Armed Forces Journal Nightmare Scenario
How a better Middle East would look
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.
What apalling racist hypocrites. Check their new map! A giant Kurdistan with access to the Black Sea and NO Palestine. And that’s just for starters…
‘Inevitable War Trumped Up in Kirkuk
… “We, the International Crisis Group, are proposing an alternative way, a way out of this looming crisis. This would involve, most importantly, cancellation of the referendum, for now. No deadline for a referendum,” he said. “Instead, a United Nations envoy should be appointed in some capacity to mediate the conflict between the various communities and with the government and with the Kurdistan regional government to find an alternative solution. The main component of that would have to be that Kirkuk and other disputed territories would gain an interim status for maybe 10 years.”
Interim what? Interim country?