In this church in rural Dorset
is one of my heroes. A man on whose death
Churchill said, "I fear whatever our need, we shall not see his like again".
An Englishmen who'll forever be connected to the deserts of Arabia.
Lawrence is best-known from the Hollywood blockbuster
where he is played by Peter O'Toole as an eccentric, intense,
young blond Englishman leading an Arab army
in a First World War revolt against the Ottoman Turks.
Damascus!
Today, Lawrence has an extraordinary new relevance.
Before American officers are posted to Iraq and Afghanistan
on their own desert campaigns, they're made to study Lawrence.
They see Lawrence as the man who cracked how to fight in the Middle East.
But there's another chapter of his life which we know much less about.
He returned from the battles in Arabia to a different kind of fight.
A fight in the cabinet rooms of Downing Street, the Palace of Versailles.
Lawrence's called this his dogfight in the corridors of power,
but unlike his battles in Arabia, this was a fight he lost.
HE SPEAKS ARABIC
His political vision for Arabia was ignored,
and this has poisoned our relations with the Middle East ever since.
He was a man of vision, unfortunately not many people were willing to listen to him after 1918.
Had they were, much of the crisis that we are facing today might not have happened.
In this film I want to show how Lawrence's campaign to reshape
the Middle East is the forgotten chapter in his story.
Its failure ultimately destroyed him
and it continues to haunt us in Iraq and Afghanistan today.
I first heard about Lawrence when I was about six.
I was living in Malaysia and when my father took me walking in the jungle,
every time I complained about being thirsty, he'd say "Lawrence of Arabia
"went for three days through the desert without food and water."
As I grew older I often thought about Lawrence, the warrior hero.
Then in 2003, after the invasion of Iraq, I became the Deputy Governor of two Iraqi provinces.
Gathered in this room are the fathers and the mothers of the new province.
I was living in Amara, a town where Lawrence stayed 90 years earlier.
Like him, I was a young British official involved in another British occupation in Iraq.
There in a Muslim town,
but surrounded by foreign soldiers, I began to read his journalism and letters.
I suddenly discovered Lawrence, not as some kind of desert warrior in a Hollywood movie,
but instead as a journalist criticising the British Government's intervention in Iraq in 1920.
In which he said, "The people of England have been led in Iraq
"into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour."
"It's a disgrace to our Imperial record.
"We are today not far from disaster."
He was writing about events in Iraq in 1920.
But to me, he was describing the insanity and indignity of what I saw around me in 2003.
Before Lawrence comes to these conclusions
on Britain's intervention in Iraq, he is embroiled in a dramatic First World War military campaign.
Lawrence is not fighting in the mud of Flanders, but in the deserts of Arabia.
Not in tanks, but on camels.
Lawrence has been sent by the British too weld Arab tribes
into an army capable of overthrowing their occupiers, the Ottoman Turks,
who are now allied with the Germans and threaten Britain's empire in the east.
But gradually Lawrence finds he's serving two masters.
As a British officer, he is pursuing the aims of the British Empire with British guns and British money.
But he is also living with and trying to serve Arabs,
whose only objective is a free, independent Arabia, whose capital is Damascus.
Damascus was central to Lawrence's vision of Arabia.
Damascus is the dream palace,
Damascus represents for him
the great age of Arab independence, one of the greatest cities of the world.
In his words, one of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
For Arab civilisation the seat of the first great Arab Empire.
All of this, and of course the wealth of the surrounding countryside,
is what made it essential for Lawrence and the Arab movement to put Damascus at their heart.
To make this incredibly cosmopolitan, sophisticated city
the capital of their new empire rather than wastelands of desert Arabia.
Lawrence's allies are not a formal army, they are insurgents, one might almost say terrorists -
using propaganda, the support of the local population,
to launch swift and devastating raids.
Their principal target was not the Ottoman soldiers, but instead the fragile rail track
which was the spine of the Ottoman empire
linking their HQ at Damascus to their garrison at Medina.
This is an Ottoman Turkish railway station,
its really a fortified blockhouse.
Two or three hundred Turkish soldiers would have been in this station
defending this section of the line.
There's something about this which is incredibly desperate, somebody has just smashed through
in order to create this spit hole. This window is too dangerous.
I mean you can feel almost... the speed
and the desperation that have gone into
hacking into this to create your firing position.
Lawrence talks a lot about creeping up on these kinds of places.
As you get within about 300 yards crawling through the sand, you can see coming through
presumably windows like this, the light of the cooking fires.
A man walks out to light a cigarette and the light
briefly illuminates his face and he sees it's a hollow-faced, pale-faced young officer.
And as Lawrence says, as long as he could keep
those soldiers in their block houses poking their rifles out those slits,
that was all they were ever going to command, 150 yards around a station like this.
While the other 100,000 square miles
stretching out here to Saudi Arabia was his.
The Arab army moved across the gravel and the sands as though across a limitless ocean.
As Lawrence said, "The Arabs might be a vapour".
The Arabs were now the right wing of a massive British-led advance.
The two forces were driving north
through the Negev desert in parallel, the Arabs on the right, the British on the left.
By December 1917, they had reached Jerusalem.
General Allenby, Commander of the British Forces in the East,
invited Lawrence to march with the soldiers into the city.
Lawrence had been obsessed with Crusader Knights since he was was a boy.
It was a moment of enormous significance,
the Holy Land reclaimed for the first time since the Crusades.
This is the Jaffa Gate of the Old City of Jerusalem.
It's the Conqueror's Gate.
So when General Allenby conquers the city in 1917
it is through this gate that he marches with Lawrence behind him.
Lawrence has swapped his Arab clothes for the correct uniform of a British officer, a British Major.
And they're marching instead of riding horses
because Christ walked into the old city of Jerusalem.
It was for Lawrence the supreme moment of the war, that's what he calls it.
So the British had won a glorious military victory, but what did it mean?
What was their long-term plan? Where was this going?
Who was going to get Jerusalem?
Who was going to get Arabia?
Lawrence had heard that in a secret deal the British and French politicians
had created something called the Sykes-Picot Agreement.
Lawrence had promised the Arabs, that in return for their support,
they could have a fully independent Arab kingdom.
But in fact, the British and French had decided to carve up Arabia into colonies.
Lawrence had hoped that he could both be a good British officer
and serve the Arab cause.
But as he changed from his British uniform
back into Arab dress, these competing loyalties were tearing him apart.
This is Lawrence's bedroom in the winter from 1917 to 1918.
And he felt that this whole fort
was imbued with memories.
As he walked through it he could feel in these lava stones memories of the Roman legionaries
for whom this was the outpost on the edge of the great desert that led to the Euphrates.
And the legends of all the later Arab kings.
Their chivalry, their crimes, their wanderings.
And he gathered here what was really a second mediaeval court.
Out in the courtyard, prancing up and down day after day,
were different Bedouin tribes coming out of the hills
bringing gifts, laying out silk robes, elaborately sewn felt carpets.
All of this a lavish re-enactment of a court.
He is living a life like King Arthur in his court at Camelot.
He has his 30th birthday just near here.
People are starting to believe his own legend, Allenby is believing it,
his British friends are believing it, his family are believing it.
Even the Arabs are beginning to believe he is a world historical figure.
He's another Alexander the Great. He, however, is aware of failure.
He feels like a fraud.
He's trying to sit here like a prophet in the desert sharing a creed of freedom.
But he's not a prophet, and he doesn't have any freedom to offer.
At this period, Lawrence's military actions become increasingly desperate and suicidal.
He leaves a note for his commanding officer saying, "We've asked them
"to fight on a lie, and I can't stand it".
Lawrence concludes that the only option is to rush the Arab army to Damascus.
Meanwhile, the British are advancing.
The Ottomans are fighting back with increasing ferocity
and the Arabs are working their way around the Turkish troops.
There is brutality, some horrendous massacres.
The race is on.
He wants the Arabs in Damascus before the British.
If the Arabs are to have any hope of claiming an independent kingdom,
any hope of saying there's no need for a British colony here,
and no need for a French colony, we've managed to grab Damascus.
Lawrence broke with his British masters and confessed to Faisal
that the Sykes-Picot Agreement would divide Arabia in colonies.
Lawrence wrote, "Faisal's escape would be to help the British so much that after the peace
"they would not be able, for shame, to shoot him down."
By the autumn of 1918, Faisal's dream was tantalisingly close as the Turkish army fled Damascus.
Lawrence and the Arab army slipped into the city
on the morning of October 1st 1918, just before the British army.
Lawrence arrived in Damascus wearing flowing Arab robes, but riding in a British Rolls Royce.
So it's here that finally Lawrence achieves his victory, and it's a moment of astonishing euphoria.
He comes into these crowded streets and he estimates there are 150,000
people around, there are rose petals being thrown on the ground.
They are shouting, "Lawrence, Lawrence, Lawrence", but it's also a moment of chaos.
The old regime has fled, the water supply has collapsed,
the electricity supply has collapsed, the sewerage has collapsed.
Bodies are lying in the street, festering corpses in the hospitals.
This strange fragile European man in his white silk gowns is grabbing people in this market.
Grabbing them trying to stop them from looting, trying to stop
the gunfire which is rocketing up and down these roofs above.
Here, in this Ottoman souk,
almost unchanged
you can see both the bullet fire on the roof
and the sense of that teaming hubbub of crowds, which Lawrence,
travel-stained, exhausted in his white robes is trying to move through, grab people and control.
For centuries Damascus had been under Ottoman control and suddenly it had collapsed.
It was a nation without law and government.
The province in which I worked in Iraq, just after the invasion,
literally every school had been stripped, all the electricity pylons were down,
it was this frenzy of looting everybody in 2003 thought was so unexpected.
The Americans claimed to be surprised by it.
But in fact, we'd seen it again and again.
It was, of course, what Lawrence saw in 1918.
As the dusk finally fell
on that first night in Damascus, Lawrence, who'd slept maybe three hours in three days,
heard a man from a minaret
begin to sing the call to prayer in a very soft, sweet and gentle voice.
He sang Allah Akbar. "God is great, there is no god
"but god and Mohammed as his prophet."
And then he dropped his voice a couple of tones and very gently
added, "And he is very good to us tonight, oh, people of Damascus."
But for Lawrence, he was aware of all the compromises of Sykes-Picot.
He was aware that Syria was probably about to be sold out to the French,
and that what seemed to be to the people of Damascus
a night of perfect freedom, was maybe just a mirage.
Lawrence was gambling that once Faisal was established in Damascus
it would be impossible for the British and French to topple him or replace him.
For Syrian historian, Sami Moubayed, Faisal was undoubtedly popular with the people.
Lawrence came in on 1st October,
Faisal followed on October 3rd. He was hailed as a saviour.
In a sense, Lawrence's confidence in Faisal was vindicated,
his belief that this was an appropriate ruler was correct.
Faisal had legitimacy, being a grandson of the prophet Mohammed.
Faisal had his war medals having fought in the Arab revolt in 1916.
Lawrence was able to witness the sense of revolution
that he had inspired and ignited in the Arabs.
Definitely these people were not going to accept French rule so easily.
So what were the French doing? Why did they want Syria?
I hate to say it, its pure colonial ambitions and reward for territory.
French blood had been spilt in World War I and there had to be a certain reward.
And there still was a strong sense of French and British colonialism and expansionist tendencies.
THEY SPEAK ARABIC
So it must have been straight down from this train station?
Somewhere in this bustling modern city is the site of the Victoria Hotel
where Lawrence held one of the most important meetings of his life.
- So it's round the corner on the right? - Yes.
OK, very good.
With a translator to help me I tried to find the exact spot of this encounter.
This area is all called Victoria, because of the bridge and hotel.
This was the great hotel down from the train station where Lawrence
hosted the historic meeting between his two masters,
General Allenby and Prince Faisal.
- Victoria... - Victoria?
- So we think roughly here where the bridge was? - Yes.
It was an extraordinary scene, the Turkish soldiers had vanished
and suddenly the streets of Damascus were full of Arabs on horses.
And the British in armoured vehicles.
Here, the site of the Hotel Victoria,
Lawrence's two lives came hurtling together.
Rolling down this avenue came Allenby,
the commander of the British forces
and Faisal, the leader of the Arab Revolt.
This was a moment that Lawrence must both have been looking forward to, but also dreading.
He'd been spinning stories to both of them.
To Allenby he kept trying convince him that working with the Arabs
was going to be the way to defeat the Ottomans
and ultimately, to defeating the Germans.
To Faisal,
he'd been suggesting that this was the way to win Arab freedom.
This great grand ambition,
where Lawrence is trying to be a Mahatma Gandhi,
he's trying to be a Mandela,
he's trying to lead an independence movement and this is where he finds out if it's going to work.
What happened in that room, we don't really know.
But what we do know is that Lawrence was asked to translate, by Allenby,
the terms of a Foreign Office telegram that laid out the Sykes-Picot agreement.
End of the meeting,
the telegram's been read,
Faisal walks out, or, according to some people, storms out.
Here,
the site of the Hotel Victoria,
perhaps fittingly now demolished,
was the beginning of most of the suspicion and recrimination
between the Middle East and Britain,
that has plagued the area for the next 90 years.
For Lawrence, Damascus was and should have been
the capital of an independent Arab empire.
But there in the Hotel Victoria,
he had seen that the British and the French wanted to create colonies.
He said to the French, "You can cling on for 20 years, if you like,
pretending to have a colony,
but in the end you'll be thrown out with no gratitude from anyone."
The strain of this realisation was immense.
One of the strangest things about what Lawrence does in Damascus,
on his very final day,
is that he has this portrait painted.
After all the chaos in the souk,
the bullets, the politics with Faisal,
he sits in a chair for James McBey, the Scottish portrait artist,
who describes watching him, impassive as sheik after sheik
comes in to kiss his hand, in tears,
to say goodbye.
This should have been the great moment of victory.
This should be a portrait of a victorious general.
Instead of which, you can see these sunken cheeks
and actually he's already taken on an air
of somebody who's haunted.
The following day, Lawrence left Damascus.
He returned to London from the war, shattered
and weighing just seven stone.
Above all, he needed rest.
But instead, he dedicated the next four years to another fight,
working in every way he could to establish the independence of Arabia.
When Lawrence came back to London
in the winter of 1918, he was in a completely different environment.
It wasn't just the winter British weather,
he was dealing with men who were debating in the Houses of Parliament
what must have seemed, to them, much bigger issues.
Bolshevik Russia, the threat of communism,
the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...
Compared to all of this, the Middle East
and Lawrence's concerns
must have just seemed like a sideshow of a sideshow.
Lawrence's enemies suggested that he'd gone native,
that he cared only about Arab interests.
But, in fact, he grasped that colonies in Arabia would not suit Britain or France.
He saw that the West lacked the power,
the knowledge and the legitimacy to control other people's countries.
He wrote,
"My ambition is
"that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion,
"not our last brown colony."
He saw that Arabs could
and should govern themselves.
I put this idea to historian James Barr.
Lawrence seems to be saying,
"Let's not set up a colony here. Let's have a dominion."
In other words, let's try to treat Arabia as though it was Canada or Australia.
- This sounds a bit ahead of its time. - It's completely ahead of its time.
Lawrence acknowledges there should be British influence
which is when he is talking about the Arabs being our first brown dominion.
There is a relationship with the British to provide advice, when it's wanted.
He sees the two as allies,
he thinks that he can achieve what Lloyd George wants,
which is a bridgehead in the Middle East.
But he can do so through the Arabs being allies,
rather than being subjects.
In order to achieve his goal,
Lawrence uses all his reputation,
all his contacts,
to get Feisal a seat at the Paris Peace Conference
at Versailles.
It is a chance to meet the most famous and influential
statesmen in the world.
A chance for Faisal to present his case.
And Lawrence was there with him all the time as his adviser.
Lawrence walks into the most extraordinary scene.
The great statesmen of Britain, France and America
have gathered to carve up the world between them.
Delegations are swarming in.
All the seeds, in fact,
for the chaos in Europe for the next 60 years
are being laid here, in the Palace of Versailles.
And the Middle East is coming into it too.
He was probably the most colourful figure in the whole conference
in his British colonel's uniform
with his Arab headdress, walking around with Faisal.
He's been trying to convince the British and the Arabs,
that the best thing is to have an independent Arabia and suddenly he's dealing with the French.
It is a little as though you are a British official in Iraq -
you have to think about not only what the Iraqis want or what's in the interests of Britain,
but you have to think about the United States today.
And for Lawrence, the equivalent is the French.
A big superpower that's just come out of the First World War.
He's gambling that he can break the agreement that the British made
with the French - he can break the Sykes-Picot agreement.
That he can convince the French that it doesn't make any sense
to make a colony in Arabia,
it would be better to have an independent state.
I suppose the problem for Lawrence is that he's there too late.
What he doesn't understand is that while all these minutes are being written
and all the civil servants are fiddling on the details on the map,
the real thing that's happened is that Clemenceau,
the French leader, has sat down with Lloyd George, the British Prime Minister
and had a conversation that's lasted about an hour,
in which everything has been resolved
a year before any agreement is signed.
Clemenceau says to Lloyd George, "What do you want?"
And Lloyd George says, "I'd like Mosul in Northern Iraq
"for the oil and I'd like Palestine."
And Clemenceau says, "Done".
And in return, Lloyd George basically says,
"Well, the French can have what they want in Syria."
Lawrence calls his time in Paris
the worst months of his life.
It's the first time that he has really seen politics up front.
He was used to being a hero.
For two and a half years in the desert,
British officers and officials
saw him as this amazingly romantic figure.
Suddenly, it was all changing.
As he began to get involved in politics he became an embarrassment.
He couldn't get into meetings with ministers,
and suddenly telegrams were flying around saying,
"Lawrence is out of control, get him out of Paris."
At the bottom of all of it though,
is the sense that all his gambles have failed.
And in the middle of all of this failure and all this shame,
which he must have felt very seriously,
he gets a very compassionate letter from Rudyard Kipling.
Kipling writes to him and says,
"Lawrence, if you don't do what they want you to do,
"you will be considered, from the Foreign Office point of view,
"the worst kind of crook.
"Pretty soon I expect they will accuse you of being motivated by finance in all that you did."
And then Kipling tries to encourage him and says,
"But you'll stick with the game, except for the necessary time to step aside and vomit...
"..because you are young and the men who are running affairs are old,
"cold and of intolerable entrails.
"And they'll drop out soon."
The just demands of peace and security will be met.
The modern equivalent of the Versailles peace conference is this,
the General Assembly of the United Nations.
This is where the resolutions
on Iraq and Afghanistan were debated and passed.
I've come here to meet Carne Ross,
who, like Lawrence,
tried to challenge the policies of the great powers.
Carne was the Iraq expert on the British delegation
to the United Nations.
After the 2003 invasion,
Carne resigned,
believing that the evidence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction
didn't justify the war.
Carne, like Lawrence, is an example of what can happen
when a British official tries to point out that a policy is wrong.
Here we were in the UN,
this forum of the international community saying that we are committed
to a peaceful route, to inspections,
as I was instructed to say for many years
and in fact, we were privately,
secretly preparing to do something entirely different.
And we will accept no outcome but victory.
To be frank, I found it a deeply disillusioning
and embittering experience and one that I'm still struggling with.
A country that I believed in and values that I believed in,
and when I saw that...
..undermined, I suppose, to put it mildly,
I felt very lost.
And I think I was naive about it,
because I think states often behave in that way
and ultimately my conclusion is one of deep scepticism
of the state system and indeed this place.
Kipling writes to Lawrence to console him, saying,
you are going to be attacked by the Foreign Office.
And you will be considered as the worst kind of crook,
they're going to accuse you of being motivated by
venal incentives.
- Yep, I know all about that. - But you're young,
and you won't step out of the game except for
the necessary moment to step aside and vomit, and get back in the game,
because these men are old,
cold and of intolerable entrails, and you'll outlast them.
What is your reaction when you hear that kind of advice?
I think it is remarkable that he said that,
because that is actually very perceptive of what it is.
I'm sure he felt that in some way he had been used as part
of a betrayal of people that he felt passionately committed to.
And I suspect also he felt lost.
He must have been asking himself, "Where next, what now?"
The pain that Carne so clearly feels
suggested to me what it must have felt like for Lawrence.
A sense that in breaking from the British government,
so many dreams and ideals had been destroyed.
That Lawrence was on the edge of a personal breakdown.
When Lawrence returns to Oxford his mother describes him sitting
for hours at a time unmoving,
his face frozen, staring at the ground.
Hannah Arendt, the great intellectual,
commenting on Lawrence at this period says,
"Never again was the experiment of secret politics
"made more purely by a more decent man.
"The Imperialists destroyed Lawrence.
"Till nothing was left but some inexplicable decency."
There was nowhere for Lawrence to hide because
here at London's Covent Garden,
he was being transformed into a major star.
Ironically, at the very moment when Lawrence
was being seen by his own colleagues as an unreliable,
ill-informed man, when he was feeling at Versailles
that people no longer respected him,
he was being transformed into an major international celebrity.
Lowell Thomas, an American journalist who had been with him in the desert,
took to Covent Garden, a show,
With Lawrence in Arabia,
which drew in over a million people in a few months.
Lawrence became, basically,
the largest international celebrity before Charlie Chaplin.
For a moment he thought he could use this,
that somehow this kind of fame
would be something that would allow him to promote the Arab cause
and get freedom for Arabia.
But what he learned and I think many celebrities have learned since,
is that it's self-consuming.
It didn't really achieve anything political.
In the end, it's celebrity.
Fame for fame's sake.
To counter this, Lawrence felt compelled
to produce his own account of that desert campaign.
He started work on what would eventually become
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Here at the Bodleian Library in Oxford,
I'm being allowed a look at the manuscripts of Lawrence's book,
with Richard Ovenden, Keeper of Special Collections.
Well, this rather unusual object, is the final
version in manuscript
of The Seven Pillars.
The myth of Lawrence,
partly self-created, has reached such a pitch,
and the literary world knows that this text is nascent
and they wanted to read it.
There's a sense that this is a monument,
this is like leaving behind a big brass tomb.
Yes. How do you achieve that, if you like, immortality through your text?
And here you can see some of that
almost, to my mind, anguish, laid out on the page.
In a way his prose is the weakest part of the whole thing.
He's obsessed with a kind of slushy,
late 19th century, decadent poetry,
"With cool head and tranquil judgement impartibly conscious
"of the flight, they oscillated from asymptote to asymptote."
Now, it is absolutely unclear to me what on earth he is
going on about when he talks about asymptote to asymptote.
Bernard Shaw writes to him and says
"Lawrence,
"you are as little to be trusted with a pen
"as a child with a torpedo."
As Lawrence was writing his book,
Britain was expanding its presence in the Middle East.
While the French were struggling to keep take control of Syria,
the British had moved into the oil-rich province of Iraq.
Their increasing occupation now faced an insurgency,
the tribes of the Euphrates were rising against them.
The British were dropping bombs and gas.
Back in his London flat, Lawrence was appalled by the hypocrisy,
the cruelty and the senselessness
of the whole British occupation.
He began to use every element of his public fame
and to the fury of his colleagues
wrote letters to The Times denouncing the British occupation.
These are the letters that I came across when I moved to Iraq in 2003
as part of another British occupation.
In those they will count exactly how many votes each candidate has.
I spent almost a year as the deputy governor of two provinces,
holding elections, trying to bring some semblance of order
and prepare the country for independence.
And from this day
is the real beginning of the transition to a free, independent Iraq.
GUNFIRE
And yet outside the compound we were facing an insurgency,
thousands of Iraqis were demonstrating outside our buildings day after day.
I was under siege with rockets and mortar shells flying in.
Initially I had thought that we could do some good,
but the longer I spent there
I realised how little we knew, and how little we could do,
how little the Iraqis wanted us there.
And I began to see Lawrence as a prophet
who had predicted this situation.
I admire Lawrence for his articles in the newspapers
as a journalist, where he reveals a much, much more radical mind.
This is The Times, Friday July 23rd 1920.
"This week's debate in the Commons on the Middle East,
"a veteran house expressed surprise the Arabs of Mesopotamia
"were in arms against us despite our well-made mandate."
So, here we are in Iraq in 1920 and it's the same situation, roughly, that we have in 2003.
People are complaining about Iraq, they don't know how to get out,
they don't know what to do about it.
And Lawrence writes in the letter,
"A remedy? I can see a cure only in immediate change of policy.
"I would make Arabic the Government language.
"I would make the Arabs do the work.
"They can.
"I would cause to leave the country every single British soldier,
"and we should then hold of Mesopotamia
"exactly as much or as little as we hold of South Africa or Canada."
It's these letters in which you see the grandeur of Lawrence's vision.
Lawrence, in those letters, seems to be saying,
"Get out. You shouldn't be there."
That sentiment is exactly what took me back to Iraq in early 2009.
I'm here with the US military,
but hoping to get a sense of what the Iraqi people feel
will be the legacy of this foreign intervention.
- We're going to pop out and load weapons. - OK.
Without further ado, let's roll.
- You're free to talk to anyone you want. - That's great.
On this road, about a year ago,
there was a car bomb about 500 metres down that road.
And really, until about three months ago,
you didn't see as many people out on this road.
The best thing is to go out with my soldiers every day
and see that there is a difference being made.
And how much of a sense of the politics do you have?
I don't have a great understanding of it.
And do you know, for example,
- who all these people are in this picture? - Um...
I don't know all of them. No.
OK. Well, let's see if we can find somebody who wants to talk.
Some of them are a bit apprehensive, understandably.
Ooh, Yani, lets have a look at this.
Can we ask him?
What would you like? What do the people want in this area?
HE SPEAKS IN NATIVE TONGUE
(TRANSLATOR) First, the US Army troops pull out.
Should leave? And then things will get better?
Of course.
What has been the cause of the violence for the last five years?
- The Americans. - The Americans.
What was the main reason for the resistance against the United States and Britain?
He says, what can you do if someone captures your house?
He says the resistance is aiming for one goal, to get American troops out.
You are British?
I'm British. From Scotland.
- He says you invade our country too? - I know, it's true.
I sense some frustration when there was this guy standing in the market
saying "American troops out. They've done nothing for us."
Well, it is frustrating, but the fact that he is able to do that is,
I think, a sign that we have accomplished a great deal here.
Ultimately, we're not here to get cheers from the people
or anything like that, we're just here to provide security.
American officers study Lawrence in order to learn how to deal with Arabs.
But Lawrence saw there's something fundamentally alien and unworkable
about the relationship between foreign troops and the local population.
No matter the first motivations for an intervention,
Lawrence saw that, for very deep reasons,
a sustained occupation like this cannot work.
Lawrence says the foreigner and Christian is not a popular person in Arabia.
Remember however friendly and informal your relations seem to be,
the foundations are very sandy ones.
I can understand what he's saying there. I think at the heart of it is,
we'll never quite fit in here.
I know where he's coming from.
At the end of the day, we're two different types of people,
we're two different cultures.
There clearly was a knot of people in the centre of that bazaar who perceive this as an occupation.
And that, I think, was Lawrence's insight.
That however much you do to overcome these divides,
in the end, it's not your country.
You don't have the knowledge, you don't have the power,
but most importantly of all,
you don't have the consent of the people.
I've come from the market to a private home in Baghdad
to talk to Ali Allawi,
a famous Iraqi intellectual and Minister for Trade and Defence
in the Iraqi government after the fall of Saddam.
It would be like any person
who doesn't really belong in your family, who walks in and stays.
He may come and paint the house,
and fix the bathroom, but he basically doesn't belong here.
Guests, when they overstay their welcome, become unwelcome.
I think Lawrence would have appreciated that, he would have understood that.
The west can only help, guide, point out, advise.
Well meaning and well intentioned,
but ultimately we have to come up with our own formula.
What would be the lesson from this for American foreign policy for the next 20 years?
I think, fools rush in where angels fear to tread!
I don't think they'll embark on this for a very long time.
It is not every day that you mobilise 200,000 people and spend nearly two, three trillion dollars.
But, all else being equal, I think it will be seen as a curious episode
with momentous consequences.
Three years after the end of the First World War, it was clear
that foreign colonial occupation was not working.
The British were facing a revolution in Iraq,
the French had been forced to throw Faisal out of Syria,
and were not sure what to do next.
Winston Churchill as Colonial Secretary,
asked Lawrence to advise him at a conference in Cairo.
Lawrence's advice was to give much more independence to the Arabs.
Faisal, who had been thrown out of Syria by the French,
was now imposed in Iraq as the king of a British-supported state.
The British provided advisors, and some support for economic development.
Nevertheless, the whole situation for the Arabs was a humiliation.
At the start of World War One, they had been promised a vast,
independent Arab kingdom, with its capital at Damascus.
But by 1921, they were left
with was a patchwork of disparate new nations,
not technically British and French colonies,
but under British and French control nevertheless.
Lawrence claimed to be satisfied with the solution,
but I believe it was a pretty hollow claim,
and it showed how far his ambitions had been beaten down
by the political process.
Here in Jordan is the Martyrs Memorial Museum,
which celebrates the Great Arab Revolt.
But most ironically of all,
in that whole museum there's no mention of Lawrence at all,
and that's almost, I think, how he would have liked it.
In order for something to be left behind,
Lawrence believed it needed to feel Arab,
that the role of foreigners had to be concealed.
The Arabs had looked to Lawrence to deliver a mighty Arab kingdom.
But what they were left with bore little resemblance to what Lawrence had promised.
This small country, Jordan,
is almost the last surviving fragment of Lawrence's dream,
a stable, pro-British kingdom still ruled by Faisal's family.
But even here, there's a reluctance to acknowledge Lawrence at all,
such is the lingering suspicion of his motives.
I discuss this with Kamel Abu Jaber,
the former Foreign Minister of Jordan, in the capital, Amman.
The history of the Arab world, from that time on,
- has been an agonised, traumatised history. - Yeah.
- A history of a bitter people with a wounded nationalism. - Yes.
And sometimes it is like somebody
that you hit on the head with a very blunt instrument,
he can't see right from wrong.
I think the Arabs are still in that stage.
I am not anti-western or anti-British, or anything like that.
But the western betrayal,
really still rankles in the Arab psyche until today.
This was the age where the western powers really succeeded in dividing
the Arab world and demolishing literally the hopes of the Arabs.
Across the border in Syria,
the animosity is even stronger.
Syria was Lawrence's nightmare.
His friend, Faisal, was expelled,
and the French, contrary to all his advice,
embarked on 20 years of ultimately disastrous colonial rule.
All of this has affected Arab perceptions,
not only of Sykes-Picot, but also of men such as Lawrence.
I discuss this with Syrian historian, Sami Moubayed.
Syria was the mother country that everything else was carved out of.
That's why it still has a major drain on people's minds.
Generation after another has been taught from grade school
to know fully well about Sykes-Picot, and to despise Sykes-Picot.
What's your reaction when you hear the name Lawrence?
I personally am not too fond of the character. I think the character,
his image has been inflated by historians,
romanticised by Orientalists.
He was a British officer and he was serving his nation's best interests.
He was in no way a hero, or a champion for the Arabs.
But, at the end of the day,
he was one of the many foreigners who came to this part of the world,
who had their hallmark,
but he definitely doesn't deserve the entire homage that you see nowadays.
Lawrence, then, is rejected by the Arabs.
His legacy in Syria,
in Jerusalem, in Jordan,
is one of suspicion,
of uncertainty.
He shows the limits of these kinds of foreign military occupation.
He was never forgiven by the Arabs and, in a sense,
he never forgave himself.
In Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, the US Army staff college,
however, Lawrence is presented in a very different light.
Every officer at this elite institution is made to read Lawrence.
I saw photographs of Lawrence behind officers' desks,
and he is on their syllabus.
I've been invited here to reflect on my experiences in the Middle East
and to discuss Lawrence's legacy.
I have the distinct privilege of introducing our speaker today,
the renowned Scottish author, Rory Stewart.
APPLAUSE
I'm very interested in Lawrence because he seems to be finding a new kind of relevance.
Now, of course, we're using Lawrence as a sort of poster-boy
of what might be involved in cross-cultural understanding or interaction with people.
He himself became increasingly sceptical as his life went on
about what this actually meant.
By 1920, he was writing letters saying, "Do not try to occupy Mesopotamia."
What Lawrence might be an emblem of,
is what it might be better not to try to do.
Things have changed since the time, for example,
of Lawrence of Arabia. Are there any thoughts on that?
You know, it's that old thing of,
"Well, I'm doing it for your own good."
If the people aren't supporting you,
then you have to question how much good you're doing.
We're now in a situation which,
the people on the ground are not going to put up with you,
not necessarily because of what you're doing,
not necessarily because you're bad at your job,
but simply because you are a foreigner.
MUSIC PLAYS
I'm not sure, here at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas,
or even when speaking to British Army officers,
that Lawrence's message really gets through.
They appear still to perceive him as a romantic figure,
as an inspiration for their work.
I put this to American historian Don Wright.
In the education provided to Majors,
Lawrence is offered as an example of this success.
The warrior, and Lawrence is a warrior,
that appeals, that's the part that appeals to the American Army officer.
They are do-ers, they are men and women of action.
What you don't get is the ambivalence that he had about what he was doing.
Lawrence never returned to Arabia again.
He lost contact with Faisal.
He separated himself from grand friends such as Churchill
and turned his back on his past at Oxford.
He did not live out his life as a Bedouin prince surrounded
by the camels and the warriors and the tents of desert Arabia.
Instead of the grandeur of the cliffs of Wadi Rum,
he retired to a small cottage in Dorset.
Probably the strangest thing about Lawrence, for me at least,
is that when he returned from the war
he chose to enlist as a private in the air force.
And originally his friends thought this was just a stunt,
that he was just going to keep it going for a few months.
It lasted for nearly 14 years.
During that period, when people were expecting him to come back
and if not become Prime Minister,
at least govern a colony or become a General,
he was performing menial tasks
as a quartermaster or a telegraph operator.
It was a breakdown, and there were many reasons for that breakdown.
Perhaps the most important is the political.
Because Lawrence felt that his life was a failure,
and the lesson for us today lies in that.
He saw something horrifying about the encounter
between countries like Britain and the United States, and Arabia.
He would not have wanted his legacy today
to be American or British officers
running around with the Seven Pillars of Wisdom,
thinking that behaving like Lawrence
was the way to do these kinds of occupations better.
Get up!
Get down!
Lawrence didn't become a colonial officer, didn't become a General,
because he realised that there was no way just by fiddling around,
by playing with the tactics,
you were going to be able to make this into a successful operation.
I am from Arab world.
I have message for Mr Bush and Mr Tony Blair. You are liars.
Looking at Iraq and Afghanistan today,
I believe very strongly that Lawrence's message would have been
not "Do it better, do it more sensitively,"
but "Don't do it at all."
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