I've returned recently
to Iraq. I'd been here before in 2003 working as a British diplomat
and as the Deputy Governor of two Iraqi provinces.
From this day is the real beginning of the transition to a free, independent Iraq.
Talking to American soldiers, I've been intrigued to find that before they're posted to the Middle East,
officers are made to study one of my boyhood heroes.
In World War One, Lawrence of Arabia united feuding Arab tribes
into a formidable army which helped topple the Ottoman Turkish Empire.
His experience of defeating a foreign military occupation,
of leading an insurgency, has led to him being held up as the man who cracked fighting in the Middle East.
So, today, his writing has become a guide to the US military
and its allies fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.
One of the key things you can take away from Colonel Lawrence
is he had an appreciation and knew the people.
There's just incredible and valuable lessons that we have taken from that.
But for me, Lawrence has a much darker message.
Lawrence might have won a war, but the politics that followed fatally undermined his success.
He aimed, he said "To write his will across the skies and build a new, independent Arab nation."
But, in these two films I want to show how Lawrence felt his dream ended in catastrophe and shame.
And I believe that if our Generals and politicians now
could see what Lawrence saw, we would not be in the mess we are in today.
For three years, I've been based in Afghanistan,
working with a community to save and restore part of the old city of Kabul.
But, at the same time, not far south of the capital,
there is war between the Taliban and western armies.
My struggle to reconcile this conflict, with all that I find so positive and entrancing
about the cultures of the Middle East, all that I have seen in the last 10 years
that I have spent living and working in this region
And in Lawrence, I found a man who experienced and understood many of these same issues.
Reading Lawrence has taught me much about the risks and challenges
of trying to intervene in a culture that is so alien to your own.
Lawrence, the warrior hero, started life a long way from the deserts of Arabia.
'Born in 1888 in a middle-class suburb of Oxford, he eventually went to Oxford University.
'When I myself was at Oxford, I often thought about Lawrence.'
About how a shy, reserved boy began, before the age of 18,
to prepare himself to be a leader.
You have to think yourself back to that period
when Britain was an Imperial power,
when young middle class Englishmen and young upper class Englishmen were being brought up to run the Empire.
Jeremy Wilson is T. E. Lawrence's authorised biographer.
He had a very, very profound sense of right and wrong.
I think that just shows, through everything he does.
I think that aspect of Lawrence must have formed really quite early on.
Lawrence had certain gifts.
He was able to manipulate people extraordinarily well,
and to manipulate people extraordinarily well
you must have an ability to size them up almost instantly.
But it's a gift - that business of being able to put people in your pocket -
it is a mixture of charm. It is a mixture of analysis, of hunch.
'For me there's another vital clue in Lawrence's early years
'that hints at his desire to change history.'
Lawrence seemed to his schoolteachers a relatively ordinary, if eccentric, bookish boy,
but there was something very strange about his interests.
He was obsessed with knights in shining armour.
He cycled round the country doing brass rubbings of crusading heroes because he wanted to emulate them.
He wanted to compete with them.
He wanted some of the glory of being a knight in shining armour.
Lawrence was not an accidental hero.
He was someone who set out, quite deliberately, to become a hero.
In 1909 when he was 20, 21,
Lawrence walked 1,000 miles across Syria and the Middle East.
A tough and dangerous journey during which he studied Crusader castles for his university thesis.
He began in Constantinople, then the capital of the Turkish Ottoman Empire.
He walked right down into Ottoman, Syria.
It was on this trip that Lawrence discovered the landscape,
and more importantly, the people that came to dominate his life.
Lawrence spent a lot of time walking through the Middle East - he was often
doing nine, ten hours a day across the landscape of Syria and Palestine.
Every night he was staying in a different village hut,
sometimes in a Bedouin tent, and they'd never take any payment for it.
He was a kind of wandering mascot I suppose, or must have seemed
to them, this blonde, English boy in his formal British clothes.
Sometimes he would aim for a Crusader castle, but often he'd be sitting
in a tent on a village floor listening to people talk about their lives, talk about the government.
By the end of it, the shy, young undergraduate from Oxford had found himself.
I can relate to Lawrence's experience, I walked from Turkey
to Bangladesh when I was 26 which took me about 21 months, and I walked about 6,000 miles,
and I stayed in about 500 village houses on the way.
These are random places that just happened to be 20 or 25 miles apart.
I walked across Afghanistan shortly after the fall of the Taliban
through villages ten days' walk from the nearest road.
I had some difficult experiences, the man on my right
in this photograph, tried to shoot me for a bet.
Afghans, in their dignity, taught me a great deal about
how to live a meaningful life and they protected me.
I found when I returned to the Government,
when I returned to working with the Foreign Office and the military in Iraq,
that I'd learnt an enormous amount. The fact that these communities are extremely generous,
often very honour-led, but also surprisingly conservative, religious and anti-foreign.
I think there are elements of emotional, spiritual motivation in this,
my sense that I had left a line of footprints for 6,000 miles behind me across Asia.
And also I think, certainly for Lawrence, walking through the Holy Land, an echo of the Crusades
of the disciples of Christ walking across the Holy Land.
He arrived here in June 1909, the Syrian capital of Krak des Chevaliers,
which he called the greatest castle in the world.
When Lawrence comes here as a young man, to get here at all,
he needs special passports and permissions coming from Istanbul.
And it is dangerous territory, often the Ottoman police are stopping him
from investigating things, when he goes off on his own, he gets beaten up.
'This is contested territory, even today.
'A central strategic point for the knights,
'Lawrence's boyhood obsession who came to conquer and hold the Holy Land for Christianity.
'It is a central link in a chain of castles stretching across Syria
'which, for three centuries, they held against the local Muslim population.'
The size of the stones, the tens of thousands of people building this building.
The amount of lives, money, energy, fanaticism poured into this kind of occupation.
You can sense here, in Krak des Chevalier,
why the Crusades are such an astonishing phenomenon, even today.
This Crusade...
..this war on terrorism is going to take a while.
..and the government's of the west were responsible for what he called,
"A Crusader campaign against Muslims."
You can see why Osama Bin Laden is obsessed by the Crusades, why George Bush refers to the Crusades.
The scale of this occupation, the amount of investment, this isn't Portakabins and barbed wire.
This is massive blocks of limestone, tens of thousands of workmen, 75 years building this castle.
So Lawrence, as he's moving around, putting himself into the mindset of the people who built this castle,
trying to understand how they defended themselves is already thinking about the link
between occupation and local populations.
And the terrible tragedy,
the surreal weirdness of foreigners trying to cling on to an alien land.
In Lawrence's time, Syria was under a different form of occupation - the rule of Ottoman Turks.
Muslims, but not Arabs, ruling despotically over a vast Arab empire.
Lawrence saw day by day the repression of Arab culture
and sensed the Arab longing for freedom.
It was, in his words, only a dream
because their "spirits were shrivelled under the numbing breath of a military government."
Lawrence's first job after university was in Syria,
where he worked in a remote area as an archaeologist.
Archaeology was very different in the Middle East then. You had a small number of foreign archaeologists
and a huge, great native workforce and Lawrence's job was to manage that workforce.
So he becomes an Arabist. He learns the language. He is immersed in the culture.
He's learning about the Syrian tribes, he comes to identify very strongly with the Arab world.
Today, this team of British archaeologists are excavating
the site of an old Ottoman Turkish garrison.
- And this thing? - That's a Mauser bullet.
- So this is Turkish? - This is Turkish.
- That is First World War munitions. You get lots of that. - Amazing.
While Lawrence was digging ancient objects out of the ground,
Europe was hurtling towards the First World War.
The Ottoman soldiers that he met were not only controlling the Arab populations,
they were about to ally themselves with Germany against Britain and France.
We are looking at the Ottoman Empire, a decaying empire, an empire that is under attack from other empires,
from other great powers, and we are also looking at an empire which faces revolt from within.
This was a fort from which the Ottomans tried to occupy a vast desert landscape
and subdue the nomadic Bedouin tribes.
This is called Batn al Ghul in Arabic, which means, "The belly of the beast."
This is a place where you move from the relative safety of the uplands over there,
down into a bandit country where the possibility of Bedouin raiding becomes a real threat.
I sometimes wonder what was going on in the minds of those Ottoman boys, those Turkish boys.
They found themselves in this very bleak landscape a long way from home,
they found that they were hated, they were unwelcome.
It must have been as miserable
as the Western Front was for British and French soldiers in a very different way.
You can see just watching these men how much Lawrence learned
from being an archaeologist, gaining a precise eye for detail, for geology, for topography.
The experience of years working alongside and managing hundreds of Arab labourers.
The landscape has the same effect on a soldier as on an archaeologist
in some ways because it is to a soldier from Manchester or London
or Denver Colorado - coming out here, it is such an alien landscape.
And the landscape teaches you, and you can either learn from it or fail
and if you fail you shouldn't be an archaeologist. It is probably the same with a soldier.
One of the exciting things about doing modern conflict
archaeology in the Middle East is that it resonates with the present.
And there is a sense in which you can see in Iraq,
and I think also in Afghanistan, that a modern empire,
the American Empire is facing insurgency and the kind of asymmetrical warfare
which is just as difficult for the Americans and British to deal with
as the insurgency the Ottoman Turks were facing 90 years ago dealing with the Arabs.
By 1914 Lawrence spoke good Arabic, he had done some remarkable journeys
and he had a real empathy for Arabic culture.
It was this that must have drawn the attention of certain departments of the British Government.
A few months before the beginning of the First World War,
Lawrence came down this narrow lane in Marylebone
to call on the Palestine Exploration Fund,
an archaeological society which is virtually unchanged from Lawrence's day.
Well, this is the frontier between British Egypt and the Ottoman Empire.
The British had this area mapped as well.
'But in 1914 the Palestine Exploration Fund was also doing its bit
'on the side for British intelligence.'
This is the map from the expedition?
This was the best map of its type for the region.
The British didn't have a decent map of the border between the Ottoman Empire and British Egypt.
This would be the front line if there was a war, it protected the main lines to British India.
The Suez Canal is absolutely the crucial factor.
'Lawrence was selected for a small team that claims to be looking for archaeological remains
'from the biblical exodus from Egypt but, in fact, the map served a military purpose.'
Suddenly he finds himself involved in this, why is he here?
- What is he doing? - There was no doubt about it that this was intended
as an undercover operation, using an academic organisation as a front.
And in fact, Lawrence jokes about being a red herring.
We even have the letter that is referring to Lawrence
as a young man, who is quite shy, but good at colloquial Arabic and gets on very well with the natives.
"He has, I think, more of the instincts of an explorer, but is very shy."
So this is a sort of a precursor for what he is going to be doing in the revolt.
Where you have small teams of a few British officers, Arab supporters,
on the move, being self-sufficient in the desert, which is hostile.
Without the survey, Lawrence would not have been Lawrence of Arabia, I feel that fervently.
Lawrence's map covers a section of the vast Negev desert,
an area that now straddles Egypt, Israel and Jordan.
An area across which he would later launch his guerrilla raids.
As he worked, he was undergoing a transformation.
I think that can be seen in his curious reaction to his first visit to the ancient site of Petra.
And it was this exactly that Lawrence saw in 1914.
He came down this gorge, arrived in this open square
and there in front of him, the most astonishing 2,000-year-old temple.
The Corinthian columns at the top looking as though they were carved yesterday.
He'd been an archaeologist for four years.
He loved the ancient world, he loved the Middle East,
and here in Petra you would have thought everything came together.
But strangely in his account, it's not the temple that he writes about, but it is this.
It's about the fact that you can only get one camel down this pass.
He's beginning to think more like a general and less like a historian.
After all this time, digging up old objects, he was beginning to realise that it was people
that he was more interested in, and in this part of the world, specifically, the Bedouin.
But secondly, it's 1914, the First World War is coming,
and Lawrence isn't just an archaeologist any more.
He is here on a new expedition, financed by the Secret Service.
He's changing from being an historian, into a spy.
Sir Mark Allen is one of Britain's foremost Arabists. He has spent more than 30 years
working for the British Diplomatic Service in the Middle East.
I asked him why the Government would take the risk of recruiting such an eccentric person.
I think when people are being recruited for public service, you are looking for conventional people,
people who have good formation, good education, who are going to behave themselves, fit in.
But we all know people like that can be a bit dull.
And so there is another type that the magpie mind spots glittering in the hedge.
A slightly unconventional, little bit eccentric maybe, a bit too clever.
And Lawrence's indifference to hierarchy again would have been attractive
because he would have seen the world the other way about and that would have been helpful to them.
His genius, I think that's a fair word to use of Lawrence, was to see that we wouldn't make much headway
dealing with Arabs unless one crossed the street, walked into the crowd
and really made a self-conscious attempt to understand how it looked to them.
I think Lawrence is remarkable in his ability to do that, his commitment to doing that.
That made Lawrence very, very unusual.
Get down! Get down!
What do you think his analysis would have been of how good we are today
at following through on those lessons?
He would have connected with American vision of trying to make the world a better place.
And I think that he would have wept with frustration at the way things are.
That these fine, wonderful, very brave, very rich, competent, powerful people
don't have the language
or the experience to walk into the crowd.
When the First World War was declared,
Lawrence was initially given a job, not in the infantry and the trenches,
but working in the map office for British intelligence.
His focus was the Ottoman Empire -
this amazing combination of Islamic sentiment and a Prussian-trained modern army.
Lawrence was soon dispatched to the British Army's command centre in Cairo -
the centre of their operations against the Ottoman army.
His job was to record carefully on maps the precise position of almost every Ottoman unit.
He began to understand their cap badges, their specialisms, their numbers.
There was almost no-one in the British headquarters who could rival, by this stage,
his knowledge of the tribal, religious and racial mix of the Middle East.
One of the reasons Lawrence is so successful,
he's one of the few people who can describe the complexity of it.
You start with Ansari Muslims on the coast, then moving inwards, you have Kurds.
Next cut down you start with Arab Circassians and Persian Ismailis, Marinite
and Greek Christians on the coast, a burst of Sunnis, some Mutawalli Shias,
and right out on the edge of Mosul you have devil-worshipping Yazidis.
The great Ottoman Turkish Empire faced some serious problems.
It was nearly bankrupt.
Its armies were weakened.
But the Ottoman sultan was still the caliph, still the supreme leader of the Islamic world.
When he called for a jihad against the British, he risked provoking revolt
not just in Arabia, but among 100 million Muslims in British India.
This threat of a jihad, or holy war, is something we are familiar with today.
But then, as now, the problem was how to respond.
Lawrence and his colleagues decided
that the solution was to launch a counter-Jihad.
In order to do so, the British allied themselves
with Sharif Hussein of Mecca, a descendant of the prophet, one of the few men
with the charisma and authority to stand as a real rival to the Ottoman Sultan.
Hussein wanted a vast independent Arab Empire after the war.
The British suggested that they would give it to him in return for his support.
Hussein took the British at face value and the basis of what
he thought was their promise, launched his revolt.
His counter-Jihad against the Ottoman Turks.
However, this revolt got off to a very bad start.
Sharif Hussein and his family were beaten again and again by the modern Turkish army
and in 1916 Lawrence was despatched from Cairo, to try to find out what was going wrong.
He was going to meet the family at the centre of the Arab revolt.
The Emir of Mecca, Sharif Hussein and with him, his sons,
Ali, Abdullah, Faisal and Zeid, he was going to try to identify
which one of these men could be the leader and he was hoping he could impress them enough
to attach himself to them and at last engage with the enemy,
finally fulfilling his dreams of doing something heroic in the deserts of Arabia.
- Which one? This one? - Yes. - OK.
Lawrence managed to get permission to travel far into the desert. He travelled by camel.
Much more elegantly, I hope, than me.
You are used to this.
- You can go a long way in the desert without much water. - Yes.
But for Lawrence, it's new for him. It is very hard.
He comes from Great Britain to the desert.
- It is a big difference. - Very hard for him.
So what are the different commands for a camel?
For example, if you want to go faster?
HE CLICKS
Lawrence learned to travel astonishing distances on a camel. He was very tough.
His camels were very strong and he could travel up to 100 miles a day.
A difficult feat, even for some of the Bedouin.
It's a nice camel.
A horse is more comfortable.
What is the problem with fighting here for you?
The Bedouin know this area.
Turkish, he don't know.
Bedouins know there is water there and he will look for the water and they will go and he will drink.
Turkish, he don't have this experience.
And also the people in the towns, do they support the Bedouin
or do they support the Othmani?
They support the Bedouins. Because they know each other.
At last, Lawrence was no longer stuck behind a desk in Cairo
with his brothers fighting in the trenches. Instead, he was on his own, riding into the desert
and beginning to get acquainted with the land he loved.
At the end of his journey, was Sharif Hussein's third son, Faisal,
waiting for him at Wadi Safra.
And there in front of him is this man, who isn't the kind of man
that a British officer would expect to meet.
For a start, he's clad in these elaborate robes, he has black slaves behind him,
he is smoking incessantly, 100 cigarettes a day, he sits up till half past three in the morning.
I think it is Lawrence's cultural awareness which lets him see that although this man doesn't look
like a British General, this is exactly the kind of man who through his patience, his gentleness,
and his family position, is going to be able to effectively lead an Arab revolt.
Lawrence described it in storybook terms, as love at first sight.
He wrote, "I felt, at first glance, that this was the man I had come to Arabia to seek."
The next two years, Lawrence spent almost all of his life living in Bedouin tents
and I'm spending a night with people whose fathers and grandfathers fought alongside Lawrence.
How about the Zubaida and the Zalubani. Does he remember them?
THEY TALK ARABIC
- They are not Howetat. - They're not.
One of the things that Lawrence says which is difficult for me not to do
is that he believes that you shouldn't ask questions.
You should spend weeks or months sitting listening to people talking about their genealogies,
talking about their families, before you ask any questions.
Lawrence found the Bedouin with their courage, their violence,
their hospitality, their dignity,
their generosity to be about as close as he could come in the modern world
to his dream of living with, fighting with, working with medieval knights.
We're sitting in the Majlis, or the meeting place of a great sheik and you can see
in the centre the coffee pot which gathers people in the evening.
THEY SING IN ARABIC
Looking around this room, you can see the kinds of issues he was dealing with every day.
You can see, first having to navigate who the most senior people in the room are.
There are three sheiks here from their respective tribes.
The different ways people sit, not showing the soles of their feet, for example.
You can see some people running prayer beads through their hands, which is generally a sign of piety.
There are five people here today who are wearing pistols.
And this is the kind of group he would have been with night after night,
trying to judge by looking into people's eyes who is going to be reliable,
who is going to want to fight with him.
It's a minefield out there and all of it represents why what Lawrence did was so uniquely difficult.
Our host's father went with Lawrence
to blow up a railway station about 200 metres from here.
What do people say about Lawrence as a man, his character?
HE SPEAKS IN HIS NATIVE TONGUE
He was an English officer who served his country for a long period of time.
He helped the Arabs in their revolt, especially with the bombings here in the area during the revolt.
So Lawrence was a friend of the Arabs.
It is striking how, although many Arabs today are suspicious of Lawrence
because of his colonial associations,
these men, whose fathers and grandfathers fought with him have picked up from their ancestors
a sense of respect, a sense that he had a real sympathy for Arab people.
But reading Lawrence's account of this time, it is also clear just how gruelling he found these conditions.
It's a pretty difficult night if you are not used to sleeping in these kind of conditions.
Got about 40 people sleeping in the tent with you,
children coming and going.
It was so cold that on certain nights they would wake up
and find five or six people had died from exposure during the night.
Its very, very strange for a foreigner because you can never fully relax
because it is not your own culture and I think one of the reasons why Lawrence's nerves
must have worn over a year or 18 months is that this tent is their home,
they've got their wives, their livestock
and they've got their children and in the evenings they can go back to them.
Whereas he, every night, is working.
He is looking around thinking, "Which of you guys is going to come out on a raid with me tomorrow?"
Is this guy who I had an argument with yesterday, is he going to fall out?
But what exactly they're thinking, I don't know.
This sort of life, and this is probably the end of it, you can see with these clapped out cars
and the various bits of rubble scattered through desert,
that the life is changing quite dramatically.
But you feel, really,
a connection to history.
The whole question of how a westerner can operate in what will feel like a very alien environment,
how Lawrence can be in an Arab tent in robes, drinking coffee, dealing with a difficult language
with tribal structures, all of the difficulty of that, but also perhaps even the romance of that,
is something that remains pressing 80 years later for American and British troops in Iraq.
- Smile, sir. - Sadat, these actually look quite nice!
Yes. Hand made, sir.
But this is not actually an Arab tent, this is a shipping container.
This is the closest they get, for some of them, to the real Arab world.
American soldiers fighting today in the Middle East are not living night after night alone in Bedouin tents.
They live a life which is both more protected and also more isolated from the local population.
The great challenge for them and the reason that they read Lawrence is to try and work out how to develop
those forms of cultural sensitivity. How to leave your own culture and enter an Arab one effectively.
As part of this, American officers are still encouraged
to read the 27 points which Lawrence wrote as a guide for British officers 90 years ago.
Thousands of US Army Majors have learned the story of Lawrence
and are also shown clips from the great movie Lawrence of Arabia.
There's the scene of Lawrence sitting in Faisal's tent.
And of course his superior, the British colonel,
wants to get on with business
and Lawrence is listening and he even finishes the recitation.
And surely the future shall be better for thee than the past.
And in the end, shall your Lord be bounteous to thee.
- And thou be satisfied. - It works really well.
I've seen many officers and NCOs who've been to Iraq and Afghanistan say, after you turn off the clip,
say, "That was exactly like any number of meetings I've had."
The interesting thing is that discussion never happened in reality, but it's OK.
The movie will work as a device to get them to think about Lawrence.
I mean, it's interesting. You open this book with Lawrence's articles.
On the first page, the American officer reading this is told,
"Learn all you can about your tribal name and bedu, get to know their families,
"clans and tribes, friends and enemies, wells hills and roads.
"Bury yourself in Arab circles, have no interests and no ideas
"except the work in hand so that your brain is saturated with one thing only
"and you realise your part."
You don't think an American officer reading that will think, "Well, come on!
"I'm not going to be able to do that"?
None of them will ever be able to speak Arabic the way that Lawrence did.
But still, I think the idea that Lawrence offers...
The example does resonate with some.
But there is another reason why the US military study Lawrence.
He is not just a cultural anthropologist.
He was, in a sense, the first foreign insurgent.
He grasped instinctively how a local population
could use its position and its landscape to defeat a foreign military occupation.
While his brothers were fighting on the Western Front,
Lawrence was immersing himself in an alien culture
and learning how a very different form of religion and nationalism
could be used to pioneer a new form of guerrilla warfare.
Normally, looking at a landscape like this, you'd just give up.
Because everything you would be taught at staff college if you were a British officer
would tell you that this landscape is a waste of time.
An army marches on its stomach, you've got to supply it, There is no way of getting food
this far into the desert, there's no water to keep people.
So what is remarkable about Lawrence is that he sees
all those things, all those negative things are, in fact, advantages
because this is going to be a problem for the Turks,
but it is not going to be so much a problem for the Bedouin.
The Bedouin have lived here.
The Bedouin can move 200 miles through this without needing water.
This is, of course, the landscape
that you can see in parts of Iraq, in parts of Southern Afghanistan.
And it is a landscape which is very, very difficult for a large army to move through.
Armies are very dependent on roads, they are very dependent on rail networks.
You can patrol this desert, but if you patrol in small numbers you can be ambushed.
And you can't garrison it because you can't re-supply yourselves.
So in the end, most of it is empty most of the time
and an empty space on the map is a very dangerous space.
The Ottoman Empire extended deep into the deserts of Arabia.
The one thing that allowed them to supply their beleaguered garrison at Medina was their railway line.
This was the only way that they could bring reinforcements or supplies.
Lawrence decided to move through the desert and not to attack the fortresses or the troops,
but instead to target precisely 1,100 miles of fragile,
expensive line and engines
in order to cut the spine of that empire.
Lawrence would have been carrying about 50 pounds of gelignite
which he needed to have got up and under these rails without being seen.
That involved him digging out about 50 pounds of sand, placing the fuse underneath
and then trying to set the trigger.
Now the trigger was usually a rifle which had been cut off at the barrel end.
As the train moves, the train pulls the trigger. At which point, the barrel,
which has got a bullet in it pointing down into the sand, ignites the entire bunch of gelignite.
These were the attacks which David Lean enacts so powerfully in his film.
Your whole train's blow up, you've no idea what's taking place.
Machine gun fire is coming in from that ridge there.
You want to get behind here in order to take cover.
It is at that point Lawrence is depending on his mortar fire which is going to come over the top
and try to get them behind the train.
But the whole thing is black smoke everywhere. Noise everywhere.
Pistons exploding. People screaming.
Trains falling off on either side.
And this whole area around it is littered with sick and dying and wounded soldiers.
It is complete carnage.
And although Lawrence tries to put a brave face on it -
he writes to friends saying, "We had a good show, we managed to get it, it was just like the wild west" -
In another letter to a friend he says, "I cannot bear the killing.
"I cannot bear the sight of these dead men."
In many dangerous spots,
the Turks would send out patrols in front of their trains
and they would walk 15 people in front of the train
to stop them from blowing it up.
It was a complete disaster.
Understandably, nobody wanted to get on this train any more.
By the end of 1917
passengers on the Damascus-Medina line are paying extra
to sit in the third class carriages at the back of the train,
rather than the first class carriages up near the engine.
And a lot of it was to do with terror.
It was terrorists, because they would put huge signs up
in the train station in Damascus anonymously at night saying,
"No good Arabs should get on this train,
"if you get on this train we'll blow you up."
Very, very similar to what terrorists will do today in Iraq,
what they will do today in Britain.
It's to do with trying to ensure, not just that you do the damage,
but that you scare people into believing you're going to do future damage.
Lawrence was an insurgent.
In today's language the Turks would have regarded him as a terrorist.
I think he would have understood what the Taliban were up to instinctively,
and objectively, on account of his own experience.
Wouldn't have any difficulty with that at all.
Little wonder then that when the US military were trying to fight insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan,
they turned back to the writings of Lawrence
and saw him as a voice for this kind of insurgency.
General David Petraeus, who was the American commander in Iraq,
and is now the commander in Afghanistan,
devised a whole new counter-insurgency doctrine,
a new field manual, a lot of which draws on Lawrence's writings.
One of the co-authors of this was John Nagl.
Downloaded more than a million times in the first month after it was published.
Copies found in Taliban training camps in Pakistan.
So we know our enemies are reading it,
now we just have to get our guys to do it.
Lawrence was trying to sap the strength of the Ottoman Empire.
He attacked their logistics.
He refused to provide them with a set-piece battle,
which he knew they would win.
And instead, he would inflict the death of a thousand cuts.
And he actually felt sorry for the conventional army he fought.
He compared it to a plant.
It is rooted firmly, it has these long lines of supply,
it can't move rapidly.
And, by comparison, an insurgent is a vapour.
An insurgent can disappear at will.
It is enormously difficult for a conventional army
designed to confront another conventional army
to fight against an immaterial vapour.
Lawrence actually was using guerrilla tactics and techniques
to create a small army of guerrilla fighters.
To some extent in Afghanistan, the Taliban is following Lawrence's precepts more precisely.
Are we right that, in this sense, he's on the side of the enemy?
To succeed in this kind of war, you need to be...
someone who thinks a little bit outside the box,
to use a horribly overused American phrase.
You have to be willing to connect with the people you are fighting,
who are also the people you are fighting with.
The fundamental challenge for the US forces and their allies
in Iraq and Afghanistan are to work with local forces.
Lawrence was in the centre of an Arab army.
He was building the capacity of local troops.
Night after night as he crossed this stony wilderness,
he was trying to bring together feuding Arab tribes
into a single national fighting force.
So Lawrence stops here for the night on his way from Wadi Rum
on an attack on a Turkish train station.
This is the carpet of brown flints that he describes over a lime scrag.
He started the day with about a hundred people and they're all fighting.
There's the Zubaida tribe, the Zalubeni tribe, some Howeitat have joined them.
He's running back and forth between these different groups,
discussing pay, spoils, who's going to ride first.
Come night, they stop
and there are three little groups around tamarisk fires.
And he's delighted, because the day started with ten different groups
and he's managed to get them to combine into three.
But if he is really going to create a new Arab nation
he's got to get them into one.
Lawrence's military genius faced its greatest test at the beginning of 1917.
His aim was to work with Auda Abu Tayeh,
one of the most famous Bedouin warriors in Arabia.
A man who couldn't count the number of people that he'd killed.
Together with Auda he decided,
without asking permission or even informing his bosses,
to head for Aqaba,
the Turkish Ottoman port that controlled the Red Sea.
It was an astonishing journey,
beginning with 17 or 18 peoples through this remote area of desert.
All the skills, his sense of insurgency,
his feeling for the tribes, came together
as historian Michael Asher, who served in the SAS, explained to me.
It was really the classic special forces operation because they made
this incredible turning movement through the hardest desert in Arabia.
There is one area called Al Houl which means "the terror", literally,
where there is not a single blade of grass, not a single tree.
Not even flies could live there.
The reasons he did that was, it was a feint.
If he'd made straight towards Aqaba,
the Turks would have realised immediately
that that was his objective.
And just a handful of men, only 17 to start off with, no heavy weapons,
they then set about recruiting local people,
the hearts and minds technique of special forces.
And they eventually became 500.
All special forces operations really go back to Aqaba, to that operation.
The fighting, which in David Lean's film
takes place on the Aqaba beaches,
in fact took place 60 miles inland, here at Abu Lissan.
This was the key point.
The Turks here controlled the pass, going down into the Guweira plain,
so he who controlled the pass really controlled Aqaba.
But it was the topography that really was the key to the battle,
because the Turks were down in the depression, that we can see here,
Lawrence's men were up on the high ground.
Basically, the Arabs had them pinned down in this hollow.
At the end of the day, after sniping at them virtually the whole day,
Lawrence got a bit fed up with the Howeitat and said to Auda Abu Tayeh,
"How is it with the Howeitat, all talk and no work?"
And, Auda who was very sensitive to these pricks against his honour,
turned absolutely pale and he marched off,
and the next minute Lawrence saw this hoard of Howeitat horsemen
charging down into the valley, and he very quickly followed on his camel.
But just at the crucial moment
he shot his own camel through the head with his pistol
and ended up sailing through the air and hit the ground,
lost consciousness, and when he came round the whole thing was over.
He'd won one of the most crucial ports in the Middle East,
and in an instant this map maker from a desk at Cairo,
with his romantic army,
had created a legend and proved the worth of the Arab forces.
The theory of the SAS is if you get the right man you can do anything.
If you get people like Lawrence
who can really understand the way Arabs think
and really see the world as they see it, then you could do it.
But of course, it is very difficult to find those kind of people,
and that is why Lawrence was so special.
It wasn't enough for Lawrence
to capture this important, strategic port,
because of course British headquarters underestimated the Arabs.
He needed now to communicate their victory back to Cairo.
There were no telephones, no telegraph,
the only way to do it was to take the news personally by camel,
across the Sinai to Suez, and then to Cairo.
Now Lawrence had to do that himself
because he realised that if he sent someone,
no-one would believe him, because this wasn't an authorised operation.
Nobody knew where Lawrence was, where had he been for all these weeks?
Nobody knew. So if an Arab had turned up and said, "We've captured, Aqaba", nobody would believe him.
Lawrence knew he had to do it in person,
so he set off on this epic ride across Sinai.
When Lawrence had left Cairo six months earlier
he'd been a junior British officer in British military uniform.
Nobody had heard from him in two months.
And during his time with the Bedouin,
he'd changed into a very different person,
on that tough journey back across Sinai.
He was travelling back to the British military headquarters,
the headquarters in Cairo.
And a world which he must half have forgotten.
When Lawrence staggered, exhausted after that heroic ride,
into the edge of the British base in Cairo,
he somehow managed to get in to see General Allenby.
The contrast between Allenby, a cavalry officer, tall,
a product of the Victorian Army in his polished riding boots,
and as Lawrence says of himself,
"A little silk-robed, bare-footed man offering to hobble the enemy,"
couldn't have been more dramatic.
And yet it was a meeting of minds.
Allenby immediately decided to provide armoured cars,
machine guns, mortars and compasses to help the Arab cause.
Allenby could see that a man like Lawrence
was exactly the person who could form the right wing of his army,
lead them against the Ottoman Turks.
For Lawrence, however, a different kind of challenge was emerging.
He suddenly had two masters, Allenby and Faisal.
He was hoping he could win a victory for General Allenby and for the British
and for Faisal, an independent Arab kingdom.
All of this, of course,
was going to depend on what was decided in Britain.
Would the British Government keep its promise
to give the Arabs the independence and freedom,
to give the Arabs the respect and the autonomy
that Lawrence felt they deserved?
While Lawrence was continuing his fight in the deserts of Arabia,
far way, back in Whitehall, the British and the French
had in fact secretly decided to betray the Arabs.
And instead of giving Faisal an independent kingdom,
to divide Arabia up into British and French colonies.
The French negotiator in all of this was George Picot.
The British negotiator was Sir Mark Sykes.
Together they decided to divide Arabia
into two Imperial possessions.
I talked to historian James Barr
about the significance of the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
The reason Sykes was brought in as an expert was because he had written
a book on the Ottoman Empire, just before the war.
And if you look in the index of that book, which Sykes wrote,
he has an entry for Arab character,
and it says, "Arab character see also treachery."
That was Sykes's view.
It was a deal done to carve up the Middle East
between these two Empires, between Britain and France.
What it did was to divide the Middle East along a diagonal line
that ran from the Mediterranean coast up to the Persian border.
From the "E" of acre to the last "K" in Kirkuk,
which gives you this wonderful idea of how it was designed on a map.
There was no...
it bore no relation to geography or to ethnicity or religion.
It was simply a line on a map.
It was a very complacent and arrogant thing to do.
It was dividing up a land that neither of them yet ran
and one of the British officials in the War Office said,
"It's a bit like being hunters who divided up the skin of a bear before we have killed it."
So Lawrence knew that the British and French were actually planning to divide Arabia up into colonies.
So how do you think this felt for Lawrence
to have to be with the Arabs to promise them this kind of freedom
while knowing that the same thing had been promised in other directions at the same time?
He's absolutely appalled and he writes a note
to his commanding officer, when he's deep in the desert, saying,
"We are getting them to fight for us on a lie and I can't stand it."
The Sykes-Picot Agreement is a deal that's seldom discussed in Britain today
but the Arabs have certainly not forgotten it
because it was a treaty that betrayed all the promises
that Lawrence and the British Government had made to the Arabs.
And worse, something that was going to haunt Middle Eastern politics
for decades to come.
When Osama Bin Laden talks about the nature of his mission,
when he thinks about Lawrence of Arabia,
he thinks about the betrayal of Sykes-Picot and calls it,
in his words, "The dissection of the Islamic world into fragments."
Next, I want to show how Lawrence tries to reverse the injustice of Sykes-Picot.
How he tries to use his fame and his military glory
to win a fair settlement for the Arabs
and how the legacy of that conflict destroyed both Lawrence
and our future relations with the Middle East.
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