By reviewed by John French

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"Kingmakers"

by Karl E. Meyer and Sharon B. Brysac

W.W. Norton Company $27.95

If you want to know why the Middle East is such an intractable mess, this is the book for you.

The subtitle of "Kingmakers" reads "The Invention of the Modern Middle East." How apt! The modern Middle East developed not as an established geographic region containing well-defined nations but, rather, as a concoction created by Northern European Christians to be inhabited mostly by Arab and Persian Muslims.

This part of the world had long consisted of nothing more than administrative districts within the vast Ottoman Empire, which was dismembered following its defeat in World War I. The allies' nation-building process that followed was often unwise and, on occasion, even foolish.

However, I run ahead of the story and of the authors' telling of it. "Kingmakers" is a fascinating history organized as a series of overlapping biographies. The tale effectively begins in 1875 when Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, seeking to solidify Britain's lifeline to India, purchased the controlling shares in the Suez Canal Company. From then on, expansion by Britain and other European nations into the Middle East and Africa became an inevitable competition for territory and power.

The region emerged as a magnet for bright, ambitious and often eccentric Westerners -- many of them British (think Lawrence of Arabia), a few French and, later, a sprinkling of Americans. These are the people who made new nations, made and unmade kings, and bequeathed us the simmering cauldron that is the Middle East today.

With the exception of Palestine, it all had to do with oil. Not oil for American automobiles but oil for the British Navy, when Winston Churchill (yes, that Winston Churchill), then First Lord of the Admiralty, decided in 1911 that his fleet would move faster and travel farther if its power source were converted from coal to oil.

This set the stage for a frantic scramble for petroleum reserves. In 1914, Britain acquired 51 percent of the shares of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. At the end of World War I a leading British statesman opined that the Allies "floated to victory on a wave of oil."

This lesson was not lost on the Americans. In 1933, Standard Oil of California entered into a contract with Saudi Arabia for exclusive rights to extract oil from that country for six decades. The U.S. State Department subsequently described this as "the greatest commercial prize in the history of the planet."

Westerners both invented nations and drew their boundaries without regard for the long-term conse-quences. Palestine provides a good example. The word "Palestine" was coined by the ancient Greeks to identify the "Land of the Philistines." It meant nothing to the Turks or Arabs.

This did not prevent a group of European Christian Zionists from pressing for the creation of a Jewish homeland in Palestine. When they succeeded in 1917 in convincing the British War Cabinet to agree, one of their ardent members burst from the meeting to confront the eminent Zionist, Chaim Weizmann, with the news, "Dr. Weizmann, it's a boy!"

Unfortunately, the deliberative process did not improve. The conclusion of World War I, the "War to End War," brought instead, to quote one observer, "a Peace to End Peace." The remarkable Gertrude Bell, the most famous woman in international affairs following World War I and an important architect of modern Iraq, advised a friend that the Paris Peace Conference was making "a horrible muddle of the Near East."

Briefly, here is what happened. First, Middle Eastern people whose only loyalty was to their tribe, and who had no democratic experience, were gathered into nations that they were expected to govern. In what became Iraq, Sunnis were put in charge, despite being in the minority, because they were educated. But most of the learned Shias were Persian.

Second, nations continued to be created with the same carelessness as was Palestine. A powerful British administrator, Sir Percy Cox, took out a map and a pencil one day in 1922 and drew the boundary between Iraq and what would become Saudi Arabia. The omnipresent Winston Churchill, as Britain's Colonial Secretary, claimed that he had "created Transjordan with a stroke of the pen one Sunday afternoon."

By edict of the French, the compact Maronite Christian entity known as Grand Liban was expanded at Syria's expense to create Greater Lebanon, thereby giving Syria a permanent grudge and destabilizing Lebanon via a large infusion of Muslims.

Not content with making kings, the West was happy to unmake them if need be. Persia is a good case in point. In 1920-21 the British engineered a coup that toppled the government there. Then, in 1941, a joint British-Russian force toppled the Persian government the British had installed in 1921. The United States got in on the act in 1953 when, through the instrument of CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt (Teddy's son) it took its turn at toppling the government of Iran, formerly known as Persia.

Every chapter of "Kingmakers" yields historical insights which, if they had been heeded, might have forestalled America's plunge into the Middle Eastern quagmire. For me, the most poignant example is Gertrude Bell's 1921 admonition about Mesopotamia (now largely Iraq): "We must evacuate Mesopotamia while we can ... so long as we stay, there will ever be a fresh reason for staying and a fresh reason for spending. Let us arise and go."