Rewriting the map

The New Map of the Middle East - Jeffrey Goldberg - The Atlantic

Goldberg looks back at his 2007 prescient article talking about how the Middle East may end up.

I was interested in how his views have changed on the original division:

In the article, I was very critical of the imperial hubris that motivated the Sykes-Picot division of the Middle East by the British and French. But I’ve warmed to the argument that the Sykes-Picot arrangement was, in one sense, inadvertently progressive. The makers of the modern Middle East roped together peoples of different ethnicities and faiths (or streams of the same faith) in what were meant to be modern, multicultural, and multi-confessional states. It is an understatement to say that the Middle East isn’t the sort of place where this kind of experiment has been shown to work. (I’m thinking of you, one-staters, by the way.) I don’t think it is worth American money, or certainly American lives, to keep Iraq a unitary state. It is, of course, important to invest in plans that forestall the creation of permanent jihadist safe havens, and about this the U.S. should bevigilant, more vigilant than it has been. But Westphalian obsessiveness—Iraq must stay together because it must stay together—just doesn’t seem wise.

In the same way, there was the same "inadvertantly progressive" justification involved in the Iraq invasion in 2003 - the view that removing a dictator who violently suppressed parts of the population would allow for democracy to flower, and that it was almost racist for opponents on the Left to argue that the people there were incapable of working out their differences peacefully.   From memory, that was pretty much the position that Christopher Hitchens promoted, and which I found somewhat persuasive at the time.   It would be interesting to know what his position is now.