One hundred years ago this month, a British aristocrat and a French diplomat drew a line across a map of the Middle East that is blamed for the chaos that dominates that region today. The Sykes-Picot agreement is faulted for its naivete, its imperialism, its betrayal of promises to Arab nationalists and its secrecy. It is a convenient scapegoat for the instability that reigns in the Middle East, but responsibility for the region's tragedy is more diffuse.

Sir Mark Sykes was a British parliamentarian and Boer War veteran picked by Lord Kitchener, the secretary of war, to advise on Middle Eastern affairs. His counterpart, Francois Georges-Picot, was a career diplomat who had served in Cairo and Beirut. They met from November 1915 to March 1916 to discuss the disposition of territories held by the Ottoman Empire when the Great War ended as there was agreement in London, Paris and Moscow, the third party to the Great Entente, that the empire would not survive the war.

They agreed to split the Levantine territory controlled by the empire three ways. Russia was given control of Istanbul, the Turkish straits and Armenia. A line was drawn from Iraq to the Mediterranean Sea, and France took the northern half, which included southern Turkey, Lebanon, present-day Syria and northern Iraq, and Britain claimed the southern half, which went from Egypt westward to present-day Jordan, and most of what is now Iraq and Kuwait. Britain also controlled the port city of Haifa, while what are now northern Israel and the West Bank were made into an international zone.