Samurai P.J. O’Rourke was to written in his tome Give War a Chance this wisdom about the Middle East:

Until 1918 the Arabian peninsula was ruled by the Ottoman Empire, so called because it had the same amount of intelligence and energy as a footstool. When the Turks backed the wrong horse in World War I, the French and English divvied up the region in a manner both completely self-serving and unbelievably haphazard, like monkeys at a salad bar. The huge, senseless notch in Jordan’s border with Saudi Arabia, for instance, is known as ‘Winston’s Hiccup’ because the then head of the British Colonial Office, Winston Churchill, is supposed to have drawn this line on a map after a very long lunch.

Okay, I only quoted that because I like the phrase “like monkeys at a salad bar.”