January 3, 1916: The Sykes-Picot Agreement

January 3, 1916: The Sykes-Picot Agreement is approved, essentially dividing control of the Ottoman Empire between Great Britain and France -- while World War I was ongoing, and both of them were fighting the Ottomans, who, at the time, showed no signs of accepting this "agreement." Italy and Russia, however, as allies to Britain and France, did accept it.

The British negotiator was Colonel Sir Tatton Benvenuto Mark Sykes, a protégé of Lord Kitchener, and the 6th Baronet Sykes. Like Colonel T.E. Lawrence, a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia, he believed in an "Arab Spirit" that resisted both Ottoman control from Turkey and Westernization, and so he wanted the region to be under a colonial system similar to India's: Princelings under the command of the British Empire.

The French negotiator was François Marie Denis Georges-Picot, the Consul-General of France in Beirut at the time. He supported a French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon, desiring what he called an "integral Syria."

Once the war was over, and Britain and France were on the winning side, the Sykes-Picot Agreement led to English influence over the nations of Egypt, Transjordan (which became Jordan), Iraq; French influence over the nations of Lebanon (making Beirut "the Paris of the Middle East," including the region's fashion center) and Syria; and the influence of both over Iran. It also created the modern nations of the Arabian Peninsula and the Persian Gulf, with more British influence than French.

All of this would create more problems than it would solve, as none of these nations' peoples fully trusted either the British or the French. Indeed, the "secret agreement" was one of the reason that, once America entered the war, President Woodrow Wilson made one of his Fourteen Points for postwar peace, in his words, "Open covenants, openly arrived at."

In 1917, Mark Sykes was a part of the negotiations that led to the Balfour Declaration, which led to the creation of the State of Israel in 1948. On February 16, 1919, only 39 years old, he died as a result of the Spanish Flu Epidemic. He was hailed as a hero by the British, the Jews, and -- at the time -- the Arabs.

François Marie Denis Georges-Picot died in 1951. His grandnephew, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, served as President of France from 1974 to 1981. 

The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL -- often incorrectly called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS) -- claimed that one of the goals of its insurgency was is to reverse the effects of the Sykes-Picot Agreement,  for the purpose of building a united Islamic State. In 2014, in a speech at the Great Mosque of al-Nuri in Mosul, Iraq, ISIL's then-leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, said, "This blessed advance will not stop until we hit the last nail in the coffin of the Sykes-Picot conspiracy."

*

January 3, 1916 was a Sunday. Betty Furness, an actress in the 1930s and '40s, and a prominent consumer advocate thereafter, was born.

Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. And while the National Hockey Association and the Pacific Coast Hockey Association seasons were in progress, neither league scheduled any games. So there were no scores on this historic day.