The Sykes-Picot Agreement And Russia

... had command of neither. Nevertheless, the young ambitious baronet made a good career as a politician and expert on the region. Georges Picot, as one English author wrote, had France’s “civilizing mission” in Asia in his blood. Before World War I, he served as the Consul-General of France in Beirut and maintained active contacts with Arab nationalists. Both he and Sykes were arrogantly convinced that the Arabs had not yet matured enough to run their lands by themselves. When these architects of the colonial conquest of the Ottoman ...