A few years ago, Osama bin Laden made a remark about 80 years of injustice. What happened 80 years ago? How did the Middle East come to be as it is now? Fromkin tells us an important piece of that story. This is the story of World War I with primary emphasis on the Ottoman Empire and how the Allies came to divide up the Middle East. It is a very well written book with clear relevance to our own times. ( )

This masterful narrative by David Fromkin describes the formation of the modern Middle East between the years 1914-1922: the fabrication of Iraq, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia by Britain, the setting of the frontiers of Syria and Lebanon by France, and the creation of the borders of Armenia and Azerbaijan by Russia. Fromkin contends that the conflicts that unsettle the region today are largely a result of the presumptuous manipulation of peoples and places by the imperialist ambitions of the Triple Entente.

The first prize to be divvied up was the Ottoman Empire. Even before the war, secret pacts divided the “Sick Man of Europe” among the allies in anticipation of its seemingly inevitable demise. But one of Britain’s largest mistakes was underestimating the Turks, both as a military actor and as a people capable of self-determination, in part because of racism.

Another racist current coloring events was a pervasive anti-Semitism among the British governing classes. It caused them to believe that Jews were conspiring with the Germans, the Turks, and of course the Russians for power. (Although many Bolsheviks were born into the Jewish religion, they could be identified as Jews in “racial” terms only.) As Fromkin notes, “The Foreign Office believed that the Jewish communities in America and, above all, Russia, wielded great power.” This led them to bizarre misunderstandings of the motives and goals of their adversaries, and to policy formation geared toward an accommodation of the non-existent Jewish conspiracies they saw looming around every corner.

The story, told from the perspective of British involvement, begins with the decision by the War Minister, Lord Kitchener, to partition the Middle East after the War. After Lord Kitchener’s death in 1916, David Lloyd George (Chancellor of the Exchequer and later Prime Minister) and Winston Churchill (serving in several different capacities) played larger roles in the British enterprise in the Middle East. “Winston Churchill,” Fromkin writes, “above all, presides over the pages of this book: a dominating figure whose genius animated events and whose larger-than-life personality colored and enlivened them.”

Fromkin firmly opposes aspersions on Churchill’s reputation that arose from his policies in WWI. Contrary to statements of Churchill’s contemporaries (with their own reputations to protect), Fromkin’s research shows that Churchill first opposed the Gallipoli option, then tried to make it contingent on a joint army-navy operation, then tried to salvage what was left with what he was given. When disaster ensued (a suspension of the failed campaign after a quarter of a million casualties on Britain’s side and a similar amount on Turkey’s), Churchill was made the scapegoat for the ill-conceived and miscarried engagement.

Churchill’s worth was recognized by British leaders, however, and he continued to help formulate policy even after he left the government. After the war, Churchill alone recognized that Britain’s terms could not be imposed if Britain’s armies left the field; and he most forcefully argued that the Moslem character of Britain’s remaining troops in the East must be taken into account lest the army’s loyalty be compromised.

Woodrow Wilson comes off poorly in Fromkin’s telling -- his insistence on attending peace negotiations upset protocol and added nothing to the process, since he came with “many general opinions but without specific proposals….” “Lacking both detailed knowledge and negotiating skills, Wilson was reduced to an obstructive role….” Naïve and ill-informed, he was manipulated by Lloyd George into furthering Britain’s imperial aims. Back home, Wilson “committed one political blunder after another, driving even potential supporters to oppose him.” Nevertheless, Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” played an influential role in the politics of Europe.

Fromkin ends his fascinating account by observing that following WWI, “administration of most of the planet was conducted in a European mode, according to European precepts, and in accordance with European concepts.” Native political structures and cultures were ignored, destroyed, and/or replaced. But legitimacy cannot be conferred by drawing lines on a map; the legacy of the dissection of the Middle East by the great powers informs our politics yet today, and thus the events discussed in this book remain highly relevant and absorbing. ( )

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. ( )

In the wake of the First World War, Western governments divvy up the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire and adjacent territories. They create new nations (sometimes with no real cultural or historical basis) and pit inhabitants against one another. The results of the political maneuvering 80 years ago are still seen in the violence and instability of the modern Middle East.

This book is a valuable and comprehensive, but readable, history of how things went south in the Middle East.

Favorite Passages

“In their passion for booty, the Allied governments lost sight of the condition upon which future gains were predicated: winning the war. Blinded by the prize, they did not see that there was a contest.” (p. 215) ( )

A dense and demanding treatment of the development of the modern middle east states. This is not, despite the subtitle, any kind of history of the fall of the Ottoman empire - the subject hardly comes up, and would have to start in any case long before Fromkin begins. Fromkin's history is instead focussed on the English involvement in the region in the years before and after the Great War, with some reference, where necessary, to the French, Russians, and the occasional Arab or American. In other words, it is in no sense a comprehensive treatment of the subject, but with this limitation in mind it is a fertile source of questions for those interested in understanding the origins of the modern Mid-East states. The book also provides, inadvertently, a reminder of the impermanence of history. By this I mean not so much that the facts of history change, although they do as new discoveries are made and new interpretations are accepted, but rather that the salient details change as present-day concerns bring new issues into focus. This book was written in 1989, and it is good entertainment to speculate on how it would have been different if written five, or ten, or fifteen years later.
Caveat lector: when I say "demanding", I mean that Fromkin presumes a good deal of familiarity with the events of the First World War, as well as an understanding of the diplomatic mindset of the late nineteenth century, a mindset superseded in precisely the period covered here. Failing this, I'm afraid this book will be rather incomprehensible. ( )