Hey, Picot, You Have To Come See The Middle East Now

By Mark Sykes, British Diplomat

François? You have to see this, François. Look at the areas of the former Ottoman Empire in 2016. Look at the countries we essentially created with a swipe of the pen a hundred years ago. You see them, François? This didn’t turn out exactly as we planned, did it, mon ami?

We were so naïve, you and I. Our European arrogance was to be expected, of course; we’ve been at the top of civilization’s heap for centuries. It was easy to draw few lines on a map and say, “OK, you chaps take what’s east of the Jordan, we’ll take the west, and here’s a nice straight line through the Arabian Desert to demarcate some of the territory.” Then we divided things up, pretended to care about the Russians, and voilà! Who cares what any of the local savages thought, or what history had to say?

Well, as you can see, my good man Picot, we were absolute twits. Oh, our artifice lasted for decades, but only because there were strongmen with the will and brutality to shunt tribal loyalties aside. But one look at Syria, Iraq, and Yemen will tell you we underestimated how important those tribal divisions would become. We thought we could decide on borders and count on an emerging national identity to make tribal divisions recede. How prescient we weren’t.

The irony is, François, you and I were acutely aware of how different to our own European sensibilities the region was, and, it turns out, remains. I remember arguing vociferously that the notion of a democratic model of government was ill-suited to the Arab mentality. The ensuing years have proved that perception right, I say with no small amount of satisfaction, but raises the obvious question: what made us think the states of the Middle East would be any better suited to a unified national identity than to democracy? Such a fool I was, thinking we could ignore or undo thousands of years of often-deadly rivalries.

Hmm. That’s interesting. François, do you see this “Israel” on the map? Is that what became of Lord Balfour’s declaration? Fascinating, fascinating. Must have been quite a peaceful – what’s that you say?

Six MILLION? Good God, Picot. And I thought the FIRST World War was a debacle. Maybe we Europeans aren’t much more capable at democracy than the inhabitants of the former Ottoman Empire. So it would appear from this “European Union” arrangement they’ve got going now…