text: I can't help but laugh at your posts.  I'm sorry, but you're biased as hell.
  
  You know the early Ottomans split up the Empire into administrative units called Eyalets and these rarely - if ever - aligned with any kind of historical boundaries of the local tribes, or with any kinds of historically known borders, right?And you know that even the late Ottomans, who got a lot more organized and created the Vilayet system, with even finer district bounders and borders, still didn't align those Vilayets with any kind of historical boundaries.
  
  In fact, if you lay a map of their administrative divisions over the League of Nation's Mandate system, you'll see the Europeans largely followed the Ottoman's Vilayet boundaries when they came up with the mandate borders.
  
  So for 800 years, Ottoman Turks can carve up the region and it's not colonialism and has no effect on future events, at all.  The Europeans come along, and presto, magico!  Colonialism.