Meet Glubb
In keeping with today’s themes of foreign service officers, British views and the Middle East, here’s the adventurous, insightful Brit Glubb, compliments of a U.S. State Department employee who doesn’t mind being assigned to bad neighborhoods:
To enable one country to appreciate what another people really thinks and desires is both the most difficult and the most vital task which confronts us. — John Bagot Glubb, Britain and the Arabs: A Study of Fifty Years 1908-1958, (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1959), p. 147
As military units prepare for service in the Middle East, it is not uncommon for them to consult the published works of British military personnel and diplomats who played such a large role in the politics of the region in the 1910s to the 1930s. It is already customary for deployers to consult the works of T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell and for those who have read more expansively, perhaps even the writings of Sir Alec Kirkbride, Sir Percy Cox, or even General Aylmer L. Haldane. Collectively, these various authors have taught our military personnel a great deal about working in the region, fighting alongside Arab irregulars, working with tribes, building governments, fostering development, and combating insurgents. The reason I’ve written this brief essay is to bring to your attention another great British soldier and diplomat, John Bagot Glubb, whose experience is as expansive if not more so than many of the aforementioned authors. His robust experience of thirty-six years in the great deserts and Bedouin tents of Iraq and Jordan greatly informs our current operations. I have written a brief biography of Glubb in order to familiarize the reader with his achievements and then compiled a collection of his observations, thoughts, and musings taken from his published writings about working with the Arab tribes, fighting guerillas, service to the nation, and on operating in the Middle East. Glubb’s views are as useful today as when he made them, incorporating them into our operations in the Middle East will greatly improve our chances for victory.
The rest of Dan Green’s essay at SWJ here. Looks like Glubb did interesting, useful work among the tribes in Iraq and Jordan against a pro-Axis military coup and Saudi Wahabbist incursions through World War II, but was on the wrong side and ran into trouble as Middle East politics got somewhat more complicated after 1948. Green paints the role of Glubb’s Arab Legion role vs. nascent Israel in somewhat benign, honorable terms. Not everyone shares that view.
Part II, Glubb’s published works, guide to the tribes.
Re Green, lack of whining about assignments, meanwhile:
Dan Green works at the U.S. Department of State (DOS) in the Office of the Coordinator for Counterterrorism. He served a year as a Political Advisor to the Tarin Kowt Provincial Reconstruction Team in Uruzgan Province, Afghanistan, for which he received the DOS’s Superior Honor Award and the U.S. Army’s Superior Civilian Service Award. He also received a letter of commendation from Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Peter Pace. The views expressed in this article are his own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Bush Administration, the DOS, the U.S. Navy, or the Department of Defense. Mr. Green recently returned from Iraq where he served as a tribal liaison officer (US Navy Reserve).
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 11:38 am on Saturday, November 3, 2007
2 Responses to “Meet Glubb”
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November 3rd, 2007 at 1:38 pm
Too bad the Brits didn’t learn from their own. We still have a lot to do to clean up the mess the Brits have made of the south. They birthed a true quagmire for themselves, and rather than do anything about it, they’ve opted to thin their ranks and leave the rest hunkered down and useless. This comes after having to listen to them sniff the air and tell us what a bunch of ignorant incompetents we are. They were the ones with a couple of centuries of experience dealing with the natives, after all, and we were to take our example from them. I often wonder, crediting them with this knowledge, just how much of their learned advice we took in the beginning.
November 3rd, 2007 at 7:32 pm
The problem with the old British gentlemen-soldiers of the first half of the twentieth century is that they romanticized the Arab world even as they did not respect it. The Arabs were their tool against the Nazis, and as such, were regarded as primitive, emotionally immature, but brave children, to be guided and looked after by Britannia. Then the Jews came along and built a modern, functioning democracy and economy in a barren place where the Arabs never had and never could, despite their handsome swords and flowing robes. It rankled. And it probably fed a lot of anti-Israeli rhetoric that has only grown uglier and more inbred into this century (not that anti-Semitism wasn’t always present in British society).