americans often view of the modern middle east as a crucible of ancient religious feuds and o p s of dictators in recent years our leaders have insisted that the apparent here for these deficiencies was military invasion armed u occupation and the american directed reformulation of the countries of the middle east starting with iraq but no one really asked the people of the region what they wanted or desired nor what their history revealed about foreign interventions instead the united states announced that this was the american freedom agenda and that the road to peace in jerusalem ran through baghdad the palestine liberation organization in p while some claim victory as our forces withdraw from iraq world opinion views the american experience in iraq in the middle east as a disastrous failure nearly five thousand dead tens of thousands gravely wounded and t most americans are not extreme will jubal about most of the rest of the world united states is an island with two small much smaller much weaker countries it's only neighbors  it's always been since the very early period in its history immune to external aggression the war of eighteen twelve was the last time the united states was really seriously threatened until pearl harbor or until the advent of nuclear weapons  four hundred fifty years of its history nearly one hundred thirty or forty years of its history the united states was a country that grew up in isolation from the rest of the world in some extent this was self or deigned isolation the idea was that people came to the new world to escape the ills of the old world and this led to the most modern glut culture in props on earth people in the united states no fewer foreign languages and people almost anywhere else could in american elites they are remarkably ignorant of foreign languages  and that's true of ordinary people so they are physically separated from the rest of the world they've never been threatened until the modern era by the rest of the world and they don't know any languages by and large some some of those some of these so this is a background which i think provides for a very low level of general knowledge you then have the stultifying effect of what passes for news on television what you were i think people makes people actually a lot more ignorant and less knowledgeable about the world by its sensationalizing and trivializ g international news and by its ignoring most important issues in international news so what they know about the world is fairly limited and i think the arab world is sort of a black hole in an otherwise quite dismal picture  in that you have a great deal of stereotyping and prejudice you have a lot of old prejudices about you have a lot of other things very strongly reinforced by cinema t v and movies  which portray the arab world almost entirely in an extremely negative light there's i don't i can't think of one positive portrayal of an arab in any movie ever see i can think of hundreds of terrorists evil shakes of  not a great deal of knowledge about the world a great deal of stereotyping the fact that the arab world is perceived in terms of as the enemy by people who are supporters of israel means that you're starting with a matrix a negative and into this is port a great deal of strong feeling of hostility to the arab world because of people's partisanship in favor of israel and those are people who tend to be influential those are people who tend to be articulate those are people who tend to have a great deal of influence on t v movies in the news and so on and so forth and so you have some particularly varial and hostility to the arab world operating in a matrix of enormous ignorance i mean if you were to tell people in the united states most arabs don't live in the desert most arabs live in cities most arabs are literate most arabs live in countries where polygamy is not practiced or at least most arabs don't practice polygamy but there are christians in the arab world that there are some countries in the arab world that are democratic you would shock most americans they have no idea about these things if you were to say a number of negative stereotypes things that reflect negative stereotypes most americans would agree so i think that the knowledge about the arab world in the united states is very very well as it turns out the american leadership knew little about the history and peoples of the middle east furthermore what they thought they knew was to say the least inaccurate and distorted the consequences will unfold over the coming generation both americans and middle easterners will continue to pay for the misguided policies of the new millennium long after it's architects are dead and buried but what would a more sober approach to the middle east have produced would result have been different if there had been a better understanding of the region and its people start at the beginning of the modern middle east in the aftermath of world war one in one thousand nine hundred between nine hundred eighteen and twenty britain and france the war's victorious powers occupied and colonized the former lands of the seven hundred year old ottoman empire no one asked to the people of the region what they desired british and french colonial civil servant to all the borders and arranged all the governments for the countries that  all the political struggles all the parties and all the conflicts of the region from that time to the present have their roots in the colonial settlement  the aftermath of the first world war ottoman turkey was dismembered and that whole empire was divided up amongst the victorious allies in a way that was extremely cynical course the colonial powers had earlier divided africa up the interior of the whole african continent amongst them eight hundred eighty five in a single conference in berlin so it was nothing new for the west european colonial powers to suddenly you know get a huge new chunk of land and divide it up amongst them the way that it worked in the eastern mediterranean area between the mediterranean let's say and iran which was an independent country is that the british and the french were the two powers and they simply drew lines on the map sometimes the lines were a little blurry and they said this goes to england and this goes to these were majority arab areas obviously the turkish empire had been ruled by muslims who were ethnic turks these were ethnic arabs and they were given a number of different states but so they had you know saudi arabia which was largely independent anyway its independence was was ratified if you like as part of that whole post world war one period then you had iraq was you know the borders were dylan delineated and it became iraq syria was delineated and became syria palestine and jordan lebanon of course was carved out in a special way to please the french and those lines didn't correspond to previous national boundaries there had been no national boundaries there by the colonial powers in each of those emerging nations the british got iraq and jordan and palestine the french got syria and lebanon and they  given kind of control over these countries by the league of nations which gave them something called a mandate because of course this was after president wilson's fourteen points one of which was that all nations have the right to self determination but you know in their patronize ing paternalistic way the governments in london and paris decided that the arab people were not ready for independence or self government and so they therefore they had to be kind of you know along by the british and french colonial powers of course oil interests were kids especially for the british they needed to be able to extract oil and to be able to protect their sea lines of communication with the empire in india so if you look at the way the boundaries were drawn for example there is one little portion that goes up from jordan north west no north east toward iraq that exactly follows the pipeline that the british had built from iraq that took the oil from there westward to the mediterranean and in fact if you drive along that portion of jordan you pos through several little towns kind of small places in the desert you're driving essentially along the top of the oil pipeline and the towns are called h one  two and h three because those were the pumping stations the towns grew up around i mean it's very blatant how it was all done just for the oil interest and of course you know then you had the su is canal and all that the sea lines of communication with us president woodrow wilson was concerned that european nationalism and imperial competition had contributed to the outbreak of the world war and he determined to dull the edges of the imperial scramble for the middle east wilson dispatched the king grain commission to discern the wishes and desires of the people of the middle east it was named after its two principal members henry king and charles crane the commission travelled to anatolian syria palestine and lebanon in one thousand nine hundred speaking with hundreds of people from elite to the most humble they concluded that the people of the region desired independent british and french colonial governments were the two least favor has a different nature in each country partly because the colonial experience was different so in algeria starting in the eighteenth thirty's you had one kind of colonial adventure which produces one kind of response in other countries you have different kinds of colonial intrusion egypt for example or or the countries of the arab east so called syria iraq lebanon on jordan and palestine were taken over after world war one by the british and the french and so there's a different process in place so to generalize in every case these responses war nationalist in the sense of people wanting not to be ruled by outside forces but in many cases they took a religious form in many cases they took a secular form in some cases they combined the two or they or there was there was a there was a process of evolution in change in egypt for example there were periods in which the national movement had a religious coloration eighteen nineties for example under most i can't remember a national party it was a secular national party but it had a certain vallance to it another part times the period of the waft after world war one when the national movement was explicitly a validly secular with muslim and christian leaders and almost no religious rhetoric to it a lot of discussion of sudan with the broader response to british colonialism where it largely a religious movement but it can also be seen as nationalist or i guess it would be in the eastern world in countries like lebanon syria iraq palestine that you had the least of valence least weight of religious elements in the initial reactions to european imperialism after world war one  and there the national movement was validly secular and religious elements were or were secondary if they if they existed at all so there were varied responses  with the religious element really only coming back where where where it had disappeared really only coming back in the latter part of the second half of the twentieth century it was of the seventy's eighty's in supposed to be temporary you know until these nations were so called ready for self governance and in the course of the second world war the french obviously had problems because you had it worked with the nazis in germany and so the british supported to some degree the movement of the syrians and the and the lebanese for independence from france in those days and of course to go came back and was you know big body of the british and the french and the and the western allies in the second world war but what happened in that whole period you had a sort of the birth of some kind of identification of people with being syrian or with being lebanese or with being jordanian but it was it was very fragile and infant in the pre second world war period because you know people still thought of themselves primarily as as muslims primarily as arabs there was you know a lot of pan islamic and pan arab feeling in those days or else they would feel identification with you know the local big town it might be nablus it might be aleppo it might be damascus they didn't necessarily think of themselves as you know a citizen of syria or a citizen of iraq or whatever the partition of this region that is that is sketched out in the  fifteen and sixteen is the basis for the governments and state the states and nations and governments of countries like iraq syria lebanon jordan and israel palestine  all of these states were carved out of provinces that were part of the ottoman empire by european powers that were acting entirely in their own self interest on the basis of rivalry between them britain and france today said you're a bit what is today jordan or between saudi arabia iraq or between syria and jordan or whatever and they're just you know hundreds and hundreds of miles of straight lines of what's on one side what's on the other side that didn't concern sykes and pico and the other british and french diplomats and strategists who drew up these lines so the first thing is that these are in some measure artificial states they have been a state of lebanon or iraq might have developed in a different way but as they are as they are today in terms of the frontiers that were stablish by these partitions and later deals between european powers their artificial stay the second impact of this was the creation of states and the first second impact of this was to create a sense of grievance among peoples who probably were pretty much carried out a source of deep anger and and a sense of grievance that that you know has diminished over time because these nation states have taken on a reality of their own britain and france divided the region between them palestine jordan iraq egypt the states of the persian gulf and istanbul went to britain which was the stronger power british politicians like winston churchill sought to monopolize actual and potential oil resources and dominate the lines of communication between the mediterranean the persian gulf and india churchill wanted me to pursue his canal and the corridor from coastal palestine through jordan and iraq to the oil fields of the gulf and iran most of the oil was already under british concessions but the company that would come to be called british petroleum or b p winston churchill had himself purchased a controlling interest to make the british government the majority shareholder of b p british control of his standing limited russian access to the mediterranean through the straits france received the scraps left in compensation for the destruction of the war on the western fro syria including the coastal region that came to be lebanon would be the french mandate there was no oil but france had become a military power on the northern and southern and eastern shores sections of an turkey resent aside from italy greece and britain and france news of the partitions met with comedian opposition and eventual armed revolt by all the peoples of the region the turkish republic emerged all rallied former ottoman military forces to fight against the partition first france then greece and britain decided to leave turkey rather than fight another war the british public winston churchill themselves engineered the counterinsurgency offensive using the new labor saving technology of air power in egypt syria and palestine were also told in armed groups which were suppressed in the long term as soon as they could do that in the interim they said other things to the arabs they said other things to others but there is an unmediated transmission from the german of what was being said in europe in the pre world war one period through the arabic press to people who could read so that was the political level there was a clear consciousness that this was a political movement intended to replace the indigenous population with a foreign european settler population people who were becoming to recreate or create a jewish state in palestine on the basis of this national movement that had developed among eastern european jews at another level there was resistance to the process of dispossession of the peasantry because what the zionist movement was trying to do was not to come in like classical movement and exploit the native population they were coming in to replace the native population not in other words to take over the land and take the surplus that would be predated by  peasant peasant cultivators but rather to replace these cultivators with jewish cultivators as a result there was a kind of friction from the early stage with people who were dispossessed from the very few colonies that were stablish there were only a few dozen by world war one but there was a clear history of tension around these first settler colonies between the population the indigenous native population which in many cases had land rights that were being ignored as  private property relations were established by the ottoman state cultivators who had indefinite and permanent right of use of frocked under the old system were being told you don't own the land the owner has sold it get off so there was a great deal of rust as a result of this and this is increases through the twenty's and thirty's and it fuels various palestinian revolts and riots and uprisings against the british who come in in world war two and against the zionist movement and this is the beginning of palestinian reaction to zionism which has nothing to do with anti semitism or even really political islam as one palestinian wrote i mean this is a perfectly fine movement and what the problem is you're doing it here the problem is you want to take as your country our country of armed opposition to foreign intervention and colonialism had been fully established the desire for true independence and opposition to intervention colonialism and