62
" Given this stunning lack of progress earned at such horrific cost, it might seem reasonable to imagine that the thoughts of the various warring nations would now turn toward peace, to trying to find some way out of the mess. Instead, precisely the opposite was happening. It’s a question that has faced peoples and nations at war since the beginning of time, and usually produced a terrible answer: in contemplating all the lives already lost, the treasure squandered, how to ever admit it was for nothing? Since such an admission is unthinkable, and the status quo untenable, the only option left is to escalate. "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
64
" gain. In modern European custom, that need had been sated by the payment of war reparations into the victor’s coffers, the grabbing of a disputed province here or there, but that seemed rather picayune in view of this conflict’s cost. Instead, all the slaughter was to be justified by a new golden age of empire, the victors far richer, far grander than before. Naturally, this simply propelled the cycle to its logical, murderous conclusion. When contemplating all to be conferred upon the eventual winners, and all to be taken from the losers, how to possibly quit now? No, what was required was greater commitment—more soldiers, more money, more loss—to be redeemed when victory finally came with more territory, more wealth, more power. "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
65
" THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE have been occasions when a vastly superior military force has managed, against all odds, to snatch defeat from all but certain victory. The phenomenon usually has root in one of three causes: arrogance, such a blinding belief in one’s own military or cultural superiority as to fail to take the enemy seriously; political interference; or tunnel vision, that curious tendency among war planners and generals to believe a flawed approach might be rectified simply by pouring more men and firepower into the fray. In early 1915, the British military would navigate its way to a fiasco of such colossal proportions as to require all three of these factors to work in concert. "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
68
" 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 "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
70
" As with Lawrence, these other competitors in the field tended to be young, wholly untrained for the missions they were given, and largely unsupervised. And just as with their more famous British counterpart, to capitalize on their extraordinary freedom of action, these men drew upon a very particular set of personality traits—cleverness, bravery, a talent for treachery—to both forge their own destiny and alter the course of history. Among them was a fallen American aristocrat in his twenties who, as the only American field intelligence officer in the Middle East during World War I, would strongly influence his nation’s postwar policy in the region, even as he remained on the payroll of Standard Oil of New York. There was the young German scholar who, donning the camouflage of Arab robes, would seek to foment an Islamic jihad against the Western colonial powers, and who would carry his “war by revolution” ideas into the Nazi era. Along with them was a Jewish scientist who, under the cover of working for the Ottoman government, would establish an elaborate anti-Ottoman spy ring and play a crucial role in creating a Jewish homeland in Palestine. If little remembered today, these men shared something else with their British counterpart. Like Lawrence, they were not the senior generals who charted battlefield campaigns in the Middle East, nor the elder statesmen who drew lines on maps in the war’s aftermath. Instead, their roles were perhaps even more profound: it was they who created the conditions on the ground that brought those campaigns to fruition, who made those postwar policies and boundaries possible. History is always a collaborative effort, and in the case of World War I an effort that involved literally millions of players, but to a surprising degree, the subterranean and complex game these four men played, their hidden loyalties and personal duels, helped create the modern Middle East and, by inevitable extension, the world we live in today. "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East
72
" undertaking however he could. But when approached by Yale in the late spring of 1916 for his help with the next round of concession-buying, Ismail Bey balked. In the Arab way of doing business, one’s word was inviolate. Ismail Bey had now seen enough of the American way to know that Yale’s assurances of compensation were quite meaningless; what he needed was a written contract. Confronted by this request, Yale explained that as a mere purchasing agent for Socony, he hadn’t the authority to pen such a guarantee, but that if Ismail Bey “wished to know my personal opinion, it was that he had better have confidence in the Company.” That wasn’t good enough for Ismail Bey; "
― Scott Anderson , Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East