Back at the turn of the last century ( and even before) the world was recognizing the value of oil in the Middle East with Britain at the forefront with the investments made in the late 1800s in the Suez Canal.
The UK interest was spawned by the inevitable conversion of the massive (at the time) Royal Navy which was utilizing the restrictive technology of coal to power in it’s ships limiting them to routes that included coaling stations within a designated distance of less than a few thousand miles.
With the UK launch of the “DREADNOUGHT” battleship in 1906, the race was on to modernize the world’s navies with oil powered vessels, sparking a building frenzy between Germany and England that culminated with the beginning of WW1 in 1914 resulting in 22 built by Britain with another 13 completed by war’s end and the Germans completing 19 by August 1914 and 5 more during the war.
The Battle of Jutland in 1915 was the only time the great navies faced off against each other with the Germans inflicting more damage in ships lost and deaths to the Royal Navy but the Brits maintaining control of the North Sea which to us represents a pyrrhic victory.
This is the military motivated backdrop, coupled with the emerging military applications and technologies of tanks and aircraft in this historical WW1 time frame that sets the table for the BIGGEST foreign policy sellout in the last 150 years, a brazen violation of promises made and repeatedly broken that we firmly believe is the primary catalyst for the turmoil the world is seeing in the Middle East TODAY.
Books have been written on this “sellout” but to cut to the chase in regards to why we are embellishing the documented historical saga in the context of current events in Israel and Iran we are reporting on TODAY there are 2 words that resonate thru history and they are Sykes/Pecoe
In 1917, there was one tribal leader named Hussein who “lorded” over the disparate tribes that have since evolved (or you might say SPLINTERED) into the multiple countries we now see in the Middle East.
Britain, which in 1917 was still the colonial superpower of the planet was keen on insuring/protecting their empire thru use of their Royal Navy and by extension Middle East oil.
The fear was the Central Powers (defined as Germany, Austria Hungary and Turkey) also targeted this up and coming vital resource in the military applications that could in theory win the war which in 1917 was a miserable bogged down stalemate and to counter this threat Sykes, the British ambassador to the region, reached out to Hussein and promised that if he helped keep the Central Powers out of the region by mobilizing the tribes to protect their territory on behalf of the Allies that when the war ended Britain would use their massive resources to support Hussein as all important KING of the region and multiple agreements were signed (each one eventually broken) clarifying this “arrangement”.
Hussein jumped at the chance as 500,000 of his “countrymen” died in defense of the disputed territories during the remainder of the war but in March 1919, mere months after the official end of the Great War , the war to end all wars that history has clearly shown spawned another a mere 20 years later,
The French grandly marched into the same territory promised to Hussein after a back door deal was cut with Pecoe, the French ambassador. Using the argument that the French DESERVED their share of the spoils not only as an ally but because much of the war was fought on their territory they forced Britain to violate all prior agreements and it was this brazen sell out that caused the dissention with the tribes that has culminated into “TODAY’S situation in the Middle East. Now you see the irony?