“The Lines on the Map Moved from Side to Side” 0
I have no interest whatsoever in Game of Thrones, which seems to have cast its spell over a good portion of the podcasters I listen to. I stopped paying extra for HBO 20 years ago and haven’t missed it.
Now comes Shaun Mullen to point out that you don’t need to pay for HBO; a Game of Thrones has been playing out in the Middle East since the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the perfidy of France and Britain towards the Arabs who, under the sponsorship of T. E. Lawrence, had allied themselves with them against the Ottomans. A nugget:
Subsequent episodes of this real-life Game of Thrones, minus scantily clad maidens and a dwarf named Tyrion, but with plenty of civil wars and bloodshed to go around, have been playing out for nearly 100 years beginning with the secret Sykes-Picot Agreement, which set the artificial boundaries of colonial Iraq, Syria and Lebanon (and eventually the state of Israel) and provoked never ending cycles of ethnic strife, poverty, disenfranchisement, religious extremism and, of course, terrorism. Which brings us to the current episode — the disintegration of Iraq — where all that is on offer.
If you want to understand what’s happening in the Middle East–to have some context for today’s events–this is a good place to start.
