The Legacy of Lawrence of Arabia

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?