Iraq today - Lawrence of Arabia's advice from yesterday

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.

Extinguishing an insurgency

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.