Grab your junk and settle back into that easy chair…..time for the professor’s history lesson of the week…..

I do a mental exercise on occasion…..I take a historical event and using known parameters I take the situation and apply a “what if” to it….like if Hitler would have been accepted to the school he applied to would he have become the maniacal toad?  It is just an exercise something I do to try and keep sharp…..I also did Castro…..what if he had been signed as a pitcher by the team he tried out for…..would he have then lead a revolution?  Like I said….it is a mental exercise I do……

From time to time I like to give my readers a little history, a perspective that they may not necessarily be exposed to in their daily lives…..in this way I hope that my reader will gain a little understanding of what is what and how with a minor adjustment things could have been different.

Today let’s talk about the Middle East and World War One……this was the days of Lawrence of Arabia and the Ottoman Empire who had sided with the bad guys of the day, Germany and Austro-Hungary……

At the end of the Great War the allies decided that they would slice up the Middle East among themselves, mostly France and the UK…..you see the allies had made a pact to do so and by passed the Arabs that they had made promises to and decided that they would not honor those promises (a great bunch, those allies)…..the document that sliced up the region was called the Sykes-Picot Agreement…..and the crap began.

Each country in today’s Middle East is an artificial entity whose borders were conceived by foreigners like Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence……they tried to placate the Arabs by given the kingship of Syria to Prince Faisal of the House of Saud….that did not take and the French removed him but the British made him the king of Iraq…..and as they say….the sh*t hit the fan and has been doing so every since.

To be honest the region was never as quiet as one would hope….there were revolts within the region when the Ottomans ruled….like the revolt in Lebanon in 1860 or the Druze Rebellion of 1909 to mention only a few…..the region has had its problems for a long time….but nothing like today.

With that short simplistic history lesson a question has been asked…..a “what if” if you will……..

If Turkey had remained neutral during WWI, would the Middle East be a better or worse place, or simply different?

Source: The Middle Eastern century that wasn’t – Al Jazeera English

History is a marvelous thing…….especially in the Middle East……the more you know the more you are confused.

And what better way to add to your confusion that an image of the geopolitical situation in the Middle East?

Class dismissed.