A Suggestion For A Better Middle East

Armed Forced Journal wonders aloud how the situation might be made better by altering borders

It’s hardly original or insightful to note that of all the areas of planet Earth, the area we Westerners call the “Middle East” is one in which the political conditions are arguably the most fragile of the modern age.

Ralph Peters, as published by the Armed Forces Journal, assays a possible solution: the redrawing and realignment of boundaries based on commonly-perceived nationalistic groupings: the Kurds in one nation, an expanded Jordan, Israel within its 1968 boundaries (save whatever issues surround the city of Jerusalem, which the article has the courage to state may be intractable within our lifetimes).

In all the suggested boundaries radically alter the national map of the Middle East, leaving very little resembling today’s alignment. An enlarged Iran, albeit moved slightly to the east and nearly landlocked, visually dominates the area; present day Iraq is completely gone, replaced by a handful of states centering on a Baghdad “city state”; nations with portentious names like “Free Baluchistan”, “Islamic Sacred State”, and “Free Kurdistan” leave one with the feeling that one is looking at a sort of Risk board.

Is the proposal reasonable? Even the article itself seems to admit that it merely suggests the concept is yet another starting point in hopeful discussion. What could be a truth of the matter is borne out fairly early in the article, as Mr Peters writes:

Via Cartography.