Robert Fisk on TE Lawrence

[Tankus]

T E Lawrence

Robert Fisk: TE Lawrence had it right about Iraq

'Rebellions can be made by 2 per cent active and 98 per cent passively sympathetic'

Back in 1929, Lawrence of Arabia wrote the entry for "Guerrilla" in the 14th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It is a chilling read - and here I thank one of my favourite readers, Peter Metcalfe of Stevenage, for sending me TE's remarkable article - because it contains so ghastly a message to the American armies in Iraq.

Writing of the Arab resistance to Turkish occupation in the 1914-18 war, he asks of the insurgents (in Iraq and elsewhere): "... suppose they were an influence, a thing invulnerable, intangible, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immobile as a whole, firm-rooted, nourished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour..."

more of the artical here

However some bright spark on wired has found out (allegedly) where d*** Chaney had acquired his foreign policy inspiration from

a 1952 comic called T Man

where have all our countrys giants gone ...?

[andsome]

Oh so true.