Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #11774 in Books
• Published on: 2001-09-01
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 636 pages

Jack Miles, Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Wonderful . . . No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East."

Review
"Wonderful...No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East."—Jack Miles, Los Angeles Book Review

"Extraordinarily ambitious, provocative and vividly written...Fromkin unfolds a gripping tale of diplomatic double-dealing, military incompetence and political upheaval."—Reid Beddow, Washington Post Book World

"Ambitious and splendid...An epic tale of ruin and disillusion...of great men, their large deeds and even larger follies."—Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal

"[It] achieves an ideal of historical writing: its absorbing narrative not only recounts past events but offers a useful way to think about them....The book demands close attention and repays it. Much of the information here was not available until recent decades, and almost every page brings us news about a past that troubles the present."—Naomi Bliven, The New Yorker

"One of the first books to take an effective panoramic view of what was happening, not only in Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, and the Arab regions of Asia but also in Afghanistan and central Asia....Readers will come away from A Peace to End All Peace not only enlightened but challenged ? challenged in a way that is brought home by the irony of the title."—The New York Times Book Review

Review
"Wonderful...No book published in recent years has more lasting relevance to our understanding of the Middle East."-Jack Miles, Los Angeles Book Review

"Extraordinarily ambitious, provocative and vividly written...Fromkin unfolds a gripping tale of diplomatic double-dealing, military incompetence and political upheaval."-Reid Beddow, Washington Post Book World

"Ambitious and splendid...An epic tale of ruin and disillusion...of great men, their large deeds and even larger follies."-Fouad Ajami, The Wall Street Journal

Customer Reviews

Still Sorting Out the Ottoman Empire

World War One brought about the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the creation of the modern Middle East. Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine (including a somewhat conditional Jewish Homeland), and the Transjordan were carved out mainly by the British. Turkey established itself as a separate entity including both European (East Thrace) and Asian parts. David Fromkin leads the reader through the changes that occurred between 1914 and 1922 in meticulous detail. Indeed, this reader found the book's main shortcoming to be the welter of specific facts that sometimes obscured the larger picture.

Fromkin's book was published in 1989 so that it has an interesting historical perspective. The Iranians had thrown out the Americans and the so-called Afghan Arabs had played their (exaggerated) role in pushing the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan, but 9-11 remained over a decade in the future. Nonetheless, Fromkin detected the strength of Islam as the most important force in the region.

Fromkin notes that the Middle East was the final area of the world to fall to Western (mostly British) imperialism. He also observes that this extension of Western power had long been anticipated with the main question being which country would get how much. In the end the British obtained more paper power than they could reasonable have hoped for, but then they found that by 1922 they had neither the will nor the wherewithal to exert that power. The Great War drained them of both. The British, and to a lesser degree the French and Americans, created weak countries and left major issues such as the fate of Kurds, Jews, and Palestinian Arabs unresolved.

An even more fundamental challenge remained and remains. In every other area of the globe subjected to Western dominance, Western forms and principles prevailed, but Fromkin notes that "at least one of those assumptions, the modern belief in secular civil government, is an alien creed in a region most of whose inhabitants...have avowed faith in a Holy Law that governs all life, including government and politics." Fromkin puts his finger right on the problem that the West has in understanding much of the region.

Even more daunting, Fromkin argues that the Middle East still has not sorted itself out after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. He notes discouragingly that it took Western Europe about more than a millennium to "resolve its post-Roman crisis of social and political identity". The region's politics lack any "sense of legitimacy" or "agreement on the rules of the game - and no belief, universally shared in the region...that the entities that call themselves countries or the men who claim to be rulers are entitled to recognition as such." The last such rulers were the Ottoman sultans.

With regard to the current troubles in Iraq, one fervently wishes that someone in Washington had appreciated the penetrating analysis by the British civil commissioner Arnold Wilson in 1920 about the area just then being called Iraq. While he was called upon to administer the provinces of Basra, Baghdad, and Mosul, he did not believe they "formed a coherent entity". As he saw it the Kurds of Mosul would never accept an Arab leader, while the Shi'ite Moslems would never accept domination by the minority Sunnis, but, to directly quote Wilson, "no form of Government has yet been envisaged, which does not involve Sunni domination." And on and on it goes.

The book features a number of familiar figures, Winston Churchill most prominent among them. Fromkin's favorable treatment of Churchill strongly suggests that Winston was repeatedly ill-served by subordinates, bad luck, and bad press. By 1922, Churchill was finished as a British politician (or so it seemed). Other major figures include Lord Kitchener, David Lloyd George, T.E. Lawrence (about whom many questions are raised). A plethora of lesser known British and French military and civil leaders abound in the pages of Fromkin's lengthy tome, not to mention the odd Russia and German. Turkish leaders, such as Enver Pasha and Mustapha Kemal often bewilder their Western counterparts.

Perhaps the oddest historical artifact reproduced by Fromkin was the belief, generally accepted among British intelligence and high-ranking civil and military leaders, in a conspiracy between Prussian generals and Jewish financiers manipulating Russian Bolsheviks and Turkish nationalists to the detriment of British interests! Moreover, in this conspiratorial view, Islam was controlled by Jewry. At this point, the reader is tempted to quietly murmur that the British should go home where they might understand something of what they are about. (The dangers of drawing too direct lessons from history are great and while the US leadership did not harbor any notions quite this crackpot, it bears notice that the US seem not to have understand Iraq, its history, or its people before sending in troops.)

Fromkin produced a fine book, not an easy read, with a wealth of information and an excellent closing summary. It suffered, at times from the size of the subject - the transformation of an entire region during a worldwide war - and the maze of characters and details. A book that bears a second reading and a subject (subjects, really) for further study. Highly recommended.

Fromkin's A Peace to End All Piece
Well-researched and it reads like a novel. 565 pages flew by before I noticed I was making progress. And timely as all get-out. What more could you posssibly want for the price of five gallons of Middle Eastern gas?

... and the foundation for Endless War.
Fromkin's seminal work is now almost 20 years old, and it is still the essential history book on the bungled making of the modern Middle East. Like another reviewer, I would gladly have given this a 6-star rating if it were possible. So much today remains the very same, save for the change from one imperial power to another. Consider from the Introduction: "The European powers at that time believed they could change Moslem Asia in the very fundamentals of its political existence, and in their attempt to do so introduced an artificial state system into the Middle East that has made it into a region of countries that have not become nations even today." On page 451 Fromkin quotes the caution of an American missionary to the woman who, by in large, created Iraq, Gertrude Bell: "You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a political entity..... they have no conception of nationhood yet."

From the perspective of a century, in some ways it is difficult to believe that all this was a sideshow, to use William Shawcross's phrase for Cambodia. The "real drama" was the Western Front, a subsidiary drama the Eastern Front, and the rise of Communism, and this very distant front was much like Burma during the Second War World, few players with meager resources.

Fromkin lays much of the blame for the misunderstandings between the West and the Middle East on Kitchener. In a description true of individuals today, he said of Kitchener: "The peculiarities of his character, the deficiencies of his understanding of the Moslem world, the misinformation regularly supplied to him by his lieutenants...... and his choice of Arab politicians...."

His chapter on the Balfour Declaration is strong; balancing the forces and players at work, and making the oft-forgotten point that the vast majority of the world's Jew's were not Zionists. The book is replete with other ironies, such as a footnoted exchange:"... on the Arab question, shows Lord Kitchener asking, "Wahabism, does that still exist?" and Sykes answering, "I think it is a dying fire." So much of the West's impression of Saudi Arabia was initially formed by TE Lawrence, in his half-fictional work "Seven Pillars of Wisdom" so Fromkin's confirmation that Lawrence himself cautioned his biographer, Graves, that his work is "...full of half-truth here." is a valuable reminder to examine the prism and motives of individuals who write about the Middle East.

On page 468, again with an easy substitution, plus ca change.... "In fact there was an outside force linked to every one of the outbreaks of violence in the Middle East, but it was the one force whose presence remained invisible to British officialdom. It was Britain herself. In a region of the globe whose inhabitants were known especially to dislike foreigners, and in a predominantly Moslem world which could abide being ruled by almost anybody except non-Moslems, a foreign Christian country ought to have expected to encounter hostility when it attempted to impose its own rule."

I agree with some of the criticism of this book: that it is a "big man's" version of history, and neglects describing broader social forces that motivate the "little man" and that it is weak on describing the thinking and motivation of the non-European regional players.

We can only hope that additional parallels with the present situation will occur, from page 561: "By the time that the war came to an end (WW I), British society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would be a benefit to Britain to expand her empire) as untrue. Viewing imperialism as a costly drain on a society that needed to invest all of its remaining resources in rebuilding itself...."

This book should be mandatory reading for the next American administration.