BF2S Forums DAST Chat

Last edited by uziq (2021-05-02 06:09:05)

“The [British] Cabinet raised the Arabs to fight for us by definite promises of self-government afterwards…. It was evident from the beginning that if we won the war these promises would be dead paper, and had I been an honest adviser of the Arabs I would have advised them to go home and not risk their lives fighting for such stuff.”

-T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom, 1926

Lawrence himself presented a proposed map of the Middle East to the British cabinet. Deborah Amos noted on NPR’s All Things Considered that Lawrence “strove to recognize tribal patterns and commercial routes” and tried to take “into account local Arab sensibilities rather than the European colonial considerations that were dominant at the time.”

Ultimately, the British chose a different, particularly colonial method of mapmaking: one literally drawn with a ruler.

Straight Lines for a Crooked World

In 1916, Sir Mark Sykes, operating on Britain’s behalf, and Francois Georges-Picot, France’s representative, drew a new map for the region. Syria and Lebanon would fall under French influence, while Britain took much of Iraq and Palestine.

This was, to put it generously, shortsighted. The Arabs felt betrayed and were understandably embittered. Soon enough Britain and France saw their spheres of influences slip away.

Beyond this, the new national borders ensured future tensions and outright violence, as can be seen by examining the northern region of a place that has received a great deal of American attention in recent decades.

“F—-d Over in a Major Way”

A writer and editor for publications including LIFE and Epicurious, Michael Y. Park traveled throughout Kurdistan in 2012. (His brother had previously served near the region with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers.) If you look at a map you won’t see Kurdistan—which lies in northern Iraq and the surrounding region—but you’ll certainly hear about it if you go there.

“People would talk about Kurdistan as opposed to Iraqi Kurdistan or Turkish Kurdistan or Syrian Kurdistan,” Park told RCL. “They talk about Kurdistan as one region.”

Much of Kurdistan is located in Iraq. The people are Kurds, but also Iraqi. How did they view that relationship?

“There was no relationship between Kurdistan and Iraq,” Park said simply.

Military force had kept the Kurdish region a part of Iraq. One of the places Park visited was Halabja, site of a chemical attack by Saddam Hussein on the Kurds: “There’s a big memorial to the victims.” On March 16, 1988, bombs containing mustard gas were dropped, killing as many as 5,000 civilians.

Saddam remained unrepentant to the end. On trial in 2006 for this and other genocidal crimes that killed as many as 180,000 Kurds, he declared: “My message to the Iraqi people is that they should not suffer from the guilt that they killed Kurds.”

The Kurds suffered thousands of deaths in the most depraved manner possible, in large part because two white, European men jammed them into a country with which they otherwise had no real connection. Park summed it up bluntly: “The Brits f—-d everyone over there in a major way.”

These particular atrocities didn’t have to be—Lawrence’s map had called for the Kurds getting their own homeland back in 1918.

Understandably, Lawrence’s reputation among the Arabs suffered when it became clear that his British compatriots wouldn’t keep their promises. Anderson wrote in Smithsonian that Sheik al-Atoun—a modern tribal leader in Jordan whose grandfather had fought alongside Lawrence—saw Lawrence as a man who ultimately served the British interest: “May I speak frankly? Maybe some of the very old ones still believe he was a friend of the Arabs, but almost everyone else, we know the truth. Even my grandfather, before he died, he believed he had been tricked.”

unnamednewbie13 wrote:

The "peace and love" can rather be a veneer, can't it. Too often it's conditional.

I wonder how many blogs and articles I could find of Christian families disinheriting their gay children, with the support of their church. Even find some where the poor kids are run out of their community.