Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac

Kingmakers: The Invention of the Modern Middle East

By Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac

The Middle East is the geographic, geostrategic and religious center of the world. Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon tried to control it long before oil was struck. After oil there was Hitler, France, Britain and the U.S. Its importance has only grown since 9/11, the stakes—think Al Qaeda and loose nukes—never higher.

KINGMAKERS: THE INVENTION OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST (W.W. Norton & Company; June 2008; $27.95 hardcover) is an invaluable guide to this complex place. Proving that biography is the most effective and enjoyable form of history, the book consists of chapter-length portraits of the Britons and Americans who created the states—drawing borders, picking rulers—of today’s Middle East (a name coined by an American naval officer). By understanding the region’s past, readers will understand its present. Many will conclude that KINGMAKERS should be required reading for global citizens—and their leaders.

The book’s colorful figures, from T.E. Lawrence to Paul Wolfowitz, come to vivid life in the authors’ narrative and analysis. This book is an apposite follow-up to Meyer and Brysac’s Tournament of Shadows, about Britain’s and Russia’s clash over Central Asia. (Indeed, one boon is their authority and flair explicating the unique animal that is the British colonial officer/adventurer.) Supporting these sketches are maps, photographs and a handy chronology of the period. A thorough bibliography lists the past studies plus the memoirs, public archives, and private papers from which the authors have taken “the odd, illuminating specimens from the deep” that provide freshness and insight. Descriptions of key events and figures are repeated in different chapters, allowing the reader to skip around.

Here is the extraordinary Gertrude Bell, who accomplished a shocking amount for a woman in that time and place (while opposing women’s suffrage). Perhaps no one knew the people of the Middle East “on the ground” better than she did. Her fine-grained familiarity with locals may account for the sentimentality and vacillation others accused her of. She committed suicide in Baghdad, her grave somewhere among the bombed ruins of Saddam’s ministries.

Here is Sir Percy Cox, drawing the borders between Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Syria and Transjordan on his map with a pencil. Like most borders drawn by the kingmakers, they did not reflect any political or geographic reality, nor locals’ wishes. Hence much of today’s conflict.

Here, especially, is “Lawrence of Arabia,” World War I’s most famous combatant. Pioneering what is now called asymmetric warfare, he turned his insurgent Arabs into a “vapour” whose very indeterminacy helped neutralize the mighty Turkish army. Ironically, Iraqi insurgents, the Taliban and Al Qaeda now pose the same challenge to the U.S. Many readers will find the authors’ analysis of the cases for and against Lawrence’s fame—including an engaging look at the making of the famous movie—worth the price of the book.

Turning to the latter half of the 20th century, when the kingmaker role passed to Americans, we meet the CIA’s Kermit Roosevelt, grandson of Theodore. In 1953 he engineered the installation of the Shah of Iran, deposing a popular and democratically elected leader. The final chapter’s examination of Paul Wolfowitz, chief champion of the latest Iraq war, provides a fitting culmination of the book’s main point: We haven’t learned from our mistakes. After Britain created Iraq in 1921, “liberation” became “occupation”; there were calls for more troops; Shiites (led by ancestors of Muqtada al-Sadr) rose up, strongly asserting their majority; anyone suspected of “collaboration” with the occupier suffered hideous retribution; and many thought the only thing worse than the status quo would be if the locals’ main wish—that the occupiers leave—was granted.

KINGMAKERS traces these chilling parallels expertly. It also puts them in the human context of the men and women responsible, people who were mainly smart, brave and serving what they felt were civilizing values. Frustratingly and poignantly, they “erred not through malice or ignorance, but through excess of ambition. [They] undertook—to state it simply—to do the impossible for the ungrateful.”

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Karl E. Meyer has written extensively on foreign affairs as a staff member of the New York Times and the Washington Post. Shareen Blair Brysac, formerly a prize-winning documentary producer at CBS News, is the author of Resisting Hitler. Tournament of Shadows was their previous book together. The couple lives in New York and Weston, Connecticut.

TITLE: KINGMAKERS: THE INVENTION OF THE MODERN MIDDLE EAST
AUTHOR: Karl E. Meyer & Shareen Blair Brysac
PUBLICATION DATE: June 9, 2008
PRICE: $27.95 hardcover
ISBN: 978-0-393-06199-4