Believe it or not, there was a time when “there is trouble in the Middle East” was not an evergreen statement.

That time has certainly passed from living memory, but was not nearly as long ago as one might imagine.

When my grandmother was born in 1906, the Ottoman Empire not only still existed, but still controlled most of the area we consider the Middle East: Syria, Palestine, the Hejaz, and Iraq.

Twenty years later, the Ottoman Empire was gone, and the conditions were established which have led to all the continuous crises in the century since.

David Fromkin detailed exactly how all of this went down from 1914 to 1922 in the aptly titled A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East.

The TL;DR version? It was the British. (It’s always the British).

You might think the book is all about the Ottoman Empire’s exploits in World War I and immediately afterward. The author certainly spends some time discussing these things, but for good reason the book is mostly centered on Winston Churchill, Lloyd George, and their imperial designs on the Middle East after the imagined but expected fall of the Ottoman Empire.

The Ottoman Empire was known as the “sick man of Europe” because its glory was clearly fading, its European holdings had been revolting to some degree or another, and with varying levels of success, since the 1820s, and if any European power really wanted to, they could expend the effort to eliminate it. But it remained because propping it up was preferable to the European powers than the free-for-all intra-European fighting which would take place for the lands involved.

The French had been active in supporting the Christians in Lebanon and believed it deserved hegemony over Syria (of which Lebanon was then a part). The British had been long concerned about the Russians: India was quite important to Britain, and so the Suez Canal and its naval access to India was important to Britain, and so Britain was the real force in power in Egypt, and the British were concerned about Russian imperial ambitions in central Asia and the Middle East. The Germans were always concerned about British imperial power and ambitions.

And so the Ottomans were stuck in the middle. When the war started, the Young Turk porte might have been influenced toward neutrality or in either direction, but the Germans did better in their diplomacy, and the Ottomans allied with the Central Powers.

What I never knew was how the British were within 24 hours of seizing Istanbul and were planning to concede it to the Russians in 1915. Churchill had sent in the navy; they had encountered some resistance and lost a ship; he commanded them to go in the next day, but the order was not followed. Had it been followed, the British would have seen the Ottomans withdraw from their positions, and they would have been able to enter Constantinople without firing many shots. The modern world would look and be entirely different if this had taken place.

But it didn’t. The navy withdrew. They planned an invasion and never really committed the resources necessary to it. It led to the Gallipoli disaster.

Since that didn’t work, the British then attempted to engender a rebellion among the Arabs against the Turks. The Arabs had their issue with Turkish leadership, but somehow the British convinced themselves they could generate enough of a rebellion to make a difference, and the Arabs would welcome British oversight. The British promised Hussein, a Hashemite ruler, that he would be caliph of the Arabs, imagining it a limited spiritual role and not its full secular-spiritual understanding. They also continued to support the opposing house of ibn Saud.

In the end Feisal and Abdullah, sons of Hussein, were used by the British as the pretense of an Arab show of force for what was really a British army. In 1917 and 1918 this British Army would successfully overrun Palestine and Syria.

World War I ended on 11/11/1918, but the conflict with the Ottoman Empire/Turkey would continue for many more years. If Lloyd George could have imposed and certified his terms early, things might have gone differently. But it took many years; the Americans did not want to cultivate British imperial ambitions but would not take on responsibility itself; final agreements were not made until 1922.

And the world of 1922 was nothing like the world of 1918, let alone 1914. The Russians were now the Bolshevik Soviets, who allied with their former opponents the Turks against their former allies the British. The British had encouraged the Greeks to press their interests in Asia Minor, and it backfired on all of them spectacularly, leading to the slaughter of many Greeks and Turks, the migration of Greek Christians from Asia Minor to Greece, leaving Asia Minor without a Christian population for the first time since the days of the Apostles, and most of the Turkish Muslims in Greece moved to Turkey.

The Europeans, primarily the British, had come in and drew lines and created nation-states to suit their short-term interests and purposes. The British attempted to dislodge the French from Syria, but without great success; it did lead, however, to the separation of Lebanon and Syria, as it is to this day. The British had propped up a competent general who became the Shah and turned Persia into Iran. The lands between Syria and Iran had never been a single polity, and contained at least three major groups; and yet the British fashioned it into a nation called Iraq, and installed a foreign Arab from the southwest, Feisal the Hashemite, as king. Churchill granted what he imagined was temporary rule over the Transjordan portion of Palestine to Feisal’s brother Abdullah, which essentially created the nation of Jordan which remains and is ruled by Abdullah’s descendant to this day. And Churchill and George really wanted to honor the Balfour Declaration and create a Jewish homeland in Palestine, but were constantly thwarted by a lack of resources and opposition from other British authorities.

And then they found oil everywhere, and it became really important. And we know the rest of the story.

When ISIS took over parts of northern Iraq, one of the first things they did - and made sure to record it - was to physically destroy the markers which delineated Syria from Iraq, sharply condemning the Sykes-Picot agreement and line. We in America might find that kind of thing baffling: why are they so obsessed with lines from about a century ago? And yet, as this book well indicates, everything had been as it had been for almost 600 years until 1922; and most would not have known much difference between Ottoman rule and the Abbasid and Umayyad rule which preceded them, so, really, 1200 years! The Middle East went from living as it did in medieval days to a world of modern nation-states with lines and divisions imposed upon them by others who considered themselves more civilized. The author did well to encourage Westerners to think about how long it took for Europe to finally figure out its political ideologies and borders after the Roman Empire, and then recognize the Middle East has only had a century of its current borders. If you are interested in what’s going on in the Middle East, this book is required reading for understanding how the Europeans, especially the British, obtained what was best for their short-term interest, and how that has turned out for everyone ever since. ( )

This book describes the dissolution of the Ottoman empire in and after the first world war, with a very strong emphasis on British politics. It is, in fact, misleading to call this a "definitive account" of the creation of the modern Middle East, as the back cover does. It can hardly be very definitive when the Turkish, Arab, Persian, German, Russian, French and American sides of the story, all taken together, receive less than half as much as space as the British one does. There's no doubt that Britain was the leading political power in the world before world war I, but especially in the beginning of the book the author drags into the narrative far too many unimportant British persons whose views didn't have any consequences worthy of mention and weren't particularly interesting to begin with. I skipped many sections of the book just out of boredom.

Nevertheless, it is certainly interesting to compare the imperial world-views of British leaders before the war to the humbled perspective they were forced to adopt after the war. It's hard to believe that a century ago leaders could still understand politics only from the narrow conceptions of colonial empire: a zero-sum game where only territorial possession mattered. The Ottoman empire was weak, so the British and the French thought it should be divided between them even though neither had any knowledge of the lands they wanted to divide. The contrast with the post-war worldview is quite striking, as the author also points out. In that sense it certainly seems to be true that this book describes a watershed moment.

The second half of the book, which describes events after the war, is more interesting than the first. British leaders eventually had to face the limits of their own power. They were instrumental in founding the countries of the Middle East in the settlement of 1922 before leaving the region for good. But the age of empires was coming to an end and the age of national self-determination was about to begin. It is a bit peculiar that Woodrow Wilson, who certainly did much more than any British politician to inaugurate this new age, is here written off as a naive buffoon who didn't have any idea what he was doing at the peace conference which ended the war. In any case, I think this book is too long and it's perspective is centered far too much on Britain. But it still has its moments, and there may not be any other book which tells the same story in this much detail.

A Peace to End All Peace
Author: David Fromkin
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Published In: New York City
Date: 1989
Pgs: 635

REVIEW MAY CONTAIN SPOILERS

Summary:
The Middle East, long a battleground of religions, ideologies, nationalism, and dynasty, her history comes alive here. This history concerns itself with the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire and how it arrived at that point. How the secret agreements of the WW1 Allies impacted the peoples and the future of the region. The reasons, ambitions, and greed that drove the Allies to make the decisions that they made. And their ultimate failure to understand what they were dealing with in the peoples of the Middle East. The same mistake made today by policymakers in seeing the world of the Middle East as a single mass instead of the polyglot of ethnicities that exists there. This is a Middle East before the Petroleum Age. A time when allegiance was still possible between Arab and Zionism. A time before the founding of Israel. A time before the arbitrary drawing of lines on a map and lumping ethnicities together whose only history together was enmity and a share of the Ottoman yoke. This book follows the narrowing of paths and circumstances that lead the region toward the endless wars and escalating acts of terrorism that continue to plague the region to this day.

Genre:
History
Military
Non-fiction

Why this book:
Always been fascinated by the Ottoman Empire and the Arab world.
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Pacing:
The telling of Ottoman and Middle East history is well paced.

Hmm Moments:
The man who coined the term The Great Game in Asia to explain the competition between England and Russia for dominance and hegemony in Asia ended up beheaded by an Uzbek emir.

I had read the stories about the veneer that was Ottoman control of their empire; dominated by outside powers, Britain, Russia, Germany; barely ruling their subjects to the degree that estimates say the government only collected 5% of their taxes some years, the remainder collected by “tax farmers”. Effective national leadership elluded the Turks at the center of the Ottoman Empire. Reading the makeup of the Empire makes me wonder what could have been if they had hit upon a federal system that gave power to the ethnic minorities and the regions in a national assembly. What would the modern Middle East look like today? Would Europe have let that flower flourish or would they have yanked it out by its root and then split it up any which way they wanted to as they did in our world. In some cases putting tribes and ethnicities under a single national tent that were immemorial enemies. There was a Turkish Parliament, but it was disbanded by the Sultan Abdul Hamid during his reign(1876-1909). The Parliament’s makeup did not reflect the rank and file of Ottoman life.

The Anti-Semitism of the British embassy and it’s colorful reports to London impacted the British attitudes and actions in the Ottoman Empire for many years to come. Instead of seeing the rise of the Young Turks in the light of enlightenment, they saw it instead cloaked in Jewish adventurism, Latin intrigue, French fervor, and the conspiracy of the freemasons.

And when the Young Turks took control, Britain replaced its ambassador. Although this time instead of being fed a diet of Anti-Semitism, they were given rosey reports full of optimism that was misleading as well. The British Foreign Office was fed on the propagandic beliefs of their men on the spot time and again.

The Young Turks threw away their chance for true federalism by excluding all non-Turks and only allowing a fraction of the Parliament seats to be filled by Arabs. Of the 22 recognized ethnic groups in the Ottoman Empire, only Turks and Arabs held seats; 150 seats were held by Turks, 60 by Arabs. None of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire identified as Ottoman, an opportunity that the Young Turks blew when they moved to insure the dominance of the Turks within the government. The text also refers to Turkey as not being the homeland of the Turks. Turkestan in the steppes of Central Asia being divided between Russia and China, giving both of them a claim to the leadership of all Turkish speaking peoples, of whom many weren’t of Turkish origin.

Churchill being described as “just losing the adolescence from his face” at the age of thirty-nine when he sought to transition from Home Secretary to First Lord of the Admiralty. Perfect example of the Harumphers holding onto power as the generational change comes to politics, a changing of the guard moment in politics that hits all systems eventually.

Where Woodrow Wilson high ideals clashed with the political realities in Europe, Asia, and America, he doesn’t come off looking so well. He was a President with razor thin margins allowing him to govern on sufferance by his enemies and occasional “friends”. He made America party to the Allies with the public proviso that there would be no secret quid pro quo on the postwar distribution of the spoils, even though he knew such agreements existed. The fall of Russia to the Communists lead to those secret agreements being disgorged into the press. He is attributed an off-the-record quote while aboard ship on his way to the World War One peace conference in 1919: “I am convinced that if this peace is not made on the highest principles of justice, it will b swept away by the peoples of the world in less than a generation. If it is any other sort of peace then I shall want to run away and hide...for there will follow not mere conflict but cataclysm.” Despite his prescience here, he failed to gather a working group to help plan the American stance on the post-war world that had any “real” connection to the world. He filled The Inquiry Group with academicians and a lot of brother-in-law syndrome as opposed to real world strategists with on-the-ground knowledge of what they were dealing with when looking at the Middle East and the actual circumstances within the Ottoman Empire that they were suggesting the dissolution and dismemberment of. This left America and the President with a program that was vague and bound to arouse millennial expectations which once in the hands of politicians would make it virtually certain to disappoint.

I had always accepted the history book version of the American Congress being the rock on which Wilson’s Fourteen Points foundered. Reading this book and seeing the plethora of behind the back, secret agreements that Britain made, sometimes contradictory, with enemies and allies makes one see that the political Britain of that era wasn’t trustworthy in the least sense. She was very much in the business of empire while espousing freedom as a balm for the sting of protectoratism and/or outright domination. They spent much of that era making secret diplomatic agreements and then throwing them away as circumstances showed them a more advantageous prospect.

Fromkin’s characterization of Woodrow Wilson makes me wonder if the President was so naive as to let himself be lead around by the nose by Lloyd George or if he was playing the “aw shucks, I’m just an American in Paris” to give him the position to negotiate the best treaty that he could in the areas of most interest to him. I believe that Wilson wanted this to have been the last war, the last meatgrinder that America ever had to feed her children to for the rest of the world’s peace. I wonder at how sad he would be today that his efforts came to so little when you look at the bloodshed of the 20th century and the way we have kicked off the 21st.

The Domino Theory existed long before it appeared in American foreign policy. The theory was put forth by British Foreign Secretary Lord Curzon as early as 1919 though still about the Bolsheviks. The British in the immediate post World War era in the Middle East were facing a number of revolts and revolutions in both their recently acquired possessions and those of long standing: troubles were arousing in Egypt, Afghanistan, Arabia, Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Mesopotamia, and Persia. Some maybe, possibly could be lain at the feet of the Soviets, but a healthy bit of it is the fault of the British for failing to understand the situation on the ground in each of those countries and provinces, up to and including the British departments of government working at odds with each other, ie: like they did in Arabia where one department was supporting Hussein in the Hejaz with money and material while another was supporting Ibn Saud with same.

The revolts across Central Asia lead to an Emir retaking his family’s traditional power and position. He brought back the Dark Ages in a big way. He reopened a 12th century tower, the Kalyan Minaret, which was the Tower of Death. Condemned criminals were tossed from teh top of the tower to their deaths, though law and order and the way the government was run under him was at his decree. When faced with a choice between that, the Red Army, or Enver Pasha, the Ottoman Young Turk exile, who had been sent there by Russia to quell and pacify the locals ahead of the Red Army, but went over to the Emir to “help” him unify the Turks and throw off the yoke of the Russians. Pasha was only interested in his own power however and ended up drawing more and more power to himself before he found himself at odds with both the Emir and the Russians.
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Last Page Sound:
The fall of the Ottoman Empire, the rise of Turkey; The rise, fall, rise, fall, and rise of Winston Churchill; From lines on a map to nationalism in the Middle East. Good stuff.

Author Assessment:
Absolutely read more by this author.

Editorial Assessment:
Was some repetitiveness chapter to chapter, but overall great stuff.

Knee Jerk Reaction:
instant classic

Dewey Decimal System:
327.41056
FROMKIN

Would recommend to:
genre fans
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Errata: ( )

This is the single best book to understanding the background to the modern Middle East regarding Israel and Palestine. I have found it referenced in pro-Israeli, anti-Israeli, pro-Palestinian, and pro-Arab histories and polemics. If there is a book on the Middle East written since 2001, this book is likely in it's bibliography. ( )

The Ottoman Empire was destroyed in WWI, and the attempt to create a structure to govern the area, and to reward the victors, is the matter of this book. Mr. Fromkin has done a good job describing the pitfalls that were dug by the arrangement, but the question arises as to how they could have been avoided. The Wilsonian plan of setting up a set of nation-states seemed to be the best plan for Europe, but the victorious Allies had plans of compensating themselves from the Ottoman territories that was far more on the eighteenth century model.
The inhabitants had some ideas of their own, drawn from the nationalist nineteenth century model, and attempted to modify the peace plan. The resulting collisions are still vibrating today. This book identifies the major players then and the modern still-operating fault-lines. ( )