Kingmakers
Summary
Who or what established the patchwork of nation-states in the fractious Middle or Near East (we prefer the latter term)? When did it happen, and why? Our belief is that no immutable forces shaped the Near East’s boundaries or enthroned its leaders. Instead, a miniscule cadre of mostly European soldiers and civil servants during and after World War I carved up the senescent Ottoman Empire. They won the acquiescence of their political overlords for crowning kings, creating a national home for the world’s Jews, determining zones of influence, conjuring pipeline routes and demarcating still-disputed frontiers. Their legacy is today’s labyrinth into which Americans seem destined to grope for the foreseeable future.
We have selected sixteen persons, thirteen Britons, three Americans, some famous, others forgotten, who all played a role in reshaping the Near East, and beyond. We have used their lives to illuminate the salient forces each personified: the new power of the press, the rise of global finance, the bureaucratic trampoline, the hunger for fame, the romance of Arabism, the demons of doctrine, the quest for oil, and not least and often misunderstood, the disinterested claims of simple decency. All of them spring from the page as impregnably self-assured, oversize and intriguing characters. They thus formed a near-perfect fit with a region (as Isaiah Berlin once remarked) that has more history than geography.
The choice of the sixteen was not easy. So large and varied is the supporting casts that even secondary figures deserve exhumation – such as Sir Percy Cox, the most decorated of civil servants, who threads through our successive chapters on cat feet. It was Sir Percy as first British High Commissioner in newborn Iraq who engaged Arab chieftains in days of inconclusive discussions in a stifling army tent, pitched at Uqair near the Persian Gulf. Finally Sir Percy took it on himself to determine the frontiers of Iraq, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. After drawing a red line on the map, he said, “Gentlemen, there are your borders.” As his aide later wrote, “It was astonishing to see the Sultan of Nejd being reprimanded like a naughty schoolboy, and being told that he, Sir Percy Cox, would himself decide on the type and general line of the frontier. Ibn Saud almost broke down, and pathetically remarked that Sir Percy was his father and brother, who had made him and raised him from nothing, and that he would surrender half his kingdom, nay the whole, if Sir Percy ordered.”
Thus Sir Percy drew the lines in the sand that were disputed by subsequent Iraqi governments, monarchist or Baathist, and which became the casus belli for the 1991 Gulf War. It our hope that our book will teem with such scenes, whose relevance needs no underscoring.