No area of the world has been more involved in military matters during the last half century than has the Middle East. The region has seen seven Arab-Israeli wars; three wars involving Iraq and two more in Afghanistan; as well as civil wars in Lebanon, Libya, Algeria, Yemen, Syria, and among Palestinians; and insurgencies in several other places. Several of these wars—most notably the last one in Iraq and the Afghan ones—involved direct Western intervention.
In addition, however, the military has been either the direct ruler of many countries, including Turkey among others, or the main pillar of the regime. Military coups, successful or otherwise, took place in Egypt, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Algeria, and Jordan. Thus, the armed forces, their equipment, demands, goals, and other seemingly purely military issues have also become prime political determinants of Middle Eastern history.
This new Routledge collection offers a survey of the scholarly work across the range of twentieth- and twenty-first-century regional history that puts these events together in a systematic context and provides a wide range of views and opinions. Comprehensively covering military history of the past hundred years, this title includes such topics as both world wars, the Turkish-Greek conflicts, Arab nationalism, the Arab-Israeli conflicts, and the post-2003 fighting in Iraq.