ARMED FORCES JOURNAL - Blood borders - June 2006

The most arbitrary and distorted borders in the world are in Africa and the Middle East. Drawn by self-interested Europeans (who have had sufficient trouble defining their own frontiers), Africa’s borders continue to provoke the deaths of millions of local inhabitants. But the unjust borders in the Middle East — to borrow from Churchill — generate more trouble than can be consumed locally.

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region’s comprehensive failure isn’t Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats. (via ARMED FORCES JOURNAL - Blood borders - June 2006)

This is an idea that gained some traction. Was this an attempt for greater involvement in the Middle East? Was this an attempt to impose a fresh set of despots by the West on the Middle East. In the last 80 years, the attractiveness of the Middle East has only increased!! The oil riches have become more important now than before.

It is these interventions by the West which also made the Middle East the hot bed of terror.