Have the U.S. and Its Allies Intentionally Balkanized Syria Into Smaller Regions?

[The Magistrate]

1. The Map In That Article Is A Good One, Ma'am

It is about where the actual lines ought to be, if one were to have a map reflecting ethnic and religious realities.

Part of the problem with the breathless tone of articles like this is that there are no 'countries' in the Middle East, at least not as we are used to thinking of nation-states in Europe. With the exceptions of Turkey and Persia and Egypt, there are simply a mass of colonial districts, first under the Ottomans, and then under several Western powers. These district boundaries were drawn up deliberately to create populations with internal tensions, so that rebellion by one group might be checked by loyalty of another, locally, without too much need of troops from a central authority, which could take quite a while to arrive in the pre-modern period. The boundaries created by the Western powers followed this practice, where they were not set by military action ( the northern boundaries of Saudi Arabia today mark where the English halted ibn' Saud's northward drive, intended to establish him as King of all Arabs, in the early 1920s ), or were not designed to isolate a favored minority ( such a the division of Lebanon from Syria, intended to maintain a Christian state on the coast ). There really is not a need for much outside intervention to break up these artificial entities, they have no real stability of their own, and small prospect of enduring through the long haul.