Page:Turkey, the great powers, and the Bagdad Railway.djvu/316

 *fluence" was established over a vast area including the provinces of Aleppo, Damascus, Deir, and Mosul. Administration of this stretch of coast and its hinterland would give French imperialists what they most wanted in the Near East—actual possession of a country in which France had many religious and cultural interests, control of the silk production of Syria and the potential cotton production of Cilicia, ownership of the Arghana copper mines, and acquisition of that portion of the Bagdad Railway lying between Mosul and the Cilician Gates of the Taurus.[25] Aside from its satisfaction of French imperial ambitions, however, "the French area defied every known law of geographic, ethnographic, and linguistic unity which one might cite who would attempt to justify it."[26]

Great Britain, by way of "compensation," was to receive complete control over lower Mesopotamia from Tekrit to the Persian Gulf and from the Arabian boundary to the Persian frontier. In addition, she was recognized as having special political and economic interests—particularly the right "to furnish such advisers as the Arabs might desire"—in a vast territory lying south of the French "zone of influence" and extending from the Sinai Peninsula to the Persian border. Palestine was to be internationalized, but was subsequently established as a homeland for the Jews. In this manner Britain, also, had adequately protected her imperial interests—she had secured possession of the Bagdad Railway in southern Mesopotamia; she had gained complete control of the head of the Persian Gulf, thus fortifying her strategic position in the Indian Ocean; she was assured the Mesopotamian cotton supply for the mills of Manchester and the Mesopotamian oil supply for the dreadnoughts of the Grand Fleet; she had erected in Palestine a buffer state which would block any future Ottoman