Resumo de A Peace To End All Peace: The Fall Of The Ottoman Empire And The Creation Of The Modern Middle East

As the title of his book suggests, David Fromkin contends that the
contemporary Middle East had its origins in the First World War. The
book tells the story of various European politicians, diplomats,
soldiers, and bureaucrats, engaging in great power politics, and
redrawing the regional map with little regard for its history or its
inhabitants.

When Fromkin speaks of the Middle East, he speaks of more than what we
today consider it to be. In addition to Turkey, Egypt, Israel, Iran,
and the various Arab states, Fromkin includes the former Soviet Central
Asia and Afghanistan. This larger region was vitally important to the
British Empire and the book concentrates significantly on British
actions and policy. In these days coal was still a main source of
energy and the strategic interest of Great Britain rested not on oil
but on the fact that the Middle East was the route to India. Transport
and communications flowed through the Suez but just as important were
the frontiers of Afghanistan. Since about the 1830s Russian expansion
in Asia gave concern to the British and the security of India was
paramount.

Russian expansion in Asia went along with Russian expansion in the
Balkans. This growth was at the expense of the Ottoman Empire and
British policy was to maintain the Sublime Porte ? as the Sultan?s
government was known ? to act as a buffer to Russian designs. German
interest and investment in the Middle East led the Ottomans to join the
Central Powers when War came but British policy remained relatively
benign. As Fromkin shows, British interest was in the war on the
western front, concern for the Middle East only began to grow when the
western war became a war of attrition.

In the British cabinet David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill
advocated entering the eastern war in order to defeat the tottering
Ottoman Empire and to turn the German flank. They were opposed by Field
Marshal Kitchener and Sir Edward Grey. By 1915, however, the
intervention policy had been carried and the struggle for mastery in
the Middle East began. The western imperialist powers ? Britain,
France, and Russia ? pursued their traditional interests in the region
looking beyond the war and manoeuvring for long term advantage. Despite
the fact that they were allies, they saw each other as rivals and even
as enemies. Concern for Russian expansion led to Kitchener?s efforts to
ally with the Moslem world. It was concern for Russian, and later
Soviet, activities in central Asia that led Britain and France to
partition the Middle East and, to a certain extent, led Britain to
support the cause of a Jewish homeland in Palestine.

True to the play of great power politics the local inhabitants had
little say in the shaping of events. Fromkin dismisses the Arab revolt
led by T.E. Lawrence and shows that the modern Middle East was shaped
by Europeans. Iraq and Transjordan were British creations and the
boundaries of all states were drawn with little knowledge or concern
for ethnic and other issues. These were efforts to introduce client
states into the Middle East. In the old system politics and religion
were inexorably intertwined ? the Ottoman Sultan was also Caliph ?
Europeans wished to create modern secular states as they had done in
other parts of the world. The British attempted to replace religion
with nationalism and the Russians with communism. Both efforts were
less than successful. Precisely at the moment that British policy
succeeded in establishing its various client states, the British public
lost its appetite for empire and the support needed to shape and build
modernism in the Middle East never came.

By 1922, with the final collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the modern
Middle East was set on its course ? a course that was to lead to
continual regional conflict and to the ever-escalating terrorism that
led to the attacks of September 11, 2001.

'A Peace to End All Peace' was first pubished in 1989 and reprinted in 2001.

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