[Marxism] Quagmire

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,1789531,00.html
Quagmire is the word

As TE Lawrence knew, and troops in Iraq are finding out, guerrillas are 
almost undefeatable

James Barr
Saturday June 3, 2006
The Guardian

As British troops went in to Iraq in March 2003, the Iraqi information 
minister, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, provided some unexpected entertainment 
at a time of great uncertainty. But some of his claims do not seem so 
risible now, one of them being: "We have drawn them into a quagmire and 
they will never get out of it."

Quagmire is the word. Unable to halt the country's descent into a sectarian 
civil war, and yet reluctant to admit failure and leave a vacuum by 
withdrawing, we are faced with a terrible dilemma in Iraq today. The 
situation would be familiar to TE Lawrence, who described in 1920 how 
clumsy involvement in Iraq had left Britain "in a trap from which it will 
be hard to escape with dignity and honour".

Lawrence had shot to fame through his role in the Arab revolt, which began 
in the Hejaz in western Arabia 90 years ago on Monday. The uprising had 
been surreptitiously encouraged by the British. By sponsoring a revolt in 
the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, they hoped to sow disarray throughout 
the Islamic world that would defuse the call to jihad issued by the Ottoman 
sultan to Muslims in India and Egypt at the beginning of the first world war.

The Turks were rapidly driven from Mecca but not Medina, which was directly 
linked by rail to their headquarters at Damascus. Just as George Bush and 
Tony Blair don't want to pull out of Iraq for the admission of failure such 
a withdrawal would represent, the Turks were loth to leave Medina in 1916 
and relinquish their leadership of the Muslim world, which they believed 
came with the possession of the holy city.

Lawrence was one of a handful of advisers dispatched to help the Bedu 
rebels. As he quickly realised, the Ottomans' determination to cling on in 
Medina left them vulnerable to hit-and-run warfare. "This show is 
splendid," he told a colleague, "you cannot imagine greater fun for us, 
greater fury and vexation for the Turks." There was no shortage of 
guerrillas. The completion of the Hejaz railway from Damascus to Medina in 
1908 had hurt the Bedu, who hired out camels and guides to travellers, and 
had sidelines in robbery and protection rackets. Like the economically 
dispossessed young men dying in the insurgency in Iraq today, the Bedu had 
little to lose from taking the abundant British gold on offer.

British and American troops in Iraq are vulnerable to similar tactics 
today. Richard Holmes's new book, Dusty Warriors, provides a vivid example 
from 2004. Determined to engage with the people of Al Amarah, the British 
army kept a base inside the city. The base, under regular mortar attack, 
had to be supplied by armoured convoys, which were frequently ambushed. The 
British fired back, preserving access to their city-centre outpost, but at 
the cost of spiralling violence. The killing of one insurgent only moves 
others to take his place. And the "fury and vexation" caused by the 
insurgents' almost unanswerable tactics seems to have triggered the alleged 
massacre in Haditha by US troops last November.

"To make war upon rebellion was messy and slow," in Lawrence's memorable 
phrase, "like eating soup with a knife." His own estimate after the war was 
that the Turks would have needed 600,000 men to pacify the Hejaz. Today in 
Iraq, a similar-sized area, there are fewer than 200,000 coalition troops. 
Soon there will be even fewer. It seems Lawrence's central message, that 
guerrillas are almost impossible to defeat, is finally beginning to sink in.

· James Barr is the author of Setting the Desert on Fire: TE Lawrence and 
Britain's Secret War in Arabia, 1916-18, published by Bloomsbury on Monday

aj_barr@xxxxxxxxxxx


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