Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East

by John Keay

Book Overview

The seeds of conflict in the Middle East were sown in the first 60 years of the 20th century. It was then that the Western powers - Britain, France and the United States - discovered the imperatives for interventions that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was also then that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged - their management by the West earning abiding resentment. with lucid analysis and...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0393058492
• ISBN13: 9780393058499
• Release Date: January 2003
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
• Length: 506 Pages
• Weight: 1.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.6" x 6.7" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Masterly

This brilliant and somewhat sardonic account of how the Middle East has been mismanaged by the European Powers between 1900 and 1960 presents an admirable interplay between the historical forces behind the events and the vividly described personalities involved with them: it is hard, after reading this book, to maintain the structuralist view of history: that individuals are ultimately unimportant compared with historical trends. Not only did the individual players often play against each other, but the settlement of the Middle East during and after the First World War was at the mercy of the rivalry, not only between Britain and France, but also (in Britain) between individuals and `some twenty separate government and military departments', with, for example, a tug-of-war between the British authorities in India and those in Egypt. In addition there was conscious double-dealing. Sir Henry McMahon, who drew up the deliberately imprecisely worded letter of promises to the Sharif Husayn of Mecca, knew that at the same time Sir Mark Sykes was making totally different arrangements for the area with his French opposite number, François Georges-Picot. The Balfour Declaration gave yet a third undertaking which could be said to have been at variance with how the Arabs understood the McMahon Letters. Even T.E.Lawrence, outraged though he was about the Sykes-Picot Agreement, did not envisage true independence for the Arabs, but rather `establishing our first brown dominion'. None of even the most pro-Arab British players thought that the Arabs were really capable of governing themselves. Some had hoped that the First World War would be `the war to end all war'. Instead the settlement, especially in the Middle East, was `a peace to end all peace', as Britain and France struggled throughout the succeeding years to maintain their control against the determined nationalism that ceaseless rebelled against their ascendancy. Keay demonstrates this in country after country: how Egypt, despite her notional independence, was for long kept as a `semi-protectorate'; how the British got Kurdish Mosul, with its oil, added to Arab Mesopotamia to form Iraq; how France created a similarly multi-ethnic unit in the Lebanon, separating it from the authority of Damascus (under which it had been since 1860) and adding the Shi'ite Bekaa Valley and the Sunni district of Tripoli to Mount Lebanon, with its Christian and Druze population, whilst at the same time they split up today's Syria into several statelets (an incredibly complex story, this); how an Iraqi uprising in 1920 was crushed, partly by bombing, with about 10,000 dead; how Syrian nationalists, claiming the Lebanon and Palestine as part of Greater Syria, were thwarted by Britain and France; and how King Feisal, who had been installed by the British in Damascus but had then thrown in his lot with the Syrian nationalists, was unceremoniously removed from Syria by the French. He was then, through fantas

A must read for policy makers

"Sowing the Wind: The Seeds of Conflict in the Middle East" by John Keay, this is a broader look at the area than "A Peace to End All Peace." Published in 2003, probably too late for policymakers to read, this is an excellent one-volume history of the Middle East, from the 1890 through the Suez crisis in 1956, with an epilog to bring us up to date. The catalog of crime and invasion, contention, execution and insurrection, siege and betrayal of Hashemite vs. Wahhabi, Sunni vs. Shia vs. Kurd vs. Turk, Allies vs. Ottomans, Britain vs. France, Zionists vs. Muslims, and other groups great and small would give a tourist pause, never mind a diplomat or soldier. "Sowing the Wind" is as entertaining as it is educational, fascinating as it is frightening. Packed with characters from Saddam to the Hoffman twins, from Lawrence to Ibn Saud, this should be required reading for every policymaker and politician. Robert A. Hall, author of "The Good Bits."

Thorough, witty, and opinionated coverage of its topic

Keay has written a terrific book, but, to appreciate it, you have to know what it is and what it isn't. It's not a general history of the Middle East in the first half of the twentieth century, but rather a history of Western colonialism, or imperialism, in the Middle East during that time period. I don't know whether Keay reads Arabic, but the book is based mostly on Western sources, not Middle Eastern ones. Nor does he strive to adopt a strictly neutral tone. The book is an argument for his opinions, and he makes the opinions plain through his offhand remarks and by his marshaling and organization of the facts. The primary opinion he defends is that Western involvement in the Middle East was a disaster, turning the region against the West and stunting its development. He also believes that the land of modern Israel was taken from the Palestinians unjustly. If you're interested in reading a defense of those views, read Keay's book. He's an excellent writer, has a good eye for interesting details, and can be very funny.

A lucid and compelling history

It is an excellent history of the Middle East (Egypt to Iran) from 1900 to 2001.As with so many of Keay's works it is immensely readable. A must for anyone seeking a clearer understanding of this complex subject.

"Into this melee now boldly blundered"

It is the British in Eygpt in 1950 that boldly blundered. This is after a British official, obsessing over a social slight, came to the stark realization that "we are loathed here." The sad and vexing parallels between the history covered in Sowing the Wind and today's Middle-East are striking and make Mr. Keay's work a critical read. To pluck but one: "Baghdad was the first city of any consequence to be captured by the British in the Second World War." In the First, the conquest cost 100,000 lives and consumed three years. In the Second, it "cost the British 34 lives and took thirty days." But the conquest, like so much in the Middle East, was deceptive: "Probably, the greatest loss of life came after the ceasefire." The environment eventually changed, and in 1943 Iraq would declare war on the Axis powers. Even then, though, the stage was being set. A ten-year old boy was taken into the home, and placed under the mentorship of one Khairallah, an Iraqi officer who had been imprisoned and, upon his release, returned to his village in Tikrit. The boy-student was Saddam Hussein. The year 1947. This gracefully written book is not focused exclusively on the U.K. in the Middle-East, but history invariably buys them the plurality of pages. Nor is the book without its lighter moments. The story of the twins from Minnesota who seem jointly and quite happily to have married the same Prince, the makeshift taxi service founded by a pair of enterprising New Zealanders, and any number of intriguing some plots -- Gertude Bell, T.E. Lawrence and others -- help to bring to the surface the multi-layered "character" of the region. (I think a book remains to be written about the prominence of British and American women -- as journalists, advisors and power brokers -- in the modern history of the Middle East, and Keays is a good place to start.)Somewhere John Dos Passos wrote that a "sense of continuity with the past" can be a source of comfort in troubled, uncertain times. The continuity that one finds in Mr. Keay's work is more unsettling than not, but it deserves, for that very reason, a serious readership, particularly in the U.S. The detailed narrative stops in the early 1960s, but Keays pulls threads together in a concluding chapter that takes us to September 11th. The history of this region continues to evolve in unexpected ways, and I share with President Bush the desire to focus on the positive changes that have taken place in Iraq in recent months and, like countless others, sincerely pray that peace and stability find a home in the region. Until then, the Middle East Keays surveyed in this exceptional book will continue to contain its unsettling continuities.