| Tuesday, November 7, 2006 |
16:10 - What the world needs now
http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/06/1833899
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What would the Middle East look like if the national borders were drawn according to traditional tribal ranges rather than arbitrary, European-imposed territorial lines?
That's what this article at the Armed Forces Journal discusses, with pretty maps and lots of in-depth discussion. It covers a lot of the ground I've been hearing people talk about lately, such as that the endemic problem in the Middle East is that because the people are tribal rather than national in their thinking and thus have no psychological link to their governments, and because their governments have oil wealth and thus no need to depend on their populaces for tax money, the people and the governments are essentially at cross purposes all the time, which is a huge barrier standing in the way of the nationalizing impulse that was what made Europe ascendant starting in the Middle Ages. The Islamic world needs to develop national identities in order to thrive in the same way, and one seemingly intelligent way to accomplish that would be to redraw the boundaries in the way proposed here.
Of course, there's still the oil issue, but one thing at a time.
Interesting reading, to say the least. And smarter than JON CARRY might have us believe of its authors.
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Brian Tiemann
