Dr. Jack Wheeler does. In 2002, The Daily Reckoning posted Wheeler’s article, “The Curse of Lawrence of Arabia.” This story was forgotten in 2002. It remains forgotten.
The most legendary American journalist of the 20th century was Lowell Thomas. I had the opportunity to meet him in 1978, when we were both guests on The Merv Griffin Show. Off camera, I asked him, “Do you feel you contributed, however inadvertently, to the political mess that is the Middle East today?” He looked at me sharply and asked me what I meant. “Well, after all,” I answered, “it was you who gave Lawrence’s promise to the Hashemites so much power.” His eyes narrowed, and he responded, “That was a long time ago.”In 1917, Lowell Thomas was a young, ambitious journalist in search of an interesting story in the lost backwater of World War I. In Jerusalem, he met a small (5 foot 4) British Army captain assigned as a liaison officer to Arabs living in a desert no one had ever heard of. Thomas saw his chance. His breathless dispatches had the purpose of creating a myth around the liaison officer who had begun teaching Arab tribes to blow up Turkish trains nobody cared about in the desert nobody ever heard of.
The liaison officer’s name was T.E. Lawrence, but Lowell Thomas called him “Lawrence of Arabia.” In 1919, Thomas went on a lecture tour in the United Kingdom and United States, showing pictures of Lawrence posing in a sheikh’s robes in a London studio, and entranced audiences with stories about the ‘White King of the Arabs.’ By the time the Treaty of Sèvres was negotiated in 1920, with Lawrence in attendance and the media mob hanging on his every word, the British felt compelled to keep Lawrence’s promise to the chieftains of an Arab tribe called the Hashemites.
The political structure of the Middle East today is the result of that promise. The Treaty of Sèvres permitted the British to seize pieces of the Ottoman Empire, which had ruled the Middle East for centuries, but joined the Germans in WWI. Instead of British colonies, the pieces were called League of Nations ‘mandates,’ for which the Brits needed puppet rulers.