Part Two: How Lawrence of Arabia Invented Modern War
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Call zone media. What's murdering my everyones? I'm Robert Evans, and right now, I'm thinking about murdering everyone. Why? Because yesterday, I got stuck in traffic for Sophie.

six minutes. Oh, insufferable. You drive a giant truck, you shouldn't have to get stuck in traffic. That's exactly what I thought, but every time you drive it over other people, suddenly there's all sorts of crimes that are being committed. Well, by who? Uh-huh. Well, by me. By the people in your way? Actually, I did have a lady back into me yesterday and hit my front end, but like,

It did no damage. Oh, my God. I felt so bad. She was like sobbing. And I was like, look, ma'am, I'm not going to call the cops like your back bumper is a little cracked. But like, if you don't want to report this to insurance, I don't give a fuck. Also, because the insurance will take her side if she decided it was your fault.

Even though she backed into you? I mean, yeah, I don't think there was much of a chance of that. Like, I was 20 feet back. She just pulled straight out of a parking space. Like, I saw her backing up. I gave her room. She just straight into me. Like, it was like, lady, you had a lot of chances to recognize that you were making a mistake here.

But I don't know. I see somebody cry. Like, I'm not going to... One of my favorite things is whenever you see someone get upset because they've hit you and you get to be like, hey...

I'm not calling anybody over this. It's such a good feeling. But one time someone rear-ended me and I was like, look, I'm not calling everyone over like a $20 sensor in the back of my terrible car. And then the kid, it was a teenager, her mom wrote me and was like, great, can I get you to sign something saying that you will not like sue or ask for money later? And I was like,

No. If there's paperwork involved, it goes through my... No, that's a real different situation, ma'am. I thought we were being cool about this. Why is everybody so unchill lately? Just calm down. Everyone's lost their mind. Calm down. You know who didn't lose their mind? Unlike in the future when you are listening to this, because I think America's about to be really chill starting next week. It could be.

We are we are electing a new president who instead of Kamala or Trump, I think, is going to be a being of pure light who is incapable of sin. So I'm sure I'm sure I'm sure in like two years we will have murdered them because the being of pure light will not get very far as a president in this country.

We all get to wear those hats that say, be thou not afraid. Yeah. Oh, no, that part's going to be great. That's the new MAGA, is be thou not afraid. Yeah. Oh, God. We're so screwed. Are you a MAGA? No, I'm Butna. Yeah. Uh...

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Anyway, let's talk about Lawrence of Arabia. Yeah. O-T-E. Okay, but speaking of angels and Lawrence of Arabia, is he particularly religious? Not as an adult. As a kid, he is. As an adult, he's just kind of like vaguely spiritual, but not like particularly religious. I think he's just kind of

too much of a thinker to be particularly devout. And it, it makes some good sense when you're traveling around in a part of the world that has a different religion than what you were raised in. He very clearly is not someone who's like, well, all these people are going to hell, right? He does not believe that at all. Yeah. Um,

Through Daum and his experience traveling the Arab and Kurdish regions of the world, Lawrence began to develop an understanding of the brutality of the Ottoman Empire, as well as its incompetence. Now during the years leading up to the big dub-dub UNO, there was a general that's World War I for all of you people who hate me every time I do this bit,

There was a general sense among Arabs that the Turks were at least their best bet at protection from Western imperialism. Right. That like, well, we don't really like being ruled by the Ottomans, but we see what you Westerners are doing to the rest of the world. And we don't want that either. At least these people are Muslim. Right.

The British had occupied Egypt in 1882 and had fought a very bloody war there against an enemy who was seen in the West not dissimilarly from how ISIS was depicted in the 21st century. So there's a lot of anger towards the West.

In 1908, just before Lawrence began his explorations, the young Turks had taken the reins of the Ottoman government. They'd turned the caliph into a figurehead and ignited a period of conflict over who would rule the dying empire. The young Turks were comparatively secular. They were Western aligned, and this amped up the internal imperialism in the Ottoman Empire substantially because that is not how most of the people in these like Arab and Kurdish and other regions of the empire really are.

the Young Turks created the Committee of Union and Progress to try and spread some of their sexy new ideas among the people they ruled. And the most significant idea they wanted to push was called Pan-Turanism.

And this is key to understanding Tayyip Recep Erdogan and the current Turkish government. It's genocide against the Kurds in Syria and against in southern Turkey. This is a very panterinism is a very important imperialist concept. This is one that runs all the way up to like Finland.

Yeah, it's – yeah. Well, let me just explain. Yeah, no, I'm so sorry. Yeah, go ahead. This is the Turkic version of the pan-Germanic racial theories that would spread after World War I. Dr. Kaveh Farouk, an expert on ancient Iran, describes pan-Turkism as –

An ideology that aims at creating a Turkic super state stretching from the Balkans in Europe eastwards across Turkey, Iran, the Caucasus, Central Asia, up to and including northwest China. Now, you will recognize if you know much about the world that most of those areas are not Turkish. Iran, not Turkish. Northwest China, very much not Turkish, you know.

Central Asia, not really Turkish. The Balkans, not Turkish. Turkish influence in some of those places, of course. Go to Sarajevo, you'll see that. But not Turks. Now, this very much a historical...

belief is justified by the claim that all the real indigenous peoples of those regions speak Turkish, or at least in their natural state spoke Turkish, and thus should belong to the same state. Quote, Hungarian pan-Turinianist activists even go further. They have proposed that the entire Eurasian landmass between Hungary and Norway and Europe to Japan and Korea was once an empire known as Turinia.

Apart from non-scholastic websites, no linguistic, anthropological, and archaeological evidence for such an empire exists. Panterranean racialists and historians would beg to differ. They are impervious to logical explanations, even in the face of hard evidence. I love this shit. Everything was Turks! In the ancient past, it was all Turks, all the way down!

I just love that shit. What a bat shit. Like, no, everything wasn't Turkish. I'm sorry. It wasn't. That's like, that's like everything was fucking. That's like the Germans being like, our,

you know, like the root of our, the Aryan race is these guys living in Nepal, you know? Uh, and, and, and also the same as like our dreams of, you know, rebreeding this like Aryan perfect race. I mean, there are Aryans in Nepal, but that's not what Aryan means, you know? Um,

So this belief forms the core of a lot of current fascist theory in Turkey and underpins, for example, the genocidal acts of the Turkish state towards Kurdish rebels in the south and across the board in Rojava. Now, all this is a lot less settled in Lawrence's day. It's just kind of gearing up. But he is watching the early stages of this thing that's going to end in genocide. And he recognizes...

This has a bad end, right? Anything like this is going to not end well. And as the Young Turks, one of the ways in which they push these panterranean ideas is by disseminating anti-Arab propaganda. They are arguing at this point in time that instead of...

existing in all these regions. All of them, all of these different peoples are descendants of Genghis Khan, who is the progenitor of the nation. This pisses people off, and there are counter-revolutions starting in 1909, the year before Lawrence goes on his first dig.

Now, that revolution had been sparked by army officers and angry students at a religious school. But the crackdown afterwards bred hatred among locals of Armenian Christians who they saw as supporting the hated Young Turk government. 30,000 of these Christians were butchered in massacres that would prove an ugly prelude to the looming genocide.

Lawrence arrived in the wake of all this chaos, and while he was living in Ottoman territory in 1911, Italy invaded and conquered Libya. All of this provoked a surge in Arab nationalism, which we should rightly see as not disconnected from the swells of nationalism across the Austro-Hungarian Empire and elsewhere in Europe.

There's a direct line between this Arab revolt that's going to brew and like Serbian nationalism, right? These are all part of like a broader cultural movement around the world. Now, there are two different but not entirely contradictory explanations for what motivated Lorenz ultimately to support an Arab uprising against the Ottomans. The most sympathetic reason and the one that paints him in the best light is related to his relationship with Daum.

Lawrence's friend later in life, E.M. Forster, argues that Lawrence was intimate and passionately devoted to Daum, although they never consummated their relationship. And given Lawrence died a virgin, he likely had no idea to do so. Satin, whose biography of young Lawrence gives the best texture on the man's life, describes the relationship as something intense but fundamentally unknowable to people reading today. However, he cites with clear textual evidence that however we define this relationship,

It inspired Lawrence's actions during World War I. In 1919, Lawrence admitted in a letter to a friend that he had joined the Arab Revolt because, "...I liked a particular Arab very much, and I thought that freedom for the race would be an acceptable present."

And that is both profoundly Orientalist and also so romantic. I know. I'm going to free your people because like, I like you. Yeah. Like that's such a, not even romantic. That's so, because like, I don't think this was a romantic relationship. That's so sweet. Yeah.

But it's like, I also love... Okay, it reminds me a little bit about how... Okay, so Sam and Frodo, because I have to bring Lord of the Rings into this somehow. Sam and Frodo have a relationship that when Tolkien talks about... Like, Tolkien talks about it and it's like, it's the relationship between brothers in arms and in war, right? Yeah. And it's the kind of relationship that now that, like, heterosexuality and homosexuality are much more, like, defined, doesn't translate to anything. Like, the modern world has no...

way of understanding this relationship you're describing. Yeah. It's just interesting because romantic is probably the closest word, but it has connotations that aren't meant. That aren't meant and that make this seem, for one thing, as something much more problematic than I think it was. Right. And man, it is just like,

Yeah, the whole like, I like this guy so much, I am going to like free his people from imperial bondage. Like personally is pretty cool. I know. With no background as a soldier as far as I can tell. With no military background at this point. Just the experience of like making chain mail and learning how to sword fight with his friends. Yeah. The SCA is coming to rescue. Yeah.

Now, in a more artful bit of writing, Lawrence, this is, I want to quote from a poem that Lawrence writes in Seven Pillars of Islam, which Satine argues is a poem that he is, he doesn't explicitly say this is a poem about Daum, but Satine argues this is a poem written for Daum after Daum's death. Quote, I love you. I loved you. So I drew these tides of men into my hands and wrote my will across the sky and stars. Damn.

Damn. Jesus. That's a line. That's bars right there. That is beyond romance. It's like paling. Yeah. I wrote my will across the sky and stars.

He's just a good writer, you know? Yeah. So in this conception, if we take this as the reason why Lawrence ultimately backed the Arab revolt, and I will I'll tell you right now, it can't be all of why. Right. Yeah. There are less romantic reasons that his country, Great Britain, gets involved.

You know, obviously they're not doing it because some random British dude liked an Arab kid. Right. You know, as I noted last episode, the Germans had started making inroads with the Ottomans after the British pulled back their support of the Sultan. Zitt Kaiser, who had thrown away Germany's alliance with Russia because he was a dumb shit, needed the Ottomans because once he's like, fuck you, Russia, he also realizes like, oh, my God, there's no one watching our ass. Right.

So we kind of have to have the Ottomans now, right? And he also, the Kaiser has convinced himself that, well, if I get the Sultan in my back pocket, if we ever have a big fight with Great Britain, I can incite a jihad against the British Empire in India, and that'll solve all my British people problems. Yeah, totally, because Muslims are definitely in power in India and always have been. Yes, yes, yes. That is a clear fact that you know. I mean, if you're the Kaiser, I guess I'm just kind of proud he knows enough about India to know there are Muslims there.

Yeah, fair enough. That's more knowledge than I would have credited Kaiser Wilhelm with having. Now, a further complication here was the recent construction of the Hijaz Railway, which connected the Arab Peninsula to the rest of modern-day Saudi Arabia. This is a railway that goes –

from like the Ottoman heartland and the Arab world all the way down through what is modern day Saudi Arabia to like Oman and Yemen, I think, right? Like that's the Hejaz, is this massive desert peninsula.

Right? And this is, you know, the Ottomans, once the Great Britain had gotten the Suez Canal going, the Ottomans had become dependent on Great Britain to move goods to a lot of parts of the world. And this railway was not only supposed to connect a lot of these backwaters of the empire, these tiny little off-the-map places that were really completely separate from the rest of the world. It was also supposed to be this like economic lifeline to the empire that reduced their dependence on Great Britain. Right?

The railway was so crucial, not just to the Ottomans, but in a lot of eyes to Islam, right? That it had been funded by donations from Muslims all over the world, including a huge number of Indian Muslims. And the fact that so many Indian Muslims had donated to fund the Hijaz railway was seen by a lot of like British observers as evidence that like, oh, we really do need to be worried that the caliph could spark a rebellion, right?

Now, this ties back to Lawrence because during the years he was digging, a realization had spread among the brass back home in England that we might – it's becoming increasingly likely that we're going to have to scrap with the Germans. And if that's the case, we probably have to have a plan to deal with the Turks. Now, Lord Kitchener, who is like the –

king shit of the British military, you know, in the period leading up to in the early stages of World War I is the guy, the man in power in the British military establishment who is first like, hey,

I am backing – like I am officially backing that we want to incite an – we're looking into the possibility of inciting an Arab rebellion in Syria, right? And supporting it enough to create a friendly state that will fracture Ottoman power, right? Kitchener is like – he's not the guy who originates the idea, but he's the first guy in power who's like, I think we should explore this as a potential official like policy move, right? Is this like –

Is this the first time... Because this is like the US's playbook, right? Is you back an uprising in order to create a friendly state to the US. Is this like...

Are there previous examples? Oh, yes. From the British, right? I don't think the US is doing much of this. I mean, we've done, you know, you could look into some aspects of our history, but like we get it either way from the Brits, right? They do this in Africa. They do this all over the place. So it's an existing playbook. Yeah, yeah.

It is definitely an existing playbook, right? This is always how the British Empire's playbook is always, you know, although it's usually a bit different because like this is we are trying to disrupt an enemy by doing this. Usually it's more we have this area we control that we are not native to and we're going to find a warrior people and we're going to both back

them, but also kind of incite conflicts between them and other peoples in order to take the pressure off of us, right? But you can see how like that playbook, you can translate that directly to what's being done here with the Ottomans, right? Well, everyone likes doing that. The Tsar did that with the Cossacks. Yes, yes. It's a very old, old playbook, right? So in September of 1913, the coming war between European powers was both something that like

Everyone knew it was happening, right, that there was some sort of general European conflict probably. And also nobody really expected it to happen. Right. Not when it happened. Right. It's one of those things where it's like, well, this will happen one day, but probably not tomorrow until eventually tomorrow comes. Right.

I hope this is impression for when this episode comes out. Impression for any number of things. Now, Kitchener being a bit smarter than a lot of people in the British Empire is not just like, well, we'll probably have a war one of these days, but not tomorrow. Kitchener's like, well, he's probably ready.

Like if we're going to wind up fighting the Germans and the Ottomans, we probably have a plan for how to like incite this rebellion that might get the Ottomans, you know, off of our fucking backs. So he sends operatives to Palestine to gather information on Ottoman military facilities there.

Now, since the Ottomans weren't just about to okay like spy bees, oh, you want to send some spies to the Holy Land? Absolutely. It was suggested that they send some local boys, some local like English boys who were already in the Ottoman Empire playing at archaeology, right? And that is how T.E. Lawrence and his friend C.L. Woolley find themselves called upon to act as spies for the mother country.

Lawrence was described by his mentor to the shell organization created to execute this expedition as someone who, quote, gets on very well with the natives. He has, I think, more the instincts of an explorer, but is very shy. Right. That's like the the what gets him this job as like, you know, he's kind of doing some James Bond shit. You know, in my six, in my five doesn't exist then. But like.

That's very much what he's doing here, right? He's being brought in by the state to help provide cover to an espionage operation. Yeah. Now, he and Woolley insist that Daum be hired as a photographer and general assistant to the team.

They are carrying out a real historical survey, but that survey is also cover to this group of actual spies that are being sent as assistants but are there to do their actual spy work, right? Lawrence is aware of this, and he writes back to his mom, we are obviously meant as red herrings. I love how they could trust the mail so well back then. Oh, of course. Nobody would look in the mail. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, the trip was mostly uneventful for our purposes, save that it marks the first time Lawrence found himself traveling the Sinai and thinking about the military value of different towns and forts along the way. One morning, he and Wooley were late meeting up with their baggage men because they were hunting a gazelle. Their camels, which had bolted the night before, were found, and the Egyptian police were contacted in a panic.

Lawrence wrote home that, quote, the result was wild telephoning all over the frontier. The Turks were wandering over their hills. About 40 Arabs were arrested and brought in as hostages for our reappearance. And meanwhile, we were sitting quietly, wondering where in the world our tents had got to.

Now, to anyone else, this would just be kind of like a funny moment. But Lawrence, being very perceptive, takes something crucial from the experience. He writes, quote, it shows how easily it is in an absolutely deserted country to defy a government. And this is going to lead him to one of the most important realizations of the last 150 years.

After the expedition, Lawrence and Woolley went back to their dig. Woolley left around June, but as was usual, Lawrence stayed. He got regular pushes to go back home, but in the last 18 months had spent just three weeks in England.

Daum and another local friend of his, Hamoudi, had by this point heard stories from Lawrence about home. And they'd repeatedly asked, hey, we would like to see, you've spent so much time in our home, we would like to see England, right? And eventually, in 1913, in the last summer before the world went mad, Lawrence obliged them.

Now, they stayed about 10 days. He brings these two Arab friends of his, and they stay for 10 days in Oxford. They are mostly treated as like curiosities. They give like speeches and stuff in public where people get to question them about like their lives in their home.

And for the most part, you know, I think it's kind of interesting that this happened, but it's not super relevant to like our question, you know, where do we put this guy morally? There is one anecdote here that I think is worth reciting to you. And so I'm going to quote again from Anthony Satin's book, The Young T.E. Lawrence, where he writes about a story that Hamoudi told of this visit after Lawrence's death. Quote,

Many wished to photograph us, Hamoudi and Daoum, as we sat with him, Lawrence, in our customary clothes. And after they took a picture, they would come and speak to him. And always he said, no, no. One day I asked why he was always saying no, no. And he laughed and said, I will tell you, these people wish to give you money. But for me, you would now be rich.

"'Don't call yourself my friend!' Hamoudi shouted, "'and say thus calmly that you kept me from riches!' It was a rare moment of cultural division between them. It also showed that the Syrians understood the wealth and privilege of their young friend."

Hamoudi remembered that Lawrence had laughed at his anger, and the more he laughed, the angrier Hamoudi became. Then Lawrence said, yes, you might have been rich, richer than any in Jerobolus. And I, what should I have been? I should have been the showman of two monkeys. And suddenly, Hamoudi admitted, all my anger died down within me. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, so he's thinking about what he's doing. Yes, he is attempting to, not that he does it perfectly, but he is trying to think ethically about the complexity and the class dynamics and wealth dynamics and disparity of his relationship with these guys. Oh, that's fascinating because I was already thinking about how it's like, well, when he goes there, they're not like putting him on stage and being like, tell us about the weird, wacky, cold place you're from, you know? Yeah.

And that does happen here. And he's like conscious and he's like, I don't want to turn this into me prostituting these boys for Orientalist reasons, right? That seems bad to me.

Right. On the other hand, he probably could have been like- He could have talked this out with them, right? There is some of that paternalism here. Right. Totally. Because they could have been like, yeah, no, let's get rich. Fuck it. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. They could have made that decision. And again, he's definitely paternalistic. He's older than them. This isn't unproblematic perfectly. But I also, it's interesting to me that he is really trying to think about this in an ethical sense. Yeah.

that somewhat comports with our modern ethics. Yeah. You know what doesn't comport with our modern ethics, Margaret? Is it our ads? They sure don't. But you know what? I like being able to pay my mortgage. Me too. Yeah. And we all just get to talk about it and then make these decisions together. That's right. Let's make some decisions together. Let's you and me prostitute ourselves. Excellent. Yeah. That sounds great. That sounds great.

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And we're done.

So when the war broke out in August of 1914, the time of leisurely afternoons, painting and reading with Dome were over. Based on his work in Palestine the previous year, Lawrence was offered a commission in the Army Intelligence Corps as a second lieutenant.

This landed Lawrence, who's now in kind of like his mid to late 20s in Cairo, which is where the movie begins to show us his story, right? This is where the 1962 film starts. I think it's valuable that we've gone a little bit back.

Yeah.

Now, Prince Hussein was not the only potential game in town for the Brits. Kitchener and his allies supported him as the new caliph, while others backed a young chieftain from Riyadh named Abdul Aziz Aziz Ibn Saud. Now, I want you to think about that last name, Saud, for a hint as to what his family's doing today.

Yeah, they're doing pretty well. Yeah, they're doing quite well. Some of the evilest people on planet Earth. And Abdulaziz Ibn Saud sucks ass too. Now, so does Prince Hussein. Both of these guys are huge dicks. And a big part of why this Arab revolt doesn't end in a better place for the Arab world, you know, I would say overwhelmingly the blame is on the Ottomans and the European powers. But a lot of it comes down to the fact that the local leaders are

the Arab leaders of this revolt are also assholes, right? And that plays a role in the structures that get set up at the end of this all, right? Now, Saud is Wahhabi, right? Which is a Puritan strain of Islam that is also strongly anti-idolatry. And Prince Hussein is a guy, he is a real asshole about it. He is super anti-woman. He is a very strict, he's also a Puritan, right? He's the guy who like bans drinking and

Mecca, you know? But he is also, he's not a Wahhabist because the Wahhabis, they're anti-idolatry and Prince Hussein kind of wants to be worshipped almost as much as Allah, right? And so he doesn't like the anti-idolatry stuff about Wahhabism. He's like, humility. Humility is no good. No, no, no. That's not my bag. I am a prince. Yeah.

Now, the outbreak of World War I has been a disaster for Mecca, right? Which is – tourism would be like kind of the wrong way of saying, but it's like religious pilgrimage, right? It's like what the city does. That's where its money comes from. People aren't doing as much of that after the whole –

war decides like, what if we take all these young men who were, you know, around to go on pilgrimages to Mecca and the like, and instead we feed them to each other's machine guns, you know? And honestly, a great, this is a great time to be a machine gun. Bad time to be a young man. So traffic to Mecca collapses and the economy follows with it. And I'm going to quote from James Barr's book here.

Meccans were reduced to selling their furniture and the ornately carved wooden doors and fretwork windows of their houses for firewood to feed themselves. These screens shielded their womenfolk indoors from prying eyes. It was a deeply humiliating resort to have to take. Wow. Yeah. Yeah.

So Prince Hussein blames the suffering and the war itself on the secular modernizing of the Ottomans, which he says violated the Koran by, for instance, allowing women to work in the post office. A major reason why Hussein gets on board with being like the figurehead of an Arab revolt against the Ottomans is he goes to Constantinople a couple of years back and he sees women working at the post office and he loses his mind. He absolutely goes fucking bonkers.

over like ladies at the post office. This guy is the anti-wokest of the anti-wokes. He describes lady post office workers as an evil that will greatly injure us if it increases. Like all this debate, why did this terrible war happen? Why are we slaughtering each other? It's lady post office workers.

So out of his mind. The words mailman. Mailman, God damn it. Yeah. Prince Hussein, real piece of shit in this story. Is this who Lawrence is going to end up backing? Anyway, I'll find out. This is who Lawrence and England end up backing. Although this is not who Lawrence personally backs. Right. Hussein is the father of the guy that Lawrence really sees as being the great leader, right? Right.

So debate rages within sort of the British intelligence and military establishments. It's very similar to how like during the Syrian civil war, you had like the US kind of military intelligence back the Kurds and you had like the CIA back these kind of alliances of like rebel groups. Well, you have within the military and the intelligence arms of kind of the British state are backing Kurds.

like Saud or Hussein, right? Oh, shit. And there's a lot of argument over like who is better. And this is,

It's also worth noting that when we're parsing out the morality of this, what Great Britain is doing here, playing with these people's lives is evil. What Prince Hussein is doing here, trying to get absolute power, make himself into a caliph is evil, right? The other Arabs, by the way, he wants to specifically be king of this massive greater Arab state and wants to be ruling Iraq and Syria because that's prestigious and the Hejaz is a backwater country.

people, the Arabs in Iraq and Syria don't want this guy ruling them. You know, they don't like him more than they like the Ottomans. In some cases, a lot less, right? But also when we're talking about like the morality of this,

You know what? Great Britain is doing here is fucked up. The Ottomans are actively doing a genocide. They are doing the Armenian genocide in this period of time. So there's not like a there's not like a these are the this is the shining bright side of this conflict back. These guys were the real heroes here. Everyone's an imperialist and everyone's a piece of shit. You know, Lawrence might have the most noble.

you know, kind of alongside a lot of the like individual dudes who are just like fighting because like, it seems like the Ottomans suck. But of the people with like power in this, he's at least less objectionable than some. So he spends the first two years of his time as an intelligence agent from 14 to 16 in Egypt, in Cairo, writing intelligence summaries from hundreds of sources across the world.

region, right? Other people are bringing in data. He is like turning it into briefings and sending it out, right? And he becomes, as a result of this duty, he's a guy who studies constantly. He's fascinated in the culture of the region. And he becomes acquainted with the history of the Bedouins.

These are the nomadic peoples in the Hijaz, in the Arab Peninsula, and they are primarily, the way everyone sees them, raiders and bandits, right? They fight a lot within each other. They are a clannish tribal people, and they make a lot of their living from like banditry, you know? It's comparable to the Kurds at the time, maybe. Yeah, there's a lot of similarities, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you could definitely draw that in some ways, right? And like...

You know, you've got some of these guys like Prince Hussein who have started to urbanize, but you also have these people who like they very much do live this nomadic existence, except for the fact that they have guns not different from how they would have lived 700 years ago when like Muhammad was alive. Right. Yeah. So the fact that Lawrence is starting to understand these people and study them was going to prove crucial to what comes next. But at the time, he's really frustrated that he's like forced to just sit on his ass and do nothing.

In May of 1915, less than one year into the war, his brother Frank had been killed in France. Four months later, his youngest son, Will, was shot down and perished. Youngest brother? Yeah, youngest brother, Will, was shot down and perished. So he loses two brothers in the first two years of the war while he's sitting in this office in Cairo being bored. And he is wracked with survivor's guilt over this. He and his brothers had been very close. In letters home to his mother, he veered between shows of strength

In a time of such fearful stress in our country, it is one's duty to watch very carefully lest one of the weaker ones be offended. But he also complained to her. We do nothing here except sit and think out harassing schemes of Arabian policy. My hair is getting very thin and gray. I'm going to be in Cairo till I die.

You know, he's an emotional guy. He's going through a lot here. This is a complex time to him. And his grief is compounded by fury at the failed allied invasion of Gallipoli. Man,

Masterminded by friend of the pod, Winston Churchill, this was a vast invasion by sea of the Ottoman coast that ended in just the worst fuck up ever, right? One of the great disasters in military history. Yeah. Yeah, just a calamitous fuck up. Now, Lawrence writes a report on precisely why the campaign, which he termed a disgrace, failed.

It was buried, this report of his, to protect the people who planned it, right? We can't have Winston Churchill getting criticized here. And it's a very good report. James Schneider writes in his book, Guerrilla Leader, he discovered that the reality in modern war that the civilian population will always suffer when a European power pursues its national interests without regard to the culture and political aspirations of the native populace.

Right. And so this, this is kind of like, he makes a, he makes a decision here that to be different, that like, we have to be different because like, if we're not, if we make these decisions based purely on what we know and think of war without any kind of like,

you know, without any sort of openness to the realities on the ground, we wind up walking into disasters, right? Yeah. Trying to preach against Vietnam syndrome, right? Where you just like stumbling, well, we're America. We know how to fight a war. This is how you do it. I don't need to know shit about this country, right? I'll just fight this the way I fight every war. Oops. Turns out it's a different part of the world that doesn't work here, you know?

Yeah, and wasn't a big thing is that when the Brits were trying to fight in the Ottoman Empire, because there just wasn't transportation and all this thing, like the modern method of moving all of the...

arms and all those things just like fell apart. Oh yeah. I mean, a lot of it's supply issues and stuff, but this was also stuff if, if there had been more knowledge of the realities of the geography of the era, like they, they wouldn't have tried it. Right. This is a thing with more knowledge and less arrogance. You would just like, no, we can't do this. We don't have the capacity. Yeah.

On June 10th, 1916, Prince Hussein had been goaded sufficiently into action that he used a small force of fighters to lay siege to the Turkish garrison at Mecca. They

They took it after three days, but the rebellion lost steam after that. Medina did not fall. And it was clear to anyone with eyes that the Ottomans would soon exact a punishment because their garrison in Medina is isolated. But they've got this train that can like get stuff down there. So they have the ability. Eventually, we'll get enough guys there that will crack down on this little rebellion.

Now, much of the internal debate in this period among the British revolved around whether or not we should send our own troops in to stop the Ottomans from, like, crushing this rebellion, specifically from capturing a place called Rabig, which contained valuable wells that would allow resupply for an attack on Mecca. The problem was twofold.

Number one, if the British sent in Christian soldiers, white guys, right? That would infuriate soldiers because like Christians are not supposed to be in the Holy Land, you know? And that would dry up support for the rebellion if it's seen as like, oh, this is really just a British thing. Oh, the British are in this, you know? Like maybe people aren't going to be willing to die if they're like, oh, so we're just fighting to become slaves of the British Empire. Well, I don't like that any better, right? But at the same token,

The British have this option. We have all these Muslim soldiers, right? From India. We can send in with modern guns and they would probably make a difference. But

If we send in Muslim soldiers, no one's going to believe that Prince Hussein is backed by us. And that's also necessary because otherwise, why would you take him seriously if he doesn't have the backing of a great power? Right. So it's just like catch 22 situation, you know, of like we can't send in white guys, but nobody takes it as seriously unless they see some white guys.

And Lawrence is on the side of arguing that we absolutely cannot send in British soldiers, right? And he argues, interestingly, he takes the stance that not only should we not send in British soldiers, they're not needed. The Bedouins can, on their own, defeat the Ottomans in Hejaz so long as we arm them properly, right? His attitude is we don't need descendant troops. They can handle this. They just need guns. Yeah.

Now, he is also terrified. A big motivation for Lawrence is that the French are poking around this situation. They keep being like, well, you guys don't want to send in troops. We got troops. We can send in troops. And then maybe the Arab peninsula is a French peninsula. You know? Perhaps we wind up with Syria. Yeah. Like, that is what the French want, Syria in particular. Right? They see this as like natural French territory. Syria. Yeah.

Everywhere is natural French territory if you really think about it. Everywhere is natural French territory, right? Now, Lawrence, he's not just doesn't like this because the British and the French don't like each other traditionally. He is a man of the world, and he is aware that the French, when they took Algeria, immediately carried out a hideously brutal genocide. And he's like, well, if they take Syria, they're going to do another genocide, right? That's just how the French be. Yeah.

He argued in letters meant to be read by other British officers that supporting Prince Hussein as the new caliph also would effectively neuter Islam as a threat to the empire, right? So there's a very imperialist slant to this too. Although the question is, does he believe that like, oh, we can neuter Islam as a threat to our ambitions in India? Or does he know that saying that will get people to back his play back home? This is one of the hardest things when you look at history. Yes.

Yes. Especially since Lawrence lies to his Arab allies and he lies to his British masters. He lies constantly to them. So it is not, he, he, he is, you know, deceitful to some of these Arabs that he claims to care about. And he is deeply deceitful to all of his superior officers. So the idea that he would just be like, Oh,

yeah, this'll stop Islam from overthrowing, you know, the Indian subcontinent or whatever. Like if he thought that lie would work, he would say it, you know, it's not necessary. It could be instead of Orientalism, just him trying to manipulate his bosses, right? Who he knows are Orientalists. Who he knows are Orientalists, right? Yeah. Yeah.

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Anyway, Lawrence kind of makes a name for himself in all of these arguments. And he's also because of some I'm not going to get into all of the politicking within the British military establishment, but he winds up getting to go along with like his boss to England.

the Hijaz in order to like meet some of these people because the other guy who like should have gone in his place was too controversial as a result of all these arguments over who to back and whether or not to send troops. So Lawrence gets to go. This is his first time kind of going to the Hijaz and

And over the course of 10 days, he meets and befriends the prince's son, Faisal, Faisal Hussein. And Faisal is the guy. He's the guy that you see in the movie. And he's the guy that like Lawrence is actually going to back as the leader of this future Arab state that he wants to incite to rebellion and independence.

Faisal and him get along so well that Faisal kind of insists that Lawrence become his appointed liaison to the British army. And Lawrence, for his part, becomes convinced that Faisal is the future of the revolt, writing back that Faisal has, quote, leadership, not intellect, nor judgment, nor political wisdom, but the flame of enthusiasm that would set the desert on fire. Thus the title of the book. Thus the title of Barr's book.

Now, the primary opponents of arming the rebellion countered Lawrence by arguing that the Bedouin were, in one officer's words, untrained rabble, most of whom have never fired a rifle.

And this is a complicated, there's a lot of like back and forth where like there'll be promised arms. Lawrence will kind of say like, oh, I just got back from my boss's guns are coming in. So we need to carry out this attack. But like the guns are coming and like the guns are not coming. Lawrence is lying to them. He's pretending that this has been done. He's doing it because he wants to, he's trying to motivate them to carry out attacks that he thinks that they can succeed at. And they in fact do succeed at, right?

But he is also lying to them. And also the British are just – It's paternalism, right? It's the same thing. Yeah, exactly. And also separately, the British are just, say, agreeing to send arms and then there will be some like behind the scenes fight and they'll be like, oh, actually we can't do that, right? Although a lot of arms do wind up getting to these rebels, right? Yeah.

So Lawrence knows that in order to kind of secure support for Faisal to get these arms, he has to make a case very clearly to his very hesitant superiors that the Bedouins can win this war. Right?

Lawrence arrived shortly after the situation in the southern Hejaz had devolved into a stalemate, one that favored the Turks. Faisal's men had worn out a lot of their initial strength, failing to chew through the defenses of Medina, but the Turks had made unexpected retreats after rumors of an Arab attack, which had allowed Faisal's men to capture the port of Rabi'g in the first place.

This was confusing because they'd moved vastly superior forces into the region. It was in analyzing their decisions here, like why all of this happened, that Lawrence would make his first key realization. And here is how Schneider describes it. "'Why did the Turks waver? It occurred to Lawrence that perhaps the virtue of irregulars lay in depth, not in face, and that it had been the threat of the attack by them upon the Turkish northern flank which had made the enemy hesitate so long.'

The actual Turkish flank ran from their front line at Rebeg, their face in Lawrence's words, to Medina, a distance of some 50 miles. But if we moved towards the Hejaz railway behind Medina, we might stretch our threat and accordingly their flank as far, potentially, as Damascus, 800 miles away to the north. Such a move would force the Turks to the defensive, and we might regain the initiative.

Do you see what he's saying here? Because this is the core of his understanding of how to do an insurgent struggle. You can present yourself as everywhere at once and it messes up a regular army. Exactly. We've got this like 50 mile front and in a conventional European war, that would be the threat.

area, right? That would be the attack. That's the area they'd have to worry about. But because we have all of these tiny little units of guys on Camel who are capable of traveling for weeks at a time and then carrying out insurgent attacks, the actual area they have to defend is 800 miles deep. And so they can't

attack and regain the initiative the way they otherwise would be able to because they have to have forces split off and be aware of all of these potential everywhere is vulnerable, right? And by doing that, we don't actually even have to carry out all that many attacks. Just the reality of our threat opens possibilities to us. Now- It's kind of like the IRAs. We only have to be lucky once. You have to be lucky every time. Yes. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, that's what he is starting to realize here. You know, the Bedouins know the terrain much better than the Turks who are not locals, and they can travel in small groups almost indefinitely with minimal need for resupply. Launching frontal attacks with these – and there's not many of them. The Bedouins are not a numerous people. These are – you know, nomads are not a high population group in the desert.

So you don't want to use them the way British officers instinctively wanted to use them by like sending them to run at guns until they were all gone. That is kind of what a lot of Lawrence's superiors see is like, well, this is how you fight a war, right? We just throw them at guns and like, oh, they're not good at being thrown at guns. There's this whole thing. The British like really have this distaste for these Bedouin troops because like they're scared of artillery. They don't like to get blown up.

It must be like their religion tells them they won't become whole in heaven if they get blown up. So like fools, they're scared of field guns. This cowardly Arab terror at being exploded. Which is funny because is it always?

- Is all of war changing after World War I? Where we like- - Yes, it should be. - No one's good at running at machine gun nests. It's a bad idea. - But they still have it. The British have not really figured this out yet. Some of them have, but like a lot of people are still doing the old ways. And yeah, there's like this whole, can you believe these cowardly Muslims don't like to explode? Not like our good English boys. They love blowing up in fields. They can't blow up enough.

It's so fucking funny to me. They're just like looking at generations being wiped out in the trenches for nothing. And like, why don't the Muslims like this? Yeah, totally. These primitive people hate dying.

Oh, it's so funny. So Lawrence is like, we shouldn't be wasting them, right? Like there's not a lot of these guys and they can do so much more damage if we split them into these tiny like fire teams and send them in behind the lines to fuck shit up, right? And that will open opportunities for us to carry out massed attacks in areas when we have the advantage and when we can actually sweep over them without taking nightmarish casualties. Right.

Which is the actual reality of guerrilla wars is not just these isolated strikes. No. You have to also work with the like mass attacks. No. It's what you call – the modern term is it's a strategy of tension. If you keep enough tension on the enemy to where they have this massive flank that they have to defend, then they will make mistakes. They will expose areas that you then can take with more conventional attacks. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

Now, Lawrence advised his allies to move troops away from prepared defenses and towards operating a terrain that would let them strike at the railway. With one redeployment, Faisal's men went from threatening a single city to 200 miles of this railway. Lawrence began to take part in raids on isolated Turkish units defending chunks of railway or on patrol. Over the course of three months, he got a feel for his Bedouin troops.

Being largely composed of family units from a culture with a low population, they had little stomach for casualties. At one key battle in January 1917, the Arab forces overran Ottoman defenders in a town called Waj, alongside British infantry and naval support.

The Brits lost one man. The Arab tribesmen lost 20. Now, the British officers in charge of this operation had all fought in France and they were like fucking 21 dudes to take a town. This is great. Right. Yeah. Lawrence had to caution them that like, no, no, no. The better one don't feel like this is a great victory. Quote,

Instead, he feared, their deaths might easily upset Arab morale. Our rebels were not materials, like soldiers, but friends of ours, trusting in our leadership.

In his book, yeah, I do love that, like soldiers, you know, they're just materials, they're trash basically, right? He's like, no, no, these guys are our buddies and they don't like to see their family die, right? You are going to war with your uncle. It's not just a casualty, right? Like that's your uncle got killed. In his book, James Barr notes that Lawrence later added this explanation.

We were not in command nationally, but by invitation, and our men were volunteers, individuals, local men, relatives, so that a death was a personal sorrow to many in the army. I mean, that's a better way to run a... I mean, I guess it's probably bad, like strategically in some...

Well, actually, not in this war. Yeah, because it makes them think more carefully instead of just throwing people in the machine gun nest. Yeah, no. Yeah, it is. It is the right. And it's why this this war that that is carried out over the Arab revolt and in broader terms, a lot of because this isn't the only part of the war in in the Middle East. Right. The British are carrying out conventional military actions trying to take the Holy Land in this period, which have been disastrous up to this point. There's an attempted invasion of Jerusalem. That's just a fucking catastrophe.

But there are more conventional attacks, but where they're taking large chunks of land and entire influential cities and ports, and you're seeing two guys died in this battle. Two of our guys died. That is the theater where Lawrence is active because they are thinking smart. That's true.

That's cool. Yeah, it's pretty cool. Now, one of the reasons why the Europeans had not felt, as I said, that the Bedouins could be good soldiers is that they're scared of artillery. And Lawrence, in these letters he's writing back to like the British general staff, argues this isn't they're not scared of hardship itself, like they're not scared of fighting. They're not even scared of dying. You know, he writes this in Seven Pillars of Wisdom. In

In mass, they were not formidable, since they had no corporate spirit, nor discipline, nor mutual confidence. The smaller the unit, the better its performance. A thousand were a mob, ineffective against a company of trained Turks. But three or four Arabs in their hills would stop a dozen Turks.

Napoleon remarked this of the Mamluks. We were yet too breathless to turn our hasty practice into principle. Our tactics were imperial snatchings. We're empirical snatchings of the first means to escape difficulty. But we were learning like our men. This recognition that, again, you know, just thinking about modern times is like,

well, if you get a thousand of these people together, it's just chaos, right? Like everyone's fighting with each other. People don't really get along very well. They certainly don't trust each other in battle. But if you separate them into these three and four man groups, it's,

then you can make them extremely effective, right? And then maybe occasionally take the risk of having them carry out larger actions. Yeah. I mean, this is the way that I would assume my friends would be useful in battle and not otherwise. Yeah. So his first few months in theater were too chaotic and violent for much in the way of groundbreaking strategy, overarching strategy to occur to him, right? He's kind of it's catch as catch can. But

But later in March, Lawrence gets lucky, by which I mean he nearly dies from another one of his constant illnesses. He gets this horrible mix of like boils and malaria and the shits. Oh yeah, boil malaria shit. Boil malaria shit, yeah. He spends 10 days dying in a tent.

To distract himself from dying, he spends all of the time kind of like hallucinating from dehydration and writing out the most influential military theory of the century. Amazing. And he is like, he's consolidating here these years of military theory that he had studied back in school and applying it to his experiences thus far in the Hejaz. And as he's trying to do this, his mind is drawn to an Austrian general, Maurice de Saxe,

who back in the early 1700 had decided that the generals of his day spent too much time worried about tactical details. How do I move this unit in opposition to this unit, right? In order to get a flight, how do I, how do I get this unit of riflemen? How do I get cavalry around their side to flank this one group of guys, right? That's a tactical problem, right? And the SACS is like, really the game is figuring out larger operational concerns. What he Carl calls the higher problems of war. Now,

Now, interestingly enough, de Saxe had written his book, which is kind of the precursor to Lawrence's groundbreaking work, while he was dying for two weeks in a tent. I mean, it makes sense. Otherwise, you're a soldier. That's what you do. Yeah. Yeah. Two things soldiers love, cigarettes and dying in tents. Yeah. So de Saxe had written a book about war that provided the framework for Lawrence's understanding of how the Bedouins fought.

An article I found helpful in all this is T.E. Lawrence and the Art of War in the 21st Century by George Gaurici. He writes,

Whether Lawrence was aware of this or not, others had presented a similar ideal. Some 2,500 years earlier, Sun Tzu, the most famous Chinese- I was about to say, yeah. Yeah, exactly. Sun Tzu has a quote about this, right? And he's the guy you'll see him recommended often today in the reading of Instagram posts of guys who want to sell you unregulated testosterone. I know, even though it's still worth reading. It's still worth reading. And Lawrence is going to use, he's not reading Sun Tzu here, but he's going to use de Saxe who's saying a similar thing in a very useful way.

It has become clear to him that the Ottoman ability to project power rested entirely on the Hejaz railway, which ran the length of the peninsula and cut through this infinity of desert. But the railway was incredibly vulnerable. It is so long you can't have men stationed on every inch of it. And Ottoman troops have very little ability to maneuver outside of where the railway takes them.

Now, any fool with soldiers can tell you that if your enemy has a train, blow it up. But Lawrence is smarter than this. He's like, no, no, no, don't blow it up. That's the worst thing to do. If you destroy the train so it can't operate, your enemy has to adapt and find a different way of getting troops and supplies in theater. And when they adapt, that will make them less vulnerable to you.

If you just fuck with the railway constantly, damaging bits and pieces of it, they'll have to keep repairing it. They'll have to keep sending troops to these different areas to repair it. They're going to have their repair crews. They're going to be like spending resources to do this. And every...

resource that they scramble to defend and repair this railway is a source that's not out there actually pressing the attack or defending other territory. Right. You want to keep them on the railway. You just want to fuck with it a little bit. You know? Yeah. Yeah.

World military. Yeah. Okay, now I'm like, yep, this man is smarter than I am. This man is smart. Yeah. This is a guy with some stuff going on under the hood. Yeah. Now, world military history is filled with insurgent movements. Alexander the Great dealt with this shit, and he was not the first imperial warlord to do so. What makes Lawrence special is not just his understanding of guerrilla tactics, but how to marry them to the larger, greater power struggle. And here's Gaurachi again.

In developing his own theory of a regular war, Lawrence identified three key elements for analysis, the algebraic, the biological, and the psychological.

The algebraic element of things refers to the physical environment that has shaped warfare in the Hejaz. For Lawrence, this was the decisive moment. Using simple math, Lawrence calculated the size of territory held by the Arabs in relation to the number of Ottoman troops in theater. The Ottomans, with only 16,000 troops in Arabia and with a shortage of staunch Arab allies among the tribes, lacked enough soldiers to establish effective control over 140,000 square miles of territory.

Geography, the vast desert, gave the Arab revolt sanctuaries that the Ottomans could not seize and hold for any length of time. As noted by Lawrence, to make war upon rebellion is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife. Yeah.

Yeah, I just love his writing. Yeah. The Arabs possessed safe havens in the vast desert and therefore had the time to conduct a protracted struggle. They received critical assistance from the British army, an army that posed serious threat to Palestine. Consequently, the Ottoman high command felt it could ill afford to spare additional troops to quell the Arab uprising. Foreign assistance and a distracted enemy proved a window of opportunity for the rebellious Arabs.

So a key part of this, it's not just that we're threatening this whole area, we're threatening this train and that diverts Ottoman troops. The war, the great power war, the British army that hasn't succeeded in taking the Holy Land but threatens it also blocks troops away. And so we are we he is looking at Lawrence is looking at these very local small unit actions in the as part of this grander struggle, which is exactly, by the way, what the Vietnamese are going to do.

They don't have this vast desert, but they have Laos and Cambodia. They have these underground tunnels. This is their safe haven. And what the Viet Cong are doing very much exists not just in concert with the greater struggle being waged by other Vietnamese elements like the NVA, this conventional army, but in the greater power struggle of the Cold War. All of these different conflicts that have an impact on who can send resources where and what can be sent where and how much things can be escalated.

Lawrence is the guy who was writing out, this is how you think about a conflict that is so broad in scope, it boggles your mind. That's where a lot of his genius comes in. No, that makes sense. Is that called grand strategy or is that- Definitely, this is grand strategy.

I think that a lot of people are bad at that because we're good at thinking about, we all think about tactics. Right. And then we even sometimes think about strategic goals, but we're rarely thinking about how that one strategic goal is going to affect everything.

how a different political power is going to be impacted and what they're going to do. It's the mind of a – or it's the mind of – it's domino theory. It's almost – he almost thinks about war the way an electrician has to think, right? Where you can't just be thinking about what is this problem in this circuit, but how does all of this connect to this broader structure of like circuits and this broader flow of power, right? Yeah. He's thinking about the flow of power, right? In a very literal sense. Yeah. Yeah.

So he's engineering. Yeah. He is an engineer of war. Whoa. Yeah. This is what elevates Lawrence's understanding beyond being just another guerrilla leader. These basic elements, this local guerrilla force pinning down an undermanned opponent, retreating to a safe haven backed by a foreign power, itself in separate conflict or conflicts with the occupier. This is how you would describe every great conflict of the last 75 years, right? Like this is what, this is what everything is, right? This is,

There's a lot of Israel-Palestine in here, right? And this conflict between you've got Israel and the United States backing them. You've got Iran supporting, you know, Hezbollah and Hamas. You know, these are, this is the nature, the basic nature of all modern conflict, really. Yeah. In other words, I just find this stuff cool.

Yeah.

And one of these heroes is a guy who's one of the coolest figures in this, although he's also, he's someone who does a lot of back dealing and wheeling and dealing. But Lawrence meets him in 18, or in 1917, in April, Aouda Abu Tayy of the Hawitat tribe. A passage from Schneider's book that I love gives you an idea of like what a fucking, almost, yeah, a storybook character this, you could hardly invent like a cooler sounding protagonist.

Centuries earlier, the Hawitat arrived from the Hejaz, and now their clans prided themselves on being true nomads in the Bedouin manner. Aouda was a tribal archetype, a heroic leader and warrior in the tradition of Cochise, Geronimo, Crazy Horse, Sitting Bull. His generosity made him poor, as his growing legend made him ever richer in reputations.

He had taken 28 wives during his adult life. His body bore the scars of 13 wounds. He had seen most of his relations slain in countless raids. Aouda had slain 75 Arabs with his own hand. How many Turks? Aouda did not tally them. They simply did not count.

His retinue compromise, the fiercest men of the tribe. Fighting besides Aura with relentless courage. I've killed 70, I've personally in a hand-to-hand combat, killed 75 of the men that I consider men. Yeah, the people who count. Yeah.

Which is like, I mean, this guy's also a monster, but you can't undeniably badass. Yeah. I think paragraphs like this help make it clear also why Lawrence finds the Bedouin way of war so much more intoxicating than, say, the Western Front. If you're a draftee in the Western Front, your combat leader's prior life experience was like competing with other rich kids to molest underclassmen at Eaton. Right.

Right. Whereas if in this war, if you wind up under out, it's this guy from like, yeah, from like a fucking storybook. Right. Yeah. The swashbuckling figure. And Lawrence is a romantic. Right. He is still enthralled with medieval poems of knights and ladies. This is catnip to him. Right. Like there was no chance of him not being on these guys side once he starts to meet these people.

Now, at the time they met, Aouda had about 500 fighters, half as many as he'd brought into the war. A desert pirate, he was frustrated trying to fight a conventional war. Aouda saw himself as an epic hero. Schneider notes, this guy, in addition to everything I've said, Aouda refers to himself exclusively in the third person.

Yeah, of course he does. Of course he does. That's what you expect from a man who has killed dozens of men in hand-to-hand combat. Yeah, by the time he gets your 10th wound and your 70th man who actually counts, you start referring to yourself in third person. Right, right. Yeah.

Lawrence sat down with Faisal and Aouda and explained his new theories about how the war should be run. He built to a thrilling conclusion where he argued that, rather than being outnumbered and outgunned, the far more noble Bedouins had a chance to attain superiority of men and materiel where it mattered.

Quote, but think of it, in regular terms, we are stronger than the Turks in transport, machine guns, cars, and high explosives at the decisive point. We can deploy a highly mobile, lightly equipped striking force of the smallest size and use it successively at distributed points along the Turkish line to force them to strengthen their posts beyond the usual 20 men. This will be our shortcut to success.

Right? This is this other recommendation. Like, war battles always go to who has the numbers, who has the most men and guns. Yeah. But that doesn't mean who has the most men and guns in total. It means where it matters. Right? Yeah. I mean, we get to pick where it matters. Right. Exactly. You don't fight when you're going to lose. Exactly. Exactly.

Lawrence assured Aouda and Faisal that allowing the Ottomans to keep Medina and the railway would work because it would keep their forces bottled up trying to defend these things while the Arabs took everything else. Quote, his stupidity will be our ally, for he believes that his success depends on holding as many of the older provinces as possible. This pride in his imperial heritage will keep him in his present absurd position, all flanks and no front.

Now, if you remember nothing else about the way empires think and function from these episodes, remember this, all flanks and no front. They can't really help themselves. That's just the way they are. Anyway. This is fascinating to me. I like this stuff. I wonder how much this still does or doesn't work, right? Because-

You know, the idea of like, oh, and then we disappear into the hills. I mean, I guess the Taliban did that to the US and Afghanistan. So I guess there is successfully. Yeah. I mean, I think it does work. It just people don't always get it right. You know, like we're looking right now at what's happening on a strategic level. I'm not talking a moral level necessarily, but like in Gaza, you know, with.

What Hamas has been doing, is this going to work out? Was it a good strategy? Is this going to work? We simply don't know. A good strategy in terms of will they achieve ultimately their goals, that's unknown, right? We can look at what the Taliban did and say they very successfully employed a version of this strategy and it worked for them.

And we can look at – we can look at to an extent Iran in Iraq, Iranian influence in Iraq and the degree of political power that it's given them in the modern-day state and like the damage that they did to the United States as another example of like, well, yeah, this is – they were fairly successful, not to the same extent the Taliban was, but fairly successful with a strategy like this. Right? Right.

When you also get into the sort of fourth generational warfare thing of like those who control the like hearts and minds of the people are the people who control the people. Like, so it's like, which is why, I mean, it's why even the right wing wants to do mutual aid is that like literally whoever is feeding the people is if you feed people that that's where their allegiance is. Right. Yeah. The system that feeds them. And, but it's interesting because in a situation like this,

It's just home territory. Yeah. And the Ottomans haven't really, I don't know enough about how the Ottomans were exerting power in that region, actually. Yeah. I mean, the same way empires generally did. Right. Mostly extractively with some outposts. Yes. Yes. And they're not great at it. Right. Again, this is the Ottomans are a failing empire. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, cool stuff. Yep. Magpie, do you have a new book that people can buy?

I do have a new book that people can buy. It's called The Sapling Cage. And if you like weird...

people running around who travel and do small scale conflict, you might like this story about a young trans girl who wants to go be a witch and learns how to spear fight. Because in my book, witches learn how to spear fight before they learn how to use magic. And hey, maybe learn how to spear fight yourself. You know, it's very what the Greeks always said about it is that it kind of just comes naturally. There's very little training really that you need. Yeah.

Poke a man with a spear. It's surprisingly easy. That's what John Brown thought too. Or not. Goodbye. I was going to say it didn't work out well for him, but I'm like, actually, it didn't work out well, but it, yeah, I mean, his larger strategic goals were successful. Right. Yeah. I mean, yes. All right. Yeah. So anyway, go make a spear. Yep.

Behind the Bastards is a production of Cool Zone Media. For more from Cool Zone Media, visit our website, coolzonemedia.com. Or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Behind the Bastards is now available on YouTube. New episodes every Wednesday and Friday. Subscribe to our channel, youtube.com slash at Behind the Bastards.

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