Sheldon Richman on the West’s Long Neocolonial History in the Middle East

Nearly
a century ago, after four bloody years of World War I, British
colonialists created the state of Iraq, complete with their
hand-picked monarch. Britain and France were authorized — or, more
precisely, authorized themselves — to create states in the Arab
world, despite the prior British promise of independence in return
for the Arabs’ revolt against the Ottoman Turks, which helped the
Allied powers defeat the Central powers. And so European countries
drew lines in the sand without much regard for the societies they
were constructing from disparate sectarian, tribal, and ethnic
populations. A hundred years later, writes Sheldon Richman, the
rise of the brutal Islamic State, with its unspeakable violence
against innocents, is an appalling but unsurprising outcome of
the last 100 years, including seven decades of neocolonialist
American intervention. 

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