One of my favorite websites is RealClearPolitics.com. A collection of various op-eds, news items and assorted wonk prizes. I read an article from the ArmedForcesJournal.com on Middle East borders.
As we know, the Euros carved up and created the national borders of the Mid East and Africa, love Rwanda. Whether they were drunk, bored or self amused, we are paying the price today along with the current residents. The article creates new borders with brillant and short descriptions why. I really recommend you read this and learn a little.
Blood borders
How a better Middle East would look
By Ralph Peters
International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference — often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war.
The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa's borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.
While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.
and I love this
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.
