Scott Anderson > Quotes

“British generals often gave away in stupidity what they had gained in ignorance.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping of a butterfly’s wings that triggers a hurricane.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“As Lawrence would later write in Seven Pillars, Sykes was “the imaginative advocate of unconvincing world movements … a bundle of prejudices, intuitions, half-sciences. His ideas were of the outside, and he lacked patience to test his materials before choosing his style of building. He would take an aspect of the truth, detach it from its circumstances, inflate it, twist and model it.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know,”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Better a thousand times the Arab untouched. The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Initial euphoria would give way to shock, shock to horror, and then, as the killing dragged on with no end in sight, horror to a kind of benumbed despair.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Victory carries a moral burden the vanquished never know, and as an architect of momentous events, Lawrence would be uniquely haunted by what he saw and did during the Great Loot.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“By almost any measure, as 1978 dawned, Iran was one of the Middle East’s “better dictatorships.” While certain professional classes or minority groups were distrusted and persecuted by the regime, they were not slaughtered en masse as in Hafez al-Assad’s Syria or Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. Its jails continued to hold some twenty-five hundred political prisoners, but that figure was greatly reduced from a few years earlier and a minute fraction on a per capita basis when set against Muammar Qaddafi’s Libya or Houari Boumediene’s Algeria. Iran’s ruling class was venal and corrupt and existed largely outside the law, but with nowhere approaching the blanket impunity or squalid decadence of the royal families of Saudi Arabia or Kuwait. What’s more, Iran was becoming a better dictatorship all the time. As a result of the shah’s recent political and judicial reforms, the opposition had far more maneuverability than in most other nations in the region, and whereas Iranian prisoners had been routinely tortured by the regime’s thugs in the past, international human rights investigators reported that in 1977 the number of new cases had been cut to precisely zero.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de Guerre; after the war, according to his brother, he found amusement in placing the medal around the neck of a friend’s dog and parading it through the streets of Oxford.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Lawrence argued that despite posing as Islamic reformists “with all the narrow minded bigotry of the puritan,” ibn-Saud and his Wahhabists were hardly representative of Islam. Instead, as he warned in “The Politics of Mecca,” the Wahhabist sect was composed of marginal medievalists, “and if it prevailed, we would have in place of the tolerant, rather comfortable Islam of Mecca and Damascus, the fanaticism of Nejd … intensified and swollen by success.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“And for all concerned there was a deepening anger that under the cloak of defending the sacred tenet of “free trade,” the United States continued to finance and do business with both sides in the conflict, growing ever richer while Europe bled.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Certainly, blame for all this [turmoil in the Middle East] doesn't rest solely with the terrible decisions that were made at the end of World War I, but it was then that one particularly toxic seed was planted. Ever since, Arab society has tended to define itself less by what it aspires to become than by what it is opposed to: colonialism, Zionism, Western imperialism in its many forms. This culture of opposition has been manipulated—indeed, feverishly nurtured—by generations of Arab dictators intent on channeling their people's anger away from their own misrule in favor of the external threat, whether it is "the great Satan" or the "illegitimate Zionist entity" or Western music playing on the streets of Cairo.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“What if I were to have you hanged?” In a clever retort, alluding to both his considerable girth and to his network of influential friends abroad, the agronomist replied, “Your Excellency, the weight of my body would break the gallows with a noise loud enough to be heard in America.” Djemal apparently liked that answer. Before the ending of their meeting, he had appointed Aaronsohn inspector in chief of a new locust eradication program,”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“For the next ninety years, the vast and profligate Saudi royal family would survive by essentially buying off the doctrinaire Wahhabists who had brought them to power, financially subsidizing their activities so long as their disciples directed their jihadist efforts abroad. The most famous product of this arrangement was to be a man named Osama bin Laden.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“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

“Thus among the warring states in Europe at the end of 1915 it was no longer a matter of satisfying what had brought them into the conflict in the first place—and in many cases, those reasons had been shockingly trivial—but to expand beyond them, the acceptable terms for peace not lowered, but raised. This conflict was no longer about playing for small advantage against one’s imperial rivals, but about hobbling them forever, ensuring that they might never again have the capability to wage such a devastating and pointless war.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“It wasn’t just the British foreign secretary whose time was taken up dealing with such things, but the foreign ministers—and in many cases, the prime ministers and presidents and kings—of all the powers, and often over struggles even less significant than that which entangled Curt Prüfer. Amid this din of complaint and trivial offense, how to know what really mattered, how to identify the true crisis when it came along?”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Mark Sykes exemplified another characteristic common among the British ruling class of the Edwardian age, a breezy arrogance that held that most of the world’s messy problems were capable of neat solution, that the British had the answers to many of them, and that it was their special burden—no less tiresome for being God-given—to enlighten the rest of humanity to that fact.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“point of comparison, over the previous century, during which it had expanded its empire to five continents, the British Empire had been involved in some forty different conflicts around the globe—colonial insurrections mostly, but including the Crimean and Boer wars—and had lost some forty thousand soldiers in the process. Over the next four years, it would lose over twenty times that number. In the disastrous Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71, France had suffered an estimated 270,000 battlefield casualties; in the present war, it was to surpass that number in the first three weeks. In this conflict, Germany would see 13 percent of its military-age male population killed, Serbia 15 percent of its total population, while in just a two-year span, 1913 to 1915, the life expectancy of a French male would drop from fifty years to twenty-seven. So inured would the architects of the carnage become to such statistics that at the launch of his 1916 Somme offensive, British general Douglas Haig could look over the first day’s casualty rolls—with fifty-eight thousand Allied soldiers dead or wounded, it remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the English-speaking world—and judge that the numbers “cannot be considered severe.” The effect of all this on the collective European”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“You know, men do nearly all die laughing, because they know death is very terrible, and a thing to be forgotten till after it has come. T. E. LAWRENCE, IN A LETTER TO HIS MOTHER, 1916”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“if one were to make a list of that small handful of revolutions that spurred change on a truly global scale in the modern era, that caused a paradigm shift in the way the world works, to the American, French and Russian Revolutions might be added the Iranian.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“...of the 10 thopusand Indian soldiers and camp followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one third would live to see the war's end.
....Taken to Constantinople, he [Gen. Charles Townshend British Commander of forces surrendered at Kut] spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island on the Bosporus, where he was given the use of a Turkish naval yachtand frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his 3 prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despitethe mear-starvation co9nditionsin Kut, had weatheredthe ordeal quite nicely. (p. 178)”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly, and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“As to the identity of those who had raged through Tabriz, Metrinko swiftly rejected the regime’s claim of “Islamic-Marxists”—and he wasn’t the first to note the inherent contradiction of that label. Instead, he pointed to “the unemployed and the lowest of the working classes, the disaffected and very volatile strata of the male populace who have nothing to lose by rioting and who are easily led by instigators.” As he noted, Tabriz had seen a massive influx of young and poorly educated men from the countryside in recent years. In the city, the luckiest among them toiled long hours in mindless and low-paying factory jobs, and all were condemned to an unrelievedly drab existence. “Given the pervasive and grim religious environment” in which these men dwelled, Metrinko wrote, “with its emphasis on the restricted role of women and condemnation of such mundane pleasures as the cinema and places where women ‘expose’ themselves to men—i.e. organizations such as social clubs, hotels, the Youth Palace, and the Iran-America Society…it is no wonder that such a group can be led into emotional and violent action. Religion is one of the few remaining constants to this class of people, and their limited conception of Islam and veneration of the Shiite hierarchy are among the few things they can retain in a society in which they feel abandoned and threatened.” Of course, what Metrinko was describing was in no way unique to Tabriz. Almost every city and sizable town in Iran possessed such a benighted underclass—which suggested the next wave of riots might come almost anywhere and at any time.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“But the darkening national mood wasn’t Farah’s imagination. By the time of the ceremony at Reza Shah’s shrine, Iran’s bursting-at-the-seams quality was giving over to paralysis. The electrical blackouts, once sporadic and of short duration, had become almost daily occurrences and stretched to hours at a time. The continuing flood of food imports had by now thoroughly gutted the rural agricultural base, driving even more young men into Iran’s teeming urban ghettos. Simultaneously, the state was being schooled on a couple of basic economic laws, specifically that in a globally interconnected economy neither recession nor inflation can be confined. In the West, the oil shocks of 1973 and 1974 had triggered both an economic downturn and a conservation movement, sharply reducing the demand for Middle Eastern oil. At the same time, the spike in oil prices had triggered a knock-on inflationary effect on almost every other product or commodity the world produced, so Iran was now paying markedly more for everything from a Chieftain tank to a bag of imported rice. So hard was the economic brake applied that by the early summer of 1976 the Iranian government was compelled to take out the first in a series of massive international loans.”
― Scott Anderson, King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation

“The foreigners come out here always to teach, whereas they had much better learn.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“Among the handful of British diplomats and military men aware of their government’s secret policy in the Middle East—that the Arabs were being encouraged to fight and die on the strength of promises that had already been traded away—were many who regarded that policy as utterly shameful, an affront to British dignity.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“To the degree that the British right hand didn’t know what the left was doing, it was because a select group of men at the highest reaches of its government went to great lengths to ensure it. To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls—deceptions, in a less charitable assessment—to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain’s wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East

“He wasn’t sure what to do. If he left the rock, it would only take a few minutes of desert air to dry his pool, and then all that would remain of him would be a small crucible of brown powder, a powder the wind would find and scatter. He wished to stay there, to protect the pool.
But after a time, he thought differently. He understood that if he stayed upon the rock, he would simply disappear as well. And so, he rose.”
― Scott Anderson, Triage

“Under orders from Kitchener himself, an attempt was to be made to bribe the Turkish commander of the Kut siege into letting Townshend’s army go in return for one million English pounds’ worth of gold. If Lawrence resented being the bearer of this shameful instruction, almost without precedent in British military history, he never let on. Then again, he’d very recently been given two reminders of the puffery and hypocrisy of military culture.”
― Scott Anderson, Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East