The tragedy of the modern Middle East is that no solution has been found for the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman Empire, which imploded in the wake of the First World War, controlled a vast geographical region known as Greater Syria. Greater Syria had no legal basis but everyone was able to identify it.
It was the sprawling territory south of the Taurus Mountains in southern Turkey and north of the Nefud Desert in Arabia. It included the present-day countries of Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, Jordan, and part of Iraq. There were relatively few arguments or battles over who controlled what territory since everywhere in Greater Syria was part of the Ottoman Sultan’s domain.
Thus, the Ottoman Empire, while it lasted, solved a problem that would bedevil the entire 20th century into the 21st. The problem of Greater Syria still hasn’t been solved. With the recent collapse of an Alawite regime thanks to Sunni Islamist groups – sectarian factionalism the Ottomans assuaged by their imperial control – it remains to this day at the root of modern Syria’s dilemma.
The immediate solution to the Ottoman collapse was the British and French colonial mandate systems over Greater Syria, with the French creating a truncated Syrian state after Lebanon, essentially given over to the French-speaking Maronite Christians, had been carved out from it. The British created and controlled what became Israel/Palestine, Jordan and Iraq. Though today’s academic and journalistic e.
