A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East | 
| Author: David Fromkin
Publisher: Holt Paperbacks
Category: Book
List Price: $20.00
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Rating:  126 reviews
Sales Rank: 10880
Media: Paperback
Pages: 636
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.4
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 1.2
ISBN: 0805068848
Dewey Decimal Number: 327.41
EAN: 9780805068849
ASIN: 0805068848
Publication Date: September 1, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: Pages clean and binding tight, pages have slight wave in first third of the book which does not affect the text. Typical wear to cover
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Product Description
The critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling account of how the modern Middle East came into being after World War I, and why it is in upheaval today
In our time the Middle East has proven a battleground of rival religions, ideologies, nationalisms, and dynasties. All of these conflicts, including the hostilities between Arabs and Israelis that have flared yet again, come down, in a sense, to the extent to which the Middle East will continue to live with its political inheritance: the arrangements, unities, and divisions imposed upon the region by the Allies after the First World War.
In A Peace to End All Peace, David Fromkin reveals how and why the Allies came to remake the geography and politics of the Middle East, drawing lines on an empty map that eventually became the new countries of Iraq, Israel, Jordan, and Lebanon. Focusing on the formative years of 1914 to 1922, when all-even an alliance between Arab nationalism and Zionism-seemed possible he raises questions about what might have been done differently, and answers questions about why things were done as they were. The current battle for a Palestinian homeland has its roots in these events of 85 years ago.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 121 more reviews...
 The law of unintended consequences November 21, 2008
Hugh Davis (Alabama)
Intelligent men, with good intentions, can make decisions whose consequences resonate for decades. This is a history of miscommunications & miscalculations whose effects are being felt today, & will be felt for years to come.
I think it is vital for anyone interested in statecraft in general or Middle Eastern affairs in particular to read & think about this book.
The British have a long & illustrious history in diplomacy, intelligence & strategy. Some of their best & brightest, not just of their generation, but of all time, were involved in these events. Nevertheless, they miscalculated their own interests, not to mention the interests of the peoples they dealt with.
This was further complicated by rivalries among at least three factions vying to lead their foreign policy, miscommunications of intentions between different individuals in their foreign policy establishment, & the mixed motives inherent in human endeavours. Ah, yes, and a little deception of allies or putative allies, combined with changes in policy as circumstances changed, which can be interpreted as dishonesty in some lights.
This is one of the most interesting books I've read in years - and I am an avid reader. If this had been a novel, though, I'd have ripped the novelist for concocting such a complex & unbelievable plot. Truth is sometimes stranger than fiction.
Even if taking a charitable view of British imperial policies, this account helps one to understand why it is difficult for Middle Easterners to take at face value Western professions of good intentions.
It may not be fair to judge statesmen of one generation by standards that evolved after their time, but that doesn't mean we can't learn from their experience, as informed by subsequent experience & observation of similar situations.
Edwin Black's "Banking on Baghdad" also sheds light on some of these issues. I highly recommend both books. Take your time to thoroughly digest these books & the lessons they contain, although I found them both very readable.
 Lessons Learned on Events from Past that Apply to Current Ops of US Foreign Policy September 15, 2008
J. Hickman
My unit read this book for professional development. I found it slow a firs, because it is a long read, but the chapters were interesting. I'm just a slow reader. The book offers countless lessons learned from the past that apply directly and indirectly to current US foreign policy in Iraq and Afghanistan. Anyone interested in learning from past events of the Great Game and large wars should read this book. One will learn a tremendous amount of background information about the Middle East: why it is the way it is today, why the region is geographically divided as it is, and other useful information. Whether the interested reader plans to visit the region for business or personal reasons or he plans to study for various reasons, this book will be valuable. I also recommend for group reading and discussion.
This brilliant book - an historical thriller through and through! July 30, 2008
Geoffrey Woollard (Cambridgeshire, England)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
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.
Still Sorting Out the Ottoman Empire June 27, 2008
Douglas S. Wood (Monona, WI)
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
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 May 25, 2008
Richard M. Rose (Denver, CO)
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?
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