Plans for Redrawing the Middle East: The Project for a “New Middle East”
The Americans are sinking into a quagmire of their own making in Iraq, but still fantasise about re-drawing the map of the whole Middle East more to their liking. One startling example is this map, produced by the Armed Forces Journal, who in their June issue portray a region that is further balkanized, and basically split up along ethnic lines, thus creating a maximalist Kurdistan (which probably would be quite US-friendly, just like the Kurdish areas in northern Iraq at present), a greater Yemen, an Iran that would move eastward (acquiring certain areas of Afghanistan while losing a part of its west to Azerbeijan and an Arab shia state), and so forth.
Not having read the article accompanying the map, I’m guessing this is not so much a proposal as an exercise in thinking out loud. Such a re-drawing would have the whole region – not to mention all Muslim countries – up in arms, possibly quite literally. But it remains an interesting avenue of thought, especially for the disenfranchised peoples who would benefit from such a rearrangement.
A real-life suggestion for redrawing national borders in the Middle East. Needless to say, it would have been a disaster.
In Alternate History and Speculative Fiction (especially the kind that takes place Twenty Minutes Into The Future), authors like to have fun by turning big countries into lots of smaller ones. May be justified by a war, a large-scale catastrophe, or simply a successful secessionist movement. Often happens with the USA, but other large countries such as China are also considered fair game.
Contrast Space Filling Empire, which is about filling the map with large countries so as not to bother with pesky borders.
0 comments: