In response to Charlie

In response to this post by Charlie.  

Charlie’s post on the Peril of Tribes is exactly what made the Sykes-Picot agreement one of the most inflammatory agreements of all-time.  I mentioned it in one of my earlier posts, but European misunderstandings of the Middle East are not more apparent then the land divisions created by the British and the French.  This problem stems from the European arrogance that had driven European imperialism, along with many other things, in Africa and all over the world.  The Europeans go in not accounting for the existing cultures or societal arrangements and impose their will on their victims.  They only had the ability to do this because of their military dominance, which holds true of the post WWI situation in the Middle East.  Britain and France had just proved to the world that they had the ability to defeat the greatest power in the continent, an important fact when it comes to the idea of revolt.  All this goes to your head, and the Europeans basically ignored the actual Middle East when it approached their land divisions.  An interesting point about the Perils of the Tribes is the fact that poorly designed land divisions not only hurt the Europeans in the sense that people were angry at them, but it also opened the Pandora’s box of issues within the Middle East itself.  Tribes were not only looking for a way out from European control, which had been put upon them after false promises, but also took up issues with surrounding Middle Eastern enemies.  This made the Middle East even more of a difficult place to control, and has basically gone unresolved.