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Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined
here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary
revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle
East.
Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders
would be well-served to engage in an exercise that
attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect,
amendment of national boundaries between the
Bosporus and the Indus. Accepting that international
statecraft has never developed effective tools —
short of war — for readjusting faulty borders, a
mental effort to grasp the Middle East's "organic"
frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent
of the difficulties we face and will continue to
face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made
deformities that will not stop generating hatred and
violence until they are corrected.
As for those who refuse to "think the unthinkable,"
declaring that boundaries must not change and that's
that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never
stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have
never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo
through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even
now (as ambassadors and special representatives
avert their eyes to study the shine on their
wingtips).
Oh, and one other dirty little secret from 5,000
years of history: Ethnic cleansing works.
Begin with the border issue most sensitive to
American readers: For Israel to have any hope of
living in reasonable peace with its neighbors, it
will have to return to its pre-1967 borders — with
essential local adjustments for legitimate security
concerns. But the issue of the territories
surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained with thousands
of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our
lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god
into a real-estate tycoon, literal turf battles have
a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed for oil wealth or
ethnic squabbles. So let us set aside this single
overstudied issue and turn to those that are
studiously ignored.
The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust
lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas
is the absence of an independent Kurdish state.
There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds
living in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the
figures are imprecise because no state has ever
allowed an honest census). Greater than the
population of present-day Iraq, even the lower
figure makes the Kurds the world's largest ethnic
group without a state of its own. Worse, Kurds have
been oppressed by every government controlling the
hills and mountains where they've lived since
Xenophon's day.
The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a
glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice
after Baghdad's fall. A Frankenstein's monster of a
state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq
should have been divided into three smaller states
immediately. We failed from cowardice and lack of
vision, bullying Iraq's Kurds into supporting the
new Iraqi government — which they do wistfully as a
quid pro quo for our good will. But were a free
plebiscite to be held, make no mistake: Nearly 100
percent of Iraq's Kurds would vote for independence.
As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who
have endured decades of violent military oppression
and a decades-long demotion to "mountain Turks" in
an effort to eradicate their identity. While the
Kurdish plight at Ankara's hands has eased somewhat
over the past decade, the repression recently
intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey
should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the
Kurds of Syria and Iran, they, too, would rush to
join an independent Kurdistan if they could. The
refusal by the world's legitimate democracies to
champion Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin
of omission far worse than the clumsy, minor sins of
commission that routinely excite our media. And by
the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from
Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most
pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.
A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq's
three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state
that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria
that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented
Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of
old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State
rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would
retain its current territory, with some southward
expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the
unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as
great a dismantling as Pakistan.
A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim
world is the Saudi royal family's treatment of Mecca
and Medina as their fiefdom. With Islam's holiest
shrines under the police-state control of one of the
world's most bigoted and oppressive regimes — a
regime that commands vast, unearned oil wealth — the
Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi
vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far
beyond their borders. The rise of the Saudis to
wealth and, consequently, influence has been the
worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as a whole
since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing
to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the
Mongol) conquest.
While non-Muslims could not effect a change in the
control of Islam's holy cities, imagine how much
healthier the Muslim world might become were Mecca
and Medina ruled by a rotating council
representative of the world's major Muslim schools
and movements in an Islamic Sacred State — a sort of
Muslim super-Vatican — where the future of a great
faith might be debated rather than merely decreed.
True justice — which we might not like — would also
give Saudi Arabia's coastal oil fields to the Shia
Arabs who populate that subregion, while a
southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to
a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around
Riyadh, the House of Saud would be capable of far
less mischief toward Islam and the world.
Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a
great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free
Kurdistan, the Arab Shia State and Free Baluchistan,
but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's
Afghanistan — a region with a historical and
linguistic affinity for Persia. Iran would, in
effect, become an ethnic Persian state again, with
the most difficult question being whether or not it
should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it
to the Arab Shia State.
What Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west,
it would gain in the east, as Pakistan's Northwest
Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan
brethren (the point of this exercise is not to draw
maps as we would like them but as local populations
would prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural
state, would also lose its Baluch territory to Free
Baluchistan. The remaining "natural" Pakistan would
lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a
westward spur near Karachi.
The city-states of the United Arab Emirates would
have a mixed fate — as they probably will in
reality. Some might be incorporated in the Arab Shia
State ringing much of the Persian Gulf (a state more
likely to evolve as a counterbalance to, rather than
an ally of, Persian Iran). Since all puritanical
cultures are hypocritical, Dubai, of necessity,
would be allowed to retain its playground status for
rich debauchees. Kuwait would remain within its
current borders, as would Oman.
In each case, this hypothetical redrawing of
boundaries reflects ethnic affinities and religious
communalism — in some cases, both. Of course, if we
could wave a magic wand and amend the borders under
discussion, we would certainly prefer to do so
selectively. Yet, studying the revised map, in
contrast to the map illustrating today's boundaries,
offers some sense of the great wrongs borders drawn
by Frenchmen and Englishmen in the 20th century did
to a region struggling to emerge from the
humiliations and defeats of the 19th century.
Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people
may be impossible. For now. But given time — and the
inevitable attendant bloodshed — new and natural
borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen more than
once.
Meanwhile, our men and women in uniform will
continue to fight for security from terrorism, for
the prospect of democracy and for access to oil
supplies in a region that is destined to fight
itself. The current human divisions and forced
unions between Ankara and Karachi, taken together
with the region's self-inflicted woes, form as
perfect a breeding ground for religious extremism, a
culture of blame and the recruitment of terrorists
as anyone could design. Where men and women look
ruefully at their borders, they look
enthusiastically for enemies.
From the world's oversupply of terrorists to its
paucity of energy supplies, the current deformations
of the Middle East promise a worsening, not an
improving, situation. In a region where only the
worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold and
where the most debased aspects of religion threaten
to dominate a disappointed faith, the U.S., its
allies and, above all, our armed forces can look for
crises without end. While Iraq may provide a
counterexample of hope — if we do not quit its soil
prematurely — the rest of this vast region offers
worsening problems on almost every front.
If the borders of the greater Middle East cannot be
amended to reflect the natural ties of blood and
faith, we may take it as an article of faith that a
portion of the bloodshed in the region will continue
to be our own.
• • •
WHO WINS, WHO LOSES
Winners —
Afghanistan
Arab Shia State
Armenia
Azerbaijan
Free Baluchistan
Free Kurdistan
Iran
Islamic Sacred State
Jordan
Lebanon
Yemen
Losers —
Afghanistan
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Kuwait
Pakistan
Qatar
Saudi Arabia
Syria
Turkey
United Arab Emirates
West Bank
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