An American, a Frenchman, and a Brit walk in and form ISIS. No joke. Retweet
By Perry Willis ![[3 Points - Politicians & War]](https://archive.downsizedc.org/blog-content/veterans-day-sidebar.png)
We’ve been reviewing the wisdom of U.S. wars and interventions. So far we’ve covered…
- Were early U.S. wars good or bad?
- Did Teddy Roosevelt co-found the Japanese empire?
- Did U.S. politicians choose the more evil side in World War 1?
- How U.S. politicians helped create the Soviet Union
- Did blundering U.S. politicians spark the rise of Nazi Germany
Now comes…
How U.S. intervention in WW1 aided the rise of radical Islam
When WW1 began, President Woodrow Wilson gave a speech admonishing the American people “to be neutral in thought as well as deed.” Sound advice. Wilson didn’t follow it. He favored Britain and France almost from the beginning, as Britain blockaded our trade with Germany. This meant that…
Americans funded and supplied Britain and France against Germany, long before German submarines started sinking our ships to compensate. Let’s recall who we were aiding.
- Great Britain was the largest empire in history
- Russia had conquered the second most territory
- France was the third largest empire
Germany was a gangster state too, having conquered a few colonies of its own. But it was nothing compared to Britain, France, and Russia. On top of that, Germany was a parliamentary monarchy, like Britain, with a federal system similar to the U.S. It was a very western state.
There was no obvious “clash of ideology” that required Wilson to choose sides against Germany. Let’s be clear…
There was no good side in WW1. But it’s pretty obvious that the U.S. was supporting the more evil set of gangsters. Let’s drive this point home by looking at what Britain, France and Russia were doing in the Islamic world in the decades prior to WW1…
- Britain conquered the Arabian Gulf chiefdoms (1820)
- France conquered Algeria (1830)
- Britain conquered Oman (1861)
- France conquered Tunisia (1881)
- Britain conquered Egypt (1882)
- Britain conquered Kuwait and then Sudan (1899)
All these conquests came at the expense of the Islamic Caliphate that ruled the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Russia fought eleven wars against the Ottoman Empire between 1568 and 1878. These wars were designed to seize access to the Mediterranean through the Turkish controlled Dardanelles. So it’s not surprising that the Ottoman Empire joined Germany and Austria-Hungary when WW1 began.
Now, ask yourself two questions as if you were a Muslim…
- How would I feel about Britain, France, and Russia?
- How would I feel about the U.S. giving victory to Britain and France?
The answers come pretty easy, right? You would hate Britain, France, Russia, and even the U.S. You might not seek future prospects for revenge, but you wouldn’t be surprised by or necessarily opposed to a neighbor who did so. Well…
The motivations for hatred and revenge were about to get much worse.
WW1 began in August 1914. By 1915, the British were negotiating with various Arab leaders for an alliance against the Ottoman Turks. The Arabs wanted a British commitment for a pan-Arab state. It would run from…
- the 37th parallel in the North (near the southern border of Turkey)
- to Iran and the Persian Gulf in the East
- the Mediterranean in the West
- the Arabian Sea in the South
Barring such a commitment the Arabs would fight on the side of their Islamic Turkish brethren against Britain, France, and Russia. The British accepted the Arabic proposal on October 24, 1915 with the limitation that the new Arab state would not include the Mediterranean coast of Syria.
With this agreement concluded British officer T.E. Lawrence joined the Arab forces and the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire began in June 1916. The story of that revolt is told in the classic movie, Lawrence of Arabia. Alas…
The Arabs would fight and die for promises that would not be kept.
Having made one agreement with the Arabs on October 24, 1915, the British then made a contrary agreement with the French on May 16, 1916. This second agreement lives in infamy as the Sykes-Picot Treaty, because of the “diplomats” who negotiated it — Mark Sykes for the British and Francois Georges-Picot for the French.
The Sykes-Picot Treaty was negotiated in secret, and for a good reason. It violated every commitment the British had made to the Arabs. It’s not for nothing that Britain gained the nickname Perfidious Albion. The two empires agreed to divide the lands promised to a pan-Arab state into five parts…
Region 1: The British would control an area extending from Baghdad to the Persian Gulf (including modern day Kuwait).
Region 2: The British would also have influence over a region covering what is now Northern Iraq, Jordan, and the Negev desert down to Sinai.
Region 3: The French would directly control Lebanon and the coastal part of Syria.
Region 4: The French would have influence over the Syrian desert east of Damascus.
Region 5: Palestine would be a supposed “international zone,” but it would really be controlled by Britain.
Sykes-Picot even gave parts of Turkey to Russia, Greece, and Italy. But…
The promised Arab state was reduced to the bottom part of the Arabian peninsula.
Oh what a blessing to future generations!
The Bolsheviks found a copy of the Sykes-Picot agreement when they seized Russian government offices in November 1917. They promptly revealed the secret treaty to the world. You would think this would have put the kibosh on the whole criminal enterprise, if not immediately then at least by the time of the 1919 Paris peace conference. After all…
- The U.S. had given victory to Britain and France
- The U.S. was by far the most powerful country negotiating the final peace settlement
- Woodrow Wilson had declared on January 8, 1918, in the very first point of his 14-point plan for the peace, that he wanted…
“Open covenants of peace, openly arrived at, after which there shall be no private international understandings of any kind, but diplomacy shall proceed always frankly and in the public view.”
The Sykes-Picot Treaty was the very opposite of that!
And yet, Wilson basically endorsed Sykes-Picot during the Paris peace talks. To cover the hypocrisy, he and his fellow gangsters adopted a euphemism. The captured Arab lands would not be called “colonies,” they would be called “mandates.”
Eventually, the regions created by Sykes-Picot would cease being mandates/colonies. They would become independent nations. But these nations were Frankenstein monsters. They contained unstable mixtures of Arabs, Persians, and Kurds — of Sunni and Shia. This instability led to a long succession of dictators, who held these unnatural states together by brute force. For the remainder of the 20th Century, Britain, France, Soviet Russia, and the United States would back these strongmen to contain angry Muslims in these territories.
What was the antidote to that for the oppressed citizens? For many religious minds, if things are going badly it must be because you’ve offended god. The normal cure for that is increased devotion, a.k.a., fundamentalism. Religious institutions also provide a good infrastructure for political resistance.
If you look for the origin of ISIS you will find it here — U.S. intervention in WW1 gave Sykes-Picot the force of law.
Thank you for being an ACTIVE DC Downsizer,
Perry Willis
Co-founder, Downsize DC
Co-creator, Zero Aggression Project
P.S. Previous articles in this series include…
- Were early U.S. wars good or bad? (covering the War of 1812, the Mexican War, the Spanish-American War, and the conquest of the Philippines)
- Did Teddy Roosevelt co-found the Japanese empire? (Covering TR’s betrayal of Korea)
- Did U.S. politicians choose the more evil side in Word War 1?
- How U.S. politicians helped create the Soviet Union
- Did blundering U.S. politicians spark the rise of Nazi Germany
PPS: Here’s a list of books I’ve consulted in this series. If you buy these books using the links below, Downsize DC will get credit we can use to expand our research library. Thank you for your interest and support.
The impact of WW1 on the Islamic world
Impact of U.S. policies on the rise of Nazi Germany
The Russian Revolution
World War 1
- The Illusion of Victory by Thomas Fleming
- World War I by Richard Maybury
- The Pity of War by Niall Ferguson
- Paris 1919 by Margaret MacMillan
- The Forgotten Depression by James Grant
The Spanish-American War, the conquest of the Philippines, and Teddy Roosevelt’s betrayal of Korea…
- Bully Boy by Jim Powell
- The Politics of War by Walter Karp
- The War Lovers by Evan Thomas
- Honor in the Dust by Gregg Jones
- The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley
The Mexican War