Are you confused by what is going on in the Middle East?
We support the Iraqi government in the fight against ISIS.
We don’t like ISIS, but ISIS is supported by Saudi Arabia who we do like.
We don’t like Assad in Syria. We support the fight against him, but ISIS is also fighting against him.
We don’t like Iran, but Iran supports the Iraqi government in its fight against ISIS.
And we like Turkey but Turkey is bombing the Kurds in Northern Iraq who are fighting ISIS.
And although the present problems started with the invasion of Iraq, the mess actually goes back almost a century, to the arbitrary carve up of the Middle East after WWl.
Behind the scenes, imperial politics were at work. In 1915 and 1916, Sir Mark Sykes, a key British adviser on the Middle East, and French diplomat François Georges Picot secretly negotiated apportioning the region after the war. Under terms of the resulting Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916, Britain was to control Mesopotamia, Transjordan (Jordan), and Palestine. The French would rule Lebanon, Syria, and Cilicia, while the Russians would receive Kurdish and Armenian lands to the northeast. An international body would govern Jerusalem. Arabia was, in the words of historian David Murphy, to receive only “a certain level of independence.”
Naturally, this deal was not revealed to the Arabs. But in November 1917, the Arabs found other cause for concern in a letter from Lord Arthur James Balfour, Britain’s foreign secretary, to Lord Lionel Walter Rothschild, a leader of the Zionist Federation, which was published in the Times of London.
What became known as the Balfour Declaration stated: “His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people…it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine.”
In the words of historians Arthur Goldschmidt and Lawrence Davidson, “the British government would control Palestine after the war with a commitment to build the Jewish national home there,” while somehow protecting the rights of the “93 percent of [Palestine’s] inhabitants, Muslim and Christian, who spoke Arabic and dreaded being cut off from other Arabs.”
Moreover, in the 1918 Declaration to the Seven (a document Henry McMahon created in response to demands by a group of prominent Syrian nationalists), the British agreed that Arabs should govern lands that had been free before the war as well as lands they had liberated, and that the government “would be based principally on consent of those governed.”
Thus, the great powers, particularly Britain, were making contradictory promises to their erstwhile allies and surreptitiously carving up lands they had not even conquered—deals that went against the promises McMahon made to Hussein in their 1915–1916 correspondence.
http://www.historynet.com/creating-chaos-lawrence-of-arabia-and-the-1916-arab-revolt.htm
