Jackson Bentley, American journalist: Your Highness, we Americans were once a colonial people, and we naturally feel sympathetic to any people anywhere who are struggling for their freedom.

Prince Feisal, Arabian monarch: Very gratifying.

Bentley: Also, my interests are the same as yours. You want your story told. I badly want a story to tell.

Feisal: Ah, now you are talking turkey, are you not?

I recently watched Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean’s 1962 epic, and kept thinking throughout the film how much it reminded me of another Western power’s involvement in Arab lands. The film focuses on British army officer T.E. Lawrence and his role in uniting the Arab tribes against their Ottoman oppressors during World War I, but it has quite a lot to say, too, about modern-day Iraq under American occupation. (For those who forget, or haven’t seen, the film, here’s a helpful synopsis, and here’s the script.)

In Arabia, the superior military might of the Turkish Ottoman forces weakened under a barrage of guerrilla attacks by Arab Bedouin horsemen, who blew up railroad tracks, disrupted supply lines, and made daring raids when the enemy least expected them. “The desert is an ocean in which no oar is dipped,” Lawrence muses during a discussion with Arabian leaders. “And on this ocean, the Bedouin go where they please and strike where they please.” The failure to appreciate the strength of guerrilla warriors fighting on their own turf has doomed many a mighty army, from the British in America to the Turks in Arabia to the Americans in Vietnam to the Russians in Afghanistan — to, perhaps, the Americans in Iraq.

The Turks could not be accused of half-heartedness in quashing the Arabian insurgency. In fact, they had a practice of viciously torturing captured Arab fighters. “In their eyes, we are not soldiers but rebels,” explains Prince Feisal, who leads the Arab forces. “Rebels, wounded or whole, are not protected by the Geneva Code … and are treated harshly.” So the Arabs would leave no wounded for the Turks: Those they could not carry to safety, they killed. Rather than being intimidated into submission by Ottoman brutality, the Arabs showed all the more determination and defiance. This should give pause to the U.S. politicos who, in the name of victory against terrorists, have opened the door for violations of the Geneva Conventions concerning the torture and indefinite detainment of prisoners. Immoral policies such as these may have the most unintended consequences.

Another of the film’s themes is the violent divisions between the desert-dwelling tribes of Arabia. The Howeitat fight the Harith, who fight the Hazimi — an endless circle of jealousies and vengeances, waged over the desert’s scarce resources. “He was nothing,” says Sherif Ali (played by Omar Sharif), who has just killed an Arab stranger who was drinking from his tribe’s well. “The well is everything.” Water was the desert’s gold in those days, but now it is oil that has become everything — reason enough to kill Sunni or Shia or Kurd in today’s bloody conflict of part-religious, part-tribal origins. In fact, the dispute over sharing oil revenues is one of the central issues tearing apart the country’s new government and threatening civil war.

On Saturday I’ll have more to say about the film and its message for today’s Arabian insurgency.

Victor Tan Chen Victor Tan Chen is In The Fray's editor in chief and the author of Cut Loose: Jobless and Hopeless in an Unfair Economy. Site: victortanchen.com | Facebook | Twitter: @victortanchen