In addition to being a celebrity, he advised Winston Churchill, then secretary of state for the colonies. While Lawrence worked there, this office, far from caring for the Arab people Lawrence claimed to love, oversaw the bombing of villages across present-day Iraq; one village was destroyed in only forty-five minutes. Churchill urged the use of chemical weapons against some of Iraq’s native populations, whom he described as ‘uncivilized tribes’. When others in the Colonial Office opposed this move, Churchill argued that gassing them was more humane than the alternative: methodical genocide.
