Free The Revenge of Geography by Robert D. Kaplan Page B

Egypt. Yemen was rich and populous from antiquity forward, but its many mountain kingdoms were always separate from one another. It is therefore no surprise that building modern, nontyrannical states in Libya and Yemen is proving more difficult than in Tunisia and Egypt.
    But it is in the Levant and Fertile Crescent where the next phase of conflict may unfold.

    Iraq, because of the 2003 American invasion, is deep into a political evolution that cannot but affect the entire Arab world. This is because of Iraq’s vast oil reserves (the second in the world behind Saudi Arabia); its large population of over 31 million; its geographical position at the juncture of the Sunni and Shiite worlds; its equidistance between Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia; and its historical and political significance as the former capital of the Abbasid Dynasty. Furthermore, Iraq is bedeviled by three legacies: almost half a century of brutal military dictatorship under various rulers, culminating in Saddam, that warped its political culture; a grim and violent history, ancient and modern, that extends far beyond the recent decades of dictatorship, and which has encouraged a harsh and suspicious national character (however essentialist this may sound); and severe ethnic and sectarian divisions.
    Iraq has never been left alone. Once again, Freya Stark: “While Egypt lies parallel and peaceful to the routes of human traffic, Iraq is from earliest times a frontier province, right-angled and obnoxious to the predestined paths of man.” 11 For Mesopotamia cut across one of history’s bloodiest migration routes, pitting man against man and breeding pessimism as a consequence. Whether Iraq was being attacked from the Syrian desert in the west or the plateau of Elam in Iran to the east, it was a constant victim of occupation. From as early as the third millennium B.C ., the ancient peoples of the Near East fought over control of Mesopotamia. Whether it was the Achaemenid Persian kings Darius and Xerxes who ruled Babylon, or the Mongol hordes that later swept down to overrun the land, or the long-running Ottoman rule that ended with the First World War, Iraq’s has been a tragic history of occupation. 12
    Furthering this bloodshed, Mesopotamia has rarely been a demographically cohesive country. The Tigris and Euphrates, which run through Iraq, have long constituted a frontier zone where various groups, often the residue of these foreign invasions, clashed and overlapped. As the French orientalist Georges Roux painstakingly documentsin
Ancient Iraq
, since antiquity, north, south, and center have usually been in pitched battle. Rulers of the first city-states, the southern Sumerians, fought the central-Mesopotamian Akkadians. They both fought the north-inhabiting Assyrians. The Assyrians, in turn, fought the Babylonians. And this was to say nothing of the many pockets of Persians who lived amid the native Mesopotamians, forming another source of strife. 13 Only the most suffocating of tyrannies could stave off the utter disintegration to which this frontier region was prone. As the scholar Adeed Dawisha notes, “The fragility of the social order was [throughout history] structural to the land of Mesopotamia.” 14 And this fragile order, which pitted group against group in a densely populated river valley with no protective boundaries, led ultimately and seemingly inexorably to a twentieth-century tyranny straight out of antiquity: a tyranny which, the moment it was toppled, led to several years of bloodcurdling anarchy with atrocities that had an ancient aura.
    For Iraq is burdened by modern as well as by ancient history. Mesopotamia was among the most weakly governed parts of the Ottoman Empire; another case of a vague geographical expression—a loose assemblage of tribes, sects, and ethnicities further divided by the Turks into the
vilayets
of Kurdish Mosul, Sunni Baghdad, and Shiite Basra, going from north to south. When the British tried to “sculpt”