Scott Anderson Quotes

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 given no alternative but to await another assault on the Suez Canal, and to then launch their own attack against the very strongest point of the Turkish line - the narrow front of southern Palestine - an approach that was to ultimately cost them fifty thousand more casualties.

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.

The modern Middle East was largely created by the British. It was they who carried the Allied war effort in the region during World War I and who, at its close, principally fashioned its peace. It was a peace presaged by the nickname given the region by covetous British leaders in wartime: 'The Great Loot.'

You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come. T. E. LAWRENCE, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, 1916

Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?

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.

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.

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.

He found a scene very much as Yale described, although, in his more accomplished hand, the macabre details would be far more graphically rendered: rats had gnawed "wet red galleries" into the bodies of the dead, many of which "were already swollen twice or thrice life-width, their fat heads laughing with black mouth. ... Of others the softer parts were fallen in. A few had burst open, and were liquescent with decay." Venturing deep into

Iraq is going to go down as one of the greatest blunders in American history.

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 commanders.

The peculiarities of my childhood, of constantly moving through so many different cultures, of always being the outsider, may have made me extraordinarily self-sufficient, but it had also bred a certain detachment, a sense that the world was a place to explore rather than truly inhabit. This manifested as a kind of shyness, even timidity.

I'd been to a number of war zones before in my life, but I had never been in one as terrifying as Chechnya.

What if I were to have you hanged?" 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." Djemal apparently liked that answer. Before the ending of their meeting, he had appointed Aaronsohn inspector in chief of a new locust eradication program,

My father suffered from chronic wanderlust. When I was 14, he set out on a yearlong road trip across Europe and Asia - and decided to take me along for company.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 -

[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.

Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.

Just as with homicide, those in the 'passion' category of suicide are much more likely to turn to whatever means are immediately available - those that are easy and quick.

Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.

But defeating one's enemies is only half the game; for a war to be truly justifiable one has to materially gain.

The principle of plural marriage was revealed to the Mormons amid much secrecy. Dark clouds hovered over the church in the early 1840s, after rumors spread that its founder, Joseph Smith, had taken up the practice of polygamy. While denying the charge in public, by 1843 Smith had shared a revelation with his closest disciples.

It was all a construct that Lawrence's biographers - at least those in the lionizing camp - have been more than willing to accept. Yet in doing so they have glided past one of the most important and fascinating riddles of T. E. Lawrence's life. How was it that a man less than four months in Arabia had come to so identify with the Arab cause that he was willing to betray the secrets of his own nation to assist it, to in effect transfer his allegiance from his homeland to a people he still barely knew?

British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.

Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated - indeed, feverishly nurtured - by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo.

Arab independence was only guaranteed in those lands that the Arabs freed themselves.

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.

History is often the tale of small moments - chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence - that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly's wings that triggers a hurricane.

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.

Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de Guerre; after the war, according to his brother, he found amusement in placing the medal around the neck of a friend's dog and parading it through the streets of Oxford.

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

Pain is always preferable to numbness.

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.

Nothing capable of sustaining an invasion force of any size. But in all this, Aqaba, lying at the very southern end of the

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.