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7133ba7
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Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling class of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world's messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden--no less tiresome for being God-given--to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact.
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Scott Anderson |
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1c1b497
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what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certainly occur, the cumulative experience of war, its day-in, day-out brutalization, was utterly antithetical to the notion of leading a heroic life.
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Scott Anderson |
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6d68491
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mold--William Henry Yale also subscribed to Roosevelt's notions of the ideal American man and of the dangers of "over-civilization," code for effeminacy. The true man, in this worldview, was a rugged individualist, physically fit as well as intellectually cultured, as equally at home leading men into battle or shooting big game on the prairie as chatting with the ladies in the salon."
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Scott Anderson |
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418afe6
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On top of this was the official indigenous Egyptian government that, though it was quite toothless, various British officials periodically felt the need to pretend to consult in order to maintain the appearance that the wishes of the actual inhabitants of Egypt somehow mattered.
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Scott Anderson |
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1303985
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Part of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correct a nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion and urgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protect its religious minority populations. At war's end, the C..
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Scott Anderson |
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500621b
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By the end of that first day, the advance landing forces at Gallipoli had already suffered nearly four thousand casualties, or considerably more than the total number of men Lawrence had projected would be needed to secure Alexandretta.
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Scott Anderson |
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1df0991
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had worked so hard to bring about, that Lawrence was suddenly
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Scott Anderson |
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40c7456
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And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of "free trade," the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled."
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Scott Anderson |
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2183a43
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this must surely be one of the most astounding documents ever presented to an Ally when engaged in a life and death struggle. For it imposed what was really a veto on the best opportunity of cutting the common enemy's life-line and of protecting our own." By acquiescing to such an outrage, Liddell Hart contended, the British General Staff were essentially "accessories to the crime," that crime being that the British in Egypt had now been gi..
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Scott Anderson |
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0888423
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The first-day objective of those landing on Cape Helles had been to secure a small village some four miles inland, and then to advance on the Turkish forts just above. Over the next seven months, the British would never reach that village, but would suffer nearly a quarter of a million casualties trying.
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Scott Anderson |
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5d00b87
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the British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment--whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three--to the world's less fortunate cultures and races.
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Scott Anderson |
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2e6ff25
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The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.
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Scott Anderson |
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8c0643a
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was a master of the PowerPoint presentation nearly a century before it existed.
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Scott Anderson |
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719f0e3
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considerably when Lord Kitchener assumed that post in 1911. Quickly coming to regard Storrs as his most trusted lieutenant--the Oriental secretary had been instrumental in torpedoing Curt Prufer's appointment to the khedival library directorship, for example--Kitchener had maintained their relationship even after his appointment to war secretary in August 1914. Since he fully intended to return to his Egyptian post once the war was over, Ki..
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Scott Anderson |
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4ac8486
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nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the
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Scott Anderson |
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6baeded
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He wasn't sure what to do. If he left the rock, it would only take a few minutes of desert air to dry his pool, and then all that would remain of him would be a small crucible of brown powder, a powder the wind would find and scatter. He wished to stay there, to protect the pool. But after a time, he thought differently. He understood that if he stayed upon the rock, he would simply disappear as well. And so, he rose.
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Scott Anderson |
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b847978
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correspondent in the Middle East, attache William Yale. With that dispatch he was establishing a tradition of fundamentally misreading the situation in the Middle East that his successors in the American intelligence community would rigorously maintain for the next ninety-five years.
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Scott Anderson |
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2cb9d7a
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LATE ONE NIGHT in early October 1913, William Yale lay in his tent in the mountains of Anatolia, struck by a sense of wonder at how quickly a life could change. Just three weeks earlier he had been living in
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Scott Anderson |
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3b7e1b6
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A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades--no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer.
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Scott Anderson |
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416eb4f
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frontier
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Scott Anderson |
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91a3924
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Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government's secret policy in the Middle East--that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away--were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity.
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Scott Anderson |
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c52a0c2
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Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them. Actually also, under the very odd conditions of Arabia, your practical work will not be as good as perhaps you think it is. T. E. LAWRENCE, ADVICE TO BRITISH OFFICERS, IN TWENTY-SEVEN ARTICLES, AUGUST 1917
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Scott Anderson |
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a8df7dd
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Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves.
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Scott Anderson |
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58b3086
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Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend's army go in return for one million English pounds' worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he'd very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture..
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Scott Anderson |
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d7b43d0
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As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was "the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements ... a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it."
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Scott Anderson |
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3acb53b
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Lawrence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists "with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan," ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in "The Politics of Mecca," the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, "and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd ... intensified and swollen..
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Scott Anderson |
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291f1ab
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Back in February 1915, when the plan had first been scuttled, Lawrence had bitterly suggested to his family that France was the true enemy in Syria. In the wake of the second scuttling in November 1915 was born an enmity that would cause him to view all future French actions in the region with utter distrust.
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Scott Anderson |
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25b4129
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Germany. If Churchill imagined, however, that a living Lawrence might have played a signal role in meeting that danger, he was surely mistaken. As Lawrence himself had been trying to tell the world for many years, the
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Scott Anderson |
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c398a16
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his son was a weak and mentally unstable young man with sadistic inclinations--which went a long way toward explaining his current flirtation with the British--
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Scott Anderson |
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013fb40
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For sheer mindless futility, though, it was hard to compete with the newly opened Southern Front in northeastern Italy. Having belatedly joined the war on the side of the Entente, by November 1915 Italy had already flung its army four times against a vastly outnumbered Austro-Hungarian force commanding the heights of a rugged mountain valley, only to be slaughtered each time; before war's end, there would be twelve battles in the Isonzo val..
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Scott Anderson |
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df38ce0
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To the degree that the British right hand didn't know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls--deceptions, in a less charitable assessment--to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain's wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military..
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Scott Anderson |
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a859a1b
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To stay in Djemal's good graces, or to soften the punishment when that failed, the foreign community in Jerusalem most often looked to two men. One was the dashing consul from neutral Spain, Antonio de la Cierva, Conde de Ballobar, who, having assumed the consular duties of most all the European "belligerent" nations, was extraordinarily well informed and influential."
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Scott Anderson |
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7f3acc8
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All of this would quickly make military considerations in the Middle East subordinate to political ones, and move the decision-making process away from military officers in the field to diplomats and politicians huddled in staterooms. If the chief distinguishing characteristic of the former had been their ineptitude, at least their intent had been clear; with the rise of the statesmen, and with different power blocs jockeying for advantage,..
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Scott Anderson |
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bf5de06
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there was just one person in the world who knew the full details of both the McMahon-Hussein Correspondence and the emerging Sykes-Picot compact, and who might have grasped the extent to which Arab, French, and British goals in the region had now been set on a collision course: Mark Sykes.
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Scott Anderson |
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c636b45
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the 400,000 British dead and wounded at the Somme were double that suffered by the French.
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Scott Anderson |
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47c1aa0
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Meanwhile, ibn-Saud was also British India's man in Arabia, with a close relationship going back to before the war.
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Scott Anderson |
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53ef317
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By popular account, on the morning of June 5, 1916, Emir Hussein climbed to a tower of his palace in Mecca and fired an old musket in the direction of the city's Turkish fort. It was the signal to rebellion, and by the end of that day Hussein's followers had launched attacks against a number of Turkish strongpoints across the length of the Hejaz.
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Scott Anderson |
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6c4ae6e
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As a boy, he had been obsessed with the tales of King Arthur's court and the chivalric code, had dreamed of leading a heroic life. In the reality of war, however, Lawrence had seen men blown to bits, often by his own handiwork, had left wounded behind to die, and had ordered prisoners to be killed. Just as any thoughtful person before or after him, what Lawrence had discovered on the battlefield was that while moments of heroism might certa..
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Scott Anderson |
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051140f
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I deem him one of the greatest beings alive in our time. I do not see his like elsewhere. I fear whatever our need we shall never see his like again.
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Scott Anderson |
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11bbda0
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And how would the Turks defend all that?" Lawrence asked. "No doubt by a trenchline across the bottom if we came like an army with banners, but suppose we were (as we might be) an influence, an idea, a thing intangible, invulnerable, without front or back, drifting about like a gas? ... Most wars were wars of contact, both forces striving into touch to avoid tactical surprise. Ours should be a war of detachment. We were to contain the enemy..
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Scott Anderson |
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94775bb
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In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, "Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America."
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truth-to-power
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Scott Anderson |
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4ffeed1
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Potemkin
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Scott Anderson |
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699356f
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The one possibility that Sanders tended to discount entirely was a landing at Gallipoli's southern tip, simply because the most basic rules of military logic--even mere common sense--argued against it.
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Scott Anderson |
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4114583
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I don't care what anyone says, it affects you, it never stops affecting you.
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Scott Anderson (novelist) |