Blood borders - Rummys new world order with Map of new middle-east!

[The Sushi Bandit]

Armed Forces Journal:Blood borders - How a better Middle East would look

http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899



<snip> ...

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.

...<end of snip> this is important - please vote for greatest

[number6]

1. hmmmmm

might be controversial

[The Sushi Bandit]

2. Just might be!

Nice to know our military is planning to change national borders!

[Igel]

3. I rather liked Peter's map.

Didn't understand bits of it, and disagree with part of it.

I understand a bit more. Kuwait is majority Sunni, apparently. Hefty Shi'ite minority, though, so I don't know that this makes a great deal of sense: it shows a bit more respect for that border than for others.

Still don't understand some bits. Why have the Hijaz independent, for example? To separate religion from oil? Dunno.

I liked how it pointed out the Nagorno-Karabakh problem is really an artificial one, imposed by borders.

Interesting mental exercise, making people consider all the various claims and counterclaims. That's about all it is.

At least the squiggleness of most of the countries is increased. Apparently a good thing.

On edit: This was posted a couple of months ago. A couple of times. Perhaps from a different source.

[The Sushi Bandit]

5. It just came to me via my libertarian friend

so it is all new to me!

the troubling thing is that this might be a document that BushCo is taking seriously!

[Igel]

9. I don't think they can.

Even if they wanted to, it's an insurmountable problem.

A nice exercise in thought how, how *could* the problems be minimized. Even then, not extirpated, as Peters points out: some communities are vestigial and scattered, and were they assembled in one place they still wouldn't have sufficient numbers to form an Andorra or Lichtenstein.

One could make an interesting computer game of this kind of exercise: put in all the various tribal information, including supra-ethnic tribalisms like Islam or 'Slavdom', and start with current borders. The player's task as UN Sec Gen, with a large standing army (obviously fiction): Compel or wheedle states to minimize the problems. You start with so many points, and every dead person is a demerit.

[mainegreen]

4. No goofier than the absurd map we have today.

Not sure its any more workable either though.

[Lisa]

6. thanks for posting! I hadn't seen it yet ...

Just the thing for my political geography class!

[The Sushi Bandit]

7. Glad to help kids!!

[Lisa]

8. they loved the one I showed them from Jon Stewart's book

I couldn't find it online, but it was a "draw your own borders onto the Middle East" fake school exercise. It was a blank map with no lines.

The students were fascinated to learn that the British administrators of Iraq (including Gertrude Bell, a geographer herself) just went out into the desert and rode along on horseback dragging a stick in the sand -- and that became the border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia. (Stewart definitely had done his homework ...)

[Igel]

10. Follow-up post:

Recently I saw an article where some researchers analysed borders and determined that stability and squiggliness (squigglyness?) were positively correlated.

Meaningful borders follow tribal boundaries; they're seldom straight lines. With few exceptions, the straighter the line, the more artificial the border, and the more it makes those near the border unhappy. (Areas with current populations whose dispositions were achieved *after* the borders were established, such as the US/Canadian border, don't count.) The squigglier the line, the more likely it reflected something real on the ground, and the more stable the border.

[The Sushi Bandit]

11. Good point.. but gerrymandered voting districts have

the most screwed up boarders I have ever seen!

[Lisa]

12. there are also situations where colonial geographers ...

... were so careless (or lazy, or understaffed) that they did not bother doing proper surveying and marking of the borders between jurisdictions. (In the foreward to the second edition of "The Dictionary of Imaginary Places", Alberto Manguel describes a situation in West Africa where the team fudged in measurements for one particular location ... not on a present-day national border, but one can imagine this sort of thing occurring elsewhere.) In an earlier time when both territories may have "belonged" to the same mother country, this was not a major issue -- but when they became independent, sometimes these ambiguous areas became major sources of conflict between the neighboring countries. For example, the border between Ethiopia and Eritrea. The authorities were supposed to clear it up at a later date, but never got around to it, so now the local people are stuck with the situation and the UN has a costly problem on its hands.


"Badme (alternatively spelt Badime, Baduma, or Badame) is the name given to
the region that includes the contested territory.
But Badme is also a village - or possibly even two villages. Neither side
has pinpointed the exact location of the Badme which is supposedly the point
of contention."

http://www.somaliawatch.org/Archivemay/000512101.htm

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/1943527.stm



Even the US and Canada have had border disputes over confusing or not-clearly-defined areas. And then there is the notorious case where the surveyors were supposedly drunk (apparently not true -- just working with primitive equipment) and put the border through existing towns.
http://www.tomifobia.com/border_lines/growth.html
http://www.townshipsheritage.com/Eng/Hist/Law/border.html

In North America, the straight lines marking many provinces and states often divided up existing aboriginal territories, just like in colonial Africa ... even though there have not been major all-out wars triggered by this, it's definitely contributed to the problems faced by Indian bands. For example, the Mohawk nation is divided between Ontario, Quebec, and New York State -- this makes it very difficult to administrate, and the band membership is fragmented. People who are in need of assistance frequently get overlooked by the various social-service agencies, which assume "it's someone else's problem".