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David Fromkin's A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East explores the dramatic events from 1914 to 1922, which transformed the political geography the Middle East. Fromkin's thorough analysis, 600 pages long, approaches those events from the perspective of the British government, dwelling on the bureaucratic struggles to formulate and implement Middle East policy.

The British experience was in many ways reminiscent of what the US is dealing with in Iraq today. Before the First World War, Britain propped up the Ottoman Empire, since they didn't want Russia to gain control of the region. As the European war bogged down in trench warfare, Britain attacked the Ottomans in a desperate attempt to break the stalemate. Meanwhile, the British sought post-war control of the Middle East, in order to protect the route to India and block Russian expansion. After the war ended, the British Empire, at its largest size in history, occupied much of the Middle East or controlled it though client states. However, the withdrawal of British troops, delayed peace talks, and widespread unrest pressured the Brits to relinquish much of their power.

You have may heard that some guys in a room in London drew the national borders of the Middle East nations; this book describes how that happened. You can see how Egypt, Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Saudi Arabia came into existence with their current boundaries. Fromkin spells out the dynamics of British policy, as government figures responded to and shaped world events.

Fromkin elaborates on the beliefs and perspectives of the relevant British officials, such as Winston Churchill, Lawrence of Arabia, Lloyd George, and Mark Sykes. One example is a bizarre report, written by the British ambassador in Constantinople, that a Jewish Freemason conspiracy controlled the Ottoman Empire. The description of British internal debates becomes somewhat monotonous, though it was amusing when the imperial forces in Egypt and India argued over which should have influence over the Middle East.

I strongly recommend A Peace to End All Peace, both for its historical background and for the way it highlights the intrinsic difficulty in controlling events in the Middle East.