The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East

The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East PDF Author: Meir Zamir
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317657403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
The role of intelligence in colonialism and decolonization is a rapidly expanding field of study. The premise of The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East is that intelligence statecraft is the "missing dimension" in the established historiography of the Middle East during and after World War II. Arguing that intelligence, especially covert political action and clandestine diplomacy, played a key role in Britain's Middle East policy, this book examines new archival sources in order to demonstrate that despite World War II and the Cold War, the traditional rivalry between Britain and France in the Middle East continued unabated, assuming the form of a little-known secret war. This shadow war strongly influenced decolonization of the region as each Power sought to undermine the other; Britain exploited France's defeat to evict it from its mandated territories in Syria and Lebanon and incorporate them in its own sphere of influence; whilst France’s successful use of intelligence enabled it to undermine Britain's position in Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Shedding new light on the clandestine Franco-Zionist collaboration against Britain in the Middle East and the role of the British secret services in the 1948 Arab-Jewish war in Palestine, this book, which presents close to 400 secret Syrian and British documents obtained by the French intelligence, is essential reading for scholars with an interest in the political history of the region, inter-Arab and international relations, and intelligence studies.

The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East

The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East PDF Author: Meir Zamir
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317657403
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 503

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Book Description
The role of intelligence in colonialism and decolonization is a rapidly expanding field of study. The premise of The Secret Anglo-French War in the Middle East is that intelligence statecraft is the "missing dimension" in the established historiography of the Middle East during and after World War II. Arguing that intelligence, especially covert political action and clandestine diplomacy, played a key role in Britain's Middle East policy, this book examines new archival sources in order to demonstrate that despite World War II and the Cold War, the traditional rivalry between Britain and France in the Middle East continued unabated, assuming the form of a little-known secret war. This shadow war strongly influenced decolonization of the region as each Power sought to undermine the other; Britain exploited France's defeat to evict it from its mandated territories in Syria and Lebanon and incorporate them in its own sphere of influence; whilst France’s successful use of intelligence enabled it to undermine Britain's position in Palestine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iraq. Shedding new light on the clandestine Franco-Zionist collaboration against Britain in the Middle East and the role of the British secret services in the 1948 Arab-Jewish war in Palestine, this book, which presents close to 400 secret Syrian and British documents obtained by the French intelligence, is essential reading for scholars with an interest in the political history of the region, inter-Arab and international relations, and intelligence studies.

A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948

A Line in the Sand: The Anglo-French Struggle for the Middle East, 1914-1948 PDF Author: James Barr
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393070654
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 479

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Book Description
Uses recently declassified French and British government documents to describe how the two countries secretly divided the Middle East during World War I and the effect these mandates had on local Arabs and Jews.

Shadow Wars

Shadow Wars PDF Author: Christopher Davidson
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1786070022
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 933

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Book Description
For more than a century successive US and UK governments have sought to thwart nationalist, socialist and pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. Through the Cold War, the ‘War on Terror’ and the present era defined by the Islamic State, the Western powers have repeatedly manipulated the region’s most powerful actors to ensure the security of their own interests and, in doing so, have given rise to religious politics, sectarian war, bloody counter-revolutions and now one of the most brutal incarnations of Islamic extremism ever seen. This is the utterly compelling, systematic dissection of Western interference in the Middle East. Christopher Davidson exposes the dark side of our foreign policy – dragging many disturbing facts out into the light for the first time. Most shocking for us today is his assertion that US intelligence agencies continue to regard the Islamic State, like al-Qaeda before it, as a strategic but volatile asset to be wielded against their enemies. Provocative, alarming and unrelenting, Shadow Wars demands to be read – now.

Fighting the People's War

Fighting the People's War PDF Author: Jonathan Fennell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107030951
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 967

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Book Description
Jonathan Fennell captures for the first time the true wartime experience of the ordinary soldiers from across the empire who made up the British and Commonwealth armies. He analyses why the great battles were won and lost and how the men that fought went on to change the world.

The Mediterranean Double-Cross System, 1941-1945

The Mediterranean Double-Cross System, 1941-1945 PDF Author: Brett Lintott
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351840428
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
This book describes and analyzes the history of the Mediterranean "Double-Cross System" of the Second World War, an intelligence operation run primarily by British officers which turned captured German spies into double agents. Through a complex system of coordination, they were utilized from 1941 to the end of the war in 1945 to secure Allied territory through security and counter-intelligence operations, and also to deceive the German military by passing false information about Allied military planning and operations. The primary questions addressed by the book are: how did the double-cross-system come into existence; what effects did it have on the intelligence war and the broader military conflict; and why did it have those effects? The book contains chapters assessing how the system came into being and how it was organized, and also chapters which analyze its performance in security and counter-intelligence operations, and in deception.

Arguing about Empire

Arguing about Empire PDF Author: Martin Thomas
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192552430
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Arguing about Empire analyses the most divisive arguments about empire between Europe's two leading colonial powers from the age of high imperialism to the post-war era of decolonization. Focusing on the domestic contexts underlying imperial rhetoric, Arguing about Empire adopts a case-study approach, treating key imperial debates as historical episodes to be investigated in depth. The episodes in question have been selected both for their chronological range, their variety, and, above all, their vitriol. Some were straightforward disputes; others involved cooperation in tense circumstances. These include the Tunisian and Egyptian crises of 1881-2, which saw France and Britain establish new North African protectorates, ostensibly in co-operation, but actually in competition; the Fashoda Crisis of 1898, when Britain and France came to the brink of war in the aftermath of the British re-conquest of Sudan; the Moroccan crises of 1905 and 1911, early tests of the Entente Cordiale, when Britain lent support to France in the face of German threats; the 1922 Chanak crisis, when that imperial Entente broke down in the face of a threatened attack on Franco-British forces by Kemalist Turkey; World War Two, which can be seen in part as an undeclared colonial war between the former allies, complicated by the division of the French Empire between De Gaulle's Free French forces and those who remained loyal to the Vichy Regime; and finally the 1956 Suez intervention, when, far from defusing another imperial crisis, Britain colluded with France and Israel to invade Egypt -- the culmination of the imperial interference that began some eighty years earlier.

The Man who Created the Middle East

The Man who Created the Middle East PDF Author: Christopher Simon Sykes
Publisher: William Collins
ISBN: 9780008121938
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
At the age of only 36, Sir Mark Sykes was signatory to the Sykes-Picot agreement, one of the most reviled treaties of modern times. A century later, Christopher Sykes' lively biography of his grandfather reassesses his life and work, and the political instability and violence in the Middle East attributed to it. The Sykes-Picot agreement was a secret pact drawn up in May 1916 between the French and the British, to divide the collapsing Ottoman Empire in the event of an allied victory in the First World War. Agreed without any Arab involvement, it negated an earlier guarantee of independence to the Arabs made by the British. Controversy has raged around it ever since. Sir Mark Sykes was not, however, a blimpish, ignorant Englishman. A passionate traveller, explorer and writer, his life was filled with adventure. From a difficult, lonely childhood in Yorkshire and an early life spent in Egypt, India, Mexico, the Arabian desert, all the while reading deeply and learning languages, Sykes published his first book about his travels through Turkey aged only twenty. After the Boer War, he returned to map areas of the Ottoman Empire no cartographer had yet visited. He was a talented cartoonist, excellent mimic and amateur actor, gifts that ensured that when elected to parliament a full House of Commons would assemble to listen to his speeches. During the First World War, Sykes was appointed to Kitchener's staff, became Political Secretary to the War Cabinet and a member of the Committee set up to consider the future of Asiatic Turkey, where he was thirty years younger than any of the other members. This search would dominate the rest of his life. He was unrelenting in his pursuit of peace and worked himself to death to find it, a victim of both exhaustion and the Spanish Flu. Written largely based on the previously undisclosed family letters and illustrated with Sykes' cartoons, this sad story of an experienced, knowledgeable, good-humoured and generous man once considered the ideal diplomat for finding a peaceful solution continues to reverberate across the world today.

Arab Intellectuals and American Power

Arab Intellectuals and American Power PDF Author: M.D. Walhout
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0755634160
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Edward Said, the famous Palestinian American scholar and activist, was one of the twentieth century's most iconic public intellectuals, whose pioneering and – to some – controversial work on Orientalism shaped Middle Eastern and postcolonial studies and beyond. But how exactly did he arrive at his famous maxim to 'speak truth to power'? This dual biographical study examines the lives of Edward Said and the eminent Lebanese philosopher and diplomat Charles Malik, a distant relative 30 years his senior whom Said knew from childhood as “Uncle Charles.” To Said, Malik was no ordinary relative; in his memoir, he called Malik “the great negative intellectual lesson of my life”, and was to describe him as “an ideal as I was growing up” only to later claim Malik “went through an ugly transformation that I could never come to terms with”. M.D. Walhout charts the development of these two remarkable figures, reconstructing in the process the way in which American power in the Middle East came to have a defining effect on Arab intellectuals in the twentieth century. Exploring issues of religion and nationalism, Walhout shows how Said came to reject much of what Malik stood for: Christian faith, hardline anti-Communism and the benign nature of American power. He argues that the example of Malik was instrumental in the development of Said's later belief that the true vocation of the intellectual was not to compromise with power, but to resist it.

Israeli Foreign Policy

Israeli Foreign Policy PDF Author: Uri Bialer
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 025304622X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Uri Bialer lays a foundation for understanding the principal aspects of Israeli foreign policy from the early days of the state's existence to the Oslo Accords. He presents a synthetic reading of sources, many of which are recently declassified official documents, to cover Israeli foreign policy over a broad chronological expanse. Bialer focuses on the objectives of Israel's foreign policy and its actualization, especially as it concerned immigration policy, oil resources, and the procurement of armaments. In addition to identifying important state actors, Bialer highlights the many figures who had no defined diplomatic roles but were influential in establishing foreign policy goals. He shows how foreign policy was essential to the political, economic, and social well-being of the state and how it helped to deal with Israel's most intractable problem, the resolution of the conflict with Arab states and the Palestinians.

Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley

Clandestine Lives of Colonel David Smiley PDF Author: Jones Clive Jones
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474441181
Category : World War, 1939-1945
Languages : en
Pages : 428

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Book Description
Drawing on extensive interviews and archival research, this biography uncovers the motivations and ideals that informed Smiley's commitment to covert action and intelligence during the Second World War and early part of the Cold War, often among tribally based societies. With particular reference to operations in Albania, Oman and Yemen, it addresses the wider issues of accountability and control of clandestine operations.