[Alhazen Al-Rashid]

Id like to recommend this book to anyone who wants a detailed explanation of the histroy of the middle east and why it is the way it is, on account of French, Russian, and British imperialism after the end of WWI. It explains the people and the doctrines involved, and how the maps were drawn and why. This is really a very interesting historical read. Let me give some examples.

"After the War to End War, they seem to have been pretty successful in Paris of making a Peace to End Peace"
--Field Marshal Earl Wavell, commenting on the Versailles Treaties

Russian and French accounts of what they were doing in the Middle East at the time were, not unnaturally, works of propaganda. British official accounts--and even the later memoirs of officials concerned--were untruthful as well. British officials who played a major role in the making of these decisions provided a version of events that was at best editited, and at worst lies. They sought to hide their meddling in Moslem religious affairs (see pages 96-106), and to pretend they had entered the Middle East as patrons of Arab Independence--a cause in which they did not in fact believe. Moreover, the supposed "arab revolt", occured not so much in reality, but in the imagination of T. E. Lawrence, a teller of fantastic tales whom the American showman THomas transformed later into "Lawrence of Arabia".

The year 1922 seems to have been the point of no return in setting the various clans on the ME on their collision courses, so that the especial intrest and excitement of the years with which this book is concerned, is that they were the creative, formative years, in which everything seemed possible. It was a time when Europeans, not implausibly, believed Arab and Jewish nationalism to be natural allies; when the French, not the Arabs were the dangerous enemies of the Zionist movement, and when oil was not an important factor in politics.