The Middle East for Dummies

From Cyrus the Great to Operation Epic Fury — Persia, Israel, and Egypt have been locked in the same struggle for 2,500 years. The only thing that changed is the unit of measurement.

In September 2004, I landed in Doha, Qatar, with a single carry-on and a paperback a friend had handed me the week before. “The Middle East for Dummies,” by Craig S. Davis, published in 2003. Four hundred plus pages that tried to compress several thousand years of civilizational collision — Persians, Egyptians, Israelites, Arabs, Ottomans — into something a newly arrived oilfield technical manager could absorb between meetings.

I read it in hotel rooms, on rigs, in the back seats of Land Cruisers crossing the desert to go to Ras Laffan between jobs. The book’s first real lesson had nothing to do with modern politics. It was about depth. The tensions I was seeing on CNN were not twentieth-century inventions. They were not even medieval. They were ancient — layered over millennia like geological strata, with the same civilizations pressing against the same fault lines, over the same geography, for the same reasons: control of the narrow passages through which wealth and power flow.

That l…