Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the United States and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East

The book is crammed. I was surprised that so much importance was put on Wendell Willkie at the beginning and it was not very interesting at all.I think a concise summary would show Anthony Eden to be weak, the British to be stupid over treatment of the Arabs, and so many plots and counter plots to make your head spin.Eisenhower was the only one with any common sense.It just wears you out.

This is the third book by James Barr regarding the Middle East. It is informative, telling a tale that gets very little coverage. The story Barr tells is a complicated one. There are many names to follow. But, anyone interested in current events in the Middle East today should read this book only to learn what came before.

well written history

Lords of the Desert is a scattershot attempt to write a book, which fails because the author could not make up his mind what story he wanted to tell.Instead we get a an endless listing of persons and events, both major and minor, without getting any sense of their relative importance or context, because the author fails to provide a single, coherent, overarching narrative.There is in this book the seed for any one of several books that, individually, might be of more interest and comprehensibility. For example:Mr. Barr could have written a book about relations between the United States and the United Kingdom during the Cold War.He could have written a book about the Middle East as a whole from World War II forward.He could have written a daring-do adventure book consisting of mini-biographies of several of the more dashing and flamboyant individual Anglo-American soldiers, diplomats, and spies who implemented their respective national policies down on the sharp end during this period.Instead, he attempted to do justice in this one narrow volume to all of these disparate parts, and ended up suffering, as successive post-World War II British governments did, from Imperial Overreach.

James Barr in Lords of the Desert describes Anglo-American relations in the Middle East “from 1942, until Britain’s exit from the Gulf in 1971.” Barr is a British academic and provides a British perspective. He is less good at explaining U.S. strategy. Both countries did co-operate to oust Iran’s prime minister Mohammad Mosaddeq in 1953 and, 50 years later, to remove Saddam Hussein in Iraq, however, these examples are the exception. Barr concludes that “Britain and the United States were invariably competitors in the Middle East, and often outright rivals.”Britain had played a major role in defeating the Ottoman Empire in WW1 and captured Jerusalem, Damascus and Baghdad during the war. Between 1920 and 1945 it was the dominant power in the Middle East. The book focuses on a period after WW2 when Britain was in rapid decline and the U.S. became the dominant power in the region. The U.S. has often been in denial about its global ambitions. Professor John Mearsheimer of the University of Chicago has done a good job elsewhere explaining how U.S. foreign policy has evolved over time. Barr seems unfamiliar with the realities of American foreign policy doublethink.One of FDR’s main war aims was to break up the British Empire and spread liberal democracy, as Benn Steil’s book “The Battle of Bretton Woods” points out. However, FDR’s successors became concerned about the spread of communism in the late 1940s and concluded that the U.S. needed allies to turn back the tide. It was feared that Europe and Asia could be overrun and fall to communism. Suddenly, the U.S. began supporting France's efforts to hang onto Vietnam when previously its policy had been to oppose European colonialism.Barr describes the various post-war crises in the Middle East. Britain had ruled Palestine under a League of Nations mandate since the break-up of the Ottoman Empire in 1921. Britain had issued the Balfour Declaration in 1917 and had pushed for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. It initially did nothing to curb Jewish immigration but as the numbers increased the Palestinians began to violently object. By 1948 Palestine was on the verge of civil war and British soldiers were being killed by both sides. The U.S. was increasingly sympathetic to the Zionist cause in the aftermath of the Holocaust. Harry Truman quipped that Jewish voters far outnumbered Arabs. The U.S. had criticized Britain for its decision to limit Jewish immigration after the war. Barr claims the U.S. was shocked when Britain suddenly walked out of Palestine in 1948 and handed the problem over to the U.N.Churchill became prime minister again in 1951 and had hoped for a partnership with the U.S. According to Barr, Truman was rude to Churchill when they met in 1952. Truman’s advisers had decided that Churchill was over the hill and needed to know his place. However, in 1953, the CIA-MI6 undertook a joint operation to overthrow the Iranian nationalist prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. For Britain, it started out as a dispute over oil. A predecessor company of BP, called Anglo-Iranian, owned oil reserves in Iran. The socialist Mossadegh wanted a greater share of the profits for Iran. Britain persuaded the U.S. that the democratically elected Mossadegh was a communist and the CIA carried out the coup. In the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries, Senator Bernie Sanders repeatedly praised Mossadegh's "secular, democratic government" and condemned the CIA.Popular nationalist movements were emerging throughout the world after WW2 and the pre-war imperial war powers were exiting the global stage. Britain’s traditional concern in the Middle East had been to protect the Suez Canal which it jointly owned with France. It had installed puppet regimes in Egypt since the late 19th century to keep the peace. The canal was Britain’s route to India and its colonies in Asia. After India was granted independence in 1948, Britain's main concern shifted to maintaining access to Middle Eastern oil. Two-thirds of Britain and France’s oil came through the canal, if it was blocked or the Soviets controlled it, it would be a disaster for Western Europe.Relations between Britain and the U.S. reached a low point over the decision by Britain, France and Israel to invade Egypt and seize the Suez Canal in 1956. The Egyptian government had nationalized the canal. Israeli intelligence believed that Egypt was about to attack Israel in 1956. The Suez invasion was originally a French-Israeli venture, which the British joined later. Egypt’s leader Gamal Abdel Nasser, had taken power in a coup in 1952 and was ambitious. He wanted to unite the countries of the Arab world under his leadership. Nasser was the mastermind behind the attack on Israel in the Six Day War in 1967. He was also a Soviet ally. Britain and France were worried that Nasser might block Europe’s oil supplies. Nasser was also stirring up trouble in France's North African colonies, with his calls for Arab nationalism.Britain, France and Israel had good reasons for the invasion. However, Eisenhower believed that he could do business with Nasser and he was keen to befriend the Arabs. Ike sided with Egypt and the Soviets. The U.S. forced Britain, France and Israel to withdraw. German Chancellor Adenauer supported France and Britain and was appalled by the action taken by Eisenhower. The president expected gratitude from the Arab world, instead, Nasser got the credit and became an Arab hero. Nasser emerged from the conflict much stronger and more hostile to American interests.Michael Doran in his book “Ike's Gamble” claims that Eisenhower told Nixon and Israel's ambassador to the U.S. that Suez had been his greatest foreign policy blunder. He grew to believe he picked the wrong side. Eisenhower also believed that the refusal of Britain and France to help in Vietnam was their revenge for Suez. Britain and France gradually disengaged from the Middle East. Germany and France signed the Treaty of Rome in 1957 and concluded that the only way to have influence and avoid being bullied by the U.S. was to work together. Together, they created the E.U. France has tried to keep the U.S. at arm's length ever since Suez. President Macron recently proclaimed that the EU needed an army to protect itself from Russia, China, and the U.S.By the 1940s Britain's empire had become a loss-making enterprise. The costs outweighed the economic benefits so Britain slowly wound up its empire. In 1968, while the U.S. was stuck in Vietnam, Prime Minister Wilson announced that Britain was closing its last Middle Eastern base in Yemen. The U.S. was annoyed at the withdrawal. According to Barr, Secretary of State Rusk told Wilson’s chief diplomat: “For God’s sake, act like Britain.” Barr claims that the U.S. had been trying to push Britain out of the Middle East since the 1940s. This incident seems to sum up a schizophrenic relationship. The U.S. had wanted to control the Middle East and viewed Britain as a rival, but it also seemed to miss not having it around.

*I received an electronic galley from netgalley.com in exchange for a review*Lords of the Desert may be a hard book for a modern American audience considering that the United States and Great Britain have been fast international allies for centuries. But Lords of the Desert chronicles the thirty years of Middle Eastern relations between the United States and Great Britain from the late 1940s to the 1970s. Sometimes, the countries collaborated, sometimes they broke with each other, and occasionally they appear to have sabotaged each other. What could account for such a complicated relationship?Great Britain was the greatest empire modern times had ever seen, but war had exhausted and bankrupted it. The United States viewed itself as the new global power following WW2 victory and sought to use that influence. It turns out that empire does not yield to rational human thought, which led to a tug of war of sorts between a Great Britain desperate to retain something of empire and their place in global affairs and the United States who had their own version of the Middle East that didn’t always square with their British “friends.”It’s an action packed narrative that belongs in the library of any individual who wants to know how the Middle East became what it is today.

Good one to read and most relevant to the on going current situation in the region