Kingdom of Heaven (2005)

I don’t understand some journalists’ obsession with the borders of the Middle East. Nobody’s arguing they are perfect or fair or reflective of demographic and political realities. Few would claim that in the Middle East, the level of democracy and respect for human rights meet the bare minimum. Probably no one in his right mind would argue that the Middle East would have been a prosperous and peaceful place if not for outside interference. None of these facts, however, gives anyone the right to make self-righteous claims that could further jeopardize the lives of the people of the region.

Yet it is surprising how a brilliant (!) piece comes out in that direction every now and then. In the new issue of the American journal The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg discusses the possibility of border changes in the Middle East. Titled “After Iraq: Mapping the new Middle East,”[1] Goldberg follows in the footsteps of the June 2006 article by the journalist Ralph Peters, “Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look.”[2] The thrust of Goldberg’s essay is the impending independence of Iraqi Kurdistan and the break up and/or expansion of virtually every state from Egypt to Iran and from Turkey to Yemen.

One of the biggest obstacles to the independence of Iraqi Kurds, Goldberg claims, is Turkey. As he puts it, Ankara’s unease about the prospects of a sense of unity between Turkish and Iraqi Kurds make independent Kurdistan a potentially explosive variable in Middle Eastern equations. “Turkey is famously sour on the idea of Kurdish independence, fearing a riptide of nationalist feelings among its own unhappy Kurds – but independence for Iraq’s Kurds seems, if not immediate, then in due course inevitable” Goldberg writes (p. 71).

I don’t like to repeat myself and therefore I won’t go into the details of why Mr. Goldberg is wrong about Turkish Kurds. I have already responded to Mr. Peters on a similar point for “Blood Borders.”[3] Suffice to say that, in the general scheme of things, his implicit suggestion, that new independent states would solve all the problems of the region and those of the Kurdish people, is deeply flawed.

It was indeed an injustice to the Kurds that they could not get a state after World War I. But let’s face it: from a purely realistic point of view, that state would not have survived for too long. A strong sense of nationhood among the Kurds did not exist at the time: Kurds were (and still are) socially fragmented. Even today, many still speak mutually unintelligible dialects of Kurdish.

Recent history also explains the lack of a Kurdish state in the region. Toward the end of its life, the Ottoman Empire had a few officers of Kurdish background, but most of them joined Turkish nationalists during the Turkish War of Independence (1919-1923). Almost none of them pushed for Kurdish independence after 1923. Without the necessary minimum of educated people who have some experience running anything, had it been created, the Kurdish state of the 1920s would have been a failed one.

Today, that is not the case. The territories of the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) are the most economically vibrant and politically secure part of Iraq. Moreover, Iraqi Kurds are doing their best to keep Iraq united, at least for the time being. As Goldberg quotes the Kurdish politician Barham Salih, currently deputy prime minister of Iraq, “if Iraq fails, no one will be able to blame the Kurds” (p. 79).

Indeed. But that is not the point. The point is that any attempt to change the borders of the Middle East is going to spill so much blood as to make the deaths since 2003 (or 1948, or 1917) negligible. It is for that human cost that any talk of border change in the Middle East is irresponsible.

Interestingly, Goldberg takes cognizance of the possibility that, contrary to his speculations, none of the borders of the region may ever change. “It’s not impossible to imagine that, in 20 years, the map of the Middle East will look exactly like it does today” he says (p. 77). The piece, one might think, is more of a thought exercise than anything.

But the major problem with “After Iraq” is that it is presented in a disturbing way: At the cover of The Atlantic is a map of the Middle East showing an independent Kurdistan, which has grown at the expense of Turkey, Iraq, and a dismembered “Persia.” That “Persia” has also lost land to “Greater Azerbaijan” and “Khuzistan.” Follow the story inside, a larger map of places with strange names like “Greater Syria,” “Greater Jordan,” “The Alawaite Republic,” “Islamic Emirate of Gaza,”  “Sunni Republic of Iraq,” and “Shiite Islamic State of Iraq” greets you.

Goldberg’s map brings to mind the board games Risk and Diplomacy, where players try to conquer the world by casting dice and trading cards. Just like real life diplomacy, the aim is to capitalize on enemies’ weaknesses and manipulate them against each other.

But there is one notable difference between board games and Goldberg’s map: real people live on the latter. It is completely lost on Goldberg (just as it was lost on Peters before him – more below) that with every attempt to change the map, more people are going to die and the region will become an even more fertile breeding ground for international terrorism.

Furthermore, Goldberg weakens his argument by granting audience to Ralph Peters. In a comical fashion, Goldberg quotes Peters explaining why and how he wrote “Blood Borders” in June 2006: “The art department gave me a blank map, and I took a crayon and drew on it. After it came out, people started arguing on the Internet that this border should, in fact, be 50 miles this way, and that border 50 miles that way, but the width of the crayon was 200 miles” (p. 75).

This sort of statement cannot be taken seriously. Perhaps Messrs. Peters and Goldberg should take their crayons and do their drawing somewhere else. In fact, they should switch careers and turn to painting, seemingly an area where both gentlemen are very passionate. At any rate, given their previous “success” with predictions (Mr. Peters with “Dude, Where’s My Civil War?” of March 2006, in which he refuted the claim that there was a civil war going on in Iraq and Mr. Goldberg with “The Great Terror” in March 2002, in which he claimed that the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein pursued nuclear weapons and had links with Al-Qaeda),[4] maybe it is time that the two gentlemen move on to new careers.

But I have a more serious suggestion and one that will keep the two journalists in business: since we all basically agree that there is something wrong with the borders of the Middle East, why don’t we discuss how to get rid of all of them?

Even American input can be helpful in such a case. In fact, following World War II, it was the United States that consciously sowed the seeds of European integration by forcing the recipients of Marshall aid to end economic nationalism. In the early 1950s, West Europeans assumed the initiative and turned their continent into the economically prosperous and politically peaceful Europe that we know today. It is hard to believe that now, but there was a time – not so long ago – that Washington implemented extremely constructive policies in other parts of the world and had excellent results.

Crayons are meant to instill creativity in small children. If Western journalists and opinion leaders wish to help solve the problems of the Middle East in a creative manner, they could start by putting pressure on their legislators and policy-makers to formulate a new Marshall Plan for the region.

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Barın Kayaoğlu is a Ph.D. candidate in history at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia and a regular contributor to the Journal of Turkish Weekly.

E-mail: kayaoglu@virginia.edu