By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Future Wars And Precision Weaponry

The twenty-first century will see an unprecedented expansion in the varieties of organized violence. The argument over whether the future will bring back big wars or extend the current pattern of asymmetrical conflicts misses the point. There is no choice involved. And the fiercest challenges may come neither from conventional nor irregular forces as we know them, but from governments and organizations willing to wage war in spheres now forbidden or still unimagined. The nature of warfare never changes, but its surface manifestations will mutate savagely in the coming decades. Beyond the question of how men, gangs, tribes, nations, and faiths will fight, what they will fight about appears grimmer still. This will be a century of contradictions: The age of super-technologies is also the new age of superstition, of great religions reduced to cults that worship bloodthirsty bogeymen. Seek to deny it though we may, we face decades of religious wars-between faiths, but also within faiths. The defining struggle of our time-the source of conflicts great and small-will be between those who believe in a merciful god and those who worship a divine disciplinarian. This philosophical divide will kill many millions. Desperate, failing civilizations will confront triumphant ones.

While racial hatreds tragically persist, wars within racial groups will kill more human beings than conflicts between races. Humans may hate a distant enemy in theory but prefer to kill their neighbors in practice. Tribes-a term forbidden twenty years ago-are back, even in Europe, where godlessness is simply another faith, if one devoid of comfort. Men will fight about all of the traditional sources of conflict, from global economics to access to wells and parcels of grazing land, but the most frequent wars and lesser conflicts will be between those who disagree over the interpretation of a single faith, as well as between different tribes within the same racial group. Often, both differences will manifest themselves in the same conflict-with atrocity the result of compounded hatreds. By now we know that the genocidal impulse isn't an anomaly. Since it continues to happen, humans are hardwired for it. Only civilization and the rule of law occasionally allow cultures to control the enduring longing to exterminate those perceived as enemies.

In what is called the West, we have our own superstitions that complicate war making. The insistence on the part of leftists and unthinking academics that all humans want peace; that all conflicts can be negotiated to a gentle ending; that all cultures and civilizations are morally equal; and that all foreign barbarities are somehow our fault is reminiscent of the papacy's insistence that the evidence had to be rejected, that Copernicus and Galileo were wrong. Our internal "culture wars" are waged between those who have created a pretty, but utterly unfounded, fantasy of a peaceful nature for humankind and the new Newtonians who recognize that the data this planet generates every day suggests otherwise. The new inquisitors insist that we can pretend war away. Even after 9/11 and the blood-cult terrorism encountered in Iraq, the American intellectual class refuses to think honestly about war. Of course, it's natural for so called Westerners, in general to look at conflict through the lens of our own recent experiences, but our wars and interventions are merely the best publicized-and far from the grimmest. For most of humanity, the American-led interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, with their broad adherence to restrictive rules, would be an incomprehensible experience.

More instructive examples of what the future holds would be the 1980s war between then-Sunni-dominated Iraq and Shi'a Persia, in which over a million soldiers and civilians died, with millions more wounded; the twin civil wars in Sierra Leone and Liberia, in which children served as shock troops and societies collapsed into anarchy; the drug lord insurgency in northern Mexico that subverts state authority; or the decade of interrelated wars in Rwanda, Burundi, and eastern Congo (formerly Zaire) which took at least two million lives-mostly civilians-most killed at close quarters and many butchered with knives. In contrast Americans-liberal or conservative-share a deluding belief that all problems have answers, if only they can be found, and that all conflicts can be brought to a resolution, if only they hit on the right formula. But this is an age of insoluble conflicts- of conflicts likely to ebb and flow throughout our lifetimes. After a few hundred years of pretending that warfare might be limited by laws, savagery is back in fashion. Except in North America and northwestern Europe, the great religious wars of the last two millennia never really ended-they were only taking naps, due to the exhaustion of one party or both. The Sunni-Shi'a contest is thirteen centuries old-as old as, but deeper than, Islam's struggle with the West. The struggle between Islam and Hinduism threatens to go into nuclear overdrive. And the racial and religious jihad of Arabs against black Africans may be on the verge of exciting a startling reaction. All of these are endless wars, punctuated by stretches of phony peace and falsely divided by historians into separate struggles. The world wars of the last century, then the Cold War-the last great struggle within the West-clouded our understanding of the longer, greater tides of history. Now, with bewildering speed, history has come back, insisting on its durability and casting the last hundred years as an aberration. We have reentered the long river of struggles over elemental issues: God and blood. We have to reset our calendars and recalibrate our mentalities.

The nature of historical records misleads us: Terrorism may be an older form of violence than warfare. Certainly, its recorded pedigree is lengthy enough, from the Assassins through John Brown to al Qa'eda. Yet, for all of the studies of terrorism in print, we fail to make the essential distinction between the two basic types of terrorists: Those who have political goals, however far-fetched, and those who believe they are on a divine mission. Grasping the difference is crucial to fighting them effectively. One could call them "practical" (or political) terrorists and "apocalyptic" terrorists. Both sorts can be deadly, but the danger from the latter is a magnitude greater. Political terrorists-the kind with which we grew familiar over the past two centuries-have earthly goals. They seek to change systems of government or to assert group rights, not to jump-start Armageddon. Political terrorists are often willing to die for their cause, but they would rather live to govern. Sometimes their grievances are legitimate. The most hardened must be killed or imprisoned, but others end up in parliaments. Except for the truly deranged-such as Timothy McVeigh-they rarely seek to create mass casualties among civilians. Apocalyptic terrorists, fired by their stern vision of religion, regard death as a promotion-making them far more dangerous opponents. These ultra zealots have little regard for the suffering even of their coreligionists. They excuse atrocities great and small as serving the self-evident will of their god. Among the worst, the impulse is simply to destroy-Israel, America, less devout Muslims, or a world they find unsatisfactory and immoral. While apocalyptic terrorists may announce political goals, no concessions would satisfy them. It is impossible to negotiate with a man who believes that his god is whispering into his ear and telling him to kill you. Religion-fueled terrorists, by their nature, cannot accept compromise. This is the ultimate zero-sum game, with a demanding god as judge and referee. Historically, the only way to deal with apocalyptic terrorists has been to wipe them out. Instead, we worry about their legal rights when we capture them.

Faced with the most implacable-if not yet the most dangerous-enemies we ever have faced, we try to tame the threat they pose by employing the terms of political science and sociology. But recasting them in our own image only deludes us as to their nature and intent. And fanaticism does not preclude genius. Horrific though it was, 9/11 was a brilliant act of strategic judo. Although the terrorists woefully misjudged the American reaction, the strikes themselves were an artful aerial choreography of death that riveted the world. The true "wonder weapon" of our time isn't one of the hyper-expensive high-tech weapons we designed for our dream wars, but the suicide bomber-dirt cheap, deadly, and even more precise than a satellite-guided bomb.

Unless terrorists gain control of a full arsenal of weapons of mass destruction, they will not be able to do as much damage to states and societies as full-blown insurgencies. In Iraq, for example, terrorism cannot force the disintegration of the state, but any number of possible insurgencies could. The dividing line between a terrorist group and an insurgency lies between the inability of the former to attract mass support and the ability of an insurgent movement to mobilize the population whose cause they claim to represent. Thus for all of the drama of terrorist attacks, insurgencies and the civil wars they spawn kill vastly more human beings. Those insurgencies range from Latin-American narcotics syndicates that challenge governments (the term "narco-terrorist" is wrong-these rich, powerful groups wage postmodern insurgencies) to classic ethnic or religious resistance struggles, such as those that recently plagued Sudan, Ivory Coast, Ethiopia, much of central Africa, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Turkey, the Russian Federation, and dozens of other states.

Insurgencies are harder to fight than terrorist movements, at least in the sense that more killing is required. Fighting terrorists may take longer, but insurgencies command more active support and they're increasingly well armed. Nor do all insurgencies originate outside of a government-the butchery in Rwanda had its origins within the state apparatus. The Hutu Interahamwe militias targeted an ethnic group, not the government. Subsequently, the new Tutsi-dominated regime in Rwanda sponsored a bloody military operation in Zaire (now Congo again) that amounted to insurgency-as-invasion. Overall, the forms of insurgency and its motivations are expanding, exacerbated by a world of faulty borders and revived competition over religious and ethnic issues. In trying to understand twenty-first-century conflict, it's helpful to view human societies as mass organisms, as ecosystems of flesh and blood. The bewildering violence we see in the developing world reveals attempts by complex human systems to regain their equilibrium after being forced out of their natural balance by European colonialism and its legacy of ill-drawn borders. Societies around the world are trying to put themselves right-and the default impulse is to do it through violence. Of one thing we may be certain: Until the international community takes the improbable (but essential) step of devising a system for peacefully correcting bad borders, we will see no end of insurgencies and civil wars.

Had we wished to design a world where conflict was inevitable, we could not have done better than yesteryear's Europeans, who drew borders in dazzling ignorance or cynicism, forcing together people who hated one another, or separating those who felt a historical affinity. Add in the revival of religion-as-blood-cult, and counterinsurgency warfare looks like the primary mode of fighting that civilized states will face in this century. The violence in the developing world over the past six decades was just a rehearsal. At present, it appears that the only possible conventional-warfare challenge to the United States would have to come from China. It's a war that neither party desires, but states often tumble clumsily into war. Thus, it's instructive to consider what a future war with China might look like, if only because its scale would be greater than any other unexpected, conventional clash. First, it must be stressed again that a general war with China is unlikely to occur. Defense contractors have done their best to exaggerate China's military capabilities, but Beijing's forces remain two full generations behind our own technologically, and China's military has yet to display the culture of flexibility and internal communication essential to twenty-first-century war fighting. The Chinese have impressive military thinkers, but their executors lag far behind. Often accused of seeking to compete globally with the United States, most of China 's far-flung endeavors are desperate attempts to secure the fuels and raw materials critical to the country's continued expansion. Beijing must maintain high growth rates to keep a restive population under control-China's leaders are far more worried about internal strife than about "American aggression." China may have interests from Sudan to Panama, but its armed forces would have difficult), reaching Taiwan in a war with the United States.

And an honest model of a conflict with China raises a number of potential surprises for which our own armed forces and government are not adequately prepared. America ’s recent conventional operations have been ground-force heavy, with swift armored advances followed by gritty infantry combat in cities. We've seen that our Army and Marine Corps are too small for their global responsibilities. Yet, a war with China would be overwhelmingly a naval and airpower conflict-at least in its initial phases. Unless China came apart in the course of the conflict, we would be unlikely to invest ground forces in an effort to control Chinese territory. Instead, we would attempt to devastate China 's military and essential infrastructure from a distance. The most probable land encounter would be a fight to the south, in Myanmar, for control of the old Burma Road, a trade lifeline for southern China (although we would first seek to control the route through a naval blockade which would require Indian support).In the broader struggle, America would be apt to get some unpleasant surprises. First, a war with China would be long, not short, and could well spread to other parts of east or southeast Asia as Beijing tried to alter the terms of the struggle. Our initial strikes from the air and sea would rapidly demonstrate the limitations of precision weaponry to inflict decisive-or even convincing-destruction on a powerful enemy with great strategic depth. China 's larger number of aircraft would begin to tell as our ordnance and even our pilots grew exhausted, leading to a standoff in the air. At sea, the initial exchange would be similar, but grimmer.

Instead of repeating the great fleet actions of World War II on a strategic scale, our naval encounter with China would look uncannily like Jutland, Part Two: The Pacific Version. After inflicting more damage on our fleet than we anticipated in our war games, the Chinese would grasp that the price of sustaining their effort was too high. Withdrawing to the protection of their air-defense umbrella, Beijing 's navy would become as immobilized as the German Imperial Fleet in the Great War-while our Navy would dominate the crucial sea-lanes, without being able to close in for the kill.

This would still be a naval war-but America’s Navy's decisive role would come in a postmodern form of commerce-raiding, closing off all trade with China (for years, not weeks or months), while standoff strikes interdicted future pipeline routes across Central Asia. The crucial theater of war would be the Indian Ocean, the waters that carry the vital trade that allows China to function as a modern, industrial state. Virtually all of the grandiose studies on high-tech wars brought to swift conclusions would prove worthless, while the old naval theorists who recognized the criticality of controlling seaborne trade would be vindicated: The strategic truth we ignore is that globalization has made control of the world's sea-lanes more important than ever before. Instead of great fleet-on-fleet battles, our Navy's essential contribution will be stopping, seizing, and occasionally sinking merchant vessels on the high seas. America ’s future Navy will combine the traditions of the Union Navy's blockade of the Confederacy with a twenty-first-century version of the South's bold commerce raiders. A conventional war with China would also have daunting unconventional aspects, but those are discussed below.

As ever more states come to possess nuclear weapons, the likelihood of their use increases exponentially. But the identity of the parties to the next nuclear exchange might surprise us. Without question, we should worry about all forms of weapons of mass factor that might prevent nuclear use under such circumstances would be the weakness of Arab armies in the post-Saddam era. Iran's military could win a conventional fight-unless Saudi Arabia called in enough chips to persuade Pakistan to open a second front. All of this remains speculation, but the other variable is that Iran will not be the last state to pursue nuclear arms. Nuclear use during the Cold War was prevented primarily by a sense of rational self-interest and by fear. A future, fanatic, nuclear-armed regime may be neither rational nor afraid.

With rare exceptions, recent discussions about "asymmetrical warfare" have focused on non-state actors employing terrorism or guerrilla techniques against Western militaries. Yet, across the coming decades, any state with which we found ourselves at war would pursue unconventional means and strategies in an attempt to offset our conventional advantages. For example, a general war with China , as described above, might settle into an atmosphere of "phony war," of wary armed confrontation after an initial bloodletting. Our own asymmetrical effort would be to starve China of resources, trade and financial instruments. For its part, China would attempt to expand the range of war-making activities, attacking our communications and electronic infrastructure at home, manipulating the global media in a struggle to command world opinion, and seeking to convince the American people that the cost of continuing the war was prohibitive. To that end, Beijing might even attempt to wage biological warfare based upon genetic engineering, betting that its larger population could more easily absorb significant losses than could ours. China would attempt to strike at America ’s domestic weaknesses, just as America would assault China 's-with both sides resorting to nontraditional means. For the US, the over centralization of America ’s food supplies and the interwoven character of our electrical grid would be enormous vulnerabilities (especially if compounded by a devastating epidemic). A national supply system that relies on massive warehouse complexes and interstate trucking worsens the centralized food-production problem. Our economies of scale and sophisticated just-in-time delivery techniques could prove appallingly fragile-a Chinese village is better equipped to feed itself than most American small towns today (to say nothing of our cities), and the general goods, the availability of which we take for granted, would quickly become scarce under pandemic conditions. America would try to divide China 's population into a regime camp and a new-nationalist peace movement. While Chinese chauvinism is powerful, discontent grows daily beyond the success-story cities (which have their own vast, combustible slums). An operational goal would be to incite a governmental overreaction to unrest-crudely put, to set Chinese to killing Chinese. Simultaneously, Beijing would attempt to divide Americans politically.

All of this brings us back to rekindled religious passion as the motive force for conflict in this new century. Far from seeing an "end of history," we're experiencing history's return with a vengeance. From the sorry close of the last century at Srebrenica to the beginning of the new one on 9/11, we've found ourselves in a great age of transitions: From the Europe-spawned "Age of Reason" that perished at Auschwitz, to the new age of faith gathering global impetus; from the Western cult of technology to the resurgence of superstition; from an age that sought to impose the rule of law, to the age of hyper lawlessness; from the age of a world ordered by Europe, to a world violently disordered by Europe's colonial legacy. Rarely has the end of a century and of a millennium coincided so neatly with a sudden break in values, beliefs, social organization-and the modalities of war. We long for recent verities, now collapsed, and find it almost as difficult to face the ferocity and unreason of this new age as our enemies find it to cope with our dominance. We live at a time when men refuse to believe what they see before them, preferring to believe in things they cannot see. Our enemies are the prisoners of a cruel vision of their god, while we are captives of our myths of a benign world. The conflicts of the coming years will force a sense of reality upon all of us.

Even those who have never read a line written by Carl von Clausewitz, the Prussian military philosopher, accept as truth his dictum that "War is simply a continuation of policy with other means." Yet, that statement was only superficially true for the European world in which Clausewitz lived, fought, and wrote, and it never applied to the American people, for whom war signified a failure of policy.To characterize the conduct of other civilizations and states from the bygone Hittite and Assyrian empires to today's Islamic heartlands, China or Russia-Clausewitz's nouns would have to be reversed: "Policy is simply a continuation of war with other means." Conflict, not peace, is the natural state of human collectives. We need not celebrate the fact but must recognize it. If peace were the default condition of humankind, wouldn't history look profoundly different?

Thousands of years of relentless slaughter cannot be written off as the fault of a few delinquents. Human beings aggregated by affinities of blood, belief, or culture are inherently competitive, not cooperative, and the competition is viscerally-and easily-perceived as a matter of life and death. Pious declarations to the contrary do not change the reality. Our blindness to this fundamental and enduring principle that all of a state's nonmilitary actions seek to achieve the ends of warfare through alternative means-leaves us strategically crippled, needlessly vulnerable, and wastefully ineffective. Only our wealth, size, and raw power redeem our strategic incompetence sufficiently to allow us to bumble forward. We continue to regard warfare as something profoundly different from all other official endeavors, as an international breakdown and a last resort (occasional military adventurism notwithstanding), but similar attitudes exist only in a core of other English-speaking countries. Elsewhere, the competition between governments, cultures, civilizations, and religions is viewed as comprehensive and unceasing, and it is waged-instinctively or consciously-with all the available elements of power. Regarding peace as the natural state of man, we not only defy history but also donate free victories to competitors and enemies. Although capable of fighting ferociously when aroused, we deny that such conduct comes naturally to us, insisting that Sergeant York merely rose to the occasion. Heritage lasts, and ours was shaped initially by visions of a "peaceable kingdom," a "New Jerusalem," a "shining city on a hill." Earliest American immigrant ancestors fled Europe 's wars and strife, determined to change not only their real-estate holdings, but also human nature. This continent was to become a new Eden, and each eruption of organized violence, from King Phillip's War to Operation Iraqi Freedom, has been regarded by us as an anomaly. This dualistic character has been addressed by a succession of scholars, but, to my knowledge, not one of them has suggested that warfare might be the human baseline: We do not rise to the occasion of war, but occasionally rise above war-remarkably often, in the exceptional American case.

Yet, it may be a predilection for prolonging even the most wretched peace that ultimately makes our wars so bloody. After a century of Euro-American conflicts, it requires little effort to make the case that the quickest way to inspire a shooting war may be to cling to the dream of peace in our time. Denying human bloodlust only permits it free rein while the "virtuous" look away. they looked away from the massacres, tortures, and mass incarcerations that swept Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia after 1975. The massacre at Srebrenica can't be blamed on Serb militias alone-Europe's pacifists were the enablers. Darfur screams, while we stop up our ears. But the truly crucial step is to realize that warfare never ceases but only shifts from one medium to others, playing now on the battlefield, later in the economic sphere, then in the cultural arena, and, always, in the pulpit. Every economy is a war economy. And every successful businessman understands this intuitively, even if he has never thought or expressed it clearly. In this new age of wars of faith, the ecumenical obsession of the West is the religious equivalent of Neville Chamberlain's appeasement-just as Islamist crusaders are the equivalent of the prime minister's German interlocutors.

Sun Tzu's primary emphasis in that passage isn't on avoiding battle-that's secondary-but on winning by alternative means. The distinction is critical. Sun Tzu would have found Western peacekeeping operations incomprehensible: avoiding battle and losing. Let's put the wisdom of the amalgam of authors we now know only as "Sun Tzu" in a more accurate perspective: If you can spare your own army by destroying your enemy through hunger, thirst, plague, exhaustion, poverty, mutiny, assassination, subterfuge, lies, or terror, let the enemy suffer and die while you profit from his agony, preserving your forces for battle against the next enemy, who might not be such a patsy. Sun Tzu would have regarded weapons of mass destruction as marvelous, practical tools-as long as only his side possessed them. Sun Tzu is Machiavelli without the condolence. The message we refuse to learn is that aggression is necessary and ineradicable. The only hope of minimizing military aggression is to channel the impulse into other, less destructive channels. The Chinese understand perfectly that policy is an extension of war beyond the crudities of the battlefield, and they act upon the insight skillfully. The Russians grasp it, too, if less coherently. Muddling Lenin, Trotsky, bitter resentment, and inherited paranoia, the Kremlin acts upon the perception clumsily (as with the depth-of-winter gas shut-offs to Ukraine and then Georgia). The French have acted as if engaged in comprehensive warfare with all other parties for four centuries, failing only because their means were never commensurate with their exaggerated ambitions. We do not need a comprehensive plan, we do, however, need to face the coldly cutthroat nature of the world in which we live, in which our ancestors lived, and in which our descendants will continue to live. While awaiting the New Jerusalem, we need to recognize that the old one was blood soaked (and the present one isn't much better). There is nothing human collectives do more effectively than making war. If we want to prevent or limit wars, this means we must obtain the results of a successful war through other means. The Beijing government understands this with such clarity that one can only admire the intellectual integrity of Chinese strategic thinking. American Defense contractors, as well as desperate generals and admirals, warn of a military confrontation with China . But why on earth would China want one when Beijing is gaining all it needs through far less painful means? Certainly, countries have a way of blundering into war-but China would much prefer to avoid a violent conflict with the U.S.

This is the Sun Tzu that we cite so glibly yet fail to understand. The Islamist threat is even fiercer-far fiercer-than China when it comes to exploiting policy as a continuation of war with other means. Saudi Arabia, for example, has engaged in a merciless religious war against the West for more than three decades, yet it has not only done so while convincing our national leaders, Republican and Democrat, that we're "friends," but has managed to gain the protection of America's military on the cheap, even as it refuses meaningful cooperation with our forces. To preserve the profits of a handful of multinational oil companies, we protect a repellent, throwback regime that willfully created Osama bin Laden and his ilk. In country after country, I personally witnessed how Saudi money is used to spread anti-Western hatred (and to divide local societies), while America 's taxpayers fund a military prostituted to the defense of the degenerate House of Saud. Wishful thinking can't win wars, and it won't preserve peace. If only we could overcome our bias against honest thinking, we might find that accepting the thousands of years of evidence that government policies are a continuation of war with other means would result in the more effective use of those "other means" and, consequently, a less frequent requirement to go to war.

Furthermore is it important to understand that International borders are never completely just. But the degree of injustice they inflict upon those whom frontiers force together or separate makes an enormous difference-often the difference between freedom and oppression, tolerance and atrocity, the rule of law and terrorism, or even peace and war. 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. Of course, no adjustment of borders, however draconian, could make every minority in the Middle East happy. In some instances, ethnic and religious groups live intermingled and have intermarried. Elsewhere, reunions based on blood or belief might not prove quite as joyous as their current proponents expect. The boundaries projected in the maps accompanying this article redress the wrongs suffered by the most significant "cheated" population groups, such as the Kurds, Baluch, and Arab Shi'a, but still fail to account adequately for Middle Eastern Christians, Bahais, Ismailis, Naqshbandis, and many other smaller minorities. And one haunting wrong can never be redressed with a reward of territory: the genocide perpetrated against the Armenians by the dying Ottoman Empire. Yet, for all the injustices the borders re-imagined here leave unaddressed, without such major boundary revisions, we shall never see a more peaceful Middle East.

Even those who abhor the topic of altering borders would be well served to engage in an exercise that attempts to conceive a fairer, if still imperfect, amendment of national boundaries between the Bosporus and the Indus. Accepting that international statecraft has never developed effective tools-short of war-for readjusting faulty borders, a mental effort to grasp the Middle East's "organic" frontiers nonetheless helps us understand the extent of the difficulties we face and will continue to face. We are dealing with colossal, man-made deformities that will not stop generating hatred and violence until they are corrected. As for those who refuse to "think the unthinkable," declaring that boundaries must not change and that's that, it pays to remember that boundaries have never stopped changing through the centuries. Borders have never been static, and many frontiers, from Congo through Kosovo to the Caucasus, are changing even now (as ambassadors and special representatives avert their eyes to study the shine on their wingtips).

For example for Israel to have any hope of living in reasonable peace with its neighbors, it will have to return to its pre-1967 borders-with essential local adjustments for legitimate security concerns. But the issue of the territories surrounding Jerusalem, a city stained with thousands of years of blood, may prove intractable beyond our lifetimes. Where all parties have turned their god into a real-estate tycoon, literal turf battles have a tenacity unrivaled by mere greed for oil wealth or ethnic squabbles.

The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent Kurdish state. There are between twenty-seven million and thirty-six million Kurds living in contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds the world's largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse, Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills and mountains where they've lived since Xenophon's day. The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice after Baghdad 's fall. A Frankenstein's monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq 's Kurds into supporting the new Iraqi government-which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake: Nearly 100 percent of Iraq 's Kurds would vote for independence. As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who have endured decades of violent military oppression and a decades-long demotion to "mountain Turks" in an effort to eradicate their identity. While the Kurdish plight at Ankara 's hands has eased somewhat over the past decade, the repression recently intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the Kurds of Syria and Iran, they, too, would rush to join an independent Kurdistan if they could. The refusal by the world's legitimate democracies to champion Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin of omission far worse than the clumsy, minor sins of commission that routinely excite our media. And by the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.

A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq 's three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenicia reborn. The Shi'a south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shi'a State rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.

A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal family's treatment of Mecca and Medina as its fiefdom. With Islam's holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the world's most bigoted and oppressive regimes-a regime that commands vast, unearned oil wealth-the Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest.

While non-Muslims could not effect a change in the control of Islam's holy cities, imagine how much healthier the Muslim world might become were Mecca and Medina ruled by a rotating council representative of the world's major Muslim schools and movements in an Islamic Sacred State-a sort of Muslim super-Vatican-where the future of a great faith might be debated rather than merely decreed. True justice-which we might not like-would also give Saudi Arabia 's coastal oil fields to the Shi'a Arabs who populate that sub-region, while a southeastern quadrant would go to Yemen. Confined to a rump Saudi Homelands Independent Territory around Riyadh, the House of Saud would be capable of far less mischief toward Islam and the world.

Iran, a state with madcap boundaries, would lose a great deal of territory to Unified Azerbaijan, Free Kurdistan, the Arab Shi'a State, and Free Baluchistan but would gain the provinces around Herat in today's Afghanistan-a region with a historical and linguistic affinity for Persia. Iran would, in effect, become an ethnic Persian state again, with the most difficult question being whether or not it should keep the port of Bandar Abbas or surrender it to the Arab Shi'a State. That Afghanistan would lose to Persia in the west, it would gain in the east, as Pakistan's Northwest Frontier tribes would be reunited with their Afghan brethren (the point of this exercise is not to draw maps as we would like them but as local populations would prefer them). Pakistan, another unnatural state, would also lose its Baluch territory to Free Baluchistan. The remaining "natural" Pakistan would lie entirely east of the Indus, except for a westward spur near Karachi.

The city-states of the United Arab Emirates would have a mixed fate-as they probably will in reality. Some might be incorporated in the Arab Shia State ringing much of the Persian Gulf (a state more likely to evolve as a counterbalance to, rather than an ally of, Persian Iran). Since all puritanical cultures are hypocritical, Dubai, of necessity, would be allowed to retain its playground status for rich debauchees. Kuwait would remain within its current borders, as would Oman. In each case, this hypothetical redrawing of boundaries reflects ethnic affinities and religious communalism-in some cases, both. Of course, if we could wave a magic wand and amend the borders under discussion, we would certainly prefer to do so selectively. Yet, studying the revised map, in contrast to the map illustrating today's boundaries, offers some sense of the great wrongs borders drawn by Frenchmen and Englishmen in the twentieth century did to a region struggling to emerge from the humiliations and defeats of the nineteenth century. Correcting borders to reflect the will of the people may be impossible. For now. But given time-and the inevitable attendant bloodshed-new and natural borders will emerge. Babylon has fallen more than once. The current human divisions and forced unions between Ankara and Karachi, taken together with the region's self-inflicted woes, form as perfect a breeding ground for religious extremism, a culture of blame, and the recruitment of terrorists as anyone could design. There men and women look ruefully at their borders, they look enthusiastically for enemies. From the world's oversupply of terrorists to its paucity of energy supplies, the current deformations of the Middle East promise a worsening, not an improving, situation. In a region where only the worst aspects of nationalism ever took hold and where the most debased aspects of religion threaten to dominate a disappointed faith, the U.S., and its allies, can look for crises without end.

As for Iraq today, there are three major powers with intense interest in the future of Iraq: the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia. The United States, having toppled Saddam Hussein, has completely mismanaged the war. Nevertheless, a unilateral withdrawal would create an unacceptable situation in which Iran, possibly competing with Turkey in the North, would become the dominant military power in the region and would be in a position to impose itself at least on southern Iraq -- and potentially all of it. Certainly there would be resistance, but Iran has a large military (even if it is poorly equipped), giving it a decided advantage in controlling a country such as Iraq.

In addition, Iran is not nearly as casualty-averse as the United States. Iran fought a war with Iraq in the 1980s that cost it about a million casualties. The longtime Iranian fear has been that the United States will somehow create a pro-American regime in Baghdad, rearm the Iraqis and thus pose for Iran round two of what was its national nightmare. It is no accident that the day before these meetings, U.S. sources speculated about the possible return of the Iraqi air force to the Iraqis. Washington was playing on Tehran's worst nightmare.

Saudi Arabia's worst nightmare would be watching Iran become the dominant power in Iraq or southern Iraq. It cannot defend itself against Iran, nor does it want to be defended by U.S. troops on Saudi soil. The Saudis want Iraq as a buffer zone between Iran and their oil fields. They opposed the original invasion, fearing just this outcome, but now that the invasion has taken place, they don't want Iran as the ultimate victor. The Saudis, therefore, are playing a complex game, both supporting Sunni co-religionists and criticizing the American presence as an occupation -- yet urgently wanting U.S. troops to remain.

The United States wants to withdraw, though it doesn't see a way out because an outright unilateral withdrawal would set the stage for Iranian domination. At the same time, the United States must have an endgame -- something the next U.S. president will have to deal with.

The Iranians no longer believe the United States is capable of creating a stable, anti-Iranian, pro-American government in Baghdad. Instead, they are terrified the United States will spoil their plans to consolidate influence within Iraq. So, while they are doing everything they can to destabilize the regime, they are negotiating with Washington. The report that three-quarters of U.S. casualties in recent weeks were caused by "rogue" Shiite militia sounds plausible. The United States has reached a level of understanding with some nonjihadist Sunni insurgent groups, many of them Baathist. The Iranians do not want to see this spread -- at least not unless the United States first deals with Tehran. The jihadists, calling themselves al Qaeda in Iraq, do not want this either, and so they have carried out a wave of assassinations of those Sunnis who have aligned with the United States, and they have killed four key aides to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a key Shiite figure.

If this sounds complicated, it is. The United States is fighting Sunnis and Shia, making peace with some Sunnis and encouraging some Shia to split off -- all the time waging an offensive against most everyone. The Iranians support many, but not all, of the Shiite groups in Iraq. In fact, many of the Iraqi Shia have grown quite wary of the Iranians. And for their part, the Saudis are condemning the Americans while hoping they stay -- and supporting Sunnis who might or might not be fighting the Americans.

The situation not only is totally out of hand, but the chance that anyone will come out of it with what they really want is slim. The United States probably will not get a pro-American government and the Iranians probably will not get to impose their will on all or part of Iraq. The Saudis, meanwhile, are feeling themselves being sucked into the Sunni quagmire.

 

This situation is one of the factors driving the talks.

By no means out of any friendliness, a mutual need is emerging. No one is in control of the situation. No one is likely to get control of the situation in any long-term serious way. It is in the interests of the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia that the Iraq situation stabilize, simply because they cannot predict the outcome -- and the worst-case scenario for each is too frightening to contemplate.

None of the three powers can bring the situation under control. Even by working together, the three will be unable to completely stabilize Iraq and end the violence. But by working together they can increase security to the point that none of their nightmare scenarios comes true. In return, the United States will have to do without a pro-American government in Baghdad and the Iranians will have to forgo having an Iraqi satellite.

Hence, we see a four-hour meeting of Iranian and U.S. security experts on stabilizing the situation in Iraq. Given the little good will between the two countries, defining roles and missions in a stabilization program will require frank and serious talks indeed. Ultimately, however, there is sufficient convergence of interests that holding these talks makes sense.

The missions are clear. The Iranian task will be to suppress the Shiite militias that are unwilling to abide by an agreement -- or any that oppose Iranian domination. Their intelligence in this area is superb and their intelligence and special operations teams have little compunction as to how they act. The Saudi mission will be to underwrite the cost of Sunni acceptance of a political compromise, as well as a Sunni war against the jihadists. Saudi intelligence in this area is pretty good and, while the Saudis do have compunctions, they will gladly give the intelligence to the Americans to work out the problem. The U.S. role will be to impose a government in Baghdad that meets Iran's basic requirements, and to use its forces to grind down the major insurgent and militia groups. This will be a cooperative effort -- meaning whacking Saudi and Iranian friends will be off the table.

No one power can resolve the security crisis in Iraq -- as four years of U.S. efforts there clearly demonstrate. But if the United States and Iran, plus Saudi Arabia, work together -- with no one providing cover for or supplies to targeted groups -- the situation can be brought under what passes for reasonable control in Iraq. More important for the three powers, the United States could draw down its troops to minimal levels much more quickly than is currently being discussed, the Iranians would have a neutral, nonaggressive Iraq on their western border and the Saudis would have a buffer zone from the Iranians. The buffer zone is the key, because what happens in the buffer zone stays in the buffer zone.

Talks in Baghdad the past days and ongoing, are about determining whether there is a way for the United States and Iran to achieve their new mutual goal. The question is whether their fear of the worst-case scenario outweighs their distrust of each other. Then there is the matter of agreeing on the details -- determining the nature of the government in Baghdad, which groups to protect and which to target, how to deal with intelligence sharing and so on.

Where the situation in Iraq seems to get out of hand, on the other hand it also is drawing the attention now of regional states that are otherwise excluded from the main negotiations on Iraq till now. And are about to signal that they are prepared to bring some method to the madness that is Iraq. However there will be many hiccups, to put it mildly, and on some days it will seem as if all is lost in Iraq. Against the backdrop of all of the agony in Iraq during the past five years, there might be some new hopes during the next 6 months.

Among others, Syria has been biding its time to exploit the situation in Iraq to break out of Damascus' diplomatic isolation. In addition to gaining U.S. recognition for its role in  Iraq negotiations, Syria expects its reward for cooperation in containing the Iraqi insurgency will involve regional and Western recognition of its position as Lebanon's main power broker.To prove their worth, the Syrians have conducted a series of maneuvers to grab Washington's attention, including staged firefights against militants and a peculiar U.S. Embassy bombing in September 2006. The Syrians also repeatedly have claimed to have greatly reduced the amount of jihadist traffic flowing into Iraq, though this involved redirecting the bulk of the Islamist militants to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon. In addition to proving its usefulness with regard to Iraq, Damascus is looking for other creative options to provide Washington with an incentive to talk to Syria. Publicly flirting with the idea of allowing Russia to establish a full-fledged naval base in Latakia and Tartus off the Syrian coast is a case in point. Thanks to these shows of cooperation, Syria is probably going to fall into the jihadist pit. The intensity of these prospective jihadist attacks most likely will be within Syria's well-trained security apparatus' ability to handle. To deal with them, President Bashar al Assad will have little choice but to follow in his father's footsteps and order his military to do whatever it takes to crack down on these militants and their supporters. Syria went through this in 1982 with the Hama massacre, which suppressed a revolt by the Muslim Brotherhood, killing more than 10,000 people in the process. Though the clashes probably will not be as severe this time around, they risk undermining the stability of al Assad's minority Alawite regime.

 

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