One of the first books I read when my son left for his first tour of Iraq was TE Lawrence’s Seven Pil­lars of Wis­dom. Long regarded as the father of guer­rilla war­fare I have found his exquis­ite prose deeply prophetic and quoted him gen­er­ously. Later I found that amongst gen­er­als involved with the Mid­dle East the­ater of war, it was required reading.

Robert Fisk has penned an arti­cle in the Inde­pen­dent affirm­ing the wis­dom of Lawrence of Ara­bia in the cur­rent Iraq affair.

Writ­ing of the Arab resis­tance to Turk­ish occu­pa­tion in the 1914–18 war, he asks of the insur­gents (in Iraq and else­where): “… sup­pose they were an influ­ence, a thing invul­ner­a­ble, intan­gi­ble, with­out front or back, drift­ing about like a gas? Armies were like plants, immo­bile as a whole, firm-rooted, nour­ished through long stems to the head. The Arabs might be a vapour…”

How typ­i­cal of Lawrence to use the hor­ror of gas war­fare as a metaphor for insur­gency. To con­trol the land they occu­pied, he con­tin­ued, the Turks “would have need of a for­ti­fied post every four square miles, and a post could not be less than 20 men. The Turks would need 600,000 men to meet the com­bined ill wills of all the local Arab peo­ple. They had 100,000 men available.”

Gen­eral Shin­seki con­curred with those esti­mates and was fired for voic­ing oppo­si­tion to Rums­feld in the early stages of the inva­sion. Today it would appear that few if any of the gen­er­als lead­ing our com­bat troops have read or taken seri­ously those hard learned truths of less than a cen­tury ago. In Viet­nam they had an acronym REMFs (rear ech­e­lon moth­er­fuck­ers) to describe those ‘lead­ers’ in the rear flank direct­ing the front lines. The REMFs should reread Seven Pil­lars of Wis­dom from the shel­ter of their for­ti­fied bunkers, their fail­ure to do so has failed the troops they command.