The Agreement That Did Not Draw the Borders

Mark Sykes told the British cabinet in 1915 that he wanted to draw a line from the e in Acre to the last k in Kirkuk. The remark is genuine, it is quoted everywhere, and it is the reason a particular story about the Middle East is almost impossible to dislodge.

The story goes: two European diplomats, Sykes for Britain and François Georges-Picot for France, sat down in 1916 with a map and a ruler and invented the countries of the Middle East, and the arbitrary lines they drew are why the region has not worked since.

It is a good story. It is also not what the agreement did.

Sykes-Picot divided the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire into zones. A blue zone of direct French control, a red zone of direct British control, areas A and B where each would have influence over an Arab state or confederation, and an international zone around Jerusalem. It was a secret understanding between two governments about who would be in charge where, after a war neither had yet won.

Compare it with a modern map and the correspondence is poor. Mosul is in the French zone. Palestine is largely international. The borders of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon and Jordan as they exist are not the lines of 1916.

Those borders came later, and they came piecemeal. The mandates, allocated in 1920 and 1922, rearranged the zones substantially. Mosul moved. Transjordan was separated from Palestine administratively. The Turkish republic fought and negotiated its southern frontier, settled in 1926. Oil concession boundaries shaped the Iraq-Kuwait and Iraq-Saudi lines. Kurdish statehood was promised at Sèvres in 1920 and dropped at Lausanne in 1923.

So: not a ruler, and not an afternoon. A twenty-year sequence of separate decisions by different people in different cities.

Now the part that matters, which is why getting this right is not a defence of anybody.

If one bad map had caused the trouble, the trouble would be an accident. Two tired men, poor information, a hurried line, and a century of consequences nobody intended. That is almost a sympathetic account.

What actually happened is worse. Each of those later decisions was taken by officials who had heard the local objections, read the local petitions, and in several cases received delegations in person. The Kurdish question was argued in detail at Lausanne and decided against. The inclusion of Mosul in Iraq was contested with evidence. The separation of Lebanon from Syria had identifiable advocates and identifiable opponents, and both were heard.

Blaming 1916 is therefore a way of making the whole thing prehistoric and anonymous, which protects everybody who made a documented choice afterwards.

It is worth asking why the myth is so popular with people who agree on nothing else.

Arab nationalists used it because it located the region's problems in foreign interference rather than in domestic politics. Islamic State used it explicitly, filming bulldozers at the Iraq-Syria frontier in 2014 and announcing the end of Sykes-Picot, because a line imposed by crusaders is a better enemy than a line negotiated by Arab governments. And Western commentators like it because it is one dated cause with two named men, which fits an article.

A century-long process with dozens of participants and no anniversary fits nothing at all, which is exactly why it is the version worth learning.