When Iraq Went Wrong

Contrary to popular belief the problems in Iraq are not entirely to do an at once ambitious and blind American foreign policy. The challenges facing the current re-construction of Iraq are actually not the fault of George Bush at all.

In 1916, during the midst of World War I, the British and French secretly sliced up the Arabian provinces that were at that time under the control of the Ottoman Empire. The fact that the British completely neglected their promise to support an Arab State in exchange for an Arab revolt led by the Amir of Mecca against the Ottomans is one source of discontent that Arab peoples could hold with the two former imperial powers. But, something more misguided lies at the bottom of the division of the Arab territories.

Whereas the peoples of Greater Syria, what the agreement divided into the states of Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and (trans)Jordan, share a relatively common history, the provinces of Mosul, Basra, and Baghdad are ethnically, linguistically, and religiously very diverse. Instead of maintaining a larger Arab state of Greater Syria, the British and French opposed the formation of an independent, unified state in favor of randomly dividing the region into imperially controlled mandates. The division of Greater Syria should have been the post-Ottoman strategy for what became Iraq. Our current situation too often glaringly reveals why this is so.

So, it is not in fact George Bush who has caused the wide spread division in Iraq- not all of it anyway. But, American foreign policy can learn a valuable lesson from the ill-fated Sykes-Picot agreement that set the stage for a tumultuous Middle East. The random (re)shaping of a region by an outside force, unless done with great tact, often leads to an outcome that is quite obviously the work of those without adequate local knowledge.