A Short History of Stupidity in the Middle East
28th June 2014
Taki is delightfully dyspeptic today.
The Sultan had wisely divided the Middle East along ethnic lines into provinces. The Anglo-French duo in 1916 proved as ignorant as George W. Bush was to be 87 years later. Had they never heard of the Sunni-Shia divide? The 1990s wars over Bosnia, Serbia and Kosovo, the Gulf War of 1991 and the disastrous Iraq war of 2003, as well as the Israeli-Palestinian tragedy, can all be traced directly to the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1920 and those two fools carving up the Middle East while their minds were obviously elsewhere. (Most likely trying to figure out whose family was older and richer.)
Winston Churchill doesn’t come out very well either. He actually created Iraq, or Mesopotamia as it was then called, and by the time he was thrown out of office in 1922 his folly had become Iraq as it is today. He created the artificial monarchy that ended so badly in 1958, thinking he was dealing with sleepy Bedouins who would genuflect in front of Faisal, whose family realm in Saudi Arabia had been usurped by some camel drivers who had never used an indoor loo.