A Peace to End All Peace is a masterpiece that picks up where Guns of August leaves off. The author threads together the wide-ranging people, places and events that reshaped the Middle East following World War I and the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The book traces the mostly failed attempts by colonialists, primarily British and French, to transform Asian cultures into Western style democracies with seemingly randomly defined national borders without regard to cultural differences separating the people. The primary motives: oil, power and military presence, as they remain today.

Bar advice.This book shows that ethnocentric Westerners have learned little about the Middle East since then. This mangled shaping and reshaping of the region continues today into Iraq by dint of war that may soon spread overtly to surrounding countries. A Peace to End All Peace demonstrates an old adage: If we cannot learn from our past mistakes, we are bound to repeat them.