Unhappy birthday, Sikes-Picot

A hundred years ago today diplomats Sir Mark Sykes of England and Francois Georges-Picot of France finished carving up the map of the crumbling Ottoman Empire in the Middle East to guarantee the West's colonial interests in the black gold flowing underneath. They never envisioned their infamous Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 16, 1916, would keep the red stuff - blood - flowing a century on as well as the oil. But here we are, futilely blasting away at imagined enemies known as the Islamic State to prevent the inevitable redrawing of the artificial boundaries that put disparate and waring peoples in the same artificial country, such as Iraq and Syria.  From the rise of Nasserism in Egypt and Baathism in Iraq after WWII, the degradation of Sikes-Picot has been relentless. Little did the Bush administration fools promoting criminal war in Iraq realize they were lighting a fire under the religious and cultural sects to seek their own space to dominate their own people. Little did the fools in the Obama administration realize their criminal support of regime change in Syria would fuel hundreds of thousands of dead in the ghastly civil war that has sent millions fleeing to the West for safety. ISIS Caliph Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi put it bluntly: "This blessed advance (ISIS gains in 2014) will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sikes-Picot conspiracy."  

We didn't learn about Sikes-Picot in school because the false and self-serving narrative our historians dreamed up to propagandize us kids about the righteousness of every senseless American war, erased it from The American Story. But turn on the equally false and self-serving narrative about our current senseless war on cable news and you'll see the its daily bombings and fleeing refugees.    

None of us today may see an end to the Sikes-Picot fantasy map. The battle to obliterate it could still be raging a hundred years from today. Sikes-Picot at a hundred: An unhappy birthday, indeed.