Peter Mansfield - A History of the Middle East

PENGUIN BOOKS

A HISTORY OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Peter Mansfield was born in 1928 in Ranchi, India, and was educated at Winchester and Cambridge. In 1955 he joined the British Foreign Office and went to Lebanon to study Arabic at the Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies. In November 1956 he resigned from the foreign service over the Suez affair, but remained in Beirut working as a political and economic journalist. He edited the Middle East Forum and corresponded regularly for the Financial Times, the Economist, the Guardian, the Indian Express and other newspapers. From 1961 to 1967 he was the Middle East correspondent of the Sunday Times, based mainly in Cairo. After 1967 he lived in London, but made regular visits to the Middle East and North Africa, and in the winter of 19712 he was visiting lecturer on Middle East politics at Willamette University, Oregon. As editor his books include The Middle East: A Political and Economic Survey and Whos Who in the Arab World. He has also written Nassers Egypt, Nasser: A Biography, The British in Egypt, The Ottoman Empire and Its Successors, Kuwait: Vanguard of the Gulf and The Arabs, a comprehensive study generally believed to be his magnum opus, which is also published by Penguin. Peter Mansfield died in 1996, and in its obituary notice The Times praised him as Eloquent, scholarly, free from convention[He] earned himself a distinguished place by forty years of thoughtful work and the passion of his convictions.

Nicolas Pelham studied Arabic in Damascus, before joining a London law firm specializing in Islamic law. In 1992 he moved to Cairo as editor of the Middle East Times, and then joined the BBC Arabic Service producing documentary programmes from across the Arab world. In 1998 he moved to Morocco as correspondent for the Economist, the BBC and the Observer. In 2005 he moved to Jerusalem as a senior analyst for International Crisis Group, reporting on Israeli and Palestinian affairs.

A History of the
Middle East

Fourth Edition
revised and updated by Nicolas Pelham

PETER MANSFIELD

PENGUIN BOOKS

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First published in Great Britain by Penguin Books Ltd 1991

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin,
a division of Penguin Books USA Inc., 1991

Published in Penguin Books (UK and USA) 1992

Second edition published in Penguin Books (UK) 2003

Published in Penguin Books (USA) 2004

Third edition published in Penguin Books (UK) 2010

This fourth edition published in Penguin Books (UK and USA) 2013

Copyright Peter Mansfield, 1991

Copyright The Estate of Peter Mansfield, 2003

Copyright Nicolas Pelham, 2010, 2013

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Mansfield, Peter, 1928

A history of the Middle East / Peter Mansfield.Fourth edition / revised
and updated by Nicolas Pelham.

pages cm

ISBN 978-0-698-15659-3

1. Middle EastHistory19th century. 2. Middle EastHistory20th century. I. Pelham, Nicolas. II. Title.

DS62.4.M36 2013

956dc23 2013019936

To Luis Caizares

In his concluding chapter, Prospects for the Twenty-first Century, written two decades ago, Peter Mansfield proved remarkably prescient. He predicted the resurgence of an armed Islamic movement across the Middle East. He foresaw that Arab regimes, however slim their power-bases, would survive. But there was one prediction where he went badly awry. In the concluding paragraph of the History, Peter ventured that as the Cold War faded away, the United States would lose its raison dtre as a military presence in the Arab world, and would hardly maintain its superpower status in the region.

Perhaps had Western policy-makers harkened, much of the subsequent bloodshed might have been averted. Certainly it is hard to argue that the Middle East is any better for the military intervention that followed. When he completed the first edition almost two decades ago, the United States was at the peak of its power. It was celebrating victory after chasing Iraq out of Kuwait; the mujahideen it backed in Afghanistan had won their jihad against the Soviet Union, and Arab states were for the first time preparing to sit down publicly with Israel to negotiate an end to their conflict.

In hindsight it looks a more innocent age. US policies in a region ten thousand miles away have boomeranged, at a cost of thousands of American lives both at home and in the Arab world. After returning to war with Iraq, the US is beating a retreat with the countrys promised political and economic reconstruction still unrealized. In Afghanistan as well as many places elsewhere, the US is fighting its former allies. And after two decades of on-off negotiations, the promised end of conflict between Israel and the Arab world remains as elusive as ever. And under Americas watch hundreds of thousands of Middle Easterners have perished in continuing conflicts in Iraq, Algeria, Sudan and Israel/Palestine. US credibility in the region is in tatters.

This update of the History attempts to analyse what went wrong. In two new chapters, it looks at unfolding US policy towards Iraq, the ArabIsraeli conflict, and the evolving jihadi movements. It suggests that rather than seek to opt for regime change from without, US interests would be better served by working with the existing political movements on the ground. Peter understood that to resolve conflicts, societies have to be at peace not just with their enemies but also with themselves. What the Arab world urgently needs is more democracy, wider political participation and much greater respect for human rights, he wrote two decades ago.

Almost universally, the deficit is greater today than it was then. Since Peter wrote his book, the Middle East has shrunk in on itself and become a more embittered, suspicious and intolerant place. Cosmopolitan cultures have atomized into their communal parts. For the vast majority of Arabs, the promise of independence has failed to materialize. For Palestinians, their homeland has been cut into an obstacle course of walls and checkpoints, rendering movement for an entire population the most restricted anywhere on earth. From where I write, I like millions of others can travel barely five minutes without being asked for my papers.

Whether the United States can yet be a force for good in the region is much debated. The outpouring of support President Obama received following his May 2009 Cairo address is testimony to the belief of many that it can. Clearly too a superpower cannot withdraw from a region that fuels the world. But as the past decade has shown, Americas armadas, bombings and military bases spark more problems than they solve. And after President Obama invested his political capital in Israel and Iran with no immediate dividend, scepticism abounds that persuasion and soft power can do any better.