T. E. Lawrence's Naivete Lives On...

[KoKo]

Now as in then, it's not that the West wants to save the Middle East - it's that the West wants the Middle East.

19 May 2015 11:01 GMT | Politics, Middle East, Europe, United Kingdom
About the Author
Alastair Sloan is a London-based journalist. He focuses on injustice and human rights in the UK, and international affairs including human rights, the arms trade, censorship, political unrest and dictatorships.

-------------

Today marks 80 years since the death of T E Lawrence, the wartime hero, renegade diplomat and reputable scholar. Lawrence had spent much of his life in motion, coursing across the Arab world, and it was in motion that he died - indulging his passion for motorbikes on an English country lane.

Lawrence's heroics during the World War I, during which he galvanised an impromptu bedouin army against the dying Ottoman Empire, were met with public adulation back home. Hoping that full independence was to be the prize for Arab loyalty in the war, he lobbied hard for France and the UK to relinquish their grip on the region, and in particular to overturn the Sykes-Picot agreement.

His enthusiastic overtures were rejected blankly. His former friends-in-arms had been betrayed, Lawrence felt, and he took the disappointment personally and bitterly to heart.

Lawrence was naive. While he saw the Arabs as friends, his bosses in London viewed them as tools - they had throughout the war, they did so afterwards - and arguably they still do today.

Naivete

The naivete of T E Lawrence lives on. Dozens of intelligent newspaper columnists, scholars and think-tankers - writing across all sides of the political spectrum, and many of whom I know and respect - still buy-in to the humanitarian intervention doctrine. There is no doubt that the Oxford-educated and highly intellectual Lawrence would also have been.

This widespread naivete among the Western intelligentsia stretches back decades. The Truman Doctrine, first enunciated in 1947, historically reversed US aversion to foreign regime change - stating that the US sought "to assist free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures".

A noble aim which was widely supported in the media; the doctrine was nothing more than a marketing illusion, cynically encasing self-interest in humanitarian rhetoric. An exemplar early expression was the CIA installing and actively supporting the totalitarian Shah of oil-rich Iran in 1953 - who was hardly a human rights hero.

More of an Interesting Read at.......

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2015/05/lawrence-naivete-lives-150517131050384.html