There Cannot Be Peace

• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Ancient Near East: A Crucible of Conflict
• Chapter 2 The Rise of Monotheism and the Seeds of Division
• Chapter 3 The Coming of Islam and the Arab Conquests
• Chapter 4 The Golden Age and the Fracturing of the Caliphate
• Chapter 5 Crusaders and Mongols: Invasions from West and East
• Chapter 6 The Ottoman Empire: A New Synthesis, An Old Reality
• Chapter 7 The Sick Man of Europe: Ottoman Decline and Western Encroachment
• Chapter 8 The Great War and the Betrayal of the Arabs
• Chapter 9 The Mandate System: Drawing Lines in the Sand
• Chapter 10 The Birth of Israel and the Catastrophe of Palestine
• Chapter 11 The Age of Nationalism and the Rise of the Strongmen
• Chapter 12 The Cold War in the Middle East: A Superpower Playground
• Chapter 13 The Iranian Revolution and the Dawn of Political Islam
• Chapter 14 The Iran-Iraq War: A Decade of Bloodshed
• Chapter 15 The First Gulf War: The Invasion of Kuwait and the International Response
• Chapter 16 The Illusory Peace: The Oslo Accords and Their Aftermath
• Chapter 17 The Rise of Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11
• Chapter 18 The Invasion of Iraq and the Unraveling of a Nation
• Chapter 19 The Arab Spring: A False Dawn of Hope
• Chapter 20 The Syrian Civil War: A Proxy War of Devastation
• Chapter 21 The Rise and Fall of the Islamic State
• Chapter 22 The New Middle East Cold War: Saudi Arabia and Iran
• Chapter 23 The Enduring Palestinian Question: A Conflict Without End
• Chapter 24 The Struggle for Resources: Water, Oil, and the Future of Conflict
• Chapter 25 A Region in Flux: The Impossibility of a Lasting Peace

The title of this book, 'There Cannot Be Peace', is not intended as a prophecy, nor is it a surrender to fatalism. Rather, it is a conclusion drawn from the unceasing procession of history in the collection of lands we now call the Middle East. It is an acknowledgment that this region, more than any other on Earth, has been defined by a state of perpetual conflict, a relentless cycle of upheaval, conquest, and rebellion that predates and informs every headline coming from the area today. To understand the modern conflicts, one must first accept that peace, as a lasting and stable condition, has been the historic exception, not the rule. This book is an attempt to understand why. It seeks to trace the deep, interwoven roots of geography, faith, and empire that have made the Middle East a crucible of conflict for millennia.

The very term "Middle East" is a curious and relatively recent invention, born of European geopolitical convenience. Coined in the early 20th century by Western strategists, it designated a region situated between the "Near East" of the Ottoman Empire and the "Far East" of China and Japan. This Eurocentric label, literally meaning 'the Middle of the East' (al-Sharq al-Awsat in Arabic), belies the region's own sense of centrality in world history. For the purposes of this narrative, the Middle East encompasses the lands stretching from Egypt in the west to the mountains of Iran in the east, from the Anatolian plateau in the north to the sands of the Arabian Peninsula in the south. It is a definition based not just on geography, but on a shared, tangled history that has bound these diverse lands and peoples together.

To speak of the Middle East is to speak of a place where history is not a passive backdrop but an active participant in the present. This is the "cradle of civilization," a term that evokes a sense of serene origin but glosses over the constant turmoil that has characterized its existence. The world’s first cities, first laws, and first empires were born here, in the fertile lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers and along the banks of the Nile. But with civilization came organized warfare. Every layer of soil seems to hold the dust of a fallen empire, every hill a forgotten fortress, and every ancient city a legacy of conquest and reconquest. The grievances are layered as deeply as the archaeological tells, making the land itself a living document of unending strife.

This region's geography is its destiny. Positioned at the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe, it was a natural conduit for trade, ideas, and armies. From the earliest recorded history, this strategic location made it a prize to be won and a territory to be controlled. The landscape itself is one of extremes: vast, inhospitable deserts juxtaposed with life-giving river valleys, and rugged mountain ranges that have sheltered minority groups and served as natural barriers to conquest. This terrain has dictated the patterns of settlement, the routes of invasion, and the very nature of power in the region for thousands of years. From the invasions of Alexander the Great to the establishment of the Suez Canal, controlling the Middle East has meant controlling the arteries of world commerce and military movement.

The physical environment has also been a relentless driver of conflict in another, more fundamental way. The region is, for the most part, arid and hot, with water being the most precious and contested of all resources. The great civilizations of Egypt and Mesopotamia were gifts of the Nile, Tigris, and Euphrates rivers, and control over these water sources has been a source of tension ever since. In the 20th century, a different liquid resource came to define the region's fate: oil. The discovery of immense petroleum reserves gave the Middle East a new and explosive strategic importance, ensuring that the interests of powerful industrial nations would become inextricably linked with the region's internal politics. This geological lottery placed unfathomable wealth beneath the sands of some of the most politically volatile territories on the planet, adding a potent new accelerant to existing fires.

If geography provided the stage for conflict, faith provided the script. The Middle East is the birthplace of the three great monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. This shared heritage as the cradle of Abrahamic faiths could have been a source of unity. Instead, it has historically been one of the most profound and enduring sources of division. Each religion sprang from this soil, and each sees the land, particularly the city of Jerusalem, as central to its sacred narrative. This has created overlapping, and often mutually exclusive, claims to the same small pieces of territory, transforming theological disputes into territorial ones. The belief in a single, universal God has, paradoxically, fueled some of the most bitter and irreconcilable conflicts in human history.

From its earliest days, monotheism was intertwined with politics. The ancient Israelites' belief in one God set them apart from their polytheistic neighbors and formed the basis of a distinct national identity. The rise of Christianity eventually saw it adopted as the state religion of the Roman Empire, which controlled much of the region. But it was the dramatic emergence of Islam from the Arabian Peninsula in the 7th century CE that most profoundly reshaped the Middle East and the world. The new faith provided the ideological impetus for a wave of conquests that united the region under a single political and religious authority for the first time in centuries. This unification, however, also laid the groundwork for future schisms, most notably the Sunni-Shia split, which continues to fuel political and military conflicts to this day.

The history of the Middle East is also a history of empires. For millennia, the region has been dominated by a succession of great powers, each leaving its mark on the culture, religion, and political landscape. The ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, Babylonians, and Persians were the first to project their power across these lands. They were followed by Alexander the Great's Macedonians, and then the Romans, who made the eastern Mediterranean the economic and intellectual heart of their empire. After the division of the Roman Empire, its eastern half, the Byzantine Empire, vied for control with the Persian Sassanids, a struggle that exhausted both and paved the way for the Arab conquests. For centuries, the region was the center of powerful Islamic Caliphates, which in turn gave way to Seljuk Turks, Crusaders from Europe, and Mongol hordes from the east.

This long history of being ruled by others, both from within and without the region, has forged a complex and often contradictory legacy. Imperial systems, out of necessity, developed methods of accommodating the vast diversity of peoples, faiths, and ethnicities under their control. However, this imperial inheritance also meant that local identities were often suppressed in favor of loyalty to a distant emperor or caliph. The concept of the nation-state, with its clearly defined borders and homogenous population, is a recent and largely foreign import, one that sits uneasily with the region's older and more fluid identities based on tribe, sect, or clan.

The final, and perhaps most consequential, imperial chapter was written by the European powers. Beginning in the 19th century, a declining Ottoman Empire, the last great indigenous power to rule the region, became the "sick man of Europe." Britain and France, in particular, extended their influence, driven by strategic interests in controlling trade routes to India and, later, access to oil. The culmination of this encroachment came after World War I, with the total dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. Victorious British and French diplomats carved up the former Ottoman territories into a series of new states and mandates, drawing lines on maps with little regard for the ethnic, religious, and tribal realities on the ground. These artificially created borders have been a source of instability and conflict ever since.

This book will chart a course through this long and turbulent history. It will begin with the ancient empires whose clashes first defined the region as a battleground. It will explore the rise of monotheism and the profound and often violent ways it reshaped societies. The narrative will follow the sweep of the Arab conquests, the glory of the Islamic Golden Age, and the subsequent fragmentation and invasions that followed. It will examine the long era of Ottoman rule and its slow, painful collapse, which drew the Western powers ever deeper into the heart of the Middle East.

The second half of the book will focus on the tumultuous modern era, beginning with the Great War and the controversial mandates that created the contemporary map of the region. It will delve into the creation of Israel and the Palestinian "Nakba," a conflict that has become a symbol of the region's seemingly intractable disputes. We will trace the rise of Arab nationalism, the era of military coups and strongmen, and the ways in which the Cold War turned the Middle East into a proxy battlefield for the superpowers. The story will continue through the Iranian Revolution, which unleashed the potent force of political Islam, and the devastating wars that followed, from the Iran-Iraq war to the invasions of Kuwait and Iraq.

Finally, the book will examine the dashed hopes of the 21st century. It will analyze the failed promise of the Oslo Accords, the rise of transnational jihadist groups like Al-Qaeda and the Islamic State, the false dawn of the Arab Spring, and the horrific civil wars in Syria and Yemen. The narrative will conclude by looking at the contemporary landscape, defined by a new cold war between Saudi Arabia and Iran, the ever-present struggle for resources like water and oil, and the enduring question of whether a lasting peace is even possible in a region so heavily burdened by its own history. The journey begins where it must, in the ancient river valleys, where the first kings built the first walls, and the enduring struggle for power in the Middle East began.

The story of conflict in the Middle East begins not with a bang, but with the slow, deliberate scratching of a reed stylus on wet clay. In the fertile plains of southern Mesopotamia, in the land the Greeks would call "between the rivers," the Sumerians built the world's first cities, devised its first writing, and, almost as a matter of course, recorded its first wars. Civilization and organized violence, it seems, are brothers born of the same inventive mind. For as soon as people gathered behind walls to protect their surplus of grain, they created something worth fighting for.

The earliest wars were, like most that would follow, about control over resources: fertile land and the water needed to make it bloom. For generations, the Sumerian city-states of Lagash and Umma, located a mere eighteen miles apart, battered each other over a coveted strip of agricultural land called the Gu'edena, or "the Edge of the Plains." This was not sporadic raiding, but a protracted, multi-generational struggle that stands as the first well-documented war between states in human history. It was a conflict so central to their existence that one ruler of Lagash, Eannatum, commissioned a monumental stone carving to immortalize his victory.

Known today as the Stele of the Vultures, this artifact from around 2500 BCE is a masterwork of political propaganda and a chillingly clear statement of military purpose. One side shows the king, Eannatum, leading a tightly packed phalanx of helmeted, spear-wielding soldiers, their shields forming a solid wall as they march over the bodies of their enemies from Umma. The other side depicts the gods sanctioning this victory, with the patron god of Lagash, Ningirsu, holding the captured soldiers of Umma in a giant net. The message was unambiguous: this war was not just the king's will, but the will of heaven.

The constant warring between city-states like Lagash and Umma spurred military innovation. Soldiers were professionals, organized into disciplined formations that required training and command structures. They used bronze helmets, heavy cloaks, and wheeled chariots. But for all their sophistication, these conflicts remained intensely local affairs. The world changed around 2334 BCE with the arrival of a man named Sargon of Akkad. He was not content to merely defeat his neighbors; he intended to rule them. Sargon was the inventor of a political technology that would define the Middle East for millennia: the empire.

Sargon, a Semitic-speaking outsider from the northern city of Akkad, embarked on a series of relentless military campaigns. In a reign that lasted over half a century, he fought some thirty-four wars, conquering the Sumerian city-states one by one and unifying Mesopotamia under a single authority for the first time. His empire stretched from the Taurus Mountains to the Persian Gulf. Sargon created the prototype of the military state, a kingdom forged and maintained by force of arms, where power flowed from the king and his standing army, not from a patchwork of rival city-priests.

Sargon's Akkadian Empire established a brutal new template for the region. Power was centralized, and loyalty was enforced. Yet, like all empires built on sheer military might, it was inherently unstable. Rebellion was constant, and after Sargon’s death, his successors struggled to hold the sprawling domain together. The empire eventually collapsed, but the idea of empire did not. It would be resurrected, most famously by the city of Babylon, which rose to prominence under its sixth king, Hammurabi, in the 18th century BCE.

Hammurabi is best known for his legal code, a collection of 282 laws carved onto a towering black diorite stele. While often celebrated as a pioneering effort in justice, the Code of Hammurabi was also a powerful instrument of imperial control. By establishing a single, uniform set of laws for all the conquered peoples of his "kingdom of the four corners," Hammurabi sought to supplant local customs and bind his diverse subjects directly to his authority. The law, like Sargon's army, was a tool for creating unity through force.

While the city-states and empires of Mesopotamia relentlessly clashed, the other great civilization of the ancient world grew in relative isolation. Protected by vast deserts to its east and west, Egypt was a civilization defined by the singular, predictable rhythm of the Nile. This geographic security allowed for a remarkable degree of political unity and cultural continuity. For centuries, Egypt’s conflicts were primarily internal matters of dynastic succession or civil strife. That changed with the dawning of its own imperial age.

During the era known as the New Kingdom (c. 1550-1070 BCE), a series of ambitious and militaristic pharaohs sought to expand Egyptian power beyond the Nile Valley. Spurred by the memory of a foreign invasion by a people known as the Hyksos, rulers like Thutmose I and Thutmose III pushed north into the Levant (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, and Israel). This expansion was a direct challenge to the other great powers of the region, creating a new and dangerous international stage for conflict.

Egypt’s imperial ambitions inevitably brought it into collision with a formidable new power that had arisen in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey): the Hittite Empire. The Hittites were a hardy, warlike people who were masters of new military technologies, including the three-man, spear-throwing heavy chariot and the mass production of iron weapons, which were stronger and cheaper than bronze. The stage was set for a superpower showdown over the control of the crucial trade routes and buffer states of Syria.

The rivalry culminated in one of the most famous and well-documented battles of the ancient world: the Battle of Kadesh in 1274 BCE. The Egyptian pharaoh, Ramesses II, leading an army of over 20,000 men, marched on the strategic city of Kadesh on the Orontes River. The Hittite king, Muwatalli II, had assembled a massive force of nearly 40,000 to meet him. Through a clever bit of deception, the Hittites concealed their army and launched a surprise chariot attack that shattered one of Ramesses's divisions and nearly led to his capture.

Ramesses, however, managed to rally his forces and, with the timely arrival of reinforcements, fought the Hittite army to a bloody standstill. Both sides claimed a great victory, a fact recorded in elaborate carvings and texts in both Egypt and the Hittite capital of Hattusa. In reality, the battle was a brutal draw. Neither empire could destroy the other, and the conflict ground on for another fifteen years.

Eventually, exhaustion and the rise of a new threat to the Hittites from Assyria in the east led the two powers to reconsider the costs of endless war. Around 1259 BCE, Ramesses II and the new Hittite king, Hattusili III, negotiated what is now recognized as the world's first surviving international peace treaty. Copies of the text, inscribed on silver tablets (the originals are lost, but clay copies survive), outlined a pact of non-aggression, established mutual defense against outside enemies, and even provided for the extradition of political refugees. For a time, an uneasy peace, cemented by the marriage of a Hittite princess to Ramesses, settled over the region.

This "Great Powers Club" of Egypt, the Hittites, Babylonia, and Assyria, which communicated in the shared diplomatic language of Akkadian, created a period of relative stability. But it was not to last. Around 1200 BCE, the interconnected world of the Late Bronze Age came to a sudden and violent end. In a matter of decades, civilizations collapsed, great cities were burned and abandoned, and trade networks disintegrated. This period, known as the Late Bronze Age Collapse, remains one of history's great mysteries.

The causes were likely a perfect storm of converging crises. Evidence points to prolonged, severe droughts and climate change that led to crop failures and widespread famine across the Eastern Mediterranean. This environmental catastrophe was likely compounded by internal rebellions, earthquakes, and the disruption of the vital trade routes that supplied the copper and tin needed to make bronze, the essential material of the era's military and economy.

Into this chaos swept mysterious groups of seaborne raiders whom Egyptian records call the "Sea Peoples." Their precise origins are unknown, but they may have been a confederation of displaced peoples from across the Aegean and Mediterranean, set in motion by the famines and social breakdown. They raided and destroyed cities along the coasts of Anatolia, Syria, and the Levant before launching a full-scale assault on Egypt itself, which barely managed to repel them. The Hittite Empire, weakened by famine and internal strife, was not so lucky; its capital was sacked, and its empire vanished from history.

A dark age descended upon much of the region. Literacy declined, cities shrank, and the old imperial order was shattered. But in the power vacuum left by the collapse, new peoples and new powers began to emerge. And from the heartland of old Mesopotamia, one power would rise from the ashes with a vengeance, creating an empire more vast, more organized, and more terrifyingly brutal than any that had come before it: Assyria.

The Assyrians had long been a regional power in northern Mesopotamia, but in the centuries following the Bronze Age Collapse, they honed themselves into the most effective military machine the world had yet seen. Their success was built on several pillars: a large, professional, and permanently standing army; mastery of siege warfare, with sophisticated battering rams and engineering corps; and the widespread use of iron weapons. But their most potent weapon was psychological.

Assyrian kings made terror a calculated and central instrument of state policy. Their royal inscriptions and the carved reliefs that decorated their palaces boast in graphic detail of the fates awaiting those who resisted them. Flaying, impaling, and mass executions were common punishments for rebellious cities. This ruthlessness was designed to terrorize enemies into submission, saving the Assyrians time and manpower.

Another key pillar of Assyrian control was the policy of mass deportation. After a conquest, the Assyrians would forcibly uproot huge segments of the population, particularly the elite, and resettle them in other parts of the empire. This practice served multiple purposes: it broke the will of conquered peoples, shattered their local identities, preempted future rebellions by removing native leadership, and provided a mobile workforce to build new cities and cultivate land in underdeveloped provinces. Over several centuries, it is estimated the Assyrians deported more than four million people, fundamentally scrambling the ethnic and cultural map of the Near East.

Under a succession of warrior-kings like Ashurnasirpal II, Tiglath-Pileser III, and Sargon II (no relation to his Akkadian namesake), the Neo-Assyrian Empire expanded relentlessly. They conquered Babylon, crushed the kingdoms of the Levant, and even subjugated Egypt for a time. By the 7th century BCE, Assyria controlled almost the entire Middle East. Its kings ruled with absolute authority, believing themselves to be the chosen instruments of the god Ashur, with a divine mandate to bring order to the world—an order maintained through conquest and fear.

But the Assyrian model of empire, built on constant warfare and brutal repression, was expensive and exhausting. The endless campaigns drained the treasury and manpower, and the systemic cruelty engendered a deep and burning hatred among its subject peoples. In 612 BCE, a coalition of two of its most subjugated vassals, the Babylonians from the south and the Medes from the east, joined forces, besieged the Assyrian capital of Nineveh, and utterly destroyed it. The collapse of the Assyrian Empire was as swift and total as its rise had been.

In the aftermath, the empire was divided between the victors. The Medes took control of the Iranian plateau and eastern Anatolia, while the Babylonians inherited Mesopotamia, Syria, and Palestine. This new Neo-Babylonian Empire enjoyed a brief but brilliant resurgence under its most famous king, Nebuchadnezzar II, who ruled from 605 to 562 BCE. He is remembered as a great builder, turning Babylon into the most magnificent city in the world, complete with its famous ziggurat and Hanging Gardens.

He is also remembered as a conqueror in the classic Mesopotamian tradition. Nebuchadnezzar crushed Egyptian attempts to reassert influence in the Levant and solidified his control over the region. This brought him into conflict with the small but stubborn kingdom of Judah. After a first rebellion, Nebuchadnezzar captured Jerusalem in 597 BCE, looted its temple, and carried off its king and thousands of its leading citizens to Babylon. When Judah rebelled again a decade later, his patience was at an end. In 586 BCE, his army returned, besieged Jerusalem for a final time, and razed the city and its sacred temple to the ground, deporting a vast portion of the remaining population.

The Neo-Babylonian empire, however, was a historical footnote compared to what came next. To the east, in the highlands of Persia (modern-day Iran), a new power was stirring. A vassal of the Median Empire, the Persian king Cyrus II, known to history as Cyrus the Great, overthrew his Median overlords in 550 BCE. This was the beginning of the Achaemenid Empire, a state that would become the largest the world had ever seen, dwarfing even that of the Assyrians.

Cyrus was a military genius. He first turned west, conquering the fabulously wealthy kingdom of Lydia in Anatolia before setting his sights on Babylon. In 539 BCE, his armies reached the great city. According to the Greek historian Herodotus, the Persians cleverly diverted the course of the Euphrates River, allowing their troops to march into the city through the dry riverbed under the walls while the Babylonians were distracted by a religious festival. The Neo-Babylonian Empire fell almost without a fight.

With the conquest of Babylon, Cyrus was now the master of the entire Fertile Crescent. Unlike the Assyrian and Babylonian conquerors before him, however, Cyrus practiced a revolutionary new form of imperial statecraft. Instead of terror and mass deportation, he established a policy of relative tolerance and multiculturalism. He presented himself not as a foreign conqueror, but as a legitimate successor to the native kings of the lands he ruled.

The most famous expression of this policy is the Cyrus Cylinder, a clay inscription in which Cyrus portrays himself as chosen by Babylon's own god, Marduk, to restore order and justice. In a move with profound future consequences, he allowed the peoples exiled by the Babylonians, including the Jews of Judah, to return to their homelands and rebuild their temples. This was not an act of pure altruism, but a pragmatic strategy to win the loyalty of his new subjects and ensure stability across his vast, diverse empire. Cyrus understood that while empires are won by the sword, they are more easily maintained with a lighter touch. The age of Persian dominance, and a new chapter in the struggle for the Middle East, had begun.