Here is a video of a special forces soldier who earned the Silver Star in Afghanistan in battle and was regarded as the "Lawrence of Afghanistan." He had a fall from grace in the military because he broke some of the Army regulations. Personally, before my deployment, I studied Sun Tzu's Art of War, the manual written by General David Petraus on Counter-insurgency warfare as well as some books written by John H. Poole such as "Militant Tricks" and "Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods" but I never got around to reading TE Lawrence's book "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" written by the Lawrence of Arabia himself. Here is a video of the interview: http://news.yahoo.com/video/lawrence-afg......434.html

Can't learn much from books anyhow.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is one of the great fictionalized accounts of history. Well worth reading.

Lawrence became a broken man when he realized that the war to win independence for Arab peoples was a scam perpetrated by his British commanders and politicians. They had no intention of allowing true independence from the Turkish empire. It was all about maintaining British control.

But as Danny said, you can't learn much from books anyhow.

While I see him as very heroic, I think he earned what he got.

“Henrik:  Like what’s hanging out in pubs or on the street, and picking up the talk of the town, is that it?
 
Alan:  That's it; and that was an old strategy, because Lawrence of Arabia, who was picked at Cambridge, amongst others, and trained in Aramaic and Arabic languages, was sent off with many of them over to the Middle East, heavily financed by London.  They began newspapers in the Middle East.  He tells you in his own book, "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom."  He tells you that his job (and the rest of them) was to set up local Arabic newspapers and feed them data, gossip, little stories like we get fed everyday here.  Then they would send out agents into the bars, the bizarres et cetera, to collect all the gossip, to see if the people were actually debating the topics they were giving them, and coming to the conclusions they wanted the people to reach.  That went on for over 150 years, this kind of data collection.
 
Henrik:  I guess they were successful down there, considering what Lawrence managed to do?
 
Alan:  Yes. Even at the time, London had over one-and-a-half thousand spies, throughout London, just doing the same stuff with the British people to collect data. Always keeping ahead of the game. What are the peasants unruly about? What's getting them angry?  Again, “are they falling for the stories of trivia we're giving them and debating it, and debating the politics that we give them to debate?” (All that stuff.)  This is nothing new.  There's nothing new in it. The only thing that's new is we're far more under a better scientific control today with the use of television. Television comes into everyone's home. You've had generations now that have grown up with television. It's taken the place of even people or babysitters. It has been a babysitter for many; and that's how they pumped a different version of reality into the minds of the public, and still do. Most folk, regardless of their age, never question why that television is there. What kind of programming is put out by specific types of experts? What is it doing to their actual mind? They question nothing, but they do believe what they're told.”

http://www.cuttingthroughthematrix.com/

And so who and what is Lawrence of America?

Man, the layout of that website is an example of When Web Designers Go Bad. The Horror. The Horror.

You're so superficial it's embarrassing.

I'm all about Style.

“We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans”

― Zbigniew Brzezinski

Never read the book, maybe I should. Sun Tzu's Art of War I didn't understand much when I first read it but AFTER my deployment I had a clear understanding of the teachings in the book and the wisdom it contained. Some books you can't understand until you learn from experience and this was the case with Sun Tzu's book the "Art of War." I think Sun Tzu was truly "enlightened" to be honest. John H. Poole's books were pretty spot on as well. Another book written by an Australian infantry officer, David Kilcullen entitled "The Accidental Guerrilla" is an excellent book on counter-insurgency warfare and the book was geared towards today's more recent counter-insurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. That being said, I will generally say from experience, that from my perspective, which I was just a National Guardsman on deployment in Afghanistan rather than a special forces trooper, counter-insurgency operations are very tough and I found myself on many occasions wishing I was fighting a conventional enemy who wore an identifiable uniform rather than carrying out a counter-insurgency operation. It was just very very tough and mind racking carrying out a counter-insurgency operation.

One book, entitled "How To Eat Soup With A Knife" (never read the book and I don't know the author of the book) but the title of the book is a good summation of what it's like to carry out a counter-insurgency operation. When you eat soup with a sharp knife you tend to cut your tongue on many occasions and when you do each time, it's very painful and it hurts pretty bad. Your mind is pretty racked after the experience of eating an entire bowl of soup with a sharp knife. Counter-insurgency is not peacekeeping and you don't always win the "hearts and minds" of people by being a nice guy in Afghanistan.

Rather, you want to earn the respect of the people there and with the mentality over there, weakness doesn't pay. And the enemy doesn't come out in the open and he likes to play dirty tricks to try to kill you or turn the population against you. On one occasion, one unit (not my unit) was being shot at by a village elder and then months later on they were meeting this same village elder to have a cup of tea because he was the key to winning a village to our side. So here they were, sitting and having tea with a guy who months earlier had just tried to kill them but they had to do it because they had orders from the Army to do so. He was the key to winning a village to our side at the time. They say that counter-insurgency is about "winning hearts and minds" but you will lose your mind doing it.

"While teaching at West Point, John Nagl was affiliated with the Strategic Studies Institute at the United States Army War College for which he co-authored a book on military professionalism in 1999. He later received the George C. Marshall Award for being the top graduate of the US Army Command and General Staff College in 2001. A revised version of his dissertation was published in 2002 as Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife, titled after an observation made by T. E. Lawrence about the challenges of fighting guerilla forces."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Nagl

"The title is an allusion to a quote from "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" by T.E. Lawrence."

"And so, Simba, the Circle of Life is complete."

FWIW, I think your interpretation of the title is way off. I mean, how would you cut yourself eating soup with a knife? I don 't see it. I've eaten cheese and apple slices right off the blade of a knife used to slice them and have yet to cut myself.

I think this is a more accurate explanation (cut and pasted from elsewhere):

"T. E. Lawrence’s aphorism that “Making war upon insurgents is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife” is difficult to fully appreciate until you have done it. Intellectually grasping the concept that fighting insurgents is messy and slow is a different thing from knowing how to defeat them; knowing how to win, in turn, is a different thing from implementing the measures required to do it."

Eating cheese wedges and apple slices is not the same thing as eating soup with a knife. It's pretty easy to eat cheese wedges and apple slices with a knife. Not so easy to do when eating soup though. The liquid from the soup tends to roll off the knife before you can get in quick enough to eat and if you attempt to go too quick, you end up accidentally cutting your tougue, which would be quite easy to do when being forced to eat soup with a knife. I guarantee you, I fully appreciate TE Lawerence's analogy or aphorism or whatever that word is. Eating soup with a knife is slow, messy, hard to do AND painful.

How about if we stop eating somebody else's soup altogether, and go home and figure out what to do with the stale muffins.

What to do with the N.S.A, C.I.A., M.I.5 & 6 and all the rest of the alphabet soup?

Insurgencies are very difficult to defeat and could take decades to defeat and even then you might not be successful. The most successful power to my knowledge at defeating insurgencies are the British and it wasn't easy for them either. I found this article which talks about why insurgencies are difficult to defeat: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/200......3316.htm

The idea is not to beat insurgencies. The idea is create them and keep them going. It's called, divide and conquer.

Our atmosphere is so thick with that alphabet soup you could cut it with a knife.

Really, I think you are stretching. Just turn the knife around, so the blade is not facing your tongue. You don't even have to touch your mouth with the knife, just dribble the soup off of it into your mouth. This process needn't be painful unless one is an idiot. As Laurence said, "Making war upon insurgents is messy and slow, like eating soup with a knife". Messy and slow, but he says nothing there about cutting oneself.

How can you "guarantee" me that you "fully appreciate" TE Lawerence's line when you said yourself that you never read the book (Seven Pillars of Wisdom) it came from? You were also unaware of the correct title (Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife) of the book you alluded to earlier. Or its author. Or even apparently where the title came from.

Now it is possible you are correct, but I've seen nothing here yet to convince me of that. Rather, what I've seen suggests that your interpretation is inaccurate.

It's not as simple as you might think balducci. Some things you just have to do yourself before you can fully understand and appreciate the difficulties of some tasks. Some aspect of a task might seem simple, but when you do it, it's not as simple or painless as it initially seemed it might be. The enemy certainly isn't going to make anything easy or painless in most cases. That's all I have to say on the matter.