Why should French President Jacques Chirac launch a crusade for regime change in Syria, after having successfully guided an international campaign to expel Syrian troops from Lebanon, and to reorganize the political landscape in Beirut? It administered Egypt, Cyprus, and Aden on the Red Sea, and had Afghanistan in its sphere of influence.The rest (except for the Arabian desert) was part of the Ottoman Empire, whose Sultan ruled over diverse ethnic populations, including Slavs, Arabs, Greeks, Armenians, and Jews.
The exposé embarrassed the British, since it contradicted their existing claims through After the war ended as planned, the terms were affirmed by the San Remo Conference of 1920 and ratified by the League of Nations in 1922. To be sure, guilt about the Sykes-Picot Accord may be haunting the West, in ways akin a return of the repressed–and of the forgotten figures of state who negotiated these territorial divisions in the wake of World War I, short-changing their inhabitants–but also provide tools of inciting opposition and to search for new forms of government. Arab military units, organized in militias or tribal groups, are fighting alongside their armies, as they did with Lawrence of Arabia, not against another empire, but against the Iraqi people who have risen up against the new imperialist yoke.Palestine remains in the throes of Arab-Israeli conflict, which the Great Powers have failed to solve.
"There is, indeed, no way to understand the implications of the "new direction" in French foreign policy, since 2002-03, without casting it against the historical backdrop of the infamous deals that colonialist France made in the early part of the 20th Century, with colonialist Britain, to conquer and divide large parts of the Middle East. Lloyd George had expressed his wish, as if in a letter to Santa Claus, that Jerusalem be taken by Christmas. The French, who endorsed the plan, would have their own marionettes in their designated spheres of influence.The mastermind of the operation was Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener, the butcher of Sudan (honored as Earl Kitchener of Khartoum), who served as the Proconsul in Egypt. In the deal, Mark Sykes for the British and François Georges-Picot for the French, with the Russians participating too, allocated much of the region, pending the minor detail of their defeating the Central Powers in World War I. The recent trend toward increasing Russian cooperation with Germany, around natural-gas marketing, and the weakening of the U.S.A. influence globally by the growing disgrace of the Bush-Cheney government, see London now working to usurp control over Southwest Asia and related developments, more than slightly away from the U.S. Cheney Administration, bringing old patterns of conflicts left over from early Twentieth-Century Europe into the fore again. In it he incorporated demands formulated in the so-called Damascus Protocol, a document drawn up by the Arab forces in Syria:In exchange for his cooperation which should lead to the control of the entire Arabian peninsula, Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and part of Cilicia, the Sherif Hussein forumalates the following demands:The independence of the Arabs, limited in a territory including in the north, Mersina Adana and limited by the 37th parallel up to the Persian border: the eastern border should be the Persian border up to the Gulf of Basra; in the south, the territory should border on the Indian Ocean, leaving aside Aden; in the west, it should be limited by the Red Sea and the Mediterranean up to Mersina.Great Britain should recognize the establishment of an Arab Caliphate and the abolition of the capitulations. The British line was that the Arabs would not accept Christian forces fighting for or with them. In a bloody exchange, they sent Feisal packing into exile, and established Syria as completely French, under French mandate.
Britain put an end to French expansionism at Fashoda in 1898. Thus the British Foreign Office invited France to send a delegate to London, to figure out what they could or could not offer Hussein. The agreement was negotiated in November 1915 by the French diplomat Georges-Picot and British Mark Sykes. Allenby explained to Picot, that the city would remain under British military administration, for some time. Clayton was in contact with various Arab exile groups and secret societies in Cairo, who intimated that other Arab leaders would be ready to rebel against the Sultan, if there were a viable leader.In a Sept. 6, 1914 memo to Kitchener, Clayton made the suggestion that Abdallah, one of Hussein's sons, be considered the British candidate.
As the military revolt continued to show its weaknesses, and some began to despair of its success, T.E. De l'accord Sykes-Picot est venue la déclaration Balfour, un an plus tard et, de la déclaration, est venu le conflit israélo-palestinien qui continue toujours. Although Sykes-Picot was intended to draw new borders according to sectarian lines, its simple straight lines also failed to take into account the actual tribal and ethnic configurations in a deeply divided region. The Arab Bureau worked out of Cairo, as part of the Intelligence Department, but ultimately under Kitchener's direction. "This was followed up by another dispatch issued by the Cairo office, to the effect that the Arabs of "Palestine, Syria, and Mesopotamia" would be given independence guaranteed by Britain, if they rose up against the Ottoman Empire.The overall idea embraced by Kitchener and his group, was that the Arabs should be encouraged to rebel against the Ottomans, and in exchange get "independence"â which meant different things to different people.
There it had its own sphere of influence to protect and, if possible, expand.