Great Syrian Revolt

Anyway, let's dive in and look at chapter five in The Guardian's Bombing Damascus.

Susan Peterson writes, Officially, the French insisted that the Syrian revolt of 1925 had no deep causes.

It was just the work of brigands and agitators who took advantage of a rising in the ever-volatile Jabal Druze to prey on vulnerable villagers and harry French forces.

Most observers at the time, however, not to mention virtually all historians since, saw early Mandate Syria as a tinderbox of discontents which even a slightest spark could burst into flame.

I mean, the Americans learned to their folly in Iraq what happens when you simply dismiss an entire army of 400,000 men with their careers and pensions and and benefits and everything else, simply vanishing into the ether.

Well, they know where the explosives are buried, put it that way.

And these, over Sorel's handling of the Syrian revolt, have been growing up the Quai d'Orsay, the French foreign ministry, for some time.

But only the bombing of Damascus and the explosion of publicity that followed transformed attorneys into a full-blown crisis of legitimacy for French rule.