[aynrandfreak]

My understanding of history is that he is responsible for the Saudis with their Wahabbist beliefs taking over Arabia. Perhaps we'd have been better served if the Ottoman Empire hadn't been broken up.

[H. Paul Pressler IV]

Without the break-up of the Ottoman Empire there would likely be no Israel and the Empire would now control all the oil on the Arab Peninsula as well as in Iraq.

[Zhang Fei]

Perhaps we'd have been better served if the Ottoman Empire hadn't been broken up.

It was breaking up on its own. The center could not hold - the Turks were having serious problems keeping the Arabs down. The Brits and the French tried to replace the Turks, but showed up at a time when their appetite for casualties was at a low ebb, following the bloodbath of WWI. The French lost three times as many military dead in WWI as Uncle Sam did in WWII - almost 1.4m people. The Brits lost almost a million dead in WWI.

The period after the Great War was not a good one in which to try to hold the European empires together, let alone expand them. But the alternative to expanding them was to let the Arab countries gain independence, which would have been profoundly destabilizing - it would have set a bad example for the existing British and French colonies. This may be why they had to step in - but their low tolerance for casualties and military expenditures in the post-WWI period ultimately doomed the effort, just as this defeatism set the stage for WWII.

[beavus]

Hear hear. Turkey may be no paradise, but the Turks do seem a bit more proficient at civil society than the Arabs.

[RobbyS]

Six of one and a half dozen of the other. The Turkish government was more or less fascist.