Most peoples and nations have their roots in ancient empires and their boundary disputes. Nowhere is that more true than the modern Middle East, whose quarrelsome nation states, Jewish and Moslem alike, are the result of the long, slow death of the Ottoman Empire and the hurried and contradictory division of its corpse by the British Empire and its allies in the period immediately following World War I.
An ally of Germany during the war, the 400-year-old empire had been dying slowly since defeats by Austrian and Venetian forces in the 17th Century. The creation of invading Turkish tribes who replaced earlier Moslem rulers in the 15th Century, its sway had extended from the Balkans to Egypt. Often through the centuries, Moslem invaders had threatened to spill beyond Spain, their last outpost, into the heart of Europe; in a often-quoted passage, the English historian Gibbon discussed the possibility of Englishmen studying Koranic theology in the colleges of Oxford if earlier encroaches had been successful (Pfaff 86).
Instead, in the period from 1918 to 1922, the British Empire, with some help from the French, was carving up the Turk, and the effect on the post-war world, the troubling new world that presented so many challenges for Europe and its empires, was beyond calculation.
In their weakness, the Ottomans had already effectively withdrawn from parts of their Empire. Egypt had been under European dominion since the Napoleonic invasion at the beginning of the 19th Century. Even though Napoleon had taken home his troops to defend his own empire, his inroads had opened the door to European domination of this ancient Mediterranean crossroads, and Egypt had been effectually under British occupation since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869. Ottoman territories in the Balkans had been recaptured by Austria-Hungary and other European powers. Even in Turkey itself, the absolute rule of Sultan Abdul al-Ahmid II had been en...