re: #6 CuriousLurker

Whoever ends up in charge of Iraq when the dust eventually settles is going forfeit any legitimacy and end up being considered the puppet of whichever outside power gets the most deeply involved.

It was outside (colonial) powers being involved in drawing borders that helped cause the mess we have today because they did what was administratively convenient for them, not what might work best for the long-term stability of a region with diverse ethnic & religious groups.

Jeffrey Goldberg annoyed the crap out of me today with this, regarding an article he’d written back in 2007:

The New Map of the Middle East
^{Why should we fight the inevitable break-up of Iraq?}

In the article, I was very critical of the imperial hubris that motivated the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East by the British and French. But I’ve warmed to the argument that the Sykes-Picot arrangement was, in one sense, inadvertently progressive. The makers of the modern Middle East roped together peoples of different ethnicities and faiths (or streams of the same faith) in what were meant to be modern, multicultural, and multi-confessional states. It is an understatement to say that the Middle East isn’t the sort of place where this kind of experiment has been shown to work. […]

WTF? They just decided this for the people? Did some outsiders do likewise for the West, or did it take centuries of bloody wars & turmoil before things changed and people learned to live with each other??

And this last paragraph:

More on all this later, but I’ll leave you with one quote from the story that struck me on re-reading, in part because it may represent what President Obama secretly feels about the Middle East. At one point, I asked David Fromkin, the author of A Peace to End all Peace, the definitive account of the making of the modern Middle East, whether he would speculate about the region’s future. This is what he said in 2007: “The Middle East has no future.”

theatlantic.com

Again, WTF? You’re talking about millions & millions of people. Are they less human, more lacking in potential than people in the West? Mr. Goldberg should probably hope & pray Fromkin was wrong as the Middle East having no future wouldn’t bode well for Israel, which sits right in the middle of it and whose well being I assume he cares about deeply.

*steps down from soapbox, flips desk, slams door on way out*