Jonathan Rugman

The Sykes-Picot agreement will be 100 years old next year, but there will be no congratulatory telegrams winging their way to the Middle East from London, or from Paris on high alert. The Islamic State, the world’s most powerful jihadist group, has filmed its men bulldozing border posts between Syria and Iraq, dealing perhaps the final blow to those Anglo-French cartological ambitions of a century ago. The ‘Caliphate’ is inhabited by some six million people and is now larger than the United Kingdom. In the words of Patrick Cockburn, ‘a new and terrifying state has been born that will not easily disappear’. Yet far from appearing out of the blue in 2014, IS was fostered for years by those who profess to oppose it, as this book argues convincingly.

Reporting Egypt’s revolution three years ago, I had a sense of history not so much repeating itself as discharging sparks which seemed eerily familiar. Smoke was billowing into my hotel bedroom from the building next door, the headquarters of the Mubarak dictatorship which protestors had set alight; yet also visible from my balcony in Cairo that night were the flickering lights of Zamalek, the island of privilege in the River Nile where my father grew up before fleeing the flames of the Nasser regime on a flying boat in 1956. At last comes a book which links the coups and revolutions witnessed by father and son. The Cambridge sociologist Hazem Kandil has produced a compelling history of Egypt’s 60-year power struggle.

Whether the United States is a force for global peace is not really up for debate in the self-described ‘indispensable nation’, though the question sharply divides opinion almost everywhere else. By focusing on America’s fixation with Iran, this short and angry book argues against. The book’s polemic is built on good foundations: we are often told that Iran is a rogue nuclear state, yet it does not possess nuclear weapons. As a signatory to the NPT, the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Iran is entitled to a peaceful nuclear energy programme as long as it is monitored by UN inspectors. However, ten years of negotiations aimed at persuading Iran to stop have led nowhere.

Montesquieu observed that popular governments are always more vindictive than monarchies. So it proved in Iran in 1979, where the demise of a 2,000-year-old monarchical tradition made most ‘Arab spring’ revolutions seem like child’s play. More than 30 years on, the descent of Ayatollah Khomeini from a jumbo jet, wearing an American bullet-proof vest, also remains arguably more significant. James Buchan concludes that Osama bin Laden was the extreme Sunni response to Khomeini’s clerical dictatorship; and without Khomeini, the Shias’ battle for survival would not have played out across the Middle East as violently as it has, including in Syria today.

One cold evening in the middle of February this year I walked into a smoke-filled room in a town called Saraqib in northern Syria to find Anthony Shadid sitting shoeless on the floor like a Bedouin and conversing in Arabic with a tall, thin school teacher, one of the leaders of the town’s revolution. A cast-iron stove, fuelled by paraffin, heated the room, and Anthony, a bearded, somewhat burly man, seemed to glow with bear-like warmth. Through the cigarette smoke I could see three notebooks proudly stacked in front of the New York Times reporter, evidently bulging with his observations. Anthony had watched rebel fighters attempt to blow up an army tank earlier that day, and he was clearly shaken by the audacity and ferocity of Syria’s violence.