The title of this post is plucked from athe script of the classic 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia, a stylized account of the accomplishments of the great Thomas Edward Lawrence. T.E.L. was a Lt. Col. of the British Army and hero of World War I. It is too early to tell if such a quote could one day apply to Tariq Nasr al Fadhli; hero of the Soviet-Afghan War, former Islamist guerilla, one time associate of Osama Bin Laden, South Yemeni Patriot, tribal leader of Zinjibar and a potential ally of the United States should it ever deign to take action against Al Qaeda in Yemen. But one can certainly hope that it will.
The New York Times recently ran a positive profile on al-Fadhli: ( http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/27/world/middleeast/27tareq.html?emc=eta1 ), which has described the somewhat extreme measures al-Fadhli has taken to garner U.S. attention. After publicly disavowing his longstanding ties to Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, al-Fadhli retreated to his ancestral lands in the South and is now holed up in a fortified compound replete with an erected United States' flag.
It would be easy to dismiss Tareq al-Fadhli as another tin-pot opportunist , but for the fact that his family's historical alliance with Britain, taste for good scotch, obvious distaste for the more extreme passions of Islamic radicals, cavalier rebellion against the sitting Yemeni government, the romanticism of a deposed tribal-aristocrat re-claiming his lands, and an on-again - off-again relationship as a United States' ally makes his narrative tremendously appealing. The best leaders and revolutionaries have been those with a taste for the dramatic, and often found in idividuals with complicated backgrounds. Think Samuel Adams in Boston Harbor circa 1773. The danger, of course, is when dramatic flair (Storming the Bastille?)devolves into imperious tyranny (chopping off heads en masse). For now we'll just have to be patient & see what develops.
