A MESS OF OUR OWN MAKING:

Its main focus, as the subtitle suggests, is "The Battle for Iraq, 1914-1921", but it deals in great detail with the byzantine negotiations and deals, the backstabbing and fighting, and the betrayals and murder that characterised the carve up of "Asiatic Turkey". It also vividly captures how the ground was prepared for much of the violence in today's Middle East.

Throughout the 19th century the Ottoman Empire--the so-called "sick man of Europe"--struggled to stay in one piece under the twin pressures of Great Power politics and separatist nationalism. The 600 year-old Muslim autocracy suffered repeated military defeats and new ideas about national self-determination were becoming attractive to its various Christian minorities.

Seeking to arrest its apparent decline it adopted technical innovations from its competitors, further centralised power in the hands of the Sublime Porte and promoted a new Ottoman identity that sought to unite Muslims and Christians. This had very little effect, as did later attempts at promoting pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism. The empire was finished and it was its entrance into WWI that sounded the final death knell.

The Allied powers did all they could to finish it off. They attempted to rally the Arabs against their Turkish overlords by promising Hussein bin Ali, the Sharif of Mecca, a rather ill-defined "independent Arab Kingdom". This proved only marginally effective and, despite the myths that surround the adventures of T. E. Lawrence, aka Lawrence of Arabia (who comes across as a clown in Rutledge's telling), most of the region's population preferred to support the Sultan-Caliph in Istanbul.

This was probably just as well because the European powers had no serious intention of allowing the creation of a genuinely independent Arab Kingdom. Sir Mark Sykes, who was now in the War Office and a protégé of arch-imperialist Lord Kitchener, and the French diplomat François Georges-Picot had secretly divided up the Middle East into "spheres of influence" for Britain and France in what would become the infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement.

Iraq fell within Britain's "sphere of influence". There had been much deliberation in London about Britain's "economic and commercial interests" in the region and there was no question that Iraq, or at least a part of it, would have to stay under British control.

London's main concern was in defending the Anglo-Persian Oil Company's (APOC) oil fields and pipelines in Abadan in southwest Iran. The government owned majority shares in this corporation but, more importantly, the British navy was changing over to oil-fired ships and so control over oil fields was going to be a major strategic factor in the future. In order to guarantee this control they took over Basra and then moved north to Baghdad and, as it became clear that there was more oil to be had further north, Mosul.

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