This is an important book that you should read about the Middle East: Shadow Wars by Christopher Davidson

I like that from his early books to this one, Davidson is becoming radicalized, based on his scholarship.  This book Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East is an important book which came out last year.  It has not received the attention it deserves: in my book, it is the People's History of US-British policies and conspiracies in the Middle East region.  There is original materials and there is some known materials about Western conspiracies and machinations in the region, and especially the use and misuse of reactionary Islam: from Egypt under Nasser to Syria today.  But Davidson knows how to tell a story, and he tells it very well.  He is quite knowledgeable that he is capable of putting together the various parts of the puzzle.  His narrative is logically linked from the Western plots after WWI to the current Western policies in the wake of Arab uprisings.  There is so much in the book that my weekly article in Al-Akhbar only dealt with the section dealing with the Cold War but up to the war of Afghanistan.  This would be (in it paperback edition) an excellent text both in an introductory course on IR in the Middle East and also in an introductory course on Middle East politics.  It is time that we treat Western intervention in the Middle East as an integral part of domestic Middle East politics (only Israel is allowed to be entitled to have its own domestic politics).  Warning: the account about the Arab uprisings clashes with the propaganda account contained in all Western media.