6 ms·

I have to refer back to these long traditional rivals when I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders and becoming a brothe

by mc32 5y ago

I have to refer back to these long traditional rivals when I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders and becoming a brotherhood of man and then at the same time rejecting homogenization of culture. You can’t eat your cake and have it. These are two historic rivals. Maybe with the right governments they can work out deals like we work out with Canada and Mexico with regard to shared resources —but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt.

bingohbangoh 5y ago
"...but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt." Are Kurds treated better within Iran? My understanding is that they're a pariah everywhere in the Middle East
- mc32 5y ago
  They’re treated poorly in all three major countries there, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The brits should have carved out a country for them, for they are different enough to deserve their own self determination. If we didn’t have Turkey in NATO and hadn’t messed with Iraq we could have helped the formation of Kurdistan, but there’s no guarantee these three wouldn’t have steamrolled them to prevent potential fragmentation from other internal out groups. Unfortunately in the 1800s as other geographies fought wars to rid differences to achieve unification, things were too tribal to achieve that there. I guess the idea of Mesopotamia was too distant to serve as a glue for all the different interests.
  - jgeada 5y ago
    The Brits intentionally created unstable countries so that none could rival them in power in a region. All those countries were too busy dealing with internal strife to become regional competitors to England.
    - goohle 5y ago
      Do you know a way to intentionally create a stable country? Can you share this secret knowledge with us, please?
      - technothrasher 5y ago
        Failing to intentionally create a stable country and intentionally creating an unstable country are two different things.
        NotSammyHagar 5y ago
        Great point. A core cause of the endless wars in the middle east is people pushed into the truly evil British model of a minority in power over a weaker but larger other party. I get that there are lots of existing problems but doing this in countries on purpose is unforgivable. My own country (the us) fucks things up too of course - Afghanistan being the latest example, but we have our own long list of shame (Iraq, many countries in south and central America...).
        goohle 5y ago
        Lot of countries are created by ruling minorities, and then their rulers are overthrown. Just look at the history of almost every country in western world.
    - mygoodaccount 5y ago
      Source? I agree the borders were a failure, but I can't find anything close to what you're saying in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
      - redis_mlc 5y ago
        The British were able to play European powers against each other for centuries, so expect the same elsewhere.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    > Unfortunately in the 1800s as other geographies fought wars to rid differences to achieve unification, things were too tribal to achieve that there. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you expand?
duxup 5y ago
I recall an American military officer describing his trying to understand the local human conflicts and alliances while serving in Iraq. Region to region and even village to village (often right next to each other) he struggled to understand / balance it all. People have their reasons, but ultimately they have to feel safe / want to work together too. That's not a justification of any given military action but more about the complexities in some regions. We think in terms of nations, some places there are so many other layers... sometimes it's not even just nation vs nation politics playing out.
- throwaway59553 5y ago
  Westerners fail to understand tribalism, or any clannish attitudes. Even the so called "experts" in charge are pretty much clueless about it.
  - duxup 5y ago
    The ability to delegate decisions up and down through layers of the government and mostly ... not involve all the infighting that COULD come from it is pretty amazing IMO. Once in a while some folks in my area get all worked up about how some regional transportation authority made some decision but man ... we do not need each city and layer of gov making their own call / fighting about it. And that's without any kinda 'serious' tribal factors at play.
  - mc32 5y ago
    It still exists in the form of different “street gangs” and “the mob” families. They just don’t happen to run regions outlined by political boundaries. These are people who otherwise are very much alike but will inflict violence upon the other as necessary.
    - philwelch 5y ago
      Gangs can be every bit as territorial as formal polities.
  - secondcoming 5y ago
tzs 5y ago
I'd have expected them to be somewhat natural allies. They are the two largest majority Shiite countries in the world by a large margin. Worldwide only around 10% of Muslims are Shiite. Around 90% are Sunni. My understanding is that Shiite vs Sunni is a big deal in Islam, akin to the Protestant vs Catholic split in Christianity. But not the Protestant vs Catholic split as it is now, but more like it was shortly after it happened when it was taken a lot more seriously.
- klyrs 5y ago
  Water rights are a zero-sum game. I'm not sure that humans can be 'natural allies,' but the deck is stacked to make natural enemies when resources get slim...
  - NortySpock 5y ago
    Coast-side desalination seems like it would reduce this issue to be less critical of a zero-sum game.
    - mc32 5y ago
      That alleviates drinking water. These are agrarian communities. It’s like proposing desal to irrigate the San Joaquin valley —expensive!
    - lazide 5y ago
      Cost makes it still essentially zero sum, unless we get actual cheap fusion off the ground anyway. Very few countries can afford to use water from desalination at any scale, and even for them the cost of it is an order of magnitude or more than using existing runoff - when the runoff exists.
- mc32 5y ago
  There is no such thing as a natural ally based on faith. We have examples of the same thing in Europe as powers attempted to control resources (arable land in agrarian times). They may ally against a common enemy or due to pacts which were broken from time to time. Germany and Japan allied and really had little in common beside a desire to control geography for the sake of resource extraction.
throwaway59553 5y ago
> I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders and becoming a brotherhood of man and then at the same time rejecting homogenization of culture. Everyone who is against borders is openly in favour of homogenization. Specially when we talk about western countries. In the West, for some reason we need diversity. In the rest of the world diversity isn't needed and preserving the homogenity of the natives is paramount. I'm sure there aren't any hidden intentions behind it tho.
dotcommand 5y ago
> I have to refer back to these long traditional rivals Long traditional rivals? Iran and iraq are relatively new 20th century european colonial creations. Iran was carved out by the british/russians and Iraq was arbitrarily drawn out on a map by the british and french. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement > when I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders and becoming a brotherhood of man and then at the same time rejecting homogenization of culture Even with homogenous cultures, no guarantee of "brotherhood of man". Look at north and south korea. The elites will always find something to fight over. > Maybe with the right governments they can work out deals like we work out with Canada and Mexico with regard to shared resources It's not the "right" governments. It's called an insurmountable power differential. Canada and mexico simple have to do what they are told. We've fought wars against canada( british empire ) and mexico and taken significant amount of territory from both to ensure that these countries "share their resources" as told. The only way this power dynamic would change if an outside force with enough power helps either canada or mexico challenge the US. I don't see that happening anytime soon. > but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt. The kurds are the outgroup everywhere - turkey, iraq, iran, etc. The kurds have been used by the US/Europe as a separatist thorn in the side of many middle east nations to keep them unstable. Similar to what we are trying to do with the uyghurs in china, rohingya in myanmar, the balochs in pakistan, india, africa, etc. One of the benefits of having drawn out nations in africa is that the nations are full of different ethnic groups that can be pit against each other making these african nations easier to control. Not sure it was the original intent, but that's where we are right now.
- jcranmer 5y ago
  > Long traditional rivals? Iran and iraq are relatively new 20th century european colonial creations. Iran was carved out by the british/russians and Iraq was arbitrarily drawn out on a map by the british and french. This is completely false when you're talking about Iran. An Iranian state has existed in more or less continuous form as an independent polity since the breakup of the Timurid Empire in ~1500. The three-way contest between the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, and Russia is a staple of the region's politics for virtually the entirety of the Early Modern period.
thomasahle 5y ago
> I have to refer back to these long traditional rivals when I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders This is exactly the kind of problems borders create. Dam conflicts like this are nearly always across borders, not within border free regions like a country. In the past city states might have had conflicts like this, but that's why we created larger governing regions to regulate resources more fairly. Today our problems are again becoming too large for our borders and we need to expand them.
- throwthere 5y ago
  > Dam conflicts like this are nearly always across borders, not within border free regions like a country. I don't think your assumption is true. Even just perusing http://www.worldwater.org/conflict/list/ http://www.worldwater.org/conflict/list/ I see plenty of intra-country conflicts. Heck, here's one in a first-world country 2 years ago-- https://www.watereducationcolorado.org/fresh-water-news/eco-vandals-shut-down-high-country-water-diversions-bound-for-the-front-range-causing-1-million-in-damage/ https://www.watereducationcolorado.org/fresh-water-news/eco-...
  - Kye 5y ago
    Yep. North and south Georgia (the state) get into fights over damming every time there's a drought. And this one between Georgia, Alabama, and Florida is ongoing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute
- philwelch 5y ago
  Borders are a symptom, not a cause. Yugoslavia was a unified country without internal borders. The lack of internal borders did not prevent ethnic warfare. The United Kingdom was a unified country without internal borders. The lack of internal borders did not prevent a century of violent conflict over the island of Ireland.
bb101 5y ago
It strikes me as an example of Sigmund Freud's "Narcissism of Small Differences"[1]: "The thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...
- Mordisquitos 5y ago
  And by sheer coincidence, I very recently learnt on a HN linked article on big-endian and little-endianness that these terms come from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift [0], where Lilliput and Blefuscu wage war over which end should be cracked first when eating a hard-boiled egg: > The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown". The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu. This seems like a perfect fictional example of the Narcissism of Small Differences, published more than a century before the birth of Sigmund Freud! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#Satirical_interpretations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#Satirica... PS: It's also a great opportunity for us to start a feud as to who should be credited with the idea, whether Freud or Swift. I declare myself Swiftian! :-D
  - cageface 5y ago
    This is brilliant. Thanks for the reference!
  - OJFord 5y ago
    Ironic really, to name such a thing after a fictional pointless war!
throwaway894345 5y ago
> These are two historic rivals. Maybe with the right governments they can work out deals like we work out with Canada and Mexico with regard to shared resources —but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt. I've been thinking a lot about this problem generically, and I'm wondering if there's more formally published elsewhere. How well do multicultural polities work compared to more homogeneous polities (polities that crudely map to an ethnic group)? I'm not strongly for or against any particular position, but it seems like there are efficiencies to more homogeneous entities and I believe one of the criticisms of the colonization of the Middle East (and the purported explanation for why there is so much conflict in the Middle East) was that the European powers drew borders (deliberately, IIRC) that were multicultural rather than ethnic. If this is true, it seems like it would contradict the multicultural thesis, but it seems to be espoused most frequently by multiculturalists. Does anyone know of anyone who has written about this more comprehensively? EDIT: This comment downthread seems related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28234364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28234364
- sudosysgen 5y ago
  The Islamic empire was not ethnic and spanned those cultures yet worked pretty well.
  - dustypotato 5y ago
    The caliphates fragmented pretty soon due to revolts.
- dudhdhdrb 5y ago
  China seems like the poster child of how effective pursuing homogeny can be. Also, you are referring to the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the partitioning of the Ottoman empire.

by mc32 5y ago

bingohbangoh 5y ago

"...but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt." Are Kurds treated better within Iran? My understanding is that they're a pariah everywhere in the Middle East

mc32 5y ago
They’re treated poorly in all three major countries there, Iran, Iraq and Turkey. The brits should have carved out a country for them, for they are different enough to deserve their own self determination. If we didn’t have Turkey in NATO and hadn’t messed with Iraq we could have helped the formation of Kurdistan, but there’s no guarantee these three wouldn’t have steamrolled them to prevent potential fragmentation from other internal out groups. Unfortunately in the 1800s as other geographies fought wars to rid differences to achieve unification, things were too tribal to achieve that there. I guess the idea of Mesopotamia was too distant to serve as a glue for all the different interests.
- jgeada 5y ago
  The Brits intentionally created unstable countries so that none could rival them in power in a region. All those countries were too busy dealing with internal strife to become regional competitors to England.
  - goohle 5y ago
    Do you know a way to intentionally create a stable country? Can you share this secret knowledge with us, please?
    - technothrasher 5y ago
      Failing to intentionally create a stable country and intentionally creating an unstable country are two different things.
      - NotSammyHagar 5y ago
        Great point. A core cause of the endless wars in the middle east is people pushed into the truly evil British model of a minority in power over a weaker but larger other party. I get that there are lots of existing problems but doing this in countries on purpose is unforgivable. My own country (the us) fucks things up too of course - Afghanistan being the latest example, but we have our own long list of shame (Iraq, many countries in south and central America...).
        goohle 5y ago
        Lot of countries are created by ruling minorities, and then their rulers are overthrown. Just look at the history of almost every country in western world.
  - mygoodaccount 5y ago
    Source? I agree the borders were a failure, but I can't find anything close to what you're saying in: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      The British were able to play European powers against each other for centuries, so expect the same elsewhere.
- philwelch 5y ago
  > Unfortunately in the 1800s as other geographies fought wars to rid differences to achieve unification, things were too tribal to achieve that there. I'm not sure what you mean by this. Can you expand?

duxup 5y ago

I recall an American military officer describing his trying to understand the local human conflicts and alliances while serving in Iraq. Region to region and even village to village (often right next to each other) he struggled to understand / balance it all. People have their reasons, but ultimately they have to feel safe / want to work together too. That's not a justification of any given military action but more about the complexities in some regions. We think in terms of nations, some places there are so many other layers... sometimes it's not even just nation vs nation politics playing out.

throwaway59553 5y ago
Westerners fail to understand tribalism, or any clannish attitudes. Even the so called "experts" in charge are pretty much clueless about it.
- duxup 5y ago
  The ability to delegate decisions up and down through layers of the government and mostly ... not involve all the infighting that COULD come from it is pretty amazing IMO. Once in a while some folks in my area get all worked up about how some regional transportation authority made some decision but man ... we do not need each city and layer of gov making their own call / fighting about it. And that's without any kinda 'serious' tribal factors at play.
- mc32 5y ago
  It still exists in the form of different “street gangs” and “the mob” families. They just don’t happen to run regions outlined by political boundaries. These are people who otherwise are very much alike but will inflict violence upon the other as necessary.
  - philwelch 5y ago
    Gangs can be every bit as territorial as formal polities.
- secondcoming 5y ago

tzs 5y ago

I'd have expected them to be somewhat natural allies. They are the two largest majority Shiite countries in the world by a large margin. Worldwide only around 10% of Muslims are Shiite. Around 90% are Sunni. My understanding is that Shiite vs Sunni is a big deal in Islam, akin to the Protestant vs Catholic split in Christianity. But not the Protestant vs Catholic split as it is now, but more like it was shortly after it happened when it was taken a lot more seriously.

klyrs 5y ago
Water rights are a zero-sum game. I'm not sure that humans can be 'natural allies,' but the deck is stacked to make natural enemies when resources get slim...
- NortySpock 5y ago
  Coast-side desalination seems like it would reduce this issue to be less critical of a zero-sum game.
  - mc32 5y ago
    That alleviates drinking water. These are agrarian communities. It’s like proposing desal to irrigate the San Joaquin valley —expensive!
  - lazide 5y ago
    Cost makes it still essentially zero sum, unless we get actual cheap fusion off the ground anyway. Very few countries can afford to use water from desalination at any scale, and even for them the cost of it is an order of magnitude or more than using existing runoff - when the runoff exists.
mc32 5y ago
There is no such thing as a natural ally based on faith. We have examples of the same thing in Europe as powers attempted to control resources (arable land in agrarian times). They may ally against a common enemy or due to pacts which were broken from time to time. Germany and Japan allied and really had little in common beside a desire to control geography for the sake of resource extraction.

throwaway59553 5y ago

> I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders and becoming a brotherhood of man and then at the same time rejecting homogenization of culture. Everyone who is against borders is openly in favour of homogenization. Specially when we talk about western countries. In the West, for some reason we need diversity. In the rest of the world diversity isn't needed and preserving the homogenity of the natives is paramount. I'm sure there aren't any hidden intentions behind it tho.

dotcommand 5y ago

> I have to refer back to these long traditional rivals Long traditional rivals? Iran and iraq are relatively new 20th century european colonial creations. Iran was carved out by the british/russians and Iraq was arbitrarily drawn out on a map by the british and french. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement > when I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders and becoming a brotherhood of man and then at the same time rejecting homogenization of culture Even with homogenous cultures, no guarantee of "brotherhood of man". Look at north and south korea. The elites will always find something to fight over. > Maybe with the right governments they can work out deals like we work out with Canada and Mexico with regard to shared resources It's not the "right" governments. It's called an insurmountable power differential. Canada and mexico simple have to do what they are told. We've fought wars against canada( british empire ) and mexico and taken significant amount of territory from both to ensure that these countries "share their resources" as told. The only way this power dynamic would change if an outside force with enough power helps either canada or mexico challenge the US. I don't see that happening anytime soon. > but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt. The kurds are the outgroup everywhere - turkey, iraq, iran, etc. The kurds have been used by the US/Europe as a separatist thorn in the side of many middle east nations to keep them unstable. Similar to what we are trying to do with the uyghurs in china, rohingya in myanmar, the balochs in pakistan, india, africa, etc. One of the benefits of having drawn out nations in africa is that the nations are full of different ethnic groups that can be pit against each other making these african nations easier to control. Not sure it was the original intent, but that's where we are right now.

jcranmer 5y ago
> Long traditional rivals? Iran and iraq are relatively new 20th century european colonial creations. Iran was carved out by the british/russians and Iraq was arbitrarily drawn out on a map by the british and french. This is completely false when you're talking about Iran. An Iranian state has existed in more or less continuous form as an independent polity since the breakup of the Timurid Empire in ~1500. The three-way contest between the Ottomans, Safavid Persia, and Russia is a staple of the region's politics for virtually the entirety of the Early Modern period.

thomasahle 5y ago

> I have to refer back to these long traditional rivals when I read people waxing poetic about the prospect of erasing international borders This is exactly the kind of problems borders create. Dam conflicts like this are nearly always across borders, not within border free regions like a country. In the past city states might have had conflicts like this, but that's why we created larger governing regions to regulate resources more fairly. Today our problems are again becoming too large for our borders and we need to expand them.

throwthere 5y ago
> Dam conflicts like this are nearly always across borders, not within border free regions like a country. I don't think your assumption is true. Even just perusing http://www.worldwater.org/conflict/list/ http://www.worldwater.org/conflict/list/ I see plenty of intra-country conflicts. Heck, here's one in a first-world country 2 years ago-- https://www.watereducationcolorado.org/fresh-water-news/eco-vandals-shut-down-high-country-water-diversions-bound-for-the-front-range-causing-1-million-in-damage/ https://www.watereducationcolorado.org/fresh-water-news/eco-...
- Kye 5y ago
  Yep. North and south Georgia (the state) get into fights over damming every time there's a drought. And this one between Georgia, Alabama, and Florida is ongoing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tri-state_water_dispute
philwelch 5y ago
Borders are a symptom, not a cause. Yugoslavia was a unified country without internal borders. The lack of internal borders did not prevent ethnic warfare. The United Kingdom was a unified country without internal borders. The lack of internal borders did not prevent a century of violent conflict over the island of Ireland.

bb101 5y ago

It strikes me as an example of Sigmund Freud's "Narcissism of Small Differences"[1]: "The thesis that communities with adjoining territories and close relationships are especially likely to engage in feuds and mutual ridicule because of hypersensitivity to details of differentiation." [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_differences https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissism_of_small_difference...

Mordisquitos 5y ago
And by sheer coincidence, I very recently learnt on a HN linked article on big-endian and little-endianness that these terms come from Gulliver's Travels by Jonathan Swift [0], where Lilliput and Blefuscu wage war over which end should be cracked first when eating a hard-boiled egg: > The novel further describes an intra-Lilliputian quarrel over the practice of breaking eggs. Traditionally, Lilliputians broke boiled eggs on the larger end; a few generations ago, an Emperor of Lilliput, the Present Emperor's great-grandfather, had decreed that all eggs be broken on the smaller end after his son cut himself breaking the egg on the larger end. The differences between Big-Endians (those who broke their eggs at the larger end) and Little-Endians had given rise to "six rebellions ... wherein one Emperor lost his life, and another his crown". The Lilliputian religion says an egg should be broken on the convenient end, which is now interpreted by the Lilliputians as the smaller end. The Big-Endians gained favour in Blefuscu. This seems like a perfect fictional example of the Narcissism of Small Differences, published more than a century before the birth of Sigmund Freud! [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#Satirical_interpretations https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilliput_and_Blefuscu#Satirica... PS: It's also a great opportunity for us to start a feud as to who should be credited with the idea, whether Freud or Swift. I declare myself Swiftian! :-D
- cageface 5y ago
  This is brilliant. Thanks for the reference!
- OJFord 5y ago
  Ironic really, to name such a thing after a fictional pointless war!

throwaway894345 5y ago

> These are two historic rivals. Maybe with the right governments they can work out deals like we work out with Canada and Mexico with regard to shared resources —but I’m not holding my breath on this given the Kurds are kind of the out group within the Iraqi family and probably won’t get full support from the central govt. I've been thinking a lot about this problem generically, and I'm wondering if there's more formally published elsewhere. How well do multicultural polities work compared to more homogeneous polities (polities that crudely map to an ethnic group)? I'm not strongly for or against any particular position, but it seems like there are efficiencies to more homogeneous entities and I believe one of the criticisms of the colonization of the Middle East (and the purported explanation for why there is so much conflict in the Middle East) was that the European powers drew borders (deliberately, IIRC) that were multicultural rather than ethnic. If this is true, it seems like it would contradict the multicultural thesis, but it seems to be espoused most frequently by multiculturalists. Does anyone know of anyone who has written about this more comprehensively? EDIT: This comment downthread seems related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28234364 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28234364

sudosysgen 5y ago
The Islamic empire was not ethnic and spanned those cultures yet worked pretty well.
- dustypotato 5y ago
  The caliphates fragmented pretty soon due to revolts.
dudhdhdrb 5y ago
China seems like the poster child of how effective pursuing homogeny can be. Also, you are referring to the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the partitioning of the Ottoman empire.