My Review of Simon Sebag Montefiore's "The Cauldron: The Making of the Modern Middle East"

120 Years of Near Constant Warfare

 

The greater middle east (Morocco to Iran) has been pretty much in a state of war for 120 years. Here the distinguished British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore presents us with an encyclopedic history of the middle east starting with Abdul-Azizz (Ibn Saud) conquest of Riyadh in 1902 up to the early stages of the U.S./Israel War with Iran in 2026. The one constant throughout this history is that the nations of the middle east has been in a near constant state of warfare fighting outside enemies, fighting among themselves, and engaging in a host of civil wars. What Montefiore’s book makes clear is that the Arab-Israeli conflict represents only a minor portion of the fighting that has taken place over the past twelve decades.

 

The book opens with Abdul Azizz conquering all of what was to become Saudi Arabia in 1917. In the following year British forces marched into the Holy Land and the British and the French then had to fight to maintain their mandates in the region. In the early 1920’s the Greco-Turkish War led to the mass ethnic cleansing of Greeks on the Asian mainland and of Turks living in Greece. There was also the Turkish massacre of Armenians in 1915. Later there were coups and counter coups with Nazi inspired officers seizing control of Iraq in 1941 which the British has to forcibly remove them. (See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2019/06/my-amazon-review-of-john-broichs-blood.html )

 

Of course, all of North Africa became a conflict zone from 1941-1943 and the British and the Russians took control of Iran during most pf the war, only to leave in 1946. In 1948 there was the Israeli War of Independence followed by the 6-Day War in 1956 and the 1967 war. All of this occurred against the backdrop of the Cold War where the U.S. and Russia jockeyed for influence and Nasser of Egypt played a dominant role.  

 

Before that Algeria endured seven years of war before achieving its independence from France. I can go on and on, with civil wars in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Sudan, and Libya.  Further, there was the six-year war in the desert between Iraq and Iran and later Iraq invaded Kuwait, and then a U.S. led coalition kicked them out. There were also mass killings in Syria, Iran, and Iraq to suppress the local population. I could go on and on, but I will stop here.

 

I have learned much from Montefiore’s book. For example, it was not the Sykes-Picot-Sazonov Agreement of 1916 that created the modern state system in the middle east; it was rather the San Remo Conference of 1920 (which reiterated the Balfour Declaration) and the Lausanne Conference of 1922-23 that establish much of the borders that we know today. Instead of starting America’s withdrawal from the region (until recently) with Donald Trump’s election in 2016, the signal was sent by Barack Obama’s failure to enforce his redline in Syria in 2013. He states that T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) was more a showman than a warrior and he minimizes the U.S. role in 1954 Iran coup, despite CIA officer Kermit Roosevelt’s claiming of the credit.

 

He believes that 1979, the year of Ayatollah Khomeini seized power in Iran as one of the most pivotal years of the 20th Century. Khomeini fooled the west into thinking he was someone they could do business with. Instead, he was as diabolical as Stalin and Mao. He had no hesitation in mass murdering his opponents and we saw that in real time earlier this year when his son killed 40,000 protestors in the streets of Tehran.

 

My criticism of the book includes that he does not pay enough attention to the role of oil in region, he is too naïve about what the chances were for Jewish-Arab reconciliation in the early days of Zionism, he understates the role of UNRWA in helping to form the Palestinian identity in the so-called refugee camps ( See: https://shulmaven.blogspot.com/2022/02/my-amazon-review-of-adi-schwatzs-and.html ), and he characterized the Hamas fighters as “militants,” an understatement, if you will. He also had Wilson presenting his 14 Points in 1918 when it was in 1917 and he credits Saudi Arabia with forming OPEC in 1960, when it was Venezuela.

 

That said Montefiore has written perhaps the defining history of the middle east since 1900. There is much to take in. To him Iran, Israel and Türkiye will determine the future of the region. And we shouldn’t underestimate the role of Morocco, perhaps the best run state in the areas whose industrial production has surpassed South Africa.