August 1920: British Announce Iraqi Insurgency Defeated; Intelligence Official Warns Otherwise

British generals announce that the insurgency in Iraq (see Early 1920) has been defeated. But former British Army intelligence officer T. E. Lawrence—“Lawrence of Arabia”—disagrees, in a dispatch published by the London Times. “The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honor,” Lawrence writes. “Things have been far worse than we have told. We are today not far from a disaster.” Lawrence knows the insurgents—indeed, he had helped train them in the techniques of guerrilla warfare. [Kolb, 2007, pp. 94]