Fox shot

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

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

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

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

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?

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.

Next speaking

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

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

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

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

Next speaking...

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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

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?

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