tail-gunner in an aircraft covering the Dunkirk evacuation. And he was fifty five.

Might therefore have Lawrence returned to serve in the Middle East - perhaps in North Africa? This is where the counterfactual throws up some interesting points. Part of the reason for Lawrence's fame by 1939 was precisely because he was already dead. His death four years earlier cleared the way for the general publication of his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of which, up to then, he had only had about 200 copies printed. He did give one of them to Archibald Wavell, who would command British forces in the Middle East early in the war and who encouraged the development of the famous Long Range Desert Group. But Wavell remained a controversial figure (Churchill eventually replaced him) and I wonder whether he would have been able to stand behind the LRDG had the trade edition of Seven Pillars of Wisdom not already become a huge bestseller. The book certainly enthused some of his men. As one of the leaders of the Long Range Desert Group wrote in his own memoir: "Lawrence had lit the flame which fans the passion of those who lead guerrilla warfare and I wanted more than anything to experience it." So there remains a question as to whether, had Lawrence lived and Seven Pillars of Wisdom remained unpublished, he would have had as great an influence as he did because he was dead.

There were other jobs on offer in the Middle East. To coordinate the military and political efforts in the region, Britain posted a minister of state to Cairo. However, this role involved liaison with the Free French after Syria and Lebanon were taken back from the Vichy regime in 1941. To them however, Lawrence was anathema and it is highly unlikely that he would have been an acceptable candidate, particularly because the Foreign Office was anxious throughout the war to reduce friction with the French as far as possible. There were other diplomatic jobs. In early 1941, when it became clear that the government in Iraq was being subverted by Axis propaganda, the British government sent Lawrence's wartime colleague Kinahan Cornwallis to Baghdad to serve as ambassador. While he was there, Cornwallis effectively coordinated the military operation which ousted Rashid Ali al Gailani, who seized power in a coup in April that year. Given Lawrence's own interest in Iraq, and his knowledge of the region, this is certainly a role that would have been open to him. But - the problem with imagining Lawrence in any governmental job is that he had upset many civil servants during his earlier service and these enmities would inevitably have worked against him had Churchill dropped him into any job. A comparable figure was Sir Louis Spears, an MP whom Churchill made his special envoy in the Levant from 1941. Spears found himself under attack from almost every direction. Again, it is highly unlikely Lawrence could have fulfilled this role because of his known dislike of the French. Perhaps he might simply have served as an adviser, in Whitehall, to Churchill. Churchill numbered Lawrence, after all, was one of "the two or three of the very best men it has ever been my fortune to work with."

At home other opportunities might have been open to him. In his final years in the Royal Air Force he had worked on developing rescue boats that were to play a vital role during the Battle of Britain picking up airmen who had ditched into the English Channel. It is possible that he might have played a greater role in this capacity during the battle for British airspace in 1940-41. But given Churchill's like of Lawrence - and his appreciation of Lawrence's fame - it is hard to believe that he would have left Lawrence working on such an important, but fundamentally unglamorous project. Could Lawrence have worked at home for the Special Operations Executive, taking on a Maurice Buckmaster-type role? I don't know enough about the Political Warfare Executive to do more than raise that question. But with that thought, one last possibility comes to mind. Might Churchill have theatrically appointed Lawrence the guerrilla leader to lead the preparations to fight the Germans on the beaches and the landing grounds had Hitler invaded in 1940? Perhaps it is here, among the Home Guard - many of them old soldiers of the First World War - that Lawrence would have found his niche. It is, of course, impossible to know for sure.

British "diplomats" bite back

2007-11-01T20:48:00.000Z

On Monday we learned that, according to the Americans, the Taliban were taking MI6 for a ride.

Then on Wednesday we heard that, according to British "diplomats", a key tribal leader in Helmand was on the verge of defecting.

Could these two articles possibly be related?

Uxbridge here I come

2007-11-01T19:19:00.000Z

I'm speaking next Wednesday, 7 November, at Uxbridge Central Library. T. E. Lawrence spent ten weeks in Uxbridge in 1922, under the guise of "Aircraftsman Ross". He had joined the Royal Air Force after handing in his resignation to the Colonial Office where he had served as Winston Churchill's adviser. By odd coincidence on 7 November it will be exactly 85 years to the day that Lawrence finished his basic training at the Uxbridge depot. My job next week will be to explain why he ended up there.

Lawrence had been spared the rigours of basic military training when he volunteered in 1914 and throughout the war he maintained an amateurishness (in the approving, British sense of the word) that often infuriated other professional soldiers. His experience at Uxbridge changed him profoundly. "The person has died", he wrote, "that to the company might be born a soul." Three years later he would write that "Uniform is like corsets …. you get used to the support of it, and feel undone if it is taken off you in the end of time."

Ending the deafening silence

2007-10-30T14:50:00.000Z

Last Friday's Times published an interesting list of the 50 key dates of world history by the historian Richard Overy. It's well worth a look: the tight selection inevitably makes it controversial and thought-provoking.

But what's he missed? Money for a start, which could have been added to one of the early Mesopotamian entries. Or accounting, from around the same time. Where's gunpowder, or the flintlock - for their explosive power and ability to change the social order? To be nit-picky I suspect Muhammad's death (and Christ's) were more important than their dates of birth. Muhammad's death sparked the creation of the Caliphate, under which Islam's influence massively expanded. The Black Death of 1348-49 - was responsible for the death of about a third of Asia's and Europe's peoples and spelled the end to feudalism in Europe. Penicillin. The telegraph, radio, television and flight are all absent, despite the impact that they have had on government communications and the speed at which the world moves. Many of the political developments of the early modern era - Hobbes's Leviathan, the US constitution, and the rights founded by the French revolution - all owe themselves to the rediscovery of classical political philosophy which itself resulted from the invention of the printing press and the breaking of the medieval church's restrictive stranglehold on ideas.

Anyway, have a look.

Missile defence: will the US go with the Russian suggestion?

2007-09-19T16:03:00.000Z

Just before I went on holiday to the Caucasus earlier this summer, Russia made an interesting offer to the United States. Faced with the Americans' revived plans to create a missile defence shield with forward radar stations in eastern Europe, at the G8 Summit the Russians suggested that America might use a base in Azerbaijan to site its radar.

I remembered the story when I was travelling through Azerbaijan. At Qabala in the centre of the country, on a hill just south of the Caucasus chain, you can see two enormous concrete rectangular structures which the Russians originally built to warn of an American missile strike against them. Today they monitor Russian space shots. I assumed at the time that this must be the place that the Russians had in mind: and indeed it was - the BBC were there at much the same time that I was. The Azerbaijanis are, by and large, reluctant to talk about politics except obliquely, and my taxi driver (a trained lab technician who could earn more as a cabbie than in a hospital) did not directly answer my question about whether the Azeri press had covered the Russian offer, and if so, what they made of it.

An interesting snippet I have just seen would suggest that the Americans are considering the Russian suggestion, which was presumably made to bring the radar into their sphere of influence.

Azerbaijan is being tugged in different directions by the rival powers. US support for the corrupt Azeri regime is evident everywhere. Public buildings (for example in Sheki) have been renovated with the help of the Department of Defense, and the land border crossing with Georgia is smart, intimidating, and supplied with computers from the US Department of Homeland Security. It will be interesting to see if the United States investigates the option further. Its Missile Defense Agency's website gives nothing away.

Flying at each other's throats

2007-08-21T11:09:00.001Z

I've just come across this interesting quote from Sir Kinahan Cornwallis, a British official who specialised in Middle Eastern matters. Here he is in 1931, commenting on the prospects for Iraq.
"What is going to happen when our influence is removed? My own prediction is that they will all fly at each other's throats and that there will be a bad slump in the administration which will continue until someone strong enough to dominate the country emerges or, alternatively, until we have to step in and intervene." (quoted in Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq, London 2007, p.210)

The situation in Iraq is now in flux and there is a sense that in the south, we have reached the finale of the British deployment. British troops in the south are now restricted to Basra Palace and the airport outside the town. Both are dangerous places, because they are attractive targets for regular mortar attacks by local insurgents eager to be able to claim the accolade of having forced the British to withdraw. Mortars are not the only threat. Conditions inside the airport base, where local contractors are also employed, are not deemed safe enough for British civilian officials to travel around without bodyguards. The focus of the British diplomatic effort is, apparently, not in improving relations with the Iraqis, but in persuading the Americans that it is time for the British to leave. Every optimistic British assessment you hear of the local authorities' determination to root out corruption, ability to run the police themselves, and so on, is designed to speed British withdrawal.

Initially proclaimed as a triumph for British "hearts n' minds" over American firepower, the south of Iraq has now become at least as unstable as the regions further north. The killing of the governor of Muthanna province this week is the latest sign that the Shia factions who 'rule' the south of the country have already started, to echo Cornwallis, "to fly at each other's throats". Muthanna had been a relatively quiet backwater, where the British passed control to the Iraqis last summer. Referring to the handover the defence secretary, Des Browne, said: "Today takes them one step nearer to assuming full responsibility for their own security and to building a stable and democratic future for their country." It does not look quite so rosy now. but there is widespread recognition that Britain has neither the forces nor the political will to stop the situation deteriorating further.

The prospect of a British withdrawal from Iraq explains the increasingly vocal American attacks on the British strategy in the south of the country, which are designed to counteract the optimistic British pronouncements that the local authorities are ready to stand on their own two feet, which are the overture to a pull-out. The American strategy to prevent a withdrawal they see as precipitate appears to be try to stir British pride by effectively accusing British troops of cowardice. Outraged British newspaper readers fired up by this slur would, presumably, demand that British troops should stay in place to prove the US wrong.

I wonder whether this rather desperate tactic will work. Surveys recently show that only a small percentage of the British public have friends and family serving in either Iraq or Afghanistan: there is a profound public lack of interest in what is happening in either, and that is clearly having a detrimental effect on British soldiers' morale in both. In this respect, note the successful intervention by the head of the army, General Sir Richard Dannatt this week to pressurise the British Royal Mail postal service into delivering parcels to troops serving in both theatres free of charge. There is little general support for the war, and many people in any case believe that British intervention in the Middle East has made further terror attacks more likely, not the reverse. In other words they may support the professionalism of Britain's armed forces while believing simultaneously that the task they have been given, in the support of the US invasion, was the wrong one. If anything, the Americans' attempt to whip up British outrage is more likely to fuel rising anti-Americanism in Britain.

For Iraqis the sad question is what will fill the vacuum once the British leave. And here it is not difficult to believe that Cornwallis's analysis of the cycle of Iraqi history remains a timeless one.

Digging up the recent past

2007-08-14T14:56:00.000Z

At the start of this year, the Great War Archaeology Group got in touch with me. The GWAG had recently got back from excavating two sites in southern Jordan, places I had also visited during the research I did for Setting the Desert on Fire. I have the greatest respect for them. Whereas I had stopped to take a few photographs and have a look about, they had spent a fortnight under the sun, surveying and digging.

Since for me, archaeology is inextricably connected to the consumption of significant volumes of real ale, their efforts were all the more impressive since they spent their time around the town of Maan, one of the more conservative parts of Jordan, and certainly some distance from the nearest keg of beer. I was delighted to be able to help them tie down the name of the station that they had been excavating on the plain south of Maan, at Wadi Rethem (Rutm), where I had briefly stopped in September 2004.

The discoveries GWAG have made are of real interest in the understanding of the Arab revolt. They have begun to shed some light on the lives of the Turkish soldiers who were stationed along the railway, and provide evidence of the fierce fighting in April 1918 around Maan station.

For a taste of where they were, do visit their website and read their excellent report, which takes a little while to load. They return to Jordan later this year. It will be fascinating to see what more they unearth this time round.

Bringing back the Caliphate

2007-08-12T14:50:00.000Z

The BBC is reporting that 100,000 people have attended a rally organised by Hizb ut-Tahrir in Indonesia. Western intelligence and border agencies look as if they have done their best to throw the conference programme into disarray, by preventing several of the speakers from travelling to Jakarta.

Hizb ut-Tahrir - banned in many countries although not in Britain (yet) - campaigns, in incendiary terms, for the restoration of the Islamic caliphate. The caliphs were the Prophet Muhammad's immediate successors; the caliphate originally was the Middle Eastern empire that they went on to conquer in the years after Muhammad's death. With the conquest of that empire by the Mongols in the thirteenth century the caliphate disappeared. The Ottoman sultans appropriated the title from 1416 as they approached the zenith of their power. From then until the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan was also the caliph. As the political leader and spokesman of Sunni Muslims worldwide he enjoyed a certain respect from European empires with Muslim colonies, like Britain, for the influence he was believed to wield over their subjects. The Sultan overstepped the mark in 1914, when, egged on by the Germans, he issued a call for jihad against his British, French and Russian enemies. By the time the war had ended Britain in particular was anxious for the caliphate to be wound up. By then and since, the caliphate had become firmly associated with the threat of jihad.

In fact it was the Turkish nationalists who dealt the caliphate its coup de grace. Initially they separated it from the Ottoman sultanate before finally scrapping it in 1924. The last caliph, a dignified and well-educated man named Abdul Mejid, who was a brilliant linguist and a painter, was escorted from Istanbul with two of his wives to the Greek border, from where, with only a small amount of money and "a number of jewels" he crossed Europe by the Orient Express. Photographs taken a few days later show him, dressed in a suit and fez, disconsolately taking the air in a resort on the edge of Lake Geneva. As far as the European powers were concerned, his role was, by the time of his deposition, reassuringly symbolic. As the London Times observed, by then he "had no power, even in spiritual matters; he could not issue decrees, and he was not permitted to exercise any form of patronage." He died in Paris, just as the city was being liberated in 1944.

In centuries past the caliphs took on the mantle of the Prophet. The Times, in its leader on the day after the caliph had been dismissed, wondered what had happened to that green garment. It reappeared in Kandahar in 1996, when the Taliban leader Mullah Omar appeared wearing it in public on a rooftop in the city. By doing so he was making the most open claim possible to be the caliph. A caliphate requires a caliph, and one of the reasons for the suspicion that rightly hangs around Hizb ut-Tahrir is the question of who that caliph would be.

A brilliant and subtly subversive exhibition

2007-08-11T16:14:00.000Z

The Houghton Shahnama, courtesy of the Aga Khan Development Network

You realise just how stupid a decision it was for London to refuse the Aga Khan planning permission to build a museum in the city at the Ismaili Centre's exhibition of artefacts from the Aga Khan's collection, entitled Spirit and Life. It only runs until the end of the month and, as the illustration above suggests, it is superb - and free to see. The items on display range in age from a page from a ninth century Cufic Qu'ran to a quirky twentieth century Sufi hat.

The exhibits - which are beautifully displayed - are quietly controversial. There are the familiar abstract geometric and foliage patterns that have come to epitomise Islamic art. But, to challenge that perception, there are dozens of different representations of the human form, as in the illuminated Shahnama above, many of them from Iran. In London they do not look as extraordinary as perhaps they should.

Further afield in the Islamic world, the sudden appearance of the human form is more arresting.

This picture shows one of the thirteenth century Bayil stones, which I saw in Baku last month. Taken from a nearby castle, they can now be found in the courtyard of the Shirvan Shahs' palace in the wonderful old city. The only other place where I have seen similar depictions of people in Islamic art is at Qasr Amra, in eastern Jordan. There the ceiling frescoes of this eighth century hunting lodge of the Umayyads have been badly damaged - whether by malice or the weather I am not sure - but, as you can see below, the energetic dancing girls painted to amuse the Caliphs can still be made out.

One connection links all three: all these representations were private art, bought by the seriously wealthy to be enjoyed beyond the general public's gaze. Thanks to the Aga Khan, we can now see many of them for ourselves - and savour their collector's poke in the eye for the petrodollar-fuelled Wahhabi extremists who would like to ban them. What a pity it is for London that the collection will be permanently housed in Toronto.

Speaking next in September

2007-07-30T09:42:00.001Z

I'm next speaking to the Saudi British Society at the Middle East Association, 33 Bury Street, London SW1, early in the evening of Tuesday 11th September. If you are interested in coming, further details can be found here.

The date - a coincidence and not deliberate - is certainly a resonant one on which to speak about the Arab revolt, which began 91 years ago this year. It was in his first public announcement after 9/11 that Osama bin Laden claimed that "Our nation has been tasting humiliation and contempt for more than eighty years". Bin Laden shows a considerable awareness of the Arab revolt and its circumstances, and he understands how powerful an abbreviation for betrayal that episode has become across the Muslim world.

"Our man in Pakistan"

2007-07-27T10:13:00.000Z

Listening to the radio news this morning, I particularly enjoyed novice Foreign Secretary David Miliband's description of President Musharraf as "Our Man in Pakistan". I wonder though, if President Musharraf will appreciate the implication that he is Britain's agent in the region. That after all, is what is helping to galvanise the groundswell of opposition to him.

Back from the Caucasus

2007-07-10T08:12:00.001Z

Alaverdi, Northern Armenia

Back from three weeks in the southern Caucasus: a full report to follow shortly. It's good to return to find that there's now no longer any need for the Free Alan Johnston banner. Here is an interesting report from Conflicts Forum which provides more of the background to this welcome development, and emphasises the need for direct talks with Hamas, no matter how unpalatable that organisation's views can seem.

Missing Links

2007-06-21T10:43:00.000Z

If, like me, you don't read or speak Arabic, then this blog, which provides quotes from, and commentary on, the Arabic press is very useful. I added it to my links recently but made no comment.

Out now!

2007-06-18T07:26:00.000Z

The paperback edition of Setting the Desert on Fire is published by Bloomsbury today. You can buy it here and read customer reviews of the hardback here.

The book featured among the Daily Telegraph's Pick of the Paperbacks on Saturday and has also recently been added to the reading list for Cambridge University's undergraduate history course: TE Lawrence and Gertrude Bell: Britain and the Arabs 1914-1922. See the full reading list here.

Advice from the past

2007-06-13T21:25:00.001Z

A handy guide from 1942

See this from Andrew Sullivan. The pdf is the thing to read. I disagree on his money quote; I would go for:

"You aren't going to Iraq to change the Iraqis. Just the opposite. We are fighting this war to preserve the principle of 'live and let live.'"

or maybe:

"Iraq has great military importance for its oil fields, with their pipelines to the Mediterranean Sea."

or perhaps, from the conversion table:

"100 Dinars........................................$402.00"

Today 100 Iraqi dinars is worth less than 8 US cents

And finally, the fact that this copy, in a university library in Dallas, Texas, was last borrowed in 1956.

The pamphlet is full of nuggets. Do read it.

The Sunni-Shia split

2007-06-13T12:58:00.000Z

The Shia Al Askari mosque in Samarra has been bombed again. It looks like another attempt to deepen the black chasm between Sunni and Shia Muslims in the country even further.

What is the origin of this divide? The answer lies thirteen hundred years ago.

The Prophet Muhammad’s death in 632 AD quickly precipitated a factional dispute over who should follow him as Caliph – a title meaning “the successor”. The murder of the third Caliph, Uthman, opened a schism between the Muslims of Iraq and Syria. When the fourth Caliph, Ali, refused to denounce his predecessor’s killing, a Syrian named Muawiyyah took matters into his own hands and seized the title from Ali; by doing so Muawiyyah became the fifth Caliph; Ali was subsequently murdered.

Ali’s hard-line followers were shocked by their leader’s murder and the speed with which his son Hasan hurried to reach agreement with Muawiyyah. They turned to Ali’s second son, Husein, to front their cause, calling themselves the Shia – short for Shia’t Ali, or the followers of Ali. At Kerbela, southwest of Baghdad, in 681 they were surrounded and massacred by an army loyal to Muawiyyah’s son Yazid, who had by now inherited his father’s mantle.

Thirteen centuries on, processions of Shia flagellants still gorily commemorate the anniversary of Husein’s death. After Mecca and Medina the Iraqi cities of Najaf, where Ali is buried, and Kerbela, where his son Husein met his fate, are the holiest Shia sites in the world. The Shia remain outnumbered by the Sunnis by more than two to one today. The split has its origins in what is now Iraq.

The absence of Alan Johnston

2007-06-13T07:36:00.000Z

The kidnap of BBC reporter Alan Johnston three months ago, has had an appreciable effect on the BBC's coverage of the developing chaos in the Gaza Strip, which has been building for several days. The BBC started reporting the crisis in detail last night, at least twenty-four hours after most of the events they were describing had happened. There has been a wave of appalling tit-for-tat killings. A commentator on the BBC's excellent World Tonight radio news last night (what a contrast in the amount of information you get compared to the simultaneous television news, where it's always "Back to you Huw") did not believe that this was the beginning of a civil war, but it looks like Fateh will withdraw from the "Unity" government and I fear revenge will take on a momentum of its own, despite the fact that most residents of the Gaza Strip deplore what is going on.

The fighting is fierce enough to prevent the journalists who are still there venturing out into the Gaza Strip but it is hard to believe that, had Mr Johnston not been abducted, the British public would have known rather sooner of the violence that is now drowning the Palestinian state.

Witness in Baghdad

2007-06-12T07:16:00.000Z

The doughty Saad Eskander's diary for May can be read here. Electricity and water shortages in the Iraqi capital have been making life very difficult as the temperature soars and even Eskander's mood seems to darken by the month. If you haven't got time to read the whole, this excerpt gives a flavour of what life is like:

"one or my library workers approached me, asking if I would grant her one month paid leave, before she submitted a memorandum. After I asked her about the reason, she told me that she suffered from some heart problem. She needs to go abroad to have an operation on her heart, as most Iraqi heart surgeons left the country for fear of kidnapping and killing. So, we have not only political, security, electricity, water and economic crises, but also acute medical crisis. We have not enough good medicine, hospitals and experienced doctors. Only the well-off people can go abroad to receive good medical treatment. The poor has always been paying much heavier price then the others, since the outbreak of the Iraq-Iran War in 1980. The night was as hot as the day. The sky was soon clouded. This what made the situation far worse. The temperature exceeded 42 centigrade. We did have national electricity for two days. We could not take frequent showers, as we have been suffering from water shortages for some time now. I was not able to use my generator for more than four hours, as I had little fuel to cool my very hot flat. The prices of fuel have gone up sharply in the black market, as our 'beloved hero' , the Minister of Oil, failed to put an end to the ongoing fuel crisis. Like all Baghdadis, we escaped to the roof, trying to have some fresh air; but there was not any. High temperature and humidity prevented my son and my wife from sleeping. They slept finally at 4.00, after the weather got a bit cooler."

Beyond the world of Big Brother and Paris Hilton

2007-06-11T14:47:00.000Z

News that the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, had a close shave when he was rocketed earlier today has finally galvanised me into writing a post I have been planning for ages: a summary of what's been going on in Afghanistan, highlighting the best of the recent press coverage.

The attack on Karzai reflects the country's growing lawlessness, which was highlighted in a report last week in the Independent. It noted a sharp increase in attacks on UN aid trucks and said that the UN's own security assessment showed a severe deterioration in the south of the country. According to the UN, most of the southern provinces of Helmand, Kandahar, Zabul and Uruzgan is regarded as "an extreme risk/hostile environment", when last year, the estimate of these areas was that they were "high risk/volatile".

Despite the worsening violence, at this time of year the southern provinces attract men looking for work in harvesting the annual opium poppy crop. This article explains the dilemma itinerant workers face, while this piece reports collusion between the farmers, Taliban and the local police to share the wealth created by the crop.

In the meantime there is a new genre of article on Afghanistan, familiar to anyone following news coverage in Iraq: the article pointing to Iranian involvement. The BBC currently offers two examples. One report says that Iran is exerting increasing influence in the country ; another reports that a "sophisticated bomb" has been found on the streets of Kabul: interestingly, it does not say when. According to the article, this device's similarity to weapons used in Iraq suggests that there is a technology transfer going on between the two war-torn countries and, the author continues, citing unnamed sources, is evidence of Iranian interference in the country's insurgency. Bombmaking experts - one of whom I met a few weeks ago - say that "shaped charge" bombs are nothing new. They certainly are not proof of Iranian involvement.

An interesting article by a former Indian diplomat in the Asia Times suggested a political decision which may help explain the deterioration in the situation in Afghanistan. MK Bhadrakumar charts the decline to the decision at the end of last year by the Afghan Parliament to grant an amnesty to any Afghan involved in any war crime during the past twenty five years. "At a single stroke", he believes, "the December 31 amnesty move deprived the US of the one weapon that it wielded for blackmailing the 'warlords' into submission - powerful leaders of the Northern Alliance groups, the mujhideen field commanders, and petty local thugs alike. The prospect of a war-crime tribunal was held like a Damocles' sword over any recalcitrant Afghan political personality". The Afghans' decision reflects their own belief that the United States government no longer has the willingness to stay the course in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and once they go, dialogue with the Taliban will be necessary.

The parliamentary decision undermines the apparent progress the British are making in the south of Afghanistan. The British have been trying to provide enough stability to enable the renovation of the hydro-electric powerplant at the Kajaki dam in the north of Helmand province, a project designed to win over local support by restoring electricity, but to do so successfully they have to pacify the area between the dam and the regional capital Lashkar Gah, along the Helmand valley, which forms the main artery of communications and the major opium poppy growing district. Since the Taliban feed off the revenue that the poppy crop generates, the towns along the river, including Gereskh and Sangin have been fiercely fought over.

There has been some evidence that the British are making headway. First came the killing of the one-legged Taliban leader, Mullah Dadullah, a brilliant operation that took advantage of a botched hostage swap in which the Taliban were induced to exchange an Italian journalist they had kidnapped for a number of their captured colleagues. One of these prisoners was Dadullah's brother, who was followed on his release by British special forces to Dadullah himself. The swap, which was heavily criticised, itself sheds light on the new dynamic in Afghanistan identified by Bhadrakumar. Then came came a new British offensive to take control of Sangin, one of the major opium markets in the region. This operation was extensively reported in the Daily Telegraph. The article contains a sentiment echoed in another Times piece today, that the soldiers in Afghanistan feel that their efforts are barely being recognised, beyond sporadic reports of the rising British death toll. "There is a lot of hard graft and sacrifice. It means a lot to the blokes for their exploits to be recognised in a world fixated by Big Brother and Paris Hilton", says a British officer quoted in the Telegraph.

The method and the result of the British offensive are reported by Reuters. Whether the peace will hold remains to be seen.

Hay fever

2007-06-01T10:42:00.001Z

Railway carriage, near Toweira station, Hijaz Railway

So the weather forecast isn't great but I am eagerly looking forward to my weekend trip to Hay-on-Wye, where I am speaking at the Festival at nine o'clock on Sunday morning, hail, rain or shine.

There will be slides - both pictures familiar if you've seen or read my book - and photographs like the one above that I took in the Hijaz mountains on the railway while doing my research in the Middle East. And there will be time for questions and ideas too.

Railways, religion and politics

2007-05-30T14:04:00.000Z

Evidence of an earlier German railway project in the Middle East

Following the news last week that the Hijaz Railway is to be revived, another Middle East, railway related story caught my eye this morning. The Iranians have signed an agreement with a German company to build a high-speed "maglev" railway line from Teheran to Mashhad, a shrine for Shia pilgrims. A spokesman for the German firm brushes aside the threat of further sanctions on Iran. "The transportation of pilgrims", he says, "is certainly not a project that would fall in the remit of a political boycott." If he truly believes this, he is falling into the trap of trying to separate politics and religion in a part of the world where they are intertwined like arabesque designs.

In this project's likely underlying motive, its similarity with the Hijaz railway, 100 years old next year, is uncanny. The Times article says, almost in passing, that "The Iranians, for their part, appear determined to make the Shia shrine easily accessible across the region." And this is surely the crux of the matter. Some of the greatest beneficiaries would, of course, be the sizeable Shia population in Iraq. Like the Hijaz Railway, this new project is profoundly political. It is to win the gratitude of Shias worldwide, and along the way, cause disagreement in Europe on the need for tighter sanctions.

Struggling with the heat?

2007-05-25T13:21:00.001Z

After a disappearance lasting several months, the Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr has magically reappeared in the holy city of Kufah, in Iraq. I've just watched him giving a press conference, half-hidden behind a battery of microphones. You can read the various theories why he has suddenly rematerialised here. Reuters adds that he is trying to reposition himself as a nationalist. In his sermon today he apparently called on his supporters to protect Sunnis and Christians from attack.

What was interesting was the way that Moqtada frequently wiped his face with a handkerchief throughout. His aides claim that he has been in Iraq throughout his absence. But it looked to me as if he was struggling with the heat. My guess, for what it's worth, is that he has just returned from somewhere rather higher and cooler, perhaps in the mountains across the Iranian border.

Greed and intrigue

2007-05-24T07:36:00.000Z

The American edition of Setting the Desert on Fire is now finally coming together. After the publication of the Bloomsbury edition last summer I made further changes to the text to make the story tighter. My publisher WW Norton's Winter and Spring catalogue is now out. "Greed and intrigue", it says, "combine explosively in this gripping tale of how the mercurial Lawrence of Arabia changed the Middle East forever." Publication is set for February next year, and the book will include more of the photographs I took during my research, as well as photographs from the time.

Separately, and halfway round the world, Auckland City Library has nominated Setting the Desert on Fire as one of its "Good Reads" this month.