Foreign Affairs

the then Ottoman controlled Middle East by outside powers. The old worn out "Empires" of the British and French and then the US tossed into that mix along the way. All of them lying to everyone, backstabbing each other and treating what existed there for centuries as being nothing more than some loose groups of people riding camels and so could just be roped off to this area or that by drawing borders in the typical European way. Carving off hunks for themselves and failing to understand or care in the least about anything while they always held the belief that they would run the Middle East like they did everything else. At the point of a gun while they sucked out the resources and value they wanted. As they had done everywhere on the globe they had ever gone. Kings and peasants business model.

So here we are now and the modern day version of The Crusades has been going now for quite awhile and has carried names like "Arab Spring" etc. So we go into countries like Iraq, Lebanon and Syria and we decide who the "good ones" are and who the "bad ones" are all the while acting in ignorance about the region, the people there and there history. For most of the West they think of it as "beginning" around the time of T.E. Lawrence if that. It is uniquely European/Western culture arrogance to adopt the attitude that every time an election is held in a Western country and a new leader is sworn in that other countries should give the incoming leaders a "new chance" and not hold over 100 years of constant lies against them. That belief may apply in Western culture but it is folly to think we can force that on groups who are from cultures that remember dishonesty in bargaining for centuries and hold those memories.

So we may end up with what was once Syria being a much smaller footprint on the globe and perhaps the pieces carved off will be a Kurdish region, a Turkish region and an Israeli region but none of it will be anything less than more lies and more forcefully drawing lines in the sand using a pen with ignorant ink.