A Peace to End All Peace

History explains a lot. David Fromkin's book on the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the division of the spoils by the Great Powers following World War I is just fascinating. Each past controversy had a contemporary parallel--Israel, the Palestine Question, Egypt Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Turkey, the Cacauses, Turkestan, Russia, France, Germany, and even the Sudan. Not to mention the complicating role of the United States' desire to make the world safe for democracy. Everything we read about in the headlines nowadays seems to have happened before, between 1918 and 1924. The characters are memorable, T.E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Woodrow Wilson, Lenin, Chaim Weizmann, Jabotinsky, Ibn Saud, Kemal Ataturk, Clemenceau, and Sir Mark Sykes, among others. It reads like a novel, is filled with scholarly footnotes that are fascinating in themselves and explains why Satayana said "those who do not remember the past, are condemned to repeat it..."