Divide and Perish

Thesis

Comprehensive review of 5000 years of the history of the people who have lived in southwest Asia and the adjoining corner of Africa indicates that these areas comprise a discrete segment of the planet that is irrevocably conjoined by valleys, plateaus, routes, and rivers, while separated from neighboring lands by deserts, seas, and mountain ranges.

The geographic coherence of the region thus delineated has imparted to its inhabitants an overlay of cultural and political commonality. It has a geopolitical identity that has received conventional recognition in the appellation, the Middle East.

Any agency that formulates its policies in disregard of these realities is doomed, over time, to see those policies frustrated. In the opinion of the author, American policymakers have fallen deep into this geopolitical trap since World War II. This error has already cost the United States a high price in wealth and lives, and threatens to exact an even higher toll unless defective policies are corrected.

Transliteration

Most foreign words and names are spelled as they appear in the

Encyclopaedia Britannica. The Britannica cited herein is the Fifteenth Edition, 1995. Aside from established spellings of place-names, Arabic words and names are spelled in accordance with the system established by the United States Board of Geographic Names, wherein the guide is printed text, not pronunciation (which is subject to dialectal variation). Some Iraqi names contain a borrowed (from Turkish?) ch – as in much – which is customarily represented in Arabic text as a triple dotted jim; the borrowed p may be represented by two dots under a ba’.