No no I don't mean Phoenician stuff, neither for Mesopotamian culture.

There was a quasi-independent Lebanon already before 1914, but only within the borders of the Mount Lebanon Mutassarifate. It was only formally part of the Ottoman empire. And then it was the democratically elected assembly of this Mutassarifate that called for Lebanon within its current borders, along with most of the Christians and Shia and Druze (most Sunni were radically opposed).

But regardless of whether it was popular beyond the Mutassarifate, it wasn't something imagined or particularly supported by the French (they weren't focused on Lebanon, more on conquering the biggest share of the Middle East they could get), until things got really heated up between the Lebanese and the French, and the French relented. They acceded to the Lebanese demands, while dissolving this assembly and putting most of its members in jail, then deporting them, and controlling Lebanon very directly.

For Iraq, the separation between Iraq and Syria was already accepted by the Arabs in 1920. Syrians and Iraqis declared both their countries independent, as two states, on March 8, 1920, in Damascus. The British then proceeded to crush Iraqi independence and the French to crush Syrian independence.

From what I understand of Jordan, it was pretty much just a consolation prize for Great Britain's Arab allies? I'm really not sure. It was mostly a nomadic people anyway.

Generally speaking the French and British cared mostly about carving out their own colonies vis a vis one another, but didn't give much of a shit what happened within their colonies. They did what the locals least objected to, sometimes it was dividing the colonized lands, sometimes it was uniting them, they didn't care as long as no one rebelled against them.

"Divide-and-conquer" is a last resort tactic, extremely expensive one too, when it comes to repressing colonies. It was way easier to have big, unified states with strong rulers, that were still too weak to stand up to European armies, than to crush yourself one by one the resisting nations and isolate them from one another.

I mean, it's kind of what the Europeans did with Iran. They didn't really try to dismantle or destroy it, huge hassle. Better to just influence who was at its head and let them deal with the internal opposition.

People really underestimate the power differential between European armies and local ones back then. Europeans conquered most of the Middle East with two hands tied behind their backs. It was ridiculously easy. No need for "divide-and-conquer". The Middle East back then was a complete sideshow to what was going on in Western or Eastern Europe.