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Summary: Excellent and accessible
Comment: At times this reads more like a Cold War thriller than a political history. There are enough secret societies, conspiracy theories and shady diplomatic deals here to keep John le Carré in plots for a month of Sundays.
"The Middle East" is a European invention. In 1914, when the story begins, the "Middle Eastern Question", as far as the Allies were concerned, was about how to divide up the lands that lay between French North Africa, Russian Asia and British India, once the decaying Ottoman Empire had breathed its last.
By 1922, when the story ends, only the new Soviet Union still had a taste for empire-building. The former territories of the Sultan had become a series of notionally independent nation states designed to be run by European "advisors". "The Middle Eastern Question" had not been solved: it had just been changed.
David Fromkin suggests that Europe's approach to the Middle East in 1914 should be seen as part of "Great Game" that had dominated foreign policy in the East in the preceding century. It was this view, combined with astonishing official incompetence, that lead Allied politicians to make disastrous misjudgements about the Arab-speaking peoples and the role of Islam.
I read this book to learn about the background to the current situation in the Middle East. I was not disappointed. It's a complex story and the author does a first rate job of disentangling it, drawing on previously closed official sources.
Written in 1989, this predates the First Gulf War. An unintended, but poignant, consequence is that Fromkin sometimes describes events of 90 years ago in phrases that could easily appear in today's news bulletins.
"A Peace to End All Peace" is an excellent and accessible work of political history.
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Summary: For studies or for fun
Comment: This book is a fantastic introduction to Britain's role in the Middle East during World War I. It was one of the recommended texts during the first year of my Middle Eastern Studies course and so, from an academic point of view, it's a must. However, because of Fromkin's writing style, it is also very easy to grasp for those wishing to further their own knowledge on the subject. You'll be surprised how quickly it takes you to get through the 1000+ pages.
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Summary: This brilliant book - an historical thriller through and through!
Comment: I am an enthusiastic amateur family historian and I have puzzled a while over an important (to my wife and I) family question: how come my wife's great uncle, Captain Thomas John Catchpole (1888 - 1917), of Lidgate, Suffolk, and of the 5th Battalion, the Suffolk Regiment, was killed by the Turks at Gaza?
Subsidiary questions have also been in my mind: why were the Turks/Ottomans our enemies in the so-called 'Great War'?; what determined the demise of the Turkish/Ottoman Empire, under which many races, including Jews, Arabs and Turks, had lived relatively peaceably?; and how did the present-day 'Middle East' become such a problem area?
I am also a member of the 'what if' school of history: this book is one of those that inspire endless speculation. If decisions had been made differently and events had taken a different course, maybe my wife's great uncle's descendants could still be living at Lidgate.
For example, what if the British Cabinet had acted on Winston Churchill's urging in 1911 to make an alliance with the Turks/Ottomans?
And if the 'Great War' had gone on for two years only (the German General Ludendorff believed the entry of the Turks/Ottomans into the war allowed the outnumbered Central powers to fight on for two years longer than they would have been able on their own), my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.
And if Winston Churchill's Dardanelles plans had prevailed over those of Lord Kitchener in March, 1915, Constantinople would have fallen, and my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.
As it was, it appears that numerous attempts were made to subvert, to attack, and to conquer the Turks/Ottomans, the defeat of whom could - and, maybe, should - have been accomplished in 1915, and my wife's great uncle would not have been killed at Gaza in 1917.
This brilliant book - an historical thriller through and through - has provided me with much information and most of the answers and I am so grateful to David Fromkin for researching and writing it and to Amazon for selling it to me.
It is quite clear to me now that the alliance between Germany and the Turks/Ottomans was at best an unintended mistake and at worst the secret design of a very few of the Turkish leaders. It could have been done very differently, with Turkey and the Ottoman Empire continuing to maintain their neutrality, to the benefit of the British and of the world.
And it also appears from Fromkin's account that the successive collapses of the British, French and Russian Governments were directly attributable to the Dardanelles disaster. In the case of Russia, of course, this meant a fatal finale for the Czar and his family and the rise of Lenin and Bolshevism.
There came on the scene in 1917 one Woodrow Wilson, as ignorant regarding Britain, France, Russia and the Turkish/Ottoman Empire as many Americans, but as determined, nevertheless, to do down the British as his later successor, Franklin Roosevelt. Despite having some high-flown thoughts, Mr Wilson helped little.
All in all, it is once again amazing to me that two great British statesmen, Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, should have been so full of foresight and wisdom. It's all too obvious that the others, including Wilson, were political pygmies.
I suppose now and with hindsight that I would probably have preferred for the Ottoman Empire to have been maintained, as Churchill often wanted, or, failing that, for the British Empire to have been vastly extended - for good!
I spotted one error (on page 299, in a section on the role of Louis D. Brandeis, later the first Jewish member of the United States Supreme Court): 'Only one Jew [Oscar Strauss] had ever been a member of the president's cabinet.' Not true: Judah Philip Benjamin played prominent roles in the cabinet of President Jefferson Davis.
(An extremely interesting piece of information gleaned from the book is that Baghdad and Jerusalem, before the War, were home to the largest populations of Jews in the Middle East. 'Jews in large numbers had lived in the Mesopotamian provinces since the time of the Babylonian captivity - about 600 BC - and thus were settled in the country a thousand years before the coming of the Arabs in AD 634.').
There has been some criticism that this book is too much about Great Britain and its leaders and people. To answer the criticism I quote the following (from page 385): 'The Prime Minister (Lloyd George) claimed that Britain was entitled to play the dominant role in the Middle East, recalling that at one time or another two and a half million British troops had been sent there, and that a quarter of a million had been killed or wounded; while the French, Gallipoli apart, had suffered practically no casualties in the Middle East, and the Americans had not been there at all.'
Thoroughly recommended: I couldn't put it down!
A personal post-script:
In the Autumn of 1917, following two earlier failed attempts by General Murray in the first half of that year, General Allenby invaded (from Egypt, which was under British protection) Palestine, and my wife's great uncle, Captain Thomas John Catchpole, was killed, during the third battle of Gaza, on the 3rd of November (reportedly fatally injured by a Turk soldier and then shot by a fellow British officer, in the presence of his own younger brother, to put him out of his misery, there being no chance that he would live), and lies buried at the Deir El Belah War Cemetery. And the Middle East is still a problem.
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Summary: What a fine mess
Comment: If you want to put the Middle East into a historical perspective and understand its present day difficulties there is no better book than this, and despite being 20 years old, it still stands completely unrivaled. It is insightful, well balanced, eloquently written and at times almost reads like an adventure story.
The book covers the region from the outbreak of war in 1914 and through to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in 1922. Fromkin gets away with covering this enormous canvas on which many books could be written on single topics (and indeed have). He does this by following a clear story line, not over emphasizing certain periods and by not peddling a political agenda.
The book is essentially built around Winston Churchill large sections are also devoted to other contemporary grandees such as Asquith, Lloyd George, Balfour, Lord Kitchener, General Allenby, Sir Mark Sykes, Francois Picot, Emir Hussein, King Faisal, Enver Pasha, Attaturk, TE Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and many other splendid characters. These people are richly described and make the book come alive in a way, where most other popular history books fail miserably.
The book also elegantly incorporates the imperial political thinking of the time and provides excellent coverage of the drivers and motivations of specially the British in their involvement in the conflict. It covers the intrigues, manipulations and conspirations that took place both within the British government and between the allies, whose main goal it was to dismantle the Ottoman Empire, weakened by gradual disintegration, carve up its constituent parts between them. The Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration being excellent examples hereof. One is left with the impression that this was a game of "Risk" on a massive scale. In fact on such a large scale that it stretched the British Empire beyond its political and military means, which again resulted in appalling execution with extraordinary and needless loss of life.
The price of these ambitions proved high for all parties. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in 1922 and Enver Pasha died on a battlefield near Dushanbe in Tajikstan fighting the Red Army in 1924. But also for the British Empire, this was the "beginning of the end". Australia began to lose confidence in Britain following the Gallipoli disaster, after years of fighting hopeless battles in Europe, Iraq and Turkey, British soldiers increasingly became mutinous and were turning against the establishment. In his description of this period, Fromkin really picks up on the political current of the time and describes how Churchill understood this and probably avoided severe social unrest in the UK.
The book effectively finishes with the 1923 Lausanne peace treaty. Britain had been replaced by the United States as the world's number one superpower. The US did not favour colonialism and hence the Sykes-Picot Agreement was confined to the historical archives. Instead Churchill and Gertrude Bell drew up a map of a new Middle East, created Palestine (under British mandate) and Syria / Lebanon under French. Feisal needed a kingdom, so they created Iraq. If Feisal was getting a kingdom, Abdullah wanted one too. So they drew Jordan. It was random, sure to create problems for the future and by no stretch of anyones imagination "their finest hour".
The book draws on a superb range of sources, is extremely well researched and has a bibliography large enough to populate a small library.
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Summary: This is clearly written history of the most important kind.
Comment: The relevance of this excellent work to our present time could not be clearer. This book is about the Middle East and how, almost inevitably, it came to be as it is today. Prof Fromkin sets out, in a clear and accessible style, how the foundations of the region's current dilemmas were laid. He is convincing, non-judgmental and without agenda or solution.
The book looks initially at the collapse of the 1,000 year old Ottoman Empire, due to its defeat in the 1st World War. Prior to that defeat in 1918, all of the current Middle East had been under Ottoman rule for some 1,000 years. Then came the treaties of Versailles and Sèvres and the end of the Ottoman Empire. The lands of the Middle East were rearranged by the great powers - the Great Powers of the day being England, France, Russia and the USA (although the USA failed to ratify these treaties and quickly withdrew into isolationism again after securing guarantees for herself regarding oil exploration in the newly subdivided area - oil was just then becoming an issue). The governing principles which determined what new countries, institutions, and political systems were to emerge in the Middle East were much as one might expect, viz - how best to serve the interests of the individual Great Powers and how one Great Power might prosper at the expense of other Great Powers. The intense rivalry between England and France was a case in point; there was no love lost there at all. Throughout this process the interests of the actual indigenous peoples of those regions were irrelevant. It is not that they were secondary - they simply did not enter into the equation in any way at all.
So the Middle East was reinvented. Countries were arbitrarily created, without logical boundaries or rational population composites (Iraq being one of them), and rulers were imposed on the basis of how best they would pander to great power interests. All this was done by a handful of powerful men in pursuit of mainly colonial interests; and it all happened, or was set in motion, between 1918 and 1922. When we look at the Middle East of today we are looking at a relatively recent and a very artificial arrangement. It should therefore come as no surprise to us that it is beset by such tremendous problems.
It is virtually certain that great changes will come as the region's own political development tries to undo the chaos imposed on it in that "Peace to end all Peace". But how long this will take and how it will finally settle is very unclear, although it is virtually certain that great suffering still awaits these most unfortunate victims of history. It is also virtually certain that outside interference is not going to be helpful.
Professor Fromkin's book has given me the ability, for the first time, to understand in a clear and logical way, how the Middle East finds itself in today's dreadful state. To anyone with an interest in the area, which must include us all really, I strongly recommend this excellent work. And without any doubt, all political leaders should be obliged to read it.
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