Mirror of the Arab World
Mirror of the Arab World: Lebanon in Conflict
by Sandra Mackey
The villains of the postcolonial world are the mapmakers, and Sandra Mackey doesn’t entirely spare them. About one-fifth of the way into her strongly detailed but not sprawling story of Lebanon’s role in the Arab world, she remembers the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, when Iraq’s King Faisal and the famed Lawrence of Arabia made a brief plea for an Arab state, which went ignored: “British and French mapmakers were already huddled behind closed doors drawing the boundaries of what would …
