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False Prophets: British Leaders' Fateful Fascination with the Middle East from Suez to Syria
Britain shaped the modern Middle East through the lines that it drew in the sand after the First World War and through the League of Nation mandates over the fledgling states which followed. Since the Second World War, oil interests, Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflict, militant Islam and the Anglo-American special relationship have all drawn Britain back into the Middle East.
While Anthony Eden and Tony Blair are the two most prominent examples of prime ministers whose reputations have been ruined by their interventions in the region, they were not alone in taking significant risks in deploying British forces to the Middle East. The sense that Britain knew the region, understood its people and could help solve its problems, even if only for the reason that British imperialism had created the problems in the first place, was an unspoken assumption of successive prime ministers. One way or another, every post-war prime minister has entertained strong views about the Middle East and their actions have often compounded the very evils in the region they sought to combat.
Drawing these threads together, Nigel Ashton explores the reasons why British leaders have been unable to resist returning to the mire of the Middle East, while highlighting the misconceptions about the region which have helped shape their interventions, and the legacy of history which has fuelled their pride and arrogance. It shows that their fears and insecurities have made them into false prophets who have conjured existential threats out of the Middle East.
While Anthony Eden and Tony Blair are the two most prominent examples of prime ministers whose reputations have been ruined by their interventions in the region, they were not alone in taking significant risks in deploying British forces to the Middle East. The sense that Britain knew the region, understood its people and could help solve its problems, even if only for the reason that British imperialism had created the problems in the first place, was an unspoken assumption of successive prime ministers. One way or another, every post-war prime minister has entertained strong views about the Middle East and their actions have often compounded the very evils in the region they sought to combat.
Drawing these threads together, Nigel Ashton explores the reasons why British leaders have been unable to resist returning to the mire of the Middle East, while highlighting the misconceptions about the region which have helped shape their interventions, and the legacy of history which has fuelled their pride and arrogance. It shows that their fears and insecurities have made them into false prophets who have conjured existential threats out of the Middle East.
- GenresMiddle East
448 pages, Hardcover
First published March 3, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 19, 2024
It is not surprising that this book begins with Suez and not the coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran two years before as it would have complicated his simplistic analysis of UK Middle East policy leading up to Britain's ridiculous (except for all the dead and injured UK soldiers and military and civilian dead of Iraq and Afghanistan) as a continuum of deliberate policy and to create this trajectory he ropes in the military actions in places like Yemen and Oman in the 1960's and 70's. The author is attempting to read history backwards to find the roots of the UK's recent disastrous, pointless and ineffectual Middle East policy. He also indulges in some rather dishonest legerdemain to, at various stages, include Libya and Afghanistan, but never really gets to grip with his subject because, despite a 13 page 'select' biography of, only, English language archival and printed sources, there is little indication of most of them having been used for anything but confirming what he has read in more general histories or absorbed from media sources.
Most dishonestly this is not in any sense an examination of 'British leaders fascination with the Middle East' as the subtitle claims but a rather pedestrian and superficial rehash of Britain's Suez adventure under Eden and Blair's surrender of all independent UK action to the whims of American policy makers, although when you look at the horrifying mess they made of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular and the entire region in general it is hard to see how such proactive words as 'policy' or 'maker' can be justified.
Let me be honest as far as I am concerned Tony Blair dropped his pants and begged to be sodomised as long as he could hang out with Bush while American 'policy' towards Iraq and Afghanistan was no more then the masturbatory fantasies of some of the most stupid and inadequate leaders the USA has ever had.
I can't find a reason to read this book - its account of, to take Suez for example, is so bad because it never bothers to try for anything but the superficial. We get the stories about the nationalisation of the canal but no mention that the treaty under which the UK and France ran the canal was going to expire in half a dozen years anyway. We are told that Eden was convinced that loss of control of the canal meant that the UK's oil supply was in danger, though it wasn't an issue that exercised the French, they were annoyed with Nasser because of his support for the rebels in Algeria. Indeed no one in Italy, Germany, Ireland, Spain or the Benelux and Scandinavian countries had concerns about the canal reverting to Egyptian control, that Britain did said more about Britain's problems with accepting a changing world. It is significant that PM Eden and others always referred to Nasser as a new Mussolini or Hitler viewing him always within, what we would now term a Eurocentric context, they never thought to see him as responding to, be driven by, or having completely Egyptian motives. To do so would have required UK politicians to see people like Nasser independent of the colonial context in which they viewed everyone.
I could go on but will move on to comment on one the greater idiocies that still cloud UK thinking the 'Special Relationship' with the USA - that even at the time Churchill created the concept it paid no attention to the reality that most citizens of the USA had no roots with the UK and many came from countries that actually loathed the UK.
To look at the UK's delusional and disastrous Middle East policies one needs to look at the UK's inability to acknowledge or admit how long colonial ways of thought persisted - so much of what happened in the 'Middle East' was a outgrowth of plans devised to deal with the loss of India, and the Indian army, with new a alliance with Pakistan and via them with the Muslim states in the Middle East and at the root of all this was the 'martial races' theories of the old Indian empire.
This is simply a stupid and bad book - it is not full of dreadful; mistakes only dreadful banalities and blandness - there are so many excellent books about Suez, about Britain's post WWII role with the USA in trying to run the rest of the world, and about the idiocies of the whole post 9/11 debacle intervening in countries that were not only far away but which no one made any attempt to understand that to read this book is both an insult to your intelligence and a waste of time.
Most dishonestly this is not in any sense an examination of 'British leaders fascination with the Middle East' as the subtitle claims but a rather pedestrian and superficial rehash of Britain's Suez adventure under Eden and Blair's surrender of all independent UK action to the whims of American policy makers, although when you look at the horrifying mess they made of Iraq and Afghanistan in particular and the entire region in general it is hard to see how such proactive words as 'policy' or 'maker' can be justified.
Let me be honest as far as I am concerned Tony Blair dropped his pants and begged to be sodomised as long as he could hang out with Bush while American 'policy' towards Iraq and Afghanistan was no more then the masturbatory fantasies of some of the most stupid and inadequate leaders the USA has ever had.
I can't find a reason to read this book - its account of, to take Suez for example, is so bad because it never bothers to try for anything but the superficial. We get the stories about the nationalisation of the canal but no mention that the treaty under which the UK and France ran the canal was going to expire in half a dozen years anyway. We are told that Eden was convinced that loss of control of the canal meant that the UK's oil supply was in danger, though it wasn't an issue that exercised the French, they were annoyed with Nasser because of his support for the rebels in Algeria. Indeed no one in Italy, Germany, Ireland, Spain or the Benelux and Scandinavian countries had concerns about the canal reverting to Egyptian control, that Britain did said more about Britain's problems with accepting a changing world. It is significant that PM Eden and others always referred to Nasser as a new Mussolini or Hitler viewing him always within, what we would now term a Eurocentric context, they never thought to see him as responding to, be driven by, or having completely Egyptian motives. To do so would have required UK politicians to see people like Nasser independent of the colonial context in which they viewed everyone.
I could go on but will move on to comment on one the greater idiocies that still cloud UK thinking the 'Special Relationship' with the USA - that even at the time Churchill created the concept it paid no attention to the reality that most citizens of the USA had no roots with the UK and many came from countries that actually loathed the UK.
To look at the UK's delusional and disastrous Middle East policies one needs to look at the UK's inability to acknowledge or admit how long colonial ways of thought persisted - so much of what happened in the 'Middle East' was a outgrowth of plans devised to deal with the loss of India, and the Indian army, with new a alliance with Pakistan and via them with the Muslim states in the Middle East and at the root of all this was the 'martial races' theories of the old Indian empire.
This is simply a stupid and bad book - it is not full of dreadful; mistakes only dreadful banalities and blandness - there are so many excellent books about Suez, about Britain's post WWII role with the USA in trying to run the rest of the world, and about the idiocies of the whole post 9/11 debacle intervening in countries that were not only far away but which no one made any attempt to understand that to read this book is both an insult to your intelligence and a waste of time.
June 12, 2024
An informative if rather jaundiced view of the relationships between British politicians and the Middle East since World War 2. It's view is monocular and, beyond the "Anglo-American special relationship", it doesn't take into account wider European, Global or even commercial/capitalism considerations that certainly influenced actions and consequences over those years. Unfortunately there is an element of fashionable anti-imperialism and Politician bashing here and the book has the flavour of an academic's search for black and white in a world of grey. It did however fill gaps in my understanding of the Middle East but I can't agree with all of Ashton's conclusions.
August 23, 2023
Extremely informative on British policy in regards to the Middle East, however analysis at times is lacking, and more attention should be paid to a number of themes.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews