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From the above link: http://crescentandcross.wordpress.com/2006/10/26/the-men-in-black/#more-3

Perhaps it is the fact that I find myself in that ‘distinguished’ time period known as middle age where my physical eyesight worsens as my intellectual eyesight sharpens. Perhaps it is the fact that I am looking towards the future and that I have begun to realize what kind of hellish world my children and grandchildren are going to inherit one day. Or maybe it is just my unadulterated sense of anti-Semitism that seems to increase at seemingly the same rate as do the wrinkles around my eyes and the graying in my hair.

Yes, that’s right, my sense of ‘anti-Semitism,’ since this is the only ‘acceptable’ description of what it means today to politely refuse membership in the religion of worshipping all things Jewish…’Anti-Semitism’…an organic dislike or unease when it comes to the ideology known as Phariseeism, the same ideology that–just by coincidence, I’m sure–Jesus of Nazareth also did not like. An anti-polar, magnetic rejection of anything having to do with Israel, Zionism, or ‘God’s-chosen-peopleism’. A general aversion to the soul-destroying poison known as Judaistic thinking as well as to all the other things that have brought mankind to the brink of general extinction. Being opposed to the abuse of women through pornography, the murder of unborn children, usury, economic exploitation, a deviant sexual lifestyle, communism, all these things are symptoms of this disease known as ‘anti-Semitism’…

…And of course, last but certainly not least, opposing the Holocaust in-progress that is sure to dwarf anything that has taken place up until now, meaning the extermination of 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe who have refused to be kissed by the same angel of death (whose name coincidentally happens to be Azrael) that has all but destroyed the Christian West.

I will not try to pretend otherwise. Being in the presence of today’s Pharisees and their lapdogs gives me the heebie-jeebies, as a good friend of mine likes to refer to it. It gives me the same kind of sick feeling in my stomach that I used to get when I was a kid and had to accompany my Grandfather (a medical doctor) to the nursing homes on Thursdays so that he could give the older folks their medicine. It was not their old age that I found disquieting, since I prefer the company of older people to that of my half-witted Western peers, but rather the fact that most of them were neither lucid nor rational. They carried on conversations with the furniture and called me ‘Sally’ or some other name that indicated to me that they suffered from severe dementia. Oftentimes what came out of their mouths was nothing but a wordsalad of pure gibberish or else they wailed out loud over seemingly nothing…

A preview of where its all headed thanks to those low IQs…..

THE COMING ANARCHY
by Robert D. Kaplan

How scarcity, crime, overpopulation, tribalism, and disease are rapidly
destroying the social fabric of our planet
The Atlantic Monthly, February 1994
http://www.TheAtlantic.com/atlantic/election/connection/foreign/anarcf.htm
table of contents
The Minister’s eyes were like egg yolks, an aftereffect of some of the many
illnesses, malaria especially, endemic in his country. There was also an
irrefutable sadness in his eyes. He spoke in a slow and creaking voice, the
voice of hope about to expire. Flame trees, coconut palms, and a ballpoint-blue
Atlantic composed the background. None of it seemed beautiful, though. “In
forty-five years I have never seen things so bad. We did not manage ourselves
well after the British departed. But what we have now is something worse–the
revenge of the poor, of the social failures, of the people least able to bring
up children in a modern society.” Then he referred to the recent coup in the
West African country Sierra Leone. “The boys who took power in Sierra Leone come
from houses like this.” The Minister jabbed his finger at a corrugated metal
shack teeming with children. “In three months these boys confiscated all the
official Mercedes, Volvos, and BMWs and willfully wrecked them on the road.” The
Minister mentioned one of the coup’s leaders, Solomon Anthony Joseph Musa, who
shot the people who had paid for his schooling, “in order to erase the
humiliation and mitigate the power his middle-class sponsors held over him.”
Tyranny is nothing new in Sierra Leone or in the rest of West Africa. But it is
now part and parcel of an increasing lawlessness that is far more significant
than any coup, rebel incursion, or episodic experiment in democracy. Crime was
what my friend–a top-ranking African official whose life would be threatened
were I to identify him more precisely–really wanted to talk about. Crime is
what makes West Africa a natural point of departure for my report on what the
political character of our planet is likely to be in the twenty-first century.
The cities of West Africa at night are some of the unsafest places in the world.
Streets are unlit; the police often lack gasoline for their vehicles; armed
burglars, carjackers, and muggers proliferate. “The government in Sierra Leone
has no writ after dark,” says a foreign resident, shrugging. When I was in the
capital, Freetown, last September, eight men armed with AK-47s broke into the
house of an American man. They tied him up and stole everything of value. Forget
Miami: direct flights between the United States and the Murtala Muhammed
Airport, in neighboring Nigeria’s largest city, Lagos, have been suspended by
order of the U.S. Secretary of Transportation because of ineffective security at
the terminal and its environs. A State Department report cited the airport for
“extortion by law-enforcement and immigration officials.” This is one of the few
times that the U.S. government has embargoed a foreign airport for reasons that
are linked purely to crime. In Abidjan, effectively the capital of the Cote
d’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast, restaurants have stick- and gun-wielding guards who
walk you the fifteen feet or so between your car and the entrance, giving you an
eerie taste of what American cities might be like in the future. An Italian
ambassador was killed by gunfire when robbers invaded an Abidjan restaurant. The
family of the Nigerian ambassador was tied up and robbed at gunpoint in the
ambassador’s residence. After university students in the Ivory Coast caught
bandits who had been plaguing their dorms, they executed them by hanging tires
around their necks and setting the tires on fire. In one instance Ivorian
policemen stood by and watched the “necklacings,” afraid to intervene. Each time
I went to the Abidjan bus terminal, groups of young men with restless, scanning
eyes surrounded my taxi, putting their hands all over the windows, demanding
“tips” for carrying my luggage even though I had only a rucksack. In cities in
six West African countries I saw similar young men everywhere–hordes of them.
They were like loose molecules in a very unstable social fluid, a fluid that was
clearly on the verge of igniting.
“You see,” my friend the Minister told me, “in the villages of Africa it is
perfectly natural to feed at any table and lodge in any hut. But in the cities
this communal existence no longer holds. You must pay for lodging and be invited
for food. When young men find out that their relations cannot put them up, they
become lost. They join other migrants and slip gradually into the criminal
process.”
“In the poor quarters of Arab North Africa,” he continued, “there is much less
crime, because Islam provides a social anchor: of education and indoctrination.
Here in West Africa we have a lot of superficial Islam and superficial
Christianity. Western religion is undermined by animist beliefs not suitable to
a moral society, because they are based on irrational spirit power. Here spirits
are used to wreak vengeance by one person against another, or one group against
another.” Many of the atrocities in the Liberian civil war have been tied to
belief in juju spirits, and the BBC has reported, in its magazine Focus on
Africa, that in the civil fighting in adjacent Sierra Leone, rebels were said to
have “a young woman with them who would go to the front naked, always walking
backwards and looking in a mirror to see where she was going. This made her
invisible, so that she could cross to the army’s positions and there bury charms
. . . to improve the rebels’ chances of success.”
Finally my friend the Minister mentioned polygamy. Designed for a pastoral way
of life, polygamy continues to thrive in sub-Saharan Africa even though it is
increasingly uncommon in Arab North Africa. Most youths I met on the road in
West Africa told me that they were from “extended” families, with a mother in
one place and a father in another. Translated to an urban environment, loose
family structures are largely responsible for the world’s highest birth rates
and the explosion of the HIV virus on the continent. Like the communalism and
animism, they provide a weak shield against the corrosive social effects of life
in cities. In those cities African culture is being redefined while
desertification and deforestation–also tied to overpopulation–drive more and
more African peasants out of the countryside.
A Premonition of the Future
West Africa is becoming the symbol of worldwide demographic, environmental, and
societal stress, in which criminal anarchy emerges as the real “strategic”
danger. Disease, overpopulation, unprovoked crime, scarcity of resources,
refugee migrations, the increasing erosion of nation-states and international
borders, and the empowerment of private armies, security firms, and
international drug cartels are now most tellingly demonstrated through a West
African prism. West Africa provides an appropriate introduction to the issues,
often extremely unpleasant to discuss, that will soon confront our civilization.
To remap the political earth the way it will be a few decades hence–as I intend
to do in this article–I find I must begin with West Africa.
There is no other place on the planet where political maps are so
deceptive–where, in fact, they tell such lies–as in West Africa. Start with
Sierra Leone. According to the map, it is a nation-state of defined borders,
with a government in control of its territory. In truth the Sierra Leonian
government, run by a twenty-seven-year-old army captain, Valentine Strasser,
controls Freetown by day and by day also controls part of the rural interior. In
the government’s territory the national army is an unruly rabble threatening
drivers and passengers at most checkpoints. In the other part of the country
units of two separate armies from the war in Liberia have taken up residence, as
has an army of Sierra Leonian rebels. The government force fighting the rebels
is full of renegade commanders who have aligned themselves with disaffected
village chiefs. A pre-modern formlessness governs the battlefield, evoking the
wars in medieval Europe prior to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, which ushered in
the era of organized nation-states.
As a consequence, roughly 400,000 Sierra Leonians are internally displaced,
280,000 more have fled to neighboring Guinea, and another 100,000 have fled to
Liberia, even as 400,000 Liberians have fled to Sierra Leone. The third largest
city in Sierra Leone, Gondama, is a displaced-persons camp. With an additional
600,000 Liberians in Guinea and 250,000 in the Ivory Coast, the borders dividing
these four countries have become largely meaningless. Even in quiet zones none
of the governments except the Ivory Coast’s maintains the schools, bridges,
roads, and police forces in a manner necessary for functional sovereignty. The
Koranko ethnic group in northeastern Sierra Leone does all its trading in
Guinea. Sierra Leonian diamonds are more likely to be sold in Liberia than in
Freetown. In the eastern provinces of Sierra Leone you can buy Liberian beer but
not the local brand.
In Sierra Leone, as in Guinea, as in the Ivory Coast, as in Ghana, most of the
primary rain forest and the secondary bush is being destroyed at an alarming
rate. I saw convoys of trucks bearing majestic hardwood trunks to coastal ports.
When Sierra Leone achieved its independence, in 1961, as much as 60 percent of
the country was primary rain forest. Now six percent is. In the Ivory Coast the
proportion has fallen from 38 percent to eight percent. The deforestation has
led to soil erosion, which has led to more flooding and more mosquitoes.
Virtually everyone in the West African interior has some form of malaria.
Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a more tempered and
gradual manner, throughout West Africa and much of the underdeveloped world: the
withering away of central governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains,
the unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of war. West
Africa is reverting to the Africa of the Victorian atlas. It consists now of a
series of coastal trading posts, such as Freetown and Conakry, and an interior
that, owing to violence, volatility, and disease, is again becoming, as Graham
Greene once observed, “blank” and “unexplored.” However, whereas Greene’s vision
implies a certain romance, as in the somnolent and charmingly seedy Freetown of
his celebrated novel The Heart of the Matter, it is Thomas Malthus, the
philosopher of demographic doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa’s
future. And West Africa’s future, eventually, will also be that of most of the
rest of the world.
Consider “Chicago.” I refer not to Chicago, Illinois, but to a slum district of
Abidjan, which the young toughs in the area have named after the American city.
(“Washington” is another poor section of Abidjan.) Although Sierra Leone is
widely regarded as beyond salvage, the Ivory Coast has been considered an
African success story, and Abidjan has been called “the Paris of West Africa.”
Success, however, was built on two artificial factors: the high price of cocoa,
of which the Ivory Coast is the world’s leading producer, and the talents of a
French expatriate community, whose members have helped run the government and
the private sector. The expanding cocoa economy made the Ivory Coast a magnet
for migrant workers from all over West Africa: between a third and a half of the
country’s population is now non-Ivorian, and the figure could be as high as 75
percent in Abidjan. During the 1980s cocoa prices fell and the French began to
leave. The skyscrapers of the Paris of West Africa are a facade. Perhaps 15
percent of Abidjan’s population of three million people live in shantytowns like
Chicago and Washington, and the vast majority live in places that are not much
better. Not all of these places appear on any of the readily available maps.
This is another indication of how political maps are the products of tired
conventional wisdom and, in the Ivory Coast’s case, of an elite that will
ultimately be forced to relinquish power.
Chicago, like more and more of Abidjan, is a slum in the bush: a checkerwork of
corrugated zinc roofs and walls made of cardboard and black plastic wrap. It is
located in a gully teeming with coconut palms and oil palms, and is ravaged by
flooding. Few residents have easy access to electricity, a sewage system, or a
clean water supply. The crumbly red laterite earth crawls with foot-long lizards
both inside and outside the shacks. Children defecate in a stream filled with
garbage and pigs, droning with malarial mosquitoes. In this stream women do the
washing. Young unemployed men spend their time drinking beer, palm wine, and gin
while gambling on pinball games constructed out of rotting wood and rusty nails.
These are the same youths who rob houses in more prosperous Ivorian
neighborhoods at night. One man I met, Damba Tesele, came to Chicago from
Burkina Faso in 1963. A cook by profession, he has four wives and thirty-two
children, not one of whom has made it to high school. He has seen his shanty
community destroyed by municipal authorities seven times since coming to the
area. Each time he and his neighbors rebuild. Chicago is the latest incarnation.
Fifty-five percent of the Ivory Coast’s population is urban, and the proportion
is expected to reach 62 percent by 2000. The yearly net population growth is 3.6
percent. This means that the Ivory Coast’s 13.5 million people will become 39
million by 2025, when much of the population will consist of urbanized peasants
like those of Chicago. But don’t count on the Ivory Coast’s still existing then.
Chicago, which is more indicative of Africa’s and the Third World’s demographic
present–and even more of the future–than any idyllic junglescape of women
balancing earthen jugs on their heads, illustrates why the Ivory Coast, once a
model of Third World success, is becoming a case study in Third World
catastrophe.
President Felix Houphouet-Boigny, who died last December at the age of about
ninety, left behind a weak cluster of political parties and a leaden bureaucracy
that discourages foreign investment. Because the military is small and the
non-Ivorian population large, there is neither an obvious force to maintain
order nor a sense of nationhood that would lessen the need for such enforcement.
The economy has been shrinking since the mid-1980s. Though the French are
working assiduously to preserve stability, the Ivory Coast faces a possibility
worse than a coup: an anarchic implosion of criminal violence–an urbanized
version of what has already happened in Somalia. Or it may become an African
Yugoslavia, but one without mini-states to replace the whole.
Because the demographic reality of West Africa is a countryside draining into
dense slums by the coast, ultimately the region’s rulers will come to reflect
the values of these shanty-towns. There are signs of this already in Sierra
Leone–and in Togo, where the dictator Etienne Eyadema, in power since 1967, was
nearly toppled in 1991, not by democrats but by thousands of youths whom the
London-based magazine West Africa described as “Soweto-like stone-throwing
adolescents.” Their behavior may herald a regime more brutal than Eyadema’s
repressive one.
The fragility of these West African “countries” impressed itself on me when I
took a series of bush taxis along the Gulf of Guinea, from the Togolese capital
of Lome, across Ghana, to Abidjan. The 400-mile journey required two full days
of driving, because of stops at two border crossings and an additional eleven
customs stations, at each of which my fellow passengers had their bags searched.
I had to change money twice and repeatedly fill in currency-declaration forms. I
had to bribe a Togolese immigration official with the equivalent of eighteen
dollars before he would agree to put an exit stamp on my passport. Nevertheless,
smuggling across these borders is rampant. The London Observer has reported that
in 1992 the equivalent of $856 million left West Africa for Europe in the form
of “hot cash” assumed to be laundered drug money. International cartels have
discovered the utility of weak, financially strapped West African regimes.
The more fictitious the actual sovereignty, the more severe border authorities
seem to be in trying to prove otherwise. Getting visas for these states can be
as hard as crossing their borders. The Washington embassies of Sierra Leone and
Guinea–the two poorest nations on earth, according to a 1993 United Nations
report on “human development”–asked for letters from my bank (in lieu of
prepaid round-trip tickets) and also personal references, in order to prove that
I had sufficient means to sustain myself during my visits. I was reminded of my
visa and currency hassles while traveling to the communist states of Eastern
Europe, particularly East Germany and Czechoslovakia, before those states
collapsed.
Ali A. Mazrui, the director of the Institute of Global Cultural Studies at the
State University of New York at Binghamton, predicts that West Africa–indeed,
the whole continent–is on the verge of large-scale border upheaval. Mazrui
writes, “In the 21st century France will be withdrawing from West Africa as she
gets increasingly involved in the affairs [of Europe]. France’s West African
sphere of influence will be filled by Nigeria–a more natural hegemonic power. .
. . It will be under those circumstances that Nigeria’s own boundaries are
likely to expand to incorporate the Republic of Niger (the Hausa link), the
Republic of Benin (the Yoruba link) and conceivably Cameroon.”
The future could be more tumultuous, and bloodier, than Mazrui dares to say.
France will withdraw from former colonies like Benin, Togo, Niger, and the Ivory
Coast, where it has been propping up local currencies. It will do so not only
because its attention will be diverted to new challenges in Europe and Russia
but also because younger French officials lack the older generation’s emotional
ties to the ex-colonies. However, even as Nigeria attempts to expand, it, too,
is likely to split into several pieces. The State Department’s Bureau of
Intelligence and Research recently made the following points in an analysis of
Nigeria: “Prospects for a transition to civilian rule and democratization are
slim. . . . The repressive apparatus of the state security service . . . will be
difficult for any future civilian government to control. . . . The country is
becoming increasingly ungovernable. . . . Ethnic and regional splits are
deepening, a situation made worse by an increase in the number of states from 19
to 30 and a doubling in the number of local governing authorities; religious
cleavages are more serious; Muslim fundamentalism and evangelical Christian
militancy are on the rise; and northern Muslim anxiety over southern [Christian]
control of the economy is intense . . . the will to keep Nigeria together is now
very weak.”
Given that oil-rich Nigeria is a bellwether for the region–its population of
roughly 90 million equals the populations of all the other West African states
combined–it is apparent that Africa faces cataclysms that could make the
Ethiopian and Somalian famines pale in comparison. This is especially so because
Nigeria’s population, including that of its largest city, Lagos, whose crime,
pollution, and overcrowding make it the cliche par excellence of Third World
urban dysfunction, is set to double during the next twenty-five years, while the
country continues to deplete its natural resources.
Part of West Africa’s quandary is that although its population belts are
horizontal, with habitation densities increasing as one travels south away from
the Sahara and toward the tropical abundance of the Atlantic littoral, the
borders erected by European colonialists are vertical, and therefore at
cross-purposes with demography and topography. Satellite photos depict the same
reality I experienced in the bush taxi: the Lome-Abidjan coastal
corridor–indeed, the entire stretch of coast from Abidjan eastward to Lagos–is
one burgeoning megalopolis that by any rational economic and geographical
standard should constitute a single sovereignty, rather than the five (the Ivory
Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, and Nigeria) into which it is currently divided.
As many internal African borders begin to crumble, a more impenetrable boundary
is being erected that threatens to isolate the continent as a whole: the wall of
disease. Merely to visit West Africa in some degree of safety, I spent about
$500 for a hepatitis B vaccination series and other disease prophylaxis. Africa
may today be more dangerous in this regard than it was in 1862, before
antibiotics, when the explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton described the health
situation on the continent as “deadly, a Golgotha, a Jehannum.” Of the
approximately 12 million people worldwide whose blood is HIV-positive, 8 million
are in Africa. In the capital of the Ivory Coast, whose modern road system only
helps to spread the disease, 10 percent of the population is HIV-positive. And
war and refugee movements help the virus break through to more-remote areas of
Africa. Alan Greenberg, M.D., a representative of the Centers for Disease
Control in Abidjan, explains that in Africa the HIV virus and tuberculosis are
now “fast-forwarding each other.” Of the approximately 4,000 newly diagnosed
tuberculosis patients in Abidjan, 45 percent were also found to be HIV-positive.
As African birth rates soar and slums proliferate, some experts worry that viral
mutations and hybridizations might, just conceivably, result in a form of the
AIDS virus that is easier to catch than the present strain.
It is malaria that is most responsible for the disease wall that threatens to
separate Africa and other parts of the Third World from more-developed regions
of the planet in the twenty-first century. Carried by mosquitoes, malaria,
unlike AIDS, is easy to catch. Most people in sub-Saharan Africa have recurring
bouts of the disease throughout their entire lives, and it is mutating into
increasingly deadly forms. “The great gift of Malaria is utter apathy,” wrote
Sir Richard Burton, accurately portraying the situation in much of the Third
World today. Visitors to malaria-afflicted parts of the planet are protected by
a new drug, mefloquine, a side effect of which is vivid, even violent, dreams.
But a strain of cerebral malaria resistant to mefloquine is now on the
offensive. Consequently, defending oneself against malaria in Africa is becoming
more and more like defending oneself against violent crime. You engage in
“behavior modification”: not going out at dusk, wearing mosquito repellent all
the time.
And the cities keep growing. I got a general sense of the future while driving
from the airport to downtown Conakry, the capital of Guinea. The
forty-five-minute journey in heavy traffic was through one never-ending
shantytown: a nightmarish Dickensian spectacle to which Dickens himself would
never have given credence. The corrugated metal shacks and scabrous walls were
coated with black slime. Stores were built out of rusted shipping containers,
junked cars, and jumbles of wire mesh. The streets were one long puddle of
floating garbage. Mosquitoes and flies were everywhere. Children, many of whom
had protruding bellies, seemed as numerous as ants. When the tide went out, dead
rats and the skeletons of cars were exposed on the mucky beach. In twenty-eight
years Guinea’s population will double if growth goes on at current rates.
Hardwood logging continues at a madcap speed, and people flee the Guinean
countryside for Conakry. It seemed to me that here, as elsewhere in Africa and
the Third World, man is challenging nature far beyond its limits, and nature is
now beginning to take its revenge.
Africa may be as relevant to the future character of world politics as the
Balkans were a hundred years ago, prior to the two Balkan wars and the First
World War. Then the threat was the collapse of empires and the birth of nations
based solely on tribe. Now the threat is more elemental: nature unchecked.
Africa’s immediate future could be very bad. The coming upheaval, in which
foreign embassies are shut down, states collapse, and contact with the outside
world takes place through dangerous, disease-ridden coastal trading posts, will
loom large in the century we are entering. (Nine of twenty-one U.S. foreign-aid
missions to be closed over the next three years are in Africa–a prologue to a
consolidation of U.S. embassies themselves.) Precisely because much of Africa is
set to go over the edge at a time when the Cold War has ended, when
environmental and demographic stress in other parts of the globe is becoming
critical, and when the post-First World War system of nation-states–not just in
the Balkans but perhaps also in the Middle East–is about to be toppled, Africa
suggests what war, borders, and ethnic politics will be like a few decades
hence.
To understand the events of the next fifty years, then, one must understand
environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic destiny, and the
transformation of war. The order in which I have named these is not accidental.
Each concept except the first relies partly on the one or ones before it,
meaning that the last two–new approaches to mapmaking and to warfare–are the
most important. They are also the least understood. I will now look at each
idea, drawing upon the work of specialists and also my own travel experiences in
various parts of the globe besides Africa, in order to fill in the blanks of a
new political atlas.
The Environment as a Hostile Power
For a while the media will continue to ascribe riots and other violent upheavals
abroad mainly to ethnic and religious conflict. But as these conflicts multiply,
it will become apparent that something else is afoot, making more and more
places like Nigeria, India, and Brazil ungovernable.
Mention “the environment” or “diminishing natural resources” in foreign-policy
circles and you meet a brick wall of skepticism or boredom. To conservatives
especially, the very terms seem flaky. Public-policy foundations have
contributed to the lack of interest, by funding narrowly focused environmental
studies replete with technical jargon which foreign-affairs experts just let
pile up on their desks.
It is time to understand “the environment” for what it is: the national-security
issue of the early twenty-first century. The political and strategic impact of
surging populations, spreading disease, deforestation and soil erosion, water
depletion, air pollution, and, possibly, rising sea levels in critical,
overcrowded regions like the Nile Delta and Bangladesh–developments that will
prompt mass migrations and, in turn, incite group conflicts–will be the core
foreign-policy challenge from which most others will ultimately emanate,
arousing the public and uniting assorted interests left over from the Cold War.
In the twenty-first century water will be in dangerously short supply in such
diverse locales as Saudi Arabia, Central Asia, and the southwestern United
States. A war could erupt between Egypt and Ethiopia over Nile River water. Even
in Europe tensions have arisen between Hungary and Slovakia over the damming of
the Danube, a classic case of how environmental disputes fuse with ethnic and
historical ones. The political scientist and erstwhile Clinton adviser Michael
Mandelbaum has said, “We have a foreign policy today in the shape of a
doughnut–lots of peripheral interests but nothing at the center.” The
environment, I will argue, is part of a terrifying array of problems that will
define a new threat to our security, filling the hole in Mandelbaum’s doughnut
and allowing a post- Cold War foreign policy to emerge inexorably by need rather
than by design.
Our Cold War foreign policy truly began with George F. Kennan’s famous article,
signed “X,” published in Foreign Affairs in July of 1947, in which Kennan argued
for a “firm and vigilant containment” of a Soviet Union that was imperially,
rather than ideologically, motivated. It may be that our post-Cold War foreign
policy will one day be seen to have had its beginnings in an even bolder and
more detailed piece of written analysis: one that appeared in the journal
International Security. The article, published in the fall of 1991 by Thomas
Fraser Homer-Dixon, who is the head of the Peace and Conflict Studies Program at
the University of Toronto, was titled “On the Threshold: Environmental Changes
as Causes of Acute Conflict.” Homer-Dixon has, more successfully than other
analysts, integrated two hitherto separate fields–military-conflict studies and
the study of the physical environment.
In Homer-Dixon’s view, future wars and civil violence will often arise from
scarcities of resources such as water, cropland, forests, and fish. Just as
there will be environmentally driven wars and refugee flows, there will be
environmentally induced praetorian regimes–or, as he puts it, “hard regimes.”
Countries with the highest probability of acquiring hard regimes, according to
Homer-Dixon, are those that are threatened by a declining resource base yet also
have “a history of state [read ‘military’] strength.” Candidates include
Indonesia, Brazil, and, of course, Nigeria. Though each of these nations has
exhibited democratizing tendencies of late, Homer-Dixon argues that such
tendencies are likely to be superficial “epiphenomena” having nothing to do with
long-term processes that include soaring populations and shrinking raw
materials. Democracy is problematic; scarcity is more certain.
Indeed, the Saddam Husseins of the future will have more, not fewer,
opportunities. In addition to engendering tribal strife, scarcer resources will
place a great strain on many peoples who never had much of a democratic or
institutional tradition to begin with. Over the next fifty years the earth’s
population will soar from 5.5 billion to more than nine billion. Though
optimists have hopes for new resource technologies and free-market development
in the global village, they fail to note that, as the National Academy of
Sciences has pointed out, 95 percent of the population increase will be in the
poorest regions of the world, where governments now–just look at Africa–show
little ability to function, let alone to implement even marginal improvements.
Homer-Dixon writes, ominously, “Neo-Malthusians may underestimate human
adaptability in today’s environmental-social system, but as time passes their
analysis may become ever more compelling.”
While a minority of the human population will be, as Francis Fukuyama would put
it, sufficiently sheltered so as to enter a “post-historical” realm, living in
cities and suburbs in which the environment has been mastered and ethnic
animosities have been quelled by bourgeois prosperity, an increasingly large
number of people will be stuck in history, living in shantytowns where attempts
to rise above poverty, cultural dysfunction, and ethnic strife will be doomed by
a lack of water to drink, soil to till, and space to survive in. In the
developing world environmental stress will present people with a choice that is
increasingly among totalitarianism (as in Iraq), fascist-tending mini-states (as
in Serb-held Bosnia), and road-warrior cultures (as in Somalia). Homer-Dixon
concludes that “as environmental degradation proceeds, the size of the potential
social disruption will increase.”
Tad Homer-Dixon is an unlikely Jeremiah. Today a boyish thirty-seven, he grew up
amid the sylvan majesty of Vancouver Island, attending private day schools. His
speech is calm, perfectly even, and crisply enunciated. There is nothing in his
background or manner that would indicate a bent toward pessimism. A Canadian
Anglican who spends his summers canoeing on the lakes of northern Ontario, and
who talks about the benign mountains, black bears, and Douglas firs of his
youth, he is the opposite of the intellectually severe neoconservative, the kind
at home with conflict scenarios. Nor is he an environmentalist who opposes
development. “My father was a logger who thought about ecologically safe
forestry before others,” he says. “He logged, planted, logged, and planted. He
got out of the business just as the issue was being polarized by
environmentalists. They hate changed ecosystems. But human beings, just by
carrying seeds around, change the natural world.” As an only child whose
playground was a virtually untouched wilderness and seacoast, Homer-Dixon has a
familiarity with the natural world that permits him to see a reality that most
policy analysts–children of suburbia and city streets–are blind to.
“We need to bring nature back in,” he argues. “We have to stop separating
politics from the physical world–the climate, public health, and the
environment.” Quoting Daniel Deudney, another pioneering expert on the security
aspects of the environment, Homer-Dixon says that “for too long we’ve been
prisoners of ‘social-social’ theory, which assumes there are only social causes
for social and political changes, rather than natural causes, too. This
social-social mentality emerged with the Industrial Revolution, which separated
us from nature. But nature is coming back with a vengeance, tied to population
growth. It will have incredible security implications.
“Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where
homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial
regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other
isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways.
Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction.”
We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s
and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The
other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that
is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Although both parts will be threatened by
environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will
not.
The Last Man will adjust to the loss of underground water tables in the western
United States. He will build dikes to save Cape Hatteras and the Chesapeake
beaches from rising sea levels, even as the Maldive Islands, off the coast of
India, sink into oblivion, and the shorelines of Egypt, Bangladesh, and
Southeast Asia recede, driving tens of millions of people inland where there is
no room for them, and thus sharpening ethnic divisions.
Homer-Dixon points to a world map of soil degradation in his Toronto office.
“The darker the map color, the worse the degradation,” he explains. The West
African coast, the Middle East, the Indian subcontinent, China, and Central
America have the darkest shades, signifying all manner of degradation, related
to winds, chemicals, and water problems. “The worst degradation is generally
where the population is highest. The population is generally highest where the
soil is the best. So we’re degrading earth’s best soil.”
China, in Homer-Dixon’s view, is the quintessential example of environmental
degradation. Its current economic “success” masks deeper problems. “China’s
fourteen percent growth rate does not mean it’s going to be a world power. It
means that coastal China, where the economic growth is taking place, is joining
the rest of the Pacific Rim. The disparity with inland China is intensifying.”
Referring to the environmental research of his colleague, the Czech-born
ecologist Vaclav Smil, Homer-Dixon explains how the per capita availability of
arable land in interior China has rapidly declined at the same time that the
quality of that land has been destroyed by deforestation, loss of topsoil, and
salinization. He mentions the loss and contamination of water supplies, the
exhaustion of wells, the plugging of irrigation systems and reservoirs with
eroded silt, and a population of 1.54 billion by the year 2025: it is a
misconception that China has gotten its population under control. Large-scale
population movements are under way, from inland China to coastal China and from
villages to cities, leading to a crime surge like the one in Africa and to
growing regional disparities and conflicts in a land with a strong tradition of
warlordism and a weak tradition of central government–again as in Africa. “We
will probably see the center challenged and fractured, and China will not remain
the same on the map,” Homer-Dixon says.
Environmental scarcity will inflame existing hatreds and affect power
relationships, at which we now look.
Skinhead Cossacks, Juju Warriors
In the summer, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, Samuel P. Huntington, of
Harvard’s Olin Institute for Strategic Studies, published a thought-provoking
article called “The Clash of Civilizations?” The world, he argues, has been
moving during the course of this century from nation-state conflict to
ideological conflict to, finally, cultural conflict. I would add that as refugee
flows increase and as peasants continue migrating to cities around the
world–turning them into sprawling villages–national borders will mean less,
even as more power will fall into the hands of less educated, less sophisticated
groups. In the eyes of these uneducated but newly empowered millions, the real
borders are the most tangible and intractable ones: those of culture and tribe.
Huntington writes, “First, differences among civilizations are not only real;
they are basic,” involving, among other things, history, language, and religion.
“Second . . . interactions between peoples of different civilizations are
increasing; these increasing interactions intensify civilization consciousness.”
Economic modernization is not necessarily a panacea, since it fuels individual
and group ambitions while weakening traditional loyalties to the state. It is
worth noting, for example, that it is precisely the wealthiest and
fastest-developing city in India, Bombay, that has seen the worst intercommunal
violence between Hindus and Muslims. Consider that Indian cities, like African
and Chinese ones, are ecological time bombs–Delhi and Calcutta, and also
Beijing, suffer the worst air quality of any cities in the world–and it is
apparent how surging populations, environmental degradation, and ethnic conflict
are deeply related.
Huntington points to interlocking conflicts among Hindu, Muslim, Slavic
Orthodox, Western, Japanese, Confucian, Latin American, and possibly African
civilizations: for instance, Hindus clashing with Muslims in India, Turkic
Muslims clashing with Slavic Orthodox Russians in Central Asian cities, the West
clashing with Asia. (Even in the United States, African-Americans find
themselves besieged by an influx of competing Latinos.) Whatever the laws,
refugees find a way to crash official borders, bringing their passions with
them, meaning that Europe and the United States will be weakened by cultural
disputes.
Because Huntington’s brush is broad, his specifics are vulnerable to attack. In
a rebuttal of Huntington’s argument the Johns Hopkins professor Fouad Ajami, a
Lebanese-born Shi’ite who certainly knows the world beyond suburbia, writes in
the September-October, 1993, issue of Foreign Affairs, “The world of Islam
divides and subdivides. The battle lines in the Caucasus . . . are not
coextensive with civilizational fault lines. The lines follow the interests of
states. Where Huntington sees a civilizational duel between Armenia and
Azerbaijan, the Iranian state has cast religious zeal . . . to the wind . . . in
that battle the Iranians have tilted toward Christian Armenia.”
True, Huntington’s hypothesized war between Islam and Orthodox Christianity is
not borne out by the alliance network in the Caucasus. But that is only because
he has misidentified which cultural war is occurring there. A recent visit to
Azerbaijan made clear to me that Azeri Turks, the world’s most secular Shi’ite
Muslims, see their cultural identity in terms not of religion but of their
Turkic race. The Armenians, likewise, fight the Azeris not because the latter
are Muslims but because they are Turks, related to the same Turks who massacred
Armenians in 1915. Turkic culture (secular and based on languages employing a
Latin script) is battling Iranian culture (religiously militant as defined by
Tehran, and wedded to an Arabic script) across the whole swath of Central Asia
and the Caucasus. The Armenians are, therefore, natural allies of their fellow
Indo-Europeans the Iranians.
Huntington is correct that the Caucasus is a flashpoint of cultural and racial
war. But, as Ajami observes, Huntington’s plate tectonics are too simple. Two
months of recent travel throughout Turkey revealed to me that although the Turks
are developing a deep distrust, bordering on hatred, of fellow-Muslim Iran, they
are also, especially in the shantytowns that are coming to dominate Turkish
public opinion, revising their group identity, increasingly seeing themselves as
Muslims being deserted by a West that does little to help besieged Muslims in
Bosnia and that attacks Turkish Muslims in the streets of Germany.
In other words, the Balkans, a powder keg for nation-state war at the beginning
of the twentieth century, could be a powder keg for cultural war at the turn of
the twenty-first: between Orthodox Christianity (represented by the Serbs and a
classic Byzantine configuration of Greeks, Russians, and Romanians) and the
House of Islam. Yet in the Caucasus that House of Islam is falling into a clash
between Turkic and Iranian civilizations. Ajami asserts that this very
subdivision, not to mention all the divisions within the Arab world, indicates
that the West, including the United States, is not threatened by Huntington’s
scenario. As the Gulf War demonstrated, the West has proved capable of playing
one part of the House of Islam against another.
True. However, whether he is aware of it or not, Ajami is describing a world
even more dangerous than the one Huntington envisions, especially when one takes
into account Homer-Dixon’s research on environmental scarcity. Outside the
stretch limo would be a rundown, crowded planet of skinhead Cossacks and juju
warriors, influenced by the worst refuse of Western pop culture and ancient
tribal hatreds, and battling over scraps of overused earth in guerrilla
conflicts that ripple across continents and intersect in no discernible
pattern–meaning there’s no easy-to-define threat. Kennan’s world of one
adversary seems as distant as the world of Herodotus.
Most people believe that the political earth since 1989 has undergone immense
change. But it is minor compared with what is yet to come. The breaking apart
and remaking of the atlas is only now beginning. The crack-up of the Soviet
empire and the coming end of Arab-Israeli military confrontation are merely
prologues to the really big changes that lie ahead. Michael Vlahos, a long-range
thinker for the U.S. Navy, warns, “We are not in charge of the environment and
the world is not following us. It is going in many directions. Do not assume
that democratic capitalism is the last word in human social evolution.”
Before addressing the questions of maps and of warfare, I want to take a closer
look at the interaction of religion, culture, demographic shifts, and the
distribution of natural resources in a specific area of the world: the Middle
East.
Built on steep, muddy hills, the shantytowns of Ankara, the Turkish capital,
exude visual drama. Altindag, or “Golden Mountain,” is a pyramid of dreams,
fashioned from cinder blocks and corrugated iron, rising as though each shack
were built on top of another, all reaching awkwardly and painfully toward
heaven–the heaven of wealthier Turks who live elsewhere in the city. Nowhere
else on the planet have I found such a poignant architectural symbol of man’s
striving, with gaps in house walls plugged with rusted cans, and leeks and
onions growing on verandas assembled from planks of rotting wood. For reasons
that I will explain, the Turkish shacktown is a psychological universe away from
the African one.
To see the twenty-first century truly, one’s eyes must learn a different set of
aesthetics. One must reject the overly stylized images of travel magazines, with
their inviting photographs of exotic villages and glamorous downtowns. There are
far too many millions whose dreams are more vulgar, more real–whose raw
energies and desires will overwhelm the visions of the elites, remaking the
future into something frighteningly new. But in Turkey I learned that
shantytowns are not all bad.
Slum quarters in Abidjan terrify and repel the outsider. In Turkey it is the
opposite. The closer I got to Golden Mountain the better it looked, and the
safer I felt. I had $1,500 worth of Turkish lira in one pocket and $1,000 in
traveler’s checks in the other, yet I felt no fear. Golden Mountain was a real
neighborhood. The inside of one house told the story: The architectural bedlam
of cinder block and sheet metal and cardboard walls was deceiving. Inside was a
home–order, that is, bespeaking dignity. I saw a working refrigerator, a
television, a wall cabinet with a few books and lots of family pictures, a few
plants by a window, and a stove. Though the streets become rivers of mud when it
rains, the floors inside this house were spotless.
Other houses were like this too. Schoolchildren ran along with briefcases
strapped to their backs, trucks delivered cooking gas, a few men sat inside a
cafe sipping tea. One man sipped beer. Alcohol is easy to obtain in Turkey, a
secular state where 99 percent of the population is Muslim. Yet there is little
problem of alcoholism. Crime against persons is infinitesimal. Poverty and
illiteracy are watered-down versions of what obtains in Algeria and Egypt (to
say nothing of West Africa), making it that much harder for religious extremists
to gain a foothold.
My point in bringing up a rather wholesome, crime-free slum is this: its
existence demonstrates how formidable is the fabric of which Turkish Muslim
culture is made. A culture this strong has the potential to dominate the Middle
East once again. Slums are litmus tests for innate cultural strengths and
weaknesses. Those peoples whose cultures can harbor extensive slum life without
decomposing will be, relatively speaking, the future’s winners. Those whose
cultures cannot will be the future’s victims. Slums–in the sociological
sense–do not exist in Turkish cities. The mortar between people and family
groups is stronger here than in Africa. Resurgent Islam and Turkic cultural
identity have produced a civilization with natural muscle tone. Turks, history’s
perennial nomads, take disruption in stride.
The future of the Middle East is quietly being written inside the heads of
Golden Mountain’s inhabitants. Think of an Ottoman military encampment on the
eve of the destruction of Greek Constantinople in 1453. That is Golden Mountain.
“We brought the village here. But in the village we worked harder–in the field,
all day. So we couldn’t fast during [the holy month of] Ramadan. Here we fast.
Here we are more religious.” Aishe Tanrikulu, along with half a dozen other
women, was stuffing rice into vine leaves from a crude plastic bowl. She asked
me to join her under the shade of a piece of sheet metal. Each of these women
had her hair covered by a kerchief. In the city they were encountering
television for the first time. “We are traditional, religious people. The
programs offend us,” Aishe said. Another woman complained about the schools.
Though her children had educational options unavailable in the village, they had
to compete with wealthier, secular Turks. “The kids from rich families with
connections–they get all the places.” More opportunities, more tensions, in
other words.
My guidebook to Golden Mountain was an untypical one: Tales From the Garbage
Hills, a brutally realistic novel by a Turkish writer, Latife Tekin, about life
in the shantytowns, which in Turkey are called gecekondus (“built in a night”).
“He listened to the earth and wept unceasingly for water, for work and for the
cure of the illnesses spread by the garbage and the factory waste,” Tekin
writes. In the most revealing passage of Tales From the Garbage Hills the
squatters are told “about a certain ‘Ottoman Empire’ . . . that where they now
lived there had once been an empire of this name.” This history “confounded” the
squatters. It was the first they had heard of it. Though one of them knew “that
his grandfather and his dog died fighting the Greeks,” nationalism and an
encompassing sense of Turkish history are the province of the Turkish middle and
upper classes, and of foreigners like me who feel required to have a notion of
“Turkey.”
But what did the Golden Mountain squatters know about the armies of Turkish
migrants that had come before their own–namely, Seljuks and Ottomans? For these
recently urbanized peasants, and their counterparts in Africa, the Arab world,
India, and so many other places, the world is new, to adapt V. S. Naipaul’s
phrase. As Naipaul wrote of urban refugees in India: A Wounded Civilization,
“They saw themselves at the beginning of things: unaccommodated men making a
claim on their land for the first time, and out of chaos evolving their own
philosophy of community and self-help. For them the past was dead; they had left
it behind in the villages.”
Everywhere in the developing world at the turn of the twenty-first century these
new men and women, rushing into the cities, are remaking civilizations and
redefining their identities in terms of religion and tribal ethnicity which do
not coincide with the borders of existing states.
In Turkey several things are happening at once. In 1980, 44 percent of Turks
lived in cities; in 1990 it was 61 percent. By the year 2000 the figure is
expected to be 67 percent. Villages are emptying out as concentric rings of
gecekondu developments grow around Turkish cities. This is the real political
and demographic revolution in Turkey and elsewhere, and foreign correspondents
usually don’t write about it.
Whereas rural poverty is age-old and almost a “normal” part of the social
fabric, urban poverty is socially destabilizing. As Iran has shown, Islamic
extremism is the psychological defense mechanism of many urbanized peasants
threatened with the loss of traditions in pseudo-modern cities where their
values are under attack, where basic services like water and electricity are
unavailable, and where they are assaulted by a physically unhealthy environment.
The American ethnologist and orientalist Carleton Stevens Coon wrote in 1951
that Islam “has made possible the optimum survival and happiness of millions of
human beings in an increasingly impoverished environment over a
fourteen-hundred-year period.” Beyond its stark, clearly articulated message,
Islam’s very militancy makes it attractive to the downtrodden. It is the one
religion that is prepared to fight. A political era driven by environmental
stress, increased cultural sensitivity, unregulated urbanization, and refugee
migrations is an era divinely created for the spread and intensification of
Islam, already the world’s fastest-growing religion. (Though Islam is spreading
in West Africa, it is being hobbled by syncretization with animism: this makes
new converts less apt to become anti-Western extremists, but it also makes for a
weakened version of the faith, which is less effective as an antidote to crime.)
In Turkey, however, Islam is painfully and awkwardly forging a consensus with
modernization, a trend that is less apparent in the Arab and Persian worlds (and
virtually invisible in Africa). In Iran the oil boom–because it put development
and urbanization on a fast track, making the culture shock more intense–fueled
the 1978 Islamic Revolution. But Turkey, unlike Iran and the Arab world, has
little oil. Therefore its development and urbanization have been more gradual.
Islamists have been integrated into the parliamentary system for decades. The
tensions I noticed in Golden Mountain are natural, creative ones: the kind
immigrants face the world over. While the world has focused on religious
perversity in Algeria, a nation rich in natural gas, and in Egypt, parts of
whose capital city, Cairo, evince worse crowding than I have seen even in
Calcutta, Turkey has been living through the Muslim equivalent of the Protestant
Reformation.
Resource distribution is strengthening Turks in another way vis-a-vis Arabs and
Persians. Turks may have little oil, but their Anatolian heartland has lots of
water–the most important fluid of the twenty-first century. Turkey’s Southeast
Anatolia Project, involving twenty-two major dams and irrigation systems, is
impounding the waters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Much of the water that
Arabs and perhaps Israelis will need to drink in the future is controlled by
Turks. The project’s centerpiece is the mile-wide, sixteen-story Ataturk Dam,
upon which are emblazoned the words of modern Turkey’s founder: “Ne Mutlu Turkum
Diyene” (“Lucky is the one who is a Turk”).
Unlike Egypt’s Aswan High Dam, on the Nile, and Syria’s Revolution Dam, on the
Euphrates, both of which were built largely by Russians, the Ataturk Dam is a
predominantly Turkish affair, with Turkish engineers and companies in charge. On
a recent visit my eyes took in the immaculate offices and their gardens, the
high-voltage electric grids and phone switching stations, the dizzying sweep of
giant humming transformers, the poured-concrete spillways, and the prim
unfolding suburbia, complete with schools, for dam employees. The emerging power
of the Turks was palpable.
Erduhan Bayindir, the site manager at the dam, told me that “while oil can be
shipped abroad to enrich only elites, water has to be spread more evenly within
the society. . . . It is true, we can stop the flow of water into Syria and Iraq
for up to eight months without the same water overflowing our dams, in order to
regulate their political behavior.”
Power is certainly moving north in the Middle East, from the oil fields of
Dhahran, on the Persian Gulf, to the water plain of Harran, in southern
Anatolia–near the site of the Ataturk Dam. But will the nation-state of Turkey,
as presently constituted, be the inheritor of this wealth?
I very much doubt it.
The Lies of Mapmakers
Whereas West Africa represents the least stable part of political reality
outside Homer-Dixon’s stretch limo, Turkey, an organic outgrowth of two Turkish
empires that ruled Anatolia for 850 years, has been among the most stable.
Turkey’s borders were established not by colonial powers but in a war of
independence, in the early 1920s. Kemal Ataturk provided Turkey with a secular
nation-building myth that most Arab and African states, burdened by artificially
drawn borders, lack. That lack will leave many Arab states defenseless against a
wave of Islam that will eat away at their legitimacy and frontiers in coming
years. Yet even as regards Turkey, maps deceive.
It is not only African shantytowns that don’t appear on urban maps. Many
shantytowns in Turkey and elsewhere are also missing–as are the considerable
territories controlled by guerrilla armies and urban mafias. Traveling with
Eritrean guerrillas in what, according to the map, was northern Ethiopia,
traveling in “northern Iraq” with Kurdish guerrillas, and staying in a hotel in
the Caucasus controlled by a local mafia–to say nothing of my experiences in
West Africa–led me to develop a healthy skepticism toward maps, which, I began
to realize, create a conceptual barrier that prevents us from comprehending the
political crack-up just beginning to occur worldwide.
Consider the map of the world, with its 190 or so countries, each signified by a
bold and uniform color: this map, with which all of us have grown up, is
generally an invention of modernism, specifically of European colonialism.
Modernism, in the sense of which I speak, began with the rise of nation-states
in Europe and was confirmed by the death of feudalism at the end of the Thirty
Years’ War–an event that was interposed between the Renaissance and the
Enlightenment, which together gave birth to modern science. People were suddenly
flush with an enthusiasm to categorize, to define. The map, based on scientific
techniques of measurement, offered a way to classify new national organisms,
making a jigsaw puzzle of neat pieces without transition zones between them.
“Frontier” is itself a modern concept that didn’t exist in the feudal mind. And
as European nations carved out far-flung domains at the same time that print
technology was making the reproduction of maps cheaper, cartography came into
its own as a way of creating facts by ordering the way we look at the world.
In his book Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, Benedict Anderson, of Cornell University, demonstrates that the map
enabled colonialists to think about their holdings in terms of a “totalizing
classificatory grid. . . . It was bounded, determinate, and therefore–in
principle–countable.” To the colonialist, country maps were the equivalent of
an accountant’s ledger books. Maps, Anderson explains, “shaped the grammar” that
would make possible such questionable concepts as Iraq, Indonesia, Sierra Leone,
and Nigeria. The state, recall, is a purely Western notion, one that until the
twentieth century applied to countries covering only three percent of the
earth’s land area. Nor is the evidence compelling that the state, as a governing
ideal, can be successfully transported to areas outside the industrialized
world. Even the United States of America, in the words of one of our best living
poets, Gary Snyder, consists of “arbitrary and inaccurate impositions on what is
really here.”
Yet this inflexible, artificial reality staggers on, not only in the United
Nations but in various geographic and travel publications (themselves
by-products of an age of elite touring which colonialism made possible) that
still report on and photograph the world according to “country.” Newspapers,
this magazine, and this writer are not innocent of the tendency.
According to the map, the great hydropower complex emblemized by the Ataturk Dam
is situated in Turkey. Forget the map. This southeastern region of Turkey is
populated almost completely by Kurds. About half of the world’s 20 million Kurds
live in “Turkey.” The Kurds are predominant in an ellipse of territory that
overlaps not only with Turkey but also with Iraq, Iran, Syria, and the former
Soviet Union. The Western-enforced Kurdish enclave in northern Iraq, a
consequence of the 1991 Gulf War, has already exposed the fictitious nature of
that supposed nation-state.
On a recent visit to the Turkish-Iranian border, it occurred to me what a risky
idea the nation-state is. Here I was on the legal fault line between two
clashing civilizations, Turkic and Iranian. Yet the reality was more subtle: as
in West Africa, the border was porous and smuggling abounded, but here the
people doing the smuggling, on both sides of the border, were Kurds. In such a
moonscape, over which peoples have migrated and settled in patterns that
obliterate borders, the end of the Cold War will bring on a cruel process of
natural selection among existing states. No longer will these states be so
firmly propped up by the West or the Soviet Union. Because the Kurds overlap
with nearly everybody in the Middle East, on account of their being cheated out
of a state in the post-First World War peace treaties, they are emerging, in
effect, as the natural selector–the ultimate reality check. They have
destabilized Iraq and may continue to disrupt states that do not offer them
adequate breathing space, while strengthening states that do.
Because the Turks, owing to their water resources, their growing economy, and
the social cohesion evinced by the most crime-free slums I have encountered, are
on the verge of big-power status, and because the 10 million Kurds within Turkey
threaten that status, the outcome of the Turkish-Kurdish dispute will be more
critical to the future of the Middle East than the eventual outcome of the
recent Israeli-Palestinian agreement.
America’s fascination with the Israeli-Palestinian issue, coupled with its lack
of interest in the Turkish-Kurdish one, is a function of its own domestic and
ethnic obsessions, not of the cartographic reality that is about to transform
the Middle East. The diplomatic process involving Israelis and Palestinians
will, I believe, have little effect on the early- and mid-twenty-first-century
map of the region. Israel, with a 6.6 percent economic growth rate based
increasingly on high-tech exports, is about to enter Homer-Dixon’s stretch limo,
fortified by a well-defined political community that is an organic outgrowth of
history and ethnicity. Like prosperous and peaceful Japan on the one hand, and
war-torn and poverty-wracked Armenia on the other, Israel is a classic
national-ethnic organism. Much of the Arab world, however, will undergo
alteration, as Islam spreads across artificial frontiers, fueled by mass
migrations into the cities and a soaring birth rate of more than 3.2 percent.
Seventy percent of the Arab population has been born since 1970–youths with
little historical memory of anticolonial independence struggles, postcolonial
attempts at nation-building, or any of the Arab-Israeli wars. The most distant
recollection of these youths will be the West’s humiliation of colonially
invented Iraq in 1991. Today seventeen out of twenty-two Arab states have a
declining gross national product; in the next twenty years, at current growth
rates, the population of many Arab countries will double. These states, like
most African ones, will be ungovernable through conventional secular ideologies.
The Middle East analyst Christine M. Helms explains, “Declaring Arab nationalism
“bankrupt,” the political “disinherited” are not rationalizing the failure of
Arabism . . . or reformulating it. Alternative solutions are not contemplated.
They have simply opted for the political paradigm at the other end of the
political spectrum with which they are familiar–Islam.”
Like the borders of West Africa, the colonial borders of Syria, Iraq, Jordan,
Algeria, and other Arab states are often contrary to cultural and political
reality. As state control mechanisms wither in the face of environmental and
demographic stress, “hard” Islamic city-states or shantytown-states are likely
to emerge. The fiction that the impoverished city of Algiers, on the
Mediterranean, controls Tamanrasset, deep in the Algerian Sahara, cannot obtain
forever. Whatever the outcome of the peace process, Israel is destined to be a
Jewish ethnic fortress amid a vast and volatile realm of Islam. In that realm,
the violent youth culture of the Gaza shantytowns may be indicative of the
coming era.
The destiny of Turks and Kurds is far less certain, but far more relevant to the
kind of map that will explain our future world. The Kurds suggest a geographic
reality that cannot be shown in two-dimensional space. The issue in Turkey is
not simply a matter of giving autonomy or even independence to Kurds in the
southeast. This isn’t the Balkans or the Caucasus, where regions are merely
subdividing into smaller units, Abkhazia breaking off from Georgia, and so on.
Federalism is not the answer. Kurds are found everywhere in Turkey, including
the shanty districts of Istanbul and Ankara. Turkey’s problem is that its
Anatolian land mas

Well done! Unlike the author of the topic ;-)