Literature of the counterinsurgency – writing war’s complex cousin.

Abstract

Since T.E. Lawrence’s (Lawrence of Arabia) fabled account of his liaisons with rebel forces during the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Turks during World War I, the counterinsurgency in modern times has most recently come to be associated with the United States’ contemporary entanglements in both Iraq and Afghanistan. Where T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom has been acknowledged as seminal in writing about the counterinsurgency, the US military has developed a more recent edition of the Counterinsurgency field manual, ostensibly to inform its engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan. This essay will close read both T.E. Lawrence's account and the field manual as a literary texts to see how writing and talking about the counterinsurgency changes the way different aspects of society comes into contact and converses with the military.