Fox shot

My eye was caught yesterday by a quote in Rachel Sylvester's column yesterday in The Times. She quoted the opposition Conservative Party's defence spokesman, Dr Liam Fox, making the case for staying the course in Afghanistan. “Imagine if Churchill had said — ‘things aren’t going well in the opinion polls’,” he said. “If we are forced out that would be a shot in the arm to jihadists everywhere.”

But a vivid imagination is not necessary. Here is Churchill arguing the need to withdraw from Iraq, in a letter to the prime minister, Lloyd George, in August 1920.

There is “something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian entanglement” he wrote to Lloyd George. “It seems to me so gratuitous that after all the struggles of war, just when we want to get together our slender military resources and re-establish our finances and have a little in hand in case of danger here or there, we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts.”

“We have not got a single friend in the press on the subject, and there is no point of which they make more effective use to injure the Government. Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic warfare…”

(CHAR 16/48, Churchill to Lloyd George, 31 August 1920)

Churchill was overruled. But the idea that he, like any other elected politician, did not pay close attention to public opinion, is risible.

Next speaking

I'm speaking next Monday morning - on Lawrence of Arabia and World War One - at 9.15 am at this year's Christ Church Oxford Conflict conference, on the Making of the Modern Middle East. It's still possible to come for my talk, and any of the others - more details of how to do so can be found here.

Reinstate Michael Yon

Michael Yon is a freelance journalist who has an excellent website and who has, up to yesterday, embedded with British forces in Helmand, Afghanistan. In his most recent report he describes in great detail the circumstances in which a number of British soldiers have been killed in the town of Sangin recently. The report has led the Ministry of Defence to cancel his placement: precisely why he does not say: is it the details of the deaths, or the description of the effect of them on the other soldiers, or the Google Earth images showing exactly where they happened?

Whatever, the MoD's decision is a bad one. Michael Yon should be reinstated.

UPDATE - 26 August: Defence of the Realm suggests that the reason why Yon's report stung the MoD was because the clearance of the road was in fact a relief operation, revealing just how far the situation in Sangin has deteriorated. The MoD has also published its version of events.

The source of the famous Churchill quote

The quote, which seems to capture its author's reckless personality perfectly, has been misquoted and misattributed. There are a dozen variations of it across the internet. The questions I had were, which version is correct and where is it from?

If, like me, you guessed he said it in his younger years and bought the popular abridgement of his early works in a bid to find it, you will be disappointed, for that edition omits the passage that contains it altogether. Finally I have found the answer:

"Nothing in life is so exhilarating as to be shot at without result."

Winston S Churchill, The Story of the Malakand Field Force, London 1898.

You can read the quote in context here: see page 107. It may be that, given that the book is based on a series of letters Churchill wrote to the Daily Telegraph to describe the fighting that in fact that newspaper was the first to print it.

The British Museum and national politics

I listened last night as Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, was interviewed by Mark Lawson on BBC Radio Four. The conversation predictably turned to the perennial question of the Elgin Marbles, the reliefs from the Parthenon which are exhibited in the British Museum and which the Greek government desperately wants. Was it not the case, asked Lawson, that the Greeks, who have built a gallery to house the marbles, now had an unstoppable moral and practical case for their return? "The key thing", replied MacGregor (28 minutes in), "is whether or not you bring politics into culture. The British tradition of museums has been to separate politics, national politics, from cultural questions. The Greek tradition is a very different one."

What utter rubbish. Britain's museums and national politics have always been tightly intertwined. British rivalry with the French was an important stimulus in the building of a collection which was not an assembly of all things British, but an exhibition of Britain's power and global reach, in the capital of its empire. The dramatic growth of the museum's Egyptian collection followed the defeat, by the British, of the French at the battle of the Nile in 1799. And Elgin himself used his position as Britain's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire to take away the marbles shortly afterwards.

The French behaved similarly. On 23 July 1850 The Times reported that the French were "determined to excel us in the exhibition of Assyrian works of art in order to compensate the comparative deficiency, which the Louvre is obliged to acknowledge as to the treasures it possesses in the other great catalogues."* French archaeologists used their diplomatic corps to assist them in the removal of the Venus de Milo and the Winged Victory of Samothrace - to highlight two famous examples that grace the Louvre today - and to thwart the opposition. A set of permits to excavate made out by the Ottoman authorities to the British mysteriously disappeared at the French consulate in Tunis.

By 30 November 1861 the Illustrated London News believed that the British had regained the advantage. It celebrated the fact that "During the last few years the Foreign Office has shown a zeal in the service of archaeology not second to that of the continental governments and the National Collection has in consequence received priceless additions that would else have remained unnoticed or gone to enrich the museums of other countries."*

Personally I support Neil MacGregor's dogged refusal to surrender to Greek pressure, for reasons I've mentioned before. But the line that Britain is somehow different (and superior) as a nation is flimsy. If that is the best argument remaining, it will not be long before the marbles are back in Athens.

*Both the quotes come from Debbie Challis's fascinating book on archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, From the Harpy Tomb to the Wonders of Ephesus: British Archaeologists in the Ottoman Empire, 1840-1880, London 2008.

Was the Arab Revolt a proxy war?

With the paperback Setting the Desert on Fire about to be published in the US, The Army Lawyer runs a detailed, generous review by Major Jennifer Clark. Scroll through to pages 62-68 to read it.

But eez bootik 'otel

The Ziad Hotel in Deir ez Zor wins 2 UN Stars

I’ve written before about how useful an endorsement from the United Nations, whose staff are never known to rough it, is when picking hotels on the edges of conflict zones. The two shiny 4x4s of the UNHCR parked outside the Ziad Hotel in Deir ez Zor, in eastern Syria, showed promise. And so it proved. The Ziad offers clean, large, echoing rooms with air-conditioning in a newish block beside the canal and minutes’ walk from the centre of this bustling town on the Euphrates.

I’ve just returned from my first visit to Syria since 2002 and there are plenty of obvious changes. Tinny far-eastern cars have displaced the armada of elderly American automobiles, held together by solder and putty, which previously served as taxis. ATMs have arrived (though not always willing to dispense money), there is internet access of unexpected velocity, a dramatic increase in tourists and a rise in the number of hotels. With that last in mind I’m going to run through where I stayed on my anti-clockwise tour around the country.

Unlike in south-east Turkey last year, where I heard the phrase "but eez bootik 'otel", used repeatedly by hoteliers to justify an outrageous opening demand on the grounds that their tatty hotel has atmosphere, negotiating the price downwards in Syria is a rather less fraught process, and because the supply of beds still outstrips the number of intrepid tourists, it is possible to get discounts, even in the high tourist season.

Palmyra – the Tower Hotel. I had looked at the Heliopolis Hotel already, but it wanted about $70 for a small room with poor beds and proved unwilling to negotiate. The Tower, which is on the main street in the town, offered me a “suite” (you got space, not grandeur) for about £30, I think. It was clean enough and well-placed for the sights but nothing special. I ate across the road at a restaurant that does superb lemonade with mint by the half-litre jar.

Deir-ez-Zor - the Ziad Hotel. Two UN stars, as described above.

Aleppo – the Beit Wakil. $120 a night plus tourist tax. Despite one or two slightly buttery male reception staff who want to take your money up-front, air-conditioning that did not work and staff who shrugged when asked to fix it, which together give the impression it is coasting on its reputation, this is an atmospheric place to stay in the Armenian Jdeidah quarter, with a pretty shaded courtyard with flowers and a tinkling fountain. You can park on a meter in the nearby square, Saahat Hattab, while you dump your bags, and park overnight for 200 Syrian Pounds (ie about £3) a day in the carpark owned by the Dar al Zamaria round the corner. And the thickness of the walls at the hotel meant that the lack of air-conditioning in May was not a problem. There are many other boutique hotels appearing in the city, against whom the Beit Wakil will increasingly have to raise its game, or drop its prices. There are a growing number of good places to eat, many of them providing roof-top views across the city.

Lattakya – the Riviera Hotel. I checked in here after driving up the coast to the Meridien, where the manager wanted $185 for a room on a Friday night, but immediately came down to $134 when I laughed. I offered $70, which he would not accept, though he admitted that the hotel was only 45% occupied. The lifts have graffiti, the rooms smell of smoke. Avoid, as I did. By contrast the Riviera, on the unpromising main drag into the city, has pleasant staff and good clean rooms. They took $75 for a room. Finding it was oddly tricky, given that it is on the main road into the city: it is on the left, opposite the new looking tourist office, as the road bends round to the left. You can park on the street outside. Dinner not special.

Hama – the Orient House. I asked first at the Cairo Hotel, which is a basic but clean option in the centre of town, near the clock tower. The Cairo offers bargain rates but the rooms are not inspiring, and – I suspect – quite noisy from traffic into the night. But the same family owns other hotels in the town, one of which is the Orient House, a few minutes’ drive south – the Cairo’s owner sent his young nephew with me in my car to provide directions, including going the wrong way up a one-way street. The pleasant manager of the Orient House – brother of the manager of the Cairo – wanted $90 a night but took $75. This is a two courtyard old house with perfectly fine if slightly characterless rooms, and a pleasant courtyard dining area. It doesn’t serve alcohol, but the food was fine. The hotel was apparently the home of Akram al Hawrani, who was vice-president in the Nasser-dominated and short-lived union between Egypt and Syria, the UAR, which lasted between 1958 and 1961.

The sting in the tail of a visit to Syria is the exorbitant departure tax demanded by the Syrian government. This now stands at 1500 SP (£20); the guidebook, which was a recent edition, quoted 200 SP. Paying it left a briefly bitter taste; Syria remains a fascinating place.

Next speaking

I'm speaking next Friday, 15 May, about British-French relations in the Middle East between the Wars, at St Antony's College, Oxford. The seminar starts at 5pm.

Al Hayat review

Here's the first review I am aware of from the Arabic press - it was published in Al Hayat on Tuesday.

The lengths a tourist board will go to

News that a Spanish tourist board on the Costa Brava has used a photograph taken in the Bahamas to promote its local beach reminds me of a poster I saw four years ago.

I was in a dark and tatty bureau de change in Leh, in the Indian Himalaya. On the wall there was a dog-eared poster. "Come to India", it beckoned, beneath a photograph of a range of saw-toothed snowy peaks. They looked familiar, I thought. Yet this was the first time I had been to India.

They were familiar: the view was of the spectacular scene at Concordia - across the Line of Control in Pakistani-occupied (and Indian claimed) Kashmir, which I had seen two years before.

Was this ignorance, over-enthusiastic marketing or a political statement? It was impossible to tell.

Another review

A new review of Setting the Desert on Fire can be found here.

Next speaking...

I'm speaking twice next week:

Wednesday 11 February - to the Barnes Literary Society
Friday 13 February - at St Antony's College, Oxford

Speaking too soon

On 16 December, The Times, a newspaper that ardently supported the invasion of Iraq in 2003, published a leader which argued that the lenient treatment given to the now famous shoe-thrower, Muntazer al-Zaidi, was a colourful illustration of Iraq's transformation. "Had a protester hurled shoes and shouted insults at Saddam Hussein during the visit of a world leader" the paper reflected, "the perpetrator and all his family would probably have been put to death." The editorial glibly ended: "Iraq is far from perfect, but at least its people have learnt to enjoy freedom of expression."

Freedom of expression can only be enjoyed if it is respected - and in al-Zaidi's instance this does not seem to have been the case. According to the New York Times, who interviewed al-Zaidi's brother, after his arrest the journalist was burned with a cigarette and beaten up in an effort to extract a confession from him. The BBC corroborated this report on Friday by talking to the judge investigating the case. With a furore now raging about the treatment of the journalist the judge has today backtracked somewhat, saying that al-Zaidi was bruised during his arrest, not from his treatment afterwards.

Al-Zaidi is due to be tried for "aggression against a foreign head of state" on 31 December. Presumably by then the prosecutors hope that his bruises will have healed.

New for 2009

The paperback edition of Setting the Desert on Fire will be published in the US in April 2009.

How Rome linked Britain and the Arab world

The grave stone of Cautronius, a troop standard bearer, at Tyre, southern Lebanon

We spent a few hours deciphering Roman inscriptions when I studied Latin at school, but unfortunately not long enough for any of what I learnt to stick. Which is a pity for they yield a lot of information. When I spotted the elegantly-lettered tombstone of Cautronius, a standard-bearer of the Italian troop [I think], when I visited Lebanon last year, I thought it worthy of a photograph.*

An inscription I saw in a museum in St Albans a while ago points to some interesting linkages across the Roman world, and hints at a tragic love story. It is dedicated to Regina, and reads:

D[is] M[anibus] Regina Liberta

et Coniuge Barates Palmyrenus

Natione Catuallauna An[nomum] XXX

To the spirits of the departed and to Regina his freedwoman

and wife, a Catavellaunian by tribe, aged 30

Barates of Palmyra set this up.

Barates, a Syrian from the eastern edge of Rome's empire found himself posted to its North-West Frontier. For the gravestone of his wife was found at Arbeia Roman Fort near South Shields, on Hadrian's Wall, where Barates served. Regina's tribe, the Catavellauni came from the area around St Albans.

As the almost tangible warmth of a photograph I took several years ago in Palmyra shows, South Shields is a long way off.

*The inscription mentions something about a "falca" - which appears to mean a scythe or sickle. Any help with translation gratefully received...

The Great Arab Revolt Project

The Great Arab Revolt Project have spent two seasons digging in southern Jordan. They are about to return for a third, excavating at several Hijaz Railway stations for evidence that will give historians a much better idea of what life was like for the Ottoman soldiers guarding the track, and the guerrilla raids that targeted them.

The archaeologists will be blogging about what they find here and maintain a useful website here.

A shatter'd visage

The fallen head of a statue on Nemrut Dagi, 2150m, south-east Turkey

OZYMANDIAS

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,

Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown

And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,

The hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed.

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains: round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

This shatter'd visage is fully visible, and stands 2,150m above sea-level, but it reminded me of one of my favourite poems, Shelley's evocation of hubris, Ozymandias. At the orders of King Antiochus, statues of himself and various gods were erected on the summit of Nemrut Dagi, a few decades before the birth of Christ. At some stage in the intervening 2,000 years, the heads of the statues have fallen off. Since righted, their torsoes lie broken on the ground behind them. But one wonders: would Antiochus be disappointed, or delighted, that his visage yet survives?

Where does the title come from?

Anonymous, in a generous comment yesterday, asks where the title Setting the Desert on Fire comes from. It is taken from page 67 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1935 edition). Here is the full quote in context below:

"The Sherif's rebellion had been unsatisfactory for the last few months (standing still, which, with an irregular war, was the prelude to disaster), and my suspicion was that its lack was leadership: notintellect, nor judgement, nor political wisdom, but the flame ofenthusiasm that would set the desert on fire."

Limited powers

This article, in this morning's Financial Times, caught my eye. It details the efforts of the latest governor of Helmand province, Gulab Mangal, to root out endemic corruption. Mangal, reports the writer, dresses up in disguise and goes out on his weekends looking for policemen seeking bribes. "If they are junior, I sack them on the spot," he is quoted as saying, proudly. Which begs a question - what if they are senior?

To be fair to Mangal, however, the article goes on to suggest that he is trying to break up the local opium trade which, UN figures published earlier this week showed, grew to new record levels in this year's springtime harvest. The UN focused on the fact that overall production in Afghanistan was down, but a drought appears significantly responsible for the fall.

Golda Meir: the Iron Lady of the Middle East

Tomorrow's Sunday Times runs my review of Elinor Burkett's new biography of the Israeli prime minister, Golda Meir. Here it is.

What's going on in Syria?

It's been six years since I went to Syria, so I am not well qualified to talk with insight on the goings-on inside that state. But a report in this morning's Times that a senior Syrian general with links to Hizbollah was shot dead in the port of Tartous last Friday caught my eye. The Times has followed up the story today, quoting an analyst who says that the dead man, Mohammed Suleiman, was the liaison officer between the Syrian regime and the Lebanese political party/terror group/state within a state.* Interestingly, according to Haaretz, Syria's state-controlled media did not report the killing which, presumably, they might have done if they suspected a foreign hand at work.

Syria is being pulled in two different directions. The French, and quietly the British, have been making overtures to the British-educated President Assad (whose wife was brought up in Acton, west London), hoping to separate him from the Iranians. Syria has started talking to Israel, using Turkey as a mediator. On the other hand the President is surrounded by an older generation he inherited from his father, Hafiz, who built close ties with Iran in order to weaken neighbouring Iraq. Whether or not to maintain those ties is now the question. Assad appears to be trying to bridge the gap, saying in the Syrian newspaper Tishreen yesterday that on his trip to Teheran this past weekend he had not been acting as a go-between the West and President Ahmadinejad. On his visit he also met the Ayatollah, drawing attention to his own connection, as an Alawite, to the Shia branch of Islam. He is clearly anxious not to be seen as a puppet of the west.

The Times suggests that the assassination of Suleiman (who, judging by his home-town, is likely also to be an Alawite) is linked to internal tensions over tactics. The absence of comment on the murder in the Syrian press and my own, slightly unsettling, experience of meeting one or two the old guard six years ago make that sound eminently plausible.

* Delete as preferred

Speaking engagements

Hear me speak about TE Lawrence and his impact:

28 September 2008 to the TE Lawrence Society Symposium, at St John's College Oxford.
27 January 2009 to history students taking the TE Lawrence/Gertrude Bell Special Subject at the University of Cambridge.
11 February 2009, to the Barnes Literary Society.
7 September 2009, at the Making of the Modern Middle East conference, at Christ Church, Oxford.

DFID in Afghanistan

I've touched before on the UK Department for International Development's role in Afghanistan. Yesterday's Times ran an interesting article by Anthony Loyd on Britain's aid effort to date in Helmand, southern Afghanistan. Much of the aid Britain has squirted at the Afghans has gone, in Loyd's words, in "bungs, bribes and embezzlement". Given these inescapable facts of Afghan life, Britain's strategy of providing the security to enable the Afghans to resume business on their own terms, seems a better use of money.

American support for Israeli policy

Last year John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt caused controversy with the publication of their book, The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy. They argued that groups like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) have hijacked the foreign policy of the United States to the detriment of Americans' best interests, and included a lengthy study of US support for Israel's attempt to defeat Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 to advance their case.

Certainly, if you visit southern Lebanon today - driving past the billboards of bearded Iranian ayatollahs and soft-focus portraits of youthful 'martyrs' attached to street lamps - you will probably agree that Israel's invasion of the area two years ago has had the opposite effect to that intended. The roads have been patched up, farms repaired, and life has returned to normal. Far from being weaker, Hezbollah, which fixed the damage, is stronger than ever.

I have no doubt that Israel runs an impressive lobbying operation - I once benefited from a trip funded by the Israeli foreign office where I was able to meet many key Israeli politicians - but the question on why such lobbying strikes a chord, especially in the US is an interesting one. This month's Foreign Affairs contains a thoughtful article by Walter Russell Mead on the ideological origins and evolution of American support for an independent Jewish state, which is well worth reading in full. It starts with a striking quote from founding father John Adams, who hoped that "Once restored to an independent government and no longer persecuted they [the Jews] would soon wear away some of the asperities and peculiarities of their character and possibly in time become liberal Unitarian Christians".

The article is a gentle rebuttal of Mearsheimer and Walt's thesis, arguing that though liberal and conservative Americans have been sympathetic to Israel for completely different social and religious reasons, the combined weight of their votea has underpinned the benevolent US policy towards the state of Israel. He concludes that "In the future, as in the past, US policy toward the Middle East will, for better or worse, continue to be shaped primarily by the will of the American majority, not the machinations of any minority, however wealthy or engaged in the political process some of its members may be."

Maybe. George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War gives a vivid practical illustration of how baser economic considerations trump ideology in such democratic calculations. Crile describes how the Texan Congressman Wilson's enthusiasm for various foreign regimes was shaped by their decisions over arms procurement that could impact jobs on the General Dynamics plant in Texas that manufactured F-16 fighter jets. Israel was a notable purchaser of these. Mearsheimer and Walt explain the complex financial arrangements by which the United States supports Israel financially and in kind, so that US aid to Israel ultimately ends up keeping US workers in the defence industry in jobs. Mead's article does not touch on this, and how it might affect the US democratic process.

National Army Museum, Chelsea

I'm speaking at the National Army Museum in Chelsea at 12.30pm on Thursday.

More details can be found here.

Another review

Here.

Key dates in the formation of the modern Middle East

A correspondent gets in touch to ask if I can supply "a chronological listing of events that resulted in the present disposition of territory" in the Middle East.

This is a framework which I needed to do in connection for my next book (on which more in due course). So I sketched out what I think are the key dates.

• 1915 August – British begin secret correspondence with Sharif Husein of Mecca, offering him large, vague empire encompassing Arabia.
• 1915 November – British begin secret negotiations with French for division of Middle East between them.
• 1916 May – Sykes-Picot agreement divides Middle East between France (northern part) and Britain (southern part).
• 1916 June – Arab revolt breaks out in Mecca: by the war’s end the Arabs, under Husein’s son Feisal, would take control of Damascus, a thousand miles to the north.
• 1917 April – Britain invades Palestine
• 1917 November – Britain issues Balfour Declaration offering sympathy with Zionist aspirations for a national home in Palestine
• 1918 October – War in Middle East ends: British troops occupy Palestine, Syria, and, after a post-armistice dash north, all of Iraq.
• 1918 December – Lloyd George and Clemenceau secretly agree Britain should have Palestine and Iraq.
• 1919 summer – Paris peace conference fails to resolve Middle Eastern matters, amid acrimony.
• 1919 November – Britain pulls troops out of Syria, leaving French in charge of coastal area and Arabs under Feisal in charge of inland towns.
• 1920 April – Allies finally agree on allocation of mandates at conference in San Remo, Italy. France to have Syria, Britain to have Iraq and Palestine. The borders are as yet undefined, and their definition would be a source of some friction in the years ahead.
• 1920 July – Britain transfers Palestine from military to civil control. It would rule Palestine until May 1948, trying and failing to keep both Arabs and Jews satisfied.
• 1920 July – Armed with the mandate for Syria, France issues an ultimatum to Feisal and shortly afterwards, throws him out of inland Syria. France ruled Syria until 1946.
• 1920 August – Allies force Treaty of Sèvres on Turkey. This confirms San Remo, and also recognises the Hijaz (western Arabia) and Armenia (eastern Anatolia). Other parts of the former Ottoman Empire are parcelled out between Italy and Greece. The treaty is wrecked by the Turkish nationalists, who fight to take control of Anatolia, and by the refusal of the United States to take on the mandate for Armenia.
• 1920 September – France creates State of Greater Lebanon. Lebanese Republic created on 1 September 1926. Lebanon became independent in November 1943 following a political crisis created by the Free French decision to kidnap the President and Prime Minister, whom they were forced by the British to release. French troops leave in 1946.
• 1921 March – Churchill offers Transjordan to Feisal’s older brother, Abdullah as a temporary arrangement. In September 1922 the League of Nations approves Britain’s request to administer Palestine and Transjordan separately. Britain recognises Transjordan as a state in 1923, and as a kingdom in March 1946. Abdullah was recognised as King soon after.
• 1921 August – British crown Feisal king of Iraq to try to appease Arab opinion in the country following the rebellion the previous year. In October 1922, Iraq agrees treaty with Britain formalising their relationship. Iraq became independent in 1932.
• 1924 July – The Treaty of Lausanne finally settled the borders of Turkey, in Anatolia and in Europe.

Are there others I have missed?

Latest review

Another review - this time in the Washington Times.

Aerial reconnaissance in the Arab revolt

Another interesting review, this time on Barnes and Noble's website. It usefully draws attention to a book I had not heard about before: Polly Mohs's Military Intelligence and the Arab Revolt, published by Routledge in October last year.

According to the blurb (from Amazon) Mohs argues that "Modern intelligence techniques such as Sigint, Imint [aerial reconnaissance to you and me] and Humint were incorporated into strategic planning with greater expertise and consistency in Arabia than in any other theatre during the war, and their deployment as tactical support for the Arab forces was decisive."

Although the British overplayed the remoteness of the Hijaz, the jagged desert landscape where the revolt played out, there is no doubt that they had little to go by. A few brave explorers - most famously Richard Burton - had criss-crossed the area on foot before the war. The most recent was a young army officer named AJB Wavell who, like Burton, disguised himself as a Muslim to enter Mecca in 1909. Wavell was killed in East Africa during the First World War, before he might have been called in by the Arab Bureau to offer any assistance. The British were thus bereft of signficant first hand experience of the area. When I was doing my research, I was amused to find, in the corner of one British military map, this caveat: "This map is a collection of sketches by Egyptian pilgrimage officers and members of the Sherif's forces. An attempt has been made to control it by native information, but without success."

Until the advent of Google mapping and Google Earth a couple of years ago, maps of Saudi Arabia remained in short supply, and the one I did purchase before I visited in 2005 had few of the obscure places marked, like Wadi Safra and Hamra (where TE Lawrence first met Feisal), that I was keen to go and see. I found myself relying on copies of the same maps that the British officers had used 90 years before to guide their way.

Shortage breeds ingenuity, and the government in London's reluctance to commit forces, and the vastness of the Hijaz both encouraged the British locally to use aerial reconnaissance to make up by accurate information what they felt the Arabs lacked in numbers, weapons, organisation and tactics. After some delaying a flight was sent to Rabigh on the Arabian coast. Lawrence initially in fact dismissed the value of aerial photography - he probably saw it as a threat to his own ventures into the interior, but those reservations did not last long.

I see that an article I read some time ago, about the work of the Royal Flying Corps in the Arab Revolt, has now been joined by the text and maps from Thomas Henderson's first hand account of operations, which is kept in the Imperial War Museum in London. Both are well worth reading.

The British also successfully intercepted Turkish wireless communications. It was not until someway through my research that I discovered that a phrase dotting British telegrams concerning enemy plans - "from an absolutely reliable source" - was shorthand code for information gained from this traffic.

Anyway, since I did not give much specific thought to the role of intelligence in Setting the Desert on Fire, I am looking forward to reading Polly Mohs's book.

More reviews

Two more reviews of Setting the Desert on Fire can be found here and here.

"The Sinews of War...

Still the cheapest element in modern warfare

... are infinite money," said Cicero. And time hasn't proved him wrong.

A few weeks ago I came up with a figure of over $2,800 a second for the cost of modern warfare. It was a rough calculation based on data published by the US government on its war expenditure in Iraq to date, divided by the number of days since the US invasion in March 2003. I said it was rough.

A far more sophisticated estimate, including many other costs, can be found in Joseph Stiglitz's and Linda Bilmes's new book The Three Trillion Dollar War. I haven't, and won't have time to read it, so this book review by Sam Leith for the Daily Telegraph is useful.

The sentence that caught my eye was this one:

The operating costs of the war in Iraq are now $12.5 billion a month; which rises to $16 billion if you include Afghanistan.

By my arithmetic that works out at $4,760 per second. No wonder then that a committee of British MPs has just announced that it expects the costs of Britain's engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan to double.

The question is how long the British taxpayer will indulge this level of expenditure (and lack of evidence of results) - particularly as the UK's economic prospects worsen.