The Real Middle East?

Ralph Peters is at it again, this time redrawing the borders of the Middle East and in his new book, Never Quit The Fight. Say hello to Free Kurdistan, Free Baluchistan, the Islamic Sacred State, Greater Jordan, and more.

My colleague enjoys Peters’ exercises in creative thinking, but I don’t. Peters says:

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.

You might as well talk about life with flying cars that run on water, or what I would do with Jedi powers. It’s fun to think about, but it doesn’t have any real practical value. Because Peters redraws his lines based on a number of mistaken assumptions.

1.) Peters assumes supreme power of the US to be the sole cartographer. In truth, the chance to redraw borders would be the geopolitical gold rush of the 21st century. Everyone and their grandma would be piling in to influence how the lines were drawn. It would make today’s Iraq look like a picnic. And do you think in the end that Israel would exist, or that Syria wouldn’t get any bigger? Peters admits there are “winners” (in black) and “losers” (in red) on his map. But the Middle East is not an unspoiled lump of clay to mold in our own image.

2.) Peters assumes that there are neat ethnic lines waiting to be drawn. Far from it. There are hundreds of multicultural village in Iraq, Iran, and the region is a patchwork quilt, not an unpolished masterpiece. You can’t delineat in most towns, let alone regions. Often such a partition would force families to choose sides. Reality check: no state can be ethnically pure, and attempts to redraw borders will inevitably create new nervous minorities. It is simply impractical to think that a state can or should be created for every group that has at one time aspired to self-determination.

3.) Peters assumes that homogeneous ethnic states would be more just, stating “often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.” True. The multiethnic India was more free, more democratic, and more just than the uni-religious Pakistan, and the region far more prone to war after partition, as Iraq would be as two states. Need I also point out that tyrannical Turkmenistan is the only ethnically homogeneous state in Central Asia.

Which brings me to my last point. There are big advantages to having minority populations of neighboring nations in each state: more fluidity of trade across borders, a kinder nationalism, and tolerance. Kazakhstan, Iran, and India are all betters places for being multiethnic. Years from now we may say the same about Iraq.