The statue of Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick Maude, KCB, CMG, DSO that stood in Baghdad until the Iraqi revolution in 1958.
[From article]
On March 11th 1917, General Maude's British Indian army marched into Baghdad and took as prisoners almost 10,000 Ottoman troops. If you had to locate the birth of the modern, post-caliphate Arab world in a single event, that would be it. Over the next few years, London and Paris drew lines in the sand and invented the western Middle East, and the states we treat with today - Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia. The British certainly understand the significance of March 1917: When they returned to Baghdad to topple Saddam a decade ago, they named their new military headquarters in the Green Zone "Maude House".
[. . .]
"The Islamic State" will be the Islamic State, the one that finally redrew the infidel lines on the Arab map imposed by Anglo-French colonial administrators in 1922. The neo-caliphate will have taken Baghdad, the capital of the old caliphate for half-a-millennium, from its designation in 762 by the caliph al-Mansur as the seat of his empire. Wannabe caliph al-Baghdadi will have an historic Muslim metropolis, most of Iraq, much of Syria, and - who knows? - maybe a nibble or two of Jordan and a few other bits and pieces. John Kerry, who isn't an Islamic scholar but plays one on TV news, will continue huffin' an' a-puffin':
[. . .]
Or, as Osama used to put, when people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they go with the strong horse. The Islamic State will have land, money, oil, and a ton of great infrastructure and weaponry courtesy of American taxpayers. All the "moderate" groups we've been trying to woo from Libya to Syria and beyond will side with the strong horse. Our remaining allies, such as Jordan, reeling under the social strains of a vast swollen refugee tide from across its borders, will get with the program - or be the next to fall. Nothing exists in isolation: Syria was unimportant to the Obama Administration, so it sat by as the opposition to Assad mutated and evolved, and then spilled over into Iraq. And maybe Iraq is unimportant, too, but, bigger and stronger, ISIS will move on from there, too. Is the Kurdish north unimportant? Lebanon? Jordan? Israel?
[. . .]
to modify Trotsky, you may not be interested in the world but the world is interested in you. And, indeed, not being interested in the world would be a more credible position if you hadn't let the world move into the rental apartment above your garage. For those thousands of disaffected young Muslim men cruising jihadist websites from their drab housing projects in Antwerp and Hamburg and Minneapolis, the restored caliphate will not be a pipe dream but a new reality. And they will act accordingly.
http://www.jewishworldreview.
The Strong Horse
By Mark Steyn
Published Oct. 27, 2014
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