Why did the British decide to create the new nation of Iraq out of the 3 different Ottoman provinces?

Question

The British divvied up the Ottoman Empire's holdings and created Iraq out of the three Ottoman "vilayets" (regions) of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra. Why would they do this? If we understood why Iraq was formed, we might could answer why Iraq should remain united or break apart into three states.

Answer 1

Without trying to contact Churchill on the astral plane . My thought that if there was to be a nation, a kingdom, then It should have a balance of resources and adequate land mass to support it self and protect itself against its neighbors. and this would provide. I would expect that ethnically these principle regions were already intermixed in these fully cosmopolitan cities. In some ways the Ottoman division into smaller parts may be the artifact of a sort of city state political control exercised by these principal, likely autonomous, cities before the Turkish political domination of the area (a very long time ago).

Its late I'm mostly talking through my hat anyway. We need some scholarship on this matter. What I fairly sure of was that it was not done in malice. Nor to set the stage for future failure. No plot. No foreign Devil. Just not well thought out. Balancing client states against each other is hard to work out.

Answer 2

They found it hard to count to three.