Looking for a book/site articles to help understand Middle East politics

[Anonymous]

I'm interested in a more detailed history of recent (100years or so) political events that have shaped the region today. Not just Israel Palestine but also Iran Iraq and all the other nations in that wide and tumultuous region. They all seem horrible intertwined and there seems to have been a lot of meddling by western powers in the 20th century.

I would love to look at resources ( prefereably a well written book(s)) that get help me get all the threads straight.

[Anonymous]

It's a tall order. The books I own predate the Oslo Accords, the Iraq war, Arab Spring.

Here is a decent syllabus for an overview course:
http://www.hks.harvard.edu/syllabus/DPI-440.pdf

[Anonymous]

A Peace to End All Peace by David Fromkin

[Muslima]

The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East by Robert Frisk

At 1,107 pages, this is the "War and Peace" of Middle East histories. It stretches the map eastward to Pakistan and westward to North Africa, and covers every major war and massacre of the last hundred years, going back to the Armenian genocide of 1915. The remarkable tour-de-force here is that Fisk's first-hand reporting is his most primary source for almost everything beginning in the mid-1970s: Fisk, who now writes for Britain's Independent, is the longest-serving western correspondent in the Middle East. His knowledge is encyclopedic!

Amazon Reviews : http://www.amazon.com/The-Great-War-Civilisation-Conquest/dp/1400075173/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1407683752&sr=8-1&keywords=Robert+frisk

“Soldier and civilian, they died in their tens of thousands because death had been concocted for them, morality hitched like a halter round the warhorse so that we talk about “target-rich environments” and “collateral damage”-that most infantile of attempts to shake off the crime of killing-and report the victory parades, the tearing down of statues and the important of peace.

Governments like it that way. They want their people to see war as a drama of opposites, good and evil, “them” and “us”, victory or defeat. But war is primarily not about victory or defeat but about death and the infliction of death. It represents the total failure of the human spirit.

I have witnessed events that over the years can only be defined as an arrogance of power. After the Allied victory of 1918, the victors divided up the lands of their former enemies. In the space of just seventeen months, they created the borders of Northern Ireland, Yugoslavia and most of the Middle East. And I have spent my entire career- in Belfast and Sarajevo, in Beirut and Baghdad-watching these peoples within those borders burn. America invaded Iraq not for Saddam’s Hussein’s mythical “weapons of mass destruction” but to change the map of the Middle East, much as my father’s generation had done more than eighty years earlier.

We journalists should try to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any reason for our existence, the least must be our ability to report history as it happens so no one can say: “We didn’t know- no one told us. “Our job is to monitor the centers of power”. That is the best definition of journalism I have heard: to challenge authority-all authority especially so when governments and politicians take us to war, when they have decided that they will kill and others will die.

[Anonymous]

Op here. Thank you. Ill get started with these suggestions. The quote from Fisk is very thought provoking.

[Anonymous]

Two additional recommendations: Margaret MacMillan's Paris 1919 for a long, thorough discussion of the Versailles treaty
Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers, which talks about the origins of the First World War. Among other things it describes the contention among the European imperial powers for territory in the Middle East.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Op here. Thank you. Ill get started with these suggestions. The quote from Fisk is very thought provoking.

Robert Fisk is a journalist of strong opinion that I hope will be evident in the book.

Here's a review, that you might want to look at for some perspective:

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/11/books/review/11wheatcroft.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0