![]() ![]() ![]() Churchill did some of that carving with an eye to the old divide-and-conquer strategy: distribute the Kurds across several states, he seems to have thought, and they would make no trouble let national lines slice through ethnic ones, and the residents of Iraq (and Palestine, for that matter) would be so busy squabbling with one another that they would have no energy to cause trouble outside their borders. How did things get so messy in Mesopotamia? In part, because of Iraq’s founding at the hands Winston Churchill, “undoubtedly brilliant but utterly lacking in any kind of judgment.”Īs Britain’s colonial secretary in the early 1920s, Churchill was a principal in carving up the vast, now-fallen Ottoman Empire-which, Catherwood (History/Cambridge Univ.) suggests, sided with Germany in WWI after Churchill, then naval secretary, had requisitioned for his own fleet heavy warships due by contract to the Ottoman navy. ![]()
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