Nihilism in the Middle East: from Colonel Lawrence to Mohammed Atta.(T.E. Lawrence)(Critical Essay)

T.E. LAWRENCE'S account of the way his Arab cutthroats would beat the Turks makes eerie reading today. He asked himself how a handful of fierce zealots, whose main activities had been pilfering and brigandage, could possibly bring the Ottoman Empire to its knees. Obviously not by punching toe to toe with Turkish artillery.

"But suppose" (he writes in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom) "suppose we were an influence, an idea, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas?" Conventional armies were large and immobile, and conventional generals equally so. Instead, "we might be a vapour, blowing where it listed. Our kingdoms lay in each man's mind, and as we wanted nothing material to live on, so perhaps we offered nothing material to the killing."

Today the heavenly kingdom of Islam's more fanatical devotees, to be achieved by ridding the world of unbelievers, is half in the mind and half in the hereafter; and they have indeed become an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, without front or back or visibility, poisonously drifting about the globe like a toxic gas, striking unannounced and at will. Lest it be thought that Lawrence's use of the word gas synonymously with vapour is casual, and really means nothing special, it's worth remembering that he was writing around 1920, when mustard gas on the Western Front was the first thing every reader would think of in this context. I think it probable that Lawrence knew exactly what he was doing. It was in his nature to be unhealthily excited by gore, and killing, and nihilistic oblivion, and it was more than likely that when he wrote of "gas" he did so fully intending to convey its sinister menace, and happy enough to identify the mayhem it created with his own military designs.

There are other interesting things too in what he says, especially for anyone hoping to occupy and hold Afghanistan today--for example, the much-discussed asymmetry of forces. How many men would the Arabs need, and how many men would the Turks need, for either of them to succeed against the other? According to Lawrence the equation favoured his own guerilla-terrorists. The Turks:

 
   would have need of a fortified post every four square miles, and a post 
   could not be less than twenty men. If so, they would need six hundred 
   thousand men to meet the illwills of all the Arab peoples, combined with 
   the active hostility of a few zealots. 

Another factor in any eventual success would be propaganda, something he goes into at considerable length. This would first be used to brainwash his own troops:

 
   We had to arrange their minds in order of battle just as carefully and as 
   formally as other officers would arrange their bodies. And not only our own 
   men's minds ... We must also arrange the minds of the enemy, so far as we 
   could reach them; then those other minds of the nation supporting us behind 
   the firing line, since more than half the battle passed there in the back; 
   then the minds of the enemy nation waiting the verdict; and of the neutrals 
   looking on; circle beyond circle.