Quotes from the Pullitzer prize winner The Prize by Yergin: page 200.: (of negotiation with the Turkish Petroleum Company) "By Dec 1922, the frustrated Americans were seriously thinking of walking away completely.It was no easy matter to divide up Mesopotamia, or Iraq, as the British mandate was called, at such a crowded table. The participans argued over who would get what share of iraqi oil..... ....Faisal's task was enormous; he had not inherited a well-defined nation, but rather a collection of diverse groups- Shia Arabs and Sunni Arabs, Jews and Kurds and Yazidis- a territory with a few important cities, most of the countryside under the control of local sheikhs,and with little common political or cultural history, but with a rising Arab nationalism.... ... To this religious and ethnic mosaic, Britain sought to import constitutionalism and a responsible parliament. Faisal depended upon Britain to support his new kingdom, but his position would be greatly impaired if he were seen as being too beholden to London.... ...Britain was all for oil development, hoping that the potential oil revenues would help finance the new iraqi government and further reduce its own financial burdens... P.S.: Man, with a few changes these sentences could come from the Iraqi study group. Excellent book, read it if you want to understand just why we are there...
I read it, but I still don't understand why we are there... I thought that we were there because we "elected" the wrong president by accident.