A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East 20th Anniversary Edition, Kindle Edition

i just enjoyed reading it, with all the details and 30 side deals and moving alliances where your ally tries to sabotage you while your enemy tries to support you, and all claiming “this is a critical location for our empire, if we lose this we are done!”. You can see human psyche and how people active in designing post ww1 thinking. There is so much detail about personalities, secret agreements and especially about Arabs and Jews. I personally enjoyed finally reading r the full backstory

Fromkin is to be commended for a compilation of historical facts in great detail and thoroughness that I can only envy. This book must have been a great burden to assemble, and the facts that Fromkin has detailed, and put into much better perspective than most of his fellow historians of the period, are very important to understand his title of "The Peace to End all Peace". Some of the best sections deal with the trade-offs of the various governments after WW I who were exhausted and in financial ruin, or who just abandoned their greater responsibilities, like the USA. The whole issue of the "Jewish Conspiracy" of the Bolshevik revolution, anti-Semitism, Zionism, is dealt with in a very open and refreshing way.But the problem with most of these books, whether it is Macmillan's "1919", or Kagan's "On the Origins of War", and other extraordinarily well researched and wonderful books is that they seem to be writing for an audience of their fellow academics and fail to understand the need for modern day historians to place history into proper perspective. I shouldn't pick on Fromkin because he is no more guilty of this than the hundreds of other authors of similar books, but after reading this wonderful book, I felt the same way I do two hours after a totally filling Chinese meal at my favorite restaurant across the street from my home. I'm hungry again. The essential conundrum that this book details is that the Balfour Declaration has set in place a situation where we have had, and probably will have, perpetual war in the Middle East. This conflict has now expanded all around the world, from the World Trade Center, Bali, Madrid, Kenya, Tanzania, etc and the dilemma for Western society is whether to abandon Israel and the Zionist dream in hopes that the Islamist fanatics will go back into their caves, or whether mankind can advance in an area which Islam has held the power for well over a millennium. Fromkin completely skates around this issue. While I am sure there is some lunchroom or annual convention somewhere where a bunch of academics who live their lives in minutia give points to the author of the book with the most extensive bibliography, they really fail the greater society in producing studies of historical value that places things such as WW I, the fall of the Ottoman Empire (or any other empire) in perspective. While they may argue that such was not the purpose of their book, in fact, much of history is an indictment of human nature to have to relive history over and over again. Historians need to get out of their shell and recognize the forest for the trees. If their works are to have any real value at all, it must be that they are written to advance mankind and not have us read such books and observe how foolish our ancestors were. We know that. What a historian needs to do to be relevant is show us the common threads of the past so that we can avoid that path in the future. The fall of the Ottoman, Hapsburg, and other empires is really no different that that of Rome, the Greeks, the Tatars and the Khans, but seldom do you read a book that shows just how much of a treadmill this is for mankind. Churchill stood alone against the Nazis while the USA slept, and Bush if fighting the same ostriches who think that the Islamist fascists are somehow different, but on one connects the dots. If you want to read a book that shows what an extraordinary scholar Fromkin is, and he is, this is a great book to read, even though it will take a long time to do so. If you want to read something that lifts you past the compilation of facts and details of the past and gives you something to think about how to shape the future so that we don't have to keep going "one step forward and two steps back", I recommend Harris' "Civilization and its Enemies" book as a much better use of your time.

'A Peace to End All Peace' is history as it should be written - epic in scope, scrupulous in the use of sources, careful in analysis and effortless in prose. It is the story of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, and of the birth of the Modern Middle East from its ashes. It tells of the rise of nationalism, of the clashes of armies, and of the power of ideologies. Mostly, it is the story of how the great statesmen, in ignorance and folly, with motives which professed to be pure but usually weren't, accidentally created the Middle East we know and hate today.With the outbreak of the Great War, the status quo antebellum in the Middle East was shattered. Until the war, British policy was to use the nations of the Middle East (although they didn't know it by that name) as a barrier against expansionist Czarist Russia, which, in the four hundred years leading to the war has expanded in a rate of 50 square miles a day (p. 475). The British main interest was to keep the Ottoman Empire existing. Although situation in the Empire changed a little with the rise of Nationalism, Zionism, and especially the Young Turks movement, the European policy has not quite changed. Indeed, as the war was breaking out, the Ottoman Empire was seen as a state of no importance, and the British continually underestimated it, in a sequence of errors which brought the Empire into the war on the German side, and which culminated in the Gallipoli fiasco.Yet as the war progressed, British officials started to change their view. Great confusion and indecision characterized British decision making, torn between those who saw the East as the key to victory in the war (Lloyd George), those who saw it as a distraction of no importance (Lord Kitchener), and the various bureaucracies who battled for control, power and prestige, while supporting two different and opposing factions in Arabia - King Hussein of Mecca and Wahabbi leader Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud.Increasingly, the British saw the key to the Middle East policy in an upcoming Arab Rebellion, headed by King Hussein. In reality, Hussein held little more power then any other Emir in Arabia, and whatever troops he had were bought with British gold. When his rebellion finally came, it hardly affected the outcome of the war, and whatever aid it did give came primarily because of the Gold and influence of T.E. Lawrence on Hussein's son Feisal.The reality had little effect on British policy makers, and particularly on Mark Sykes, the maverick amateur who negotiated the unworkable agreement with the French on partitioning the Middle East between the two powers. Almost before the ink dried on the Sykes-Pico agreements, however, British officials, both in Cairo and in London, started to undermine the agreement, wishing to give no real independence to the Arabs and make as few concessions as necessary to the French.Things became increasingly complicated as the British became aware of the Zionist claim to Palestine, while Czarist Russia fell and America entered the war on an idealistic but unrealistic platform of independence to the minor nations. As the war came to an end and the negotiations in Paris started, Lloyd George's government wrestled with its conflicting pledges, the situation in the Middle East which it barely understood, and the increasingly anti-Imperialist feeling at Home. The Result was a mess, as the British alienated all of her friends (the Arabs by not granting them real independence, the Turks by supporting Greek occupation of Smyrna, the French by opposing its own colonialist designs in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and America by continuing the imperialist plan with a new Rhetoric), and had to fight uprisings throughout the Middle East with a dwindling force, due to the lack of support for the imperialist efforts at home.What David Fromkin calls the Settlement of 1922, with the Middle East in boarders more or less as they are today, with new Units such as Palestine (now Israel), Syria, Trans-Jordan and Lebanon in place, was brought more by exhaustion then by the will of the Foreign (Primarily British) statesmen who shaped it. By the end of the War, Fromkin writes "British Society was generally inclined to reject the idealistic case for imperialism (that it would extend the benefits of advanced civilization to a backward region) as quixotic, and the practical case for it (that it would benefit Britain to expend her empire) as untrue." (p. 561)... Britain's Empire, though greater than it has ever been, was no longer feasible, and the Imperialist design for the Middle East, planned in the middle of the War and imposed after it, unworkable. "British policy-makers imposed a settlement upon the Middle East in 1922 in which, for the most part, they themselves no longer believed"(p. 563, italics in the original).The most astonishing theme of the book is the utter ignorance of the decision makers, primarily in London, but also in Cairo, Mecca, Berlin and Washington. "Lloyd George, who o kept demanding that Britain should rule Palestine from (in the biblical phrase) Dan to Beersheba, did not know where Dan was. He searched for it in a nineteenth-century Biblical atlas, but it was not until nearly a year after the armistice that General Allenby was able to report to him that Dan has been located and, as it was not where the Prime Minister wanted it to be, Britain asked for a boundary further North.'A Peace to End All Peace' gives a fascinating and disturbing portrait of WW1 decision makers. One can only hope that our leaders today are better informed.