I've often heard that so much of the conflict in the middle east and Africa is due to the way the boundaries were drawn after WWI and WWII, with a "colonial" focus, (ie the the oil companies only wanted to negotiate with one country rather than several "groups"). Is this correct? Were there other reasons at the time for drawing the boundaries the way they did? Did any corporations or individuals have any say in this? Should people have known how badly this would turn out?
I'll discuss the Arab states carved out of the Ottoman Empire (Iraq, and Syria In particular), but can't say anything about Africa.
The states were drawn up based on British and French interests in the region. Britain's main interest was to gain important land between the home islands and India, while France was mainly interested in keeping up with Britain in the region. Britain already had control of Egypt, the Suez Canal, Aden in Yemen, protectorates in the Persian Gulf and significant soft power in Iran (particular in oil; and they had split Iran into north/south spheres between themselves and Russia a decade earlier). The French had already colonised Algeria and Tunisia and staked a claim for Syria as early as the 19th century.
The borders drawn, though arbitrary, roughly matched the ex-ottoman border divisions. There were interests at stake - Mosul province (Northern Iraq) was promised to France in world war 1 but incorporated into British Iraq, for example. A main reason why was the significant oil reserves found there - Britain was in the process of turning its coal-fuel based fleet into an oil-fuel one and wanted their own source of the resource (at the time they depended mainly on American exports of oil). This was not lost on the French, who got large stakes in the oil company in Iraq as compensation for giving up Mosul to Britain. The British initially promised the Kurds of Mosul independence from Iraq (in the 1920 treaty of sevres between the entente powers and the Ottoman Empire) but reneged on that promise by 1923, when the treaty of Lausanne was signed with the new Republic of Turkey. Mosul was then integrated into Iraq - reasons included keeping the costs of running an empire down (ruling one mandate of Iraq was cheaper than two mandates of Iraq and Kurdistan) and divide and rule politics (the Sunni Kurds helped balance the demographic against the majority Shia population in the south - Britain had established Faisal, an ally from the Hedjaz and a Sunni foreigner to Iraq as king in 1921). The French played similar politics, for example by splitting Lebanon from Syria to form a predominantly Christian state in the area.
Individuals had some say - Sykes and Picot of the respective British and French governments were responsible for the initial plan of splitting the Ottoman Empire up. Churchill was a big proponent of cheap methods of maintaining an empire (he recommended the use of the airforce as a cheap way to affect control, though not necessarily on consolidating Iraq in the manner that it was).
Should people have known how it would turn out? Well they didn't think in those terms, I don't think, however many of their decisions regarding colonisation and divide and rule within the respective countries shaped their histories in the twentieth century. I'll post sources later as I'm on my phone.
Sources:
Tripp, Charles. A History of Iraq. 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Sluglett, Peter. Britain in Iraq, 1914-1932. London: Ithaca Press for the Middle East Centre, St Antony's College, Oxford, 1976.
Barr, James. A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East. London: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
Atarodi, Habibollah. Great Powers, Oil and the Kurds in Mosul: (Southern Kurdistan/Northern Iraq) 1910-1925. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2003.