'Lawrence of Arabia' Offers Lessons Too Real

For the past week, a revival of "Lawrence of Arabia" has been playing to solid crowds at the Uptown Theater, the prestige big-screen movie palace in swanky Northwest Washington, D.C. In other words, on the eve of U.S. action against Iraq, some of Powertown's movers and shakers have been reminded that others before them, also great and glorious, have been down the same sandy road.

And so, as new questions from the Mideast fly into our faces - Is Osama bin Laden still alive? Will Iraq fool United Nations weapons inspectors? Is Saddam Hussein getting ready to use nerve gas? - all Americans might seek out the 1962 film to gain a bit of historical perspective on the region that looms so large in our future

Directed by David Lean, "Lawrence" won seven Academy Awards, including best picture. The film introduced two new stars, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif; moreover, on its 40th anniversary, it's delicious to see Alec Guinness portraying a sage and silky Arab, seemingly preparing for his role as the wise and wizened Obi-Wan Kenobi in "Star Wars."

While "Lawrence" is also about the rise and fall of empires, it's a true story. The real T.E. Lawrence (1888-1935) was a British officer who, during World War I, was assigned to foment an Arab uprising against the Turkish Ottoman Empire, an ally of the Kaiser's Germany. Lawrence, fluent in Arabic, galvanized once-warring tribes to unite and fight. His rhetoric, plus a few British-supplied machine guns, stirred Arab nationalism from centuries of slumber. As the title of the film suggests, his life became legend.

But then came the rub. The British were eager to see the Arabs expel the Turks, but after the fighting ended in 1918, they were just as eager to control the Arab territory themselves. A new book, "Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World," by Margaret MacMillan, a historian at the University of Toronto, captures the thinking of Britain's Prime Minister Lloyd George as he attended the post-war peace conferences in and around Versailles, France. "Like Napoleon, he was intoxicated by the possibilities of the Middle East: a restored Hellenic world in Asia Minor; a new Jewish civilization in Palestine, Suez and all the links to India safe from threat; loyal and obedient Arab states along the Fertile Crescent and the valleys of the Tigris and Euphrates; protection for British oil supplies from Persia and the possibility of new sources under direct British control."

The British plan looked great in theory, but it didn't work out so well in practice. The Arabs, thinking they had been promised independence by Lawrence in return for their military efforts against Turkish overlords, did not take kindly to being overlorded by Lawrence's countrymen instead. A rebellion broke out in Mesopotamia in 1920; MacMillan describes what happened next: "The British reacted harshly, sending punitive expeditions across the land to burn villages and exact fines. In a new but very effective tactic, their aircraft machine-gunned and bombed from the air. By the end of the year, order had been restored."

For his part, Lawrence was left in despair. Having spent so much time with Arabs, he came to identify with them and their yearning for independence. He resigned his post and returned to Britain to write his memoirs. But soon the British backed out of their Mesopotamian possession, and Iraq became independent in 1932.

Yet not too surprisingly, Iraqis remained hostile to Britain. In 1941, in the middle of World War II, a pro-Nazi faction took over the government in Baghdad. That prompted a second British invasion, which ended in 1946. And now, of course, the British, alongside the Americans, are poised for a third military mission against an even more repellent Iraqi regime.

The lesson of "Lawrence" is that military victory is only the beginning. Yes, the British could defeat the Turks. But, no, they could not rule the Arabs thereafter. Yet today, new Lawrences, American as well as British, are poised for action and adventure in an Arab land. They can probably win the fight easily enough, but history - real as well as reel - suggests that it's going to be tough to prevail in peace.