An excellent read from start to finish. I have read most books on the Middle East over the past few years and this is definitely the most comprehensive and most hard-hitting. If you are interested in contemporary Middle East politics and you haven't read this, then it's a must read. ( )

A book that provides details of the changing factions in the Middle East, and factors in the rise of ISIS that are not found in the reporting of the news media. Informative because it provides coverage of the difficulties in all the present countries in the Middle East, Northern Africa, etc. However, I found it difficult to filter out the bias the author seems to have against Western governments. ( )

For many decades US and UK governments have tried with various methods to defeat popularist, socialist and pro-democracy movements in the Middle East. Throughout the Cold War, the United States ‘War on Terror' and the terror visited on us by the Islamic State, the Western powers have repeatedly used and manipulated the region's most powerful figures to ensure the security of their own financial and nationalist interests and have given rise to brutal religious based politics, bloody sectarian wars, and now one of the most brutal visions of Islamic extremism ever seen.

Christopher Davidson exposes for us the dark side of our foreign policy which is Western interference in the Middle East. What could be the most shocking for many of us to read in this book today is his statement that US intelligence agencies continue to look at the Islamic State, as a strategic but volatile asset to be wielded against their enemies. Shadow Wars must be read as I feel is clearly shows the defeat of the ‘Arab Spring' as a type of counter revolution pushed by external interventions from the West. The book begins with past type of European Revolutions and ends up with a very convincing analysis of the demise of the Arab Spring. No one is spared in this clear and direct analysis: Arab regimes, popularist movements, the West and Israel are all vicerated here for their responsibility for the suffering of the people of Middle East today. ( )

The definitive text on the West's covert or 'Shadow Wars' in the Middle East, for the past century, spanning from the manipulated formation of the Saudi 'Islamic State', right through the US-Saudi sponsored Islamic state in Afghanistan, up to the current US-Gulf monarchy sponsored wars in Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Nigeria, Mali, and many other places. An important and necessary revisionist history that will be very uncomfortable for many to acknowledge. ( )

A book that will turn your world upside down. Or at least your existing understanding of the US's historic and present role in the Middle East. It will be a bitter pill for many to swallow, especially if you believe that the US has largely been a benign force on the world stage, but the sheer weight of unrelenting evidence is of the sort that can't just be swept under the rug.

The central argument is that the Western states, first Britain and then the US have repeatedly tried to prevent strong nation states forming in the Middle East on the basis that such states could potentially:

- ally with other foreign powers (including the USSR during the Cold War)
- nationalize their resources and dismantle lucrative monopolies held by Western companies over oil, gas, cheap labour, Suez canal, etc.

To this end, Britain and the US engaged in a mix of covert operations or 'shadow wars' often using local proxies to stop rebellions (as in Oman and Yemen) and to undermine or replace governments that could have put the Middle East on a different path (including Nasser's Egypt and Mossadegh's Iran). As the Cold War persisted, these shadow wars became ever more dangerous as the US and Britain together with local allies such as Saudi Arabia started to export Islamic extremism as a counterforce to secular Arab nationalism and other secular allies of the USSR, most notably the government of Afghanistan.

The best part of the book looks at how the secret operations and shadow wars have continued after 9/11 (9/11 was funded by renegade Saudi princes who needed to keep Al-Qaeda onboard following Bin Laden's criticism of their monarchy in the mid 1990s), and especially after the Arab Spring, as key US allies were lost in Tunisia and Egypt, requiring the return of US-backed Islamists and eventually military dictators. Then in Libya and Syria, in which full national revolutions never really took place, the US and its Arab allies made sure that uprisings were supported and all manner of groups were funded to make ensure that longstanding US foes such as Gaddafi and Assad were toppled. As this got out of hand, the US' Arab allies have increasingly turned back to the old Afghan strategy of funding some of the most extremist groups imaginable in order to get the job done, including new versions of Al-Qaeda.

In terms of references, this is by far one of the best sourced books on the subject to have ever appeared on the market. The main text of the book is 530 pages long, while the references run to a further 130 pages and there are probably several thousand in total. These include a mixture of archival documents (mainly British and American declassifications), leaked documents (many from the big batch of US State Dept diplomatic leaks around 2009-2012), and probably best of all a number of court mandated documents including some of former Sec of State Clinton's emails (not the recent Wikileak versions) and proceedings from a wide array of cases ranging from Saudi NGO funding to private sector contractor lawsuits and even the recent 9/11 victims' compensation lawsuit. There are also a number of interviews, some anonymous given the circumstances, but some are named in full too. The book makes extensive use of historical newspaper archives in different languages (French, Arabic, Serbian, etc) and includes references to many pieces that are now only available as hardcopy, if you can still find them. There are TV interviews too, most memorably from a former DIA chief who has claimed that between 2012 and 2014 the US 'wilfully' ignored the expansion of ISIS as it suited the interests of its regional Arab allies, most of which wanted to see an end to the Iran-allied governments in Damascus and Baghdad.

Unsurprisingly and to be expected there are already many reviews of this book online. The two that stand out for me so far, as they are the best researched and most balanced, are probably Steve Donoghue's essay for Christian Science Monitor ('Shadow Wars exposes underlying patterns behind Middle Eastern strife') and Robert Morris' essay over on Goodreads, who makes that point that many of the newspaper articles referenced in this book have long since disappeared down the memory hole, including even pieces in the LA Times, the Washington Post, and the crucial US News & World report on Saudi and Iran terror financing produced by David Kaplan and his team in 2003.

One area in which I thought the writer could have gone into a bit more detail would have been on Turkey's role, although he does cover the interesting court cases that point to Turkish intelligence's role in helping smuggle Qatari and other weapons across the Syrian border for ISIS and other groups. It would have been good to have covered the strange 'coup' that took place in summer 2016, but I suppose this took place after the book had already gone to press. ( )