History lesson, anyone?

Maybe you were not among the longtime JWN readers who read this lesson from history when I posted it here in March 2003?
Anyway, here below, on much the same theme is a literary excerpt that came my way recently, thanks to an old friend connected with the U.S. uniformed military… [I haven’t had time to check the exact citation, but I’ll take this person’s word for it, for old times’ sake.]

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, nsincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told, our administration more bloody and inefficient than the public knows. It is a disgrace to our imperial record, and MAY SOON BE TOO INFLAMED FOR ANY ORDINARY CURE. WE ARE TODAY NOT TOO FAR FROM A DISASTER…
…We said we went to Mesopotamia to defeat Turkey. We said we stayed to deliver the Arabs from the oppression of the Turkish Government and to make available for the world its resources of corn and oil…Our government is worse than the old Turkish system…We have killed fourteen thousand Arabs in this rising this summer…We cannot hope to maintain such an average…We are told the object of the rising was political, we are not told what the local people want…
Colonel Wilson fails to control Mesopotamia’s three million people with ninety thousand troops…we have not reached the limit of our military commitments…where is the balance to come from? Meanwhile, our unfortunate troops…under harsh conditions of climate and suppy, are policing an immense area, paying dearly every day in lives for the willfully wrong policy of the civil administration in Baghdad.

Attribution? T.E. Lawrence writing about the British experience in Iraq, in [my old employer] the Sunday Times of London, August 27, 1920