As Barack Obama was starting his tour of the Middle East this past weekend, and the policy differences between Obama and John McCain were proclaimed by various pundits to be converging, I could not help but think of a charming, almost tongue-in-cheek scene from the movie, Lawrence of Arabia.

Peter O’Toole, as Lawrence, has just taken Aqaba from the rear, has crossed the Sinai Peninsula on camel and is there in Cairo, in full Bedouin garb, to inform the British Admiralty of this heretofore improbable triumph. Jack Hawkins, as General Allenby, and Claude Rains, as Mr. Dryden from the Arab Bureau, a menacingly benign presence always lurking in the shadows, have greeted Lawrence, congratulated him on his success and are now seated around a fountain in the Admiralty’s Cairo Office, trying to figure out how best to use Lawrence’s talents going forward against the Turks.

Lawrence, at General Allenby’s behest, and as the fatherly Mr. Dryden listens on, commences to explain what will be required to further the Arab revolt. “I’ll need five thousand rifles. And sovereigns. They don’t like paper money. And instructors for the Davis guns. And more money. Much more later on.”

“Right!” the unflappable Allenby says each time with a sidelong glance at Dryden.

“And two armored cars. And field artillery.”

 “Right! Right!”

Lawrence, in his Bedouin garb, is soon dismissed and swarmed by fellow officers, while Allenby and Dryden are seen marching off to more important business, with Dryden expressing his concerns about Lawrence’s requests. “If you give the Arabs artillery, you will have made them independent.”   “Well, then I can’t do it, can I?” Allenby concludes.

And there in a nutshell, you have the policy of the Western world towards the Middle East over the past hundred and fifty years or so; meddling, patronizing and driven by our economic and imperialistic ambitions hand in hand; acting as if we know better how to deal with someone’s sovereign territory than the owner’s of it do themselves.

What makes this scene so especially poignant is the backdrop of the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which was basically the French and British drawing up control of the Middle East on a napkin, and which one only learns about at the end of the movie.

So there you have Lawrence, playing the role of chivalrous knight in a battle for Arab independence while Allenby and Dryden use him and the Arab army like pieces on a chess board. Lawrence, an exceptionally well schooled man with a deep seated sense of morality, was so sickened by the experience, he spent the rest of his life serving in the British forces under various assumed names, in the hopes he and the whole contemptible episode could be forgotten.

You can bet on this. The people of the Middle East never forgot it. Their feuds and rivalries go all the way back to Saladin battling Richard the Lionhearted for control of Jerusalem. It may seem utterly absurd in our minds to go back a thousand years, but not to them, and it goes to the heart of why a McCain presidency and a Obama presidency would be so very different. As witnessed by Prime Minister Nouri Maliki’s recent agreement with Obama’s troop withdrawal timetable, the Iraqis are not counting the months and years before we leave, as the press seems to be obsessed with here back in the States. The Iraqis are looking with a wary eye at our long term intentions.

In what was mostly skirted and ignored by the mainstream press over the last five years, the Bush Administration had every intention of keeping permanent military bases in Iraq from the start of its misguided war, a fact that fed in large part to the very insurgency we ended up fighting. It may not stick in the craw of someone on the right, who thinks dictating terms to the rest of the world seems like a grand idea, but you try having a couple thousand Iraqi soldiers parading around your home town, knowing full well they’re building a permanent just down the road. We all know goddamned well every gun toting NRA member would come crawling out the woodwork with his rifle and camouflage gear on. Why should anyone be surprised by the Iraqis’ resentments?

There is not much we can do now about having blundered into Iraq in the first place. And having done so, one can only hope to be, as Obama so aptly expressed, “as careful getting out as we were careless getting in.” But the devil is not in the details, as one would normally expect. The devil is in how the Iraqis and the wider Muslim world perceive our long term intentions. And that is why, as a mere matter of perception, an Obama presidency will diffuse so much of the anger directed at us from the Muslim world.

If we finally retreat to the benign role we played between World War I and World War II in the Middle East, we can expect to be embraced once again as friend and honest broker, from Islamabad to Damascus. But if we continue the role of an imperial power, as we have done for the past sixty years, we can expect this “never ending war on terror” on which Bush and McCain’s foreign policies thrive, to go on as long as we all shall live.