Spies in Arabia: The Great War and the Cultural Foundations of Britain's Covert Empire in the Middle East 1st Edition

Spies in Arabia is an educational read, even for those with poor educations like myself who didn't know the meaning of this book's most often-used word, "epistemology." After finishing the book the first time, in defeat and still unable to divine the meaning of this obviously key word from context, I stooped to the dictionary.Favorite passage: "... the British freely admitted, without recourse to euphemism, that they were intriguing without scruple and were doing do because the place they operated in provided them with a ready excuse for dishonorable and certainly ungentlemanly behavior.""Faith in intuition continued to derive from the perceived inscrutability of the region, the impossibility of unearthing "real" evidence ..." -- sounds like our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan today and in Iran tomorrow. Our British genes condemn us to repeating the same mistakes, I suppose. Unavoidable. We worship our star oracle in counter-insurgency, moving the failed general to head the CIA, no matter that he has never been successful in anything other than marrying the commandant's daughter and prolonging failed war, and we always come out the loser in the end, defeated in our efforts at covert empire by religious fanatics and by ungrateful native savages whom we had always assumed to have preferred our form of "democracy" to their own traditions and customs of cutting one another's throats. Conspiracy theories are preferable to facts. Unwittingly, our psychology overwhelms our efforts to collect and use intelligence. Gut instinct rules. Human nature. Humanity condemned to a vicious cycle.I was first shocked at seeing the author or editor dare so often to place [inserts] and [sics] in quotes of the sacred prose of T.E. Lawrence. That seems to me to be like trying to teach Asians to grow rice or training Afghans or Iraqis to kill, or inserting explanatory information into the Quran to help the Muslim world understand -- that takes a lot of self-assurance. An old grudge from Lawrence's well-known attitudes about Indians, I suspect. T.E.L. would no doubt be amused.One can see from the post WWI history of Iraq that our reliance on drone warfare will become the new gospel. Worse things could happen -- until the natives get drones.

This is a puzzling book in many respects beginning with its title: it is not about "Arabia" in the sense of Saudi Arabia or about the Arabic speaking world as such, but focuses on Iraq and to a lesser extent what was then Palestine and Trans-Jordan. Nor is it about "spies" as much as it is about the psychology of the men (and one woman Gertrude Bell) who for the most part were `orientalists' that is individuals claiming some knowledge and expertise on the cultures and peoples from the Near East to Central Asia. These folks were not spies in the sense of engaging in espionage, but all worked to provide information on the then Ottoman (Turkish) Empire and its peoples. Some like T.E. Lawrence (`Lawrence of Arabia') engaged in what today would be called special operations fomenting a revolt of the Bedouin Arabs against Turkish rule of what is now Saudi Arabia. According to Satia this group strongly influenced post WWI UK policy towards the Near East especially towards the formation of what this book considers a "covert empire" based on modern day Iraq using a League of Nations mandate over Mesopotamia as a cover to make Iraq a permanent, if unacknowledged, member of the British Empire. The book argues that the British Government and especially its Colonial and India Bureaucracies supported the establishment of this shadowy empire.All of which leads to what is clearly a key sub-theme of the book, the UK use of `Air Control' to administer its mandate over Iraq. In the author's opinion this led to a brutal repression of the Iraqi peoples with RAF bombers being directed to destroy villages full of innocent civilians in the name of imperial order. The RAF Intelligence Service and Colonial Office political officers are given the credit for making Air Control an effective policy.Another sub-theme of this book is the paranoia of some British civil and military officials over the threat of "Pan-Arab" movement possibly controlled by Bolshevik Russia (i.e. the Soviet Union). This is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that an official Interdepartmental Committee on the Eastern Unrest (IDCEU) was formed to study the issue.The value of this book is that breaks relatively new ground and provides a fresh look at UK colonial policy in the Near East and especially Iraq in the post WWI period. Yet it is difficult not to conclude that the book could have been a lot better organized and researched.

I wanted my money back after reading this. My written English is poor so I do not like critising others but I found reading this to be how I might imagine wading neck deep across a bog. Every noun and adverb seems to attach an adjective or adverb that when used so freely just get in the way particularly when repeated. Sentances are often long, as are paragraphs. I have lost the notes I made when I read this and was getting frustrated with the style but I remember one sentance that had a phrase "unthreatening threats" - whatever they are.There is a statement that the book is edited and I must accept that but it does not appear so to me. I have never seen a history Ph.D thesis but this work struck as this might be just that. The premise is good but it needs reducing by 50 pages.