Geopolitical Jenga and the making of chaos in the Middle East

Paul Lynch, the winner of the 2023 Booker Prize for his novel Prophet Song, has explained that in an early iteration the novel was originally set in Syria and based on research he had conducted into the human costs of societies that collapse into authoritarianism and civil war. 

However, aware that it was missing something, one day he tore it up and started again, setting his story instead in Dublin, his home town and a city whose throb of life and death he could more easily actualise in his story: “The quickest route to the universal is through the particular, it’s through your own world, what you know. And so I write about what I know,” he told New Statesman.

Read more: A review of the 2023 winner of the Booker Prize, ‘Prophet Song’

I do not know if Lynch would have read Jeremy Bowen’s The Making of the Modern Middle East: A Personal History, first published in 2022. But if he had he would have come across the non-fiction companion to his own story and a real-life source for much of its horror. I say this because mixed in with Bowen’s hard-nosed ethical reportage and his deep knowledge of the history and politics of the region are accounts of his personal experience of war’s cost to our humanity.  

One feature of the book is his ability to spot the moments of dark poetry that occur in a war.

His résumé of 30 years as a war reporter is replete with these observations, and they are what gives the book its conscience. 

For example, describing the liberation of Mosul, Iraq’s second-biggest city, after four years of barbaric rule by Islamic State, Bowen records the sight of a father and his youngest daughter waiting for the army “to hand out armfuls of flat Iraqi bread and lentil soup from a steaming pail”. 

“The girl, who was around six or seven, was dressed in a mauve T-shirt with the word ‘Princess’ in the best Disney cursive. As soon as she saw our camera she struck a pose like an Instagram influencer, left knee bent slightly over the right, left hand on left hip, with a sweet in her chubby right fist.”

It brought back to mind a question I have asked myself as I look at footage from Gaza: How is it that children still manage to laugh and play, even when all around them is horror and loss? 

Colonialism then bust

Bowen has been the BBC’s Middle East correspondent since he was first sent to report on Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in 1991 and the West’s response – the first Gulf War and the driving out of Saddam’s forces.

Since then it feels like the brave Bowen has been on the frontline of every conflict  – Libya, Egypt, Syria, Israel, Lebanon, Kurdistan – and has come to know the region, its monsters and its suffering people like the back of his hand.

But the strength of the book is in its understated but compelling political analysis. 

It doesn’t treat the wars and revolutions of the Middle East as disconnected fragments in the lives of a people with a proclivity for war and barbarism – the racist narrative that explains the omissions in much of Western thinking and commentary about the Middle East – but as part of a continuing and worsening chain reaction that starts with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and accelerates with the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement, the original sin of British and French colonialism in the region in the early 20th century. 

In his wry and ironic style Bowen puts it this way:

“The Middle East attracts outsiders, and the desire to control it has led to suffering and slaughter. It possesses resources as well as sacred and strategic territory. 

“Once the world entered the industrial era and craved carbon, the planet’s biggest reserves of oil and gas were impossible to ignore.”   

Bowen’s account of the region’s history shows how one conflict spawns another (Gulf War 1 to Gulf War 2; the 2011 invasion of Libya to the murderous stalemate of Syria; the Oslo Accords to the current war on Palestinians by Israel) and how, in this toxic broth, even popular revolution quickly turns to counter-revolution.

Thus, referring to the degeneration of the popular uprisings of 2010/11 (the so-called Arab Spring, a term Bowen says he does not use) into war and the brutal responses of cornered despots Bowen points out:

“The counter-revolution was on, and by the end of 2011, 30,000 Arabs were dead. The protesters in Cairo and Tunis who were swept up with joy about what they had done seemed not to notice, and nor did many in the West, who made a snap judgement that a happy democratic ending was on the way. It was the same illusion that liberal democracy was unstoppable that had followed the end of the Cold War.

“I had known the Middle East long enough to be horribly aware of the trouble ahead.” 

Read another book review by Mark Heywood: Echoes of Gaza — A review of Isabella Hammad’s ‘Enter Ghost’  

One big takeaway from the book is just how catalytic the West, the US and Britain in particular, have been to the chaos that has destroyed the ancient civilisation of the region, and is now spilling over into conflicts across the world. 

For example, as British legal historian Philippe Sands has detailed in his book, Lawless World, the UK and US’ ignoring of international law and the UN Security Council when launching the second Gulf War in 2003, became the premise for other states – Russia, Israel and others – to pooh-pooh the safety breaks built up carefully since World War 2. 

In March 2011, Western air strikes on Libya, after hapless Russian support for a UN Security Council resolution authorising “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians, but interpreted as a mandate for regime change, became the basis for Russia’s drawing of a bloody new line to protect the Assad regime from something similar in Syria. 

Finally, this book is essential and accessible reading for anyone trying to understand the roots of the genocide currently being undertaken by Israel in the Gaza Strip and the risks of what commentators often glibly call “a wider regional conflict”. 

Although the book ends in 2021, the conflicts it describes do not. 

Its penultimate chapter is a heart-rending account of the human costs of Israel’s 11-day war on Gaza in May 2021. 

After 300 pages and 30 years it no longer requires great prescience from Bowen to write: “Without remedial action, the next war is always inevitable.” 

In fact, all the arguments we have heard since 7 October 2023 have already been rehearsed. Referring to one of Israel’s invasions of Southern Lebanon, in the 1980s Bowen shows how the argument that civilians are a legitimate casualty of war for a population guilty of shielding “terrorists”, now heard again in Gaza, is not a new one. Says Bowen:

“When Israel goes to war, two clocks start running. One counts the time needed by the military. The other is for the time left until the outside world demands a ceasefire, which Israeli diplomats worked hard to slow down.” 

In a chapter dealing with the earlier Israeli wars on Gaza he quotes Dr Eyad el-Sarraj, one of Gaza’s best-known psychiatrists who “like many of his countrymen, believed that Israel wanted to sow hatred in new generations of Palestinians, in order that they would always have an excuse not to make peace. ‘For Israel,’ he said, peace is the most dangerous thing, not war.’”

And so the catastrophic story continues into the present and the future. 

In what Bowen calls a “geopolitical Jenga” of the Middle East where “miscalculations and misperceptions could bring it crashing down”, Bowen ends with a simple appeal to “the meddling West” and others: 

“Powerful states looking in from the outside need to stop making it worse. Do no more harm. Then try to make things better.” DM