article: When the Turkish Empire in the region disintegrated - consumed in the desert storms of the Great War - Britain and France were still, just about, major imperial powers. The blood of a lost generation of young men and the riches built up over centuries had been poured into a narrow strip of European land on the Western Front, but in the Old World there were no territorial spoils to be had. The Middle East though was different. With the Turks defeated in Jerusalem and Damascus and Sinai and Gaza there was a new world to be made. Britain, mandated by the League of Nations to govern the Holy Land, could set about honouring its commitment to the Jews of the world to build a national home for them in Palestine - probably not guessing that the issues surrounding the promise would remain a potent source of violence and discord a century later. It was a moment of cataclysmic global upheaval and new nation states were formed like new islands thrown up by an undersea volcanoes: Jordan and Iraq in the British sphere of influence and Syria and Lebanon in the French. In that age of empires no-one questioned the right of the Europeans to draw new borders to parcel up the old world - at least no-one the Europeans would have listened to. The Sykes-Picot agreement is a secret understanding concluded in May 1916, during World War I, between Great Britain and France, with the assent of Russia, for the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire. The agreement led to the division of Turkish-held Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Palestine into various French and British-administered areas. The agreement took its name from its negotiators, Sir Mark Sykes of Britain and Georges Picot of France. Some historians have pointed out that the agreement conflicted with pledges already given by the British to the Hashemite leader Husayn ibn Ali, Sharif of Mecca, who was about to lead an Arab revolt in the Hejaz against the Ottoman rulers on the understanding that the Arabs would eventually receive a much more important share of the territory won. Why border lines drawn with a ruler in WW1 still rock the Middle East In recent years of course those desert storms have begun to rise again and the structures built in that last great time of change are creaking in the wind. Syria is consumed in the fires of civil war and it is hard to see how it will emerge again as a unitary state. Next door in Lebanon - still traumatised by its own long years of conflict - a fragile tradition of co-operation between different religious communities just about hangs together. The Kurds, Sunnis and Shia gathered together in the single entity of Iraq by the British may ultimately choose in the future to separate. The old order lasted for almost exactly 100 years - one wonders if that is more or less time than its Anglo-French architects Sykes and Picot envisioned. There has been no global cataclysm on the scale of the Great War to
summary: The last time an old order collapsed in the Middle East it seemed obvious who should be invited to construct a new one.