The seeds of conflict in the Middle East were sown in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. It was then that the Western powers - Britain, France and the United States - discovered the imperatives for interventions that have plunged the region into crisis ever since. It was also then that most of the region's modern-day states were created and their regimes forged - their management by the West earned abiding resentment.Sowing the Wind tells of how and why this happened. The subject is painfully and essentially somber, but Scottish historian John Keay illuminates it with lucid analysis and sparkling anecdotes set within a rich and elegant narrative. This is that rarest of works, a history with humor, an epic with attitude, writing that delights.Sowing the Wind examines the critical political underpinnings of conflict in the Middle East. Keay (known for his best-selling history of India) focuses on the hard-core countries of the Middle East known as the fertile crescent: Egypt, Jordan, Israel/Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Iraq. Keay’s account is absolutely riveting as he follows the West’s manipulation, management, and mismanagement of the Middle East from 1900 up through the ascent of Arafat to power in the early 1960s. He ends with a forty-page tour-de-force update of the last forty years of American negotiation of economic and political fault lines in the Middle East.Keay’s sweeping history pre-Balfour to post-Sues unearths a host of surprising firsts, from the Gulf’s first “gusher” to the first aerial assaults on Baghdad, the first of Syria’s innumerable coups, and the first terrorist outrages and suicide bombers.Little-known figures - junior officers, contractors, explorers, spies - contest the orthodoxies of Arabist giants like T.E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, Glubb Pasha, and Loy Henderson. The generals - Townshend and Allenby, Gourard and Catroux, Wavell and Spears, Eisenhower and Patton - mingle memorably with maverick travelers and femmes both fatales and formidables. Four Roosevelts juggle with the fates of nations. Authors as alien as E.M. Forster and Arthur Koestler add their testimony.Pertinent, scholarly, and irreverent, Sowing the Wind provides a uniquely ambitious and enthralling insight into the making of the world’s most fraught arena.
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