Sir – It was good to see Chris Koenig reminding us that Iraq was based on the existing Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad, and Basra (History Man, August 28).

Too often Britain (along with France) is blamed for creating artificial states in the Middle East, but in fact the Ottomans had already divided the place in the only feasible way, except that the desert lying between Mesopotamia and Syria was a sort of no man’s land, not included in any Ottoman province.

Thus the need to define the famous “line in the sand” to divide modern states, but this was not a crucial difficulty.

More important was the question of creating an independent Kurdistan as promised, but apart from that, it is difficult to see how else the thing could have been done by the Turks, or by the post-war Allies.

We are seeing only too well what an intricate pattern there is of different ethnicities and religious beliefs, which could never have been accommodated by a separate state for each in the 1920s.

Roger Moreton, Oxford