Muhammad Line In The Sand And Abdullah In The Desert

Download Muhammad Line In The Sand And Abdullah In The Desert PDF/ePub or read online books in Mobi eBooks. Click Download or Read Online button to get Muhammad Line In The Sand And Abdullah In The Desert book now. This website allows unlimited access to, at the time of writing, more than 1.5 million titles, including hundreds of thousands of titles in various foreign languages.
Shifting Lines in the Sand

Author: David H. Finnie
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 1992
During the 1991 Gulf War, pundits and experts scrambled unsuccessfully to explain Iraq's "claim" to Kuwait. In a lucid and measured account of a complex historical and geographic drama that culminated in Operation Desert Storm, David Finnie elucidates the long Kuwaiti-Iraqi border dispute and lays Saddam Hussein's dubious claim to rest. He also raises larger questions about European colonialism and about the creation of new nation-states in the Middle East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Finnie vividly portrays how arbitrary the drawing of frontiers can be, and how they come to serve internal, regional, and international rivalries and ambitions. This history begins in the eighteenth century, when Kuwait was first settled by nomads from the Arabian desert. Finnie describes the country's growing prosperity under a merchant oligarchy, then shows how the Kuwaitis, seeking British protection from the sprawling Ottoman Empire, came to serve England's imperial strategy. He details the ways in which Britain parlayed its mandatory control of Iraq and its protectorate over Kuwait to curb the larger nation's ambitions and to ensure Kuwait's independence under British auspices. A fresh look at British diplomatic documents reveals how Whitehall covered its tracks, heading off the Iraqis, obfuscating League of Nations proceedings, and confounding scholars and researchers down to the present day. Pursuing his story through Britain's withdrawal from the Persian Gulf and Iraq's 1963 recognition of Kuwait's boundaries, Finnie examines the U.N. post-war measures to secure the frontier in the face of Iraq's continuing pressure for better access to Gulf waters.
Desert Queen

The life of Gertrude Bell is now the subject of the major motion picture Queen of the Desert, starring Nicole Kidman, James Franco and Damian Lewis Turning away from privileged Victorian Britain, Gertrude Bell explored, mapped and excavated the world of the Arabs, winning the trust of Arab sheiks and chieftains along the way. When the First World War erupted and the British needed the loyalty of Arab leaders, Gertrude Bell provided the intelligence for T.E. Lawrence's military activities. After the war, she played a major role in creating the modern Middle East, and was generally considered the most powerful woman in the British Empire. In this major reassessment of Bell's life, Janet Wallach reveals a woman whose achievements and independent spirit were especially remarkable for her times, and who brought the same passion and intensity to her explorations as she did to her rich and romantic life.
Saddam's War of Words

Author: Jerry M. Long
language: en
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Release Date: 2009-08-17
From a Western perspective, the Persian Gulf War of 1990-1991 largely fulfilled the first President Bush's objective: "In, out, do it, do it right, get gone. That's the message." But in the Arab world, the causes and consequences of Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and his subsequent defeat by a U.S.-led coalition were never so clear-cut. The potent blend of Islam and Arab nationalism that Saddam forged to justify the unjustifiable—his invasion of a Muslim state—gained remarkable support among both Muslims and Arabs and continued to resonate in the Middle East long after the fighting ended. Indeed, as this study argues in passing, it became a significant strand in the tangled web of ideologies and actions that led to the attacks of 9/11. This landmark book offers the first in-depth investigation of how Saddam Hussein used Islam and Arab nationalism to legitimate his invasion of Kuwait in the eyes of fellow Muslims and Arabs, while delegitimating the actions of the U.S.-led coalition and its Arab members. Jerry M. Long addresses three fundamental issues: how extensively and in what specific ways Iraq appealed to Islam during the Kuwait crisis; how elites, Islamists, and the elusive Arab "street," both in and out of the coalition, responded to that appeal and why they responded as they did; and the longer-term effects that resulted from Saddam's strategy.