What poppycock!You conveniently overlook historic western involement in the mid east.
If anything ...its our frankenstein.... first dismembered then sew back together in a hidious paradoy of ourselves.
What are you talking about? Do you even know?
The West could have dismembered the Ottoman Empire in 1800. Napolean showed that to everybody. He destroyed the Egyptian army, his fleet sailed at will until Lord Nelson came from England to kick him out again. The Arabs were helpless and shocked by their helplessness.
After 1815, England, Prussia and Russia had a sort of gentleman's agreement NOT to knock over the tottering Ottoman Empire. They decided they did not want the dislocation and fighting between the European powers that would ensue. Ottoman fighting had almost ceased to be a consideration.
Then in WWI, the Sultinate collapsed and the Turks decided to join the war on Germany's side. By the end of the war the Ottoman Empire had collapsed for good, and England and France were left filling a power vacuum. It's all well and good to say like Lawrence of Arabia, that the Arabs should rule themselves, but the Arabs hadn't ruled themselves for centuries and hadn't a clue how to go about creating a state.
The Arab and Turkish world had the entire 19th century to figure out how to catch up to the west. They failed miserably, with the exception of Attaturk in Turkey. All they managed to do was import arms. They did not manage to develop industry, rails (only the Brits built them), universities, a political culture that would support a state, or the other infrastructure of a modern state.
Now they whine about all they suffered under colonialism, which they only had about 30 years of, very little and very late, more to pick up the broken pieces of the Ottoman Empire than to really make a colony, with the exception of the French in Lebanon and Algeria. At any rate, the Arabs have all been independent for 50 or 60 years by now, so this is getting really old. |
