BY RICH GALEN

Reprinted from mullings.com

There is growing discussion over the nature of country borders in the roiling region of Northern Africa and the Middle East .

SIDEBAR

We should just call the region “NAME” to save typing.

I think others call it MENA, but that’s an example of why the U.S. budget deficit is so enormous: Bureaucrats insist on using two syllables when just rearranging the letters would reduce syllable waste, fraud, and abuse by half.

Wait! Don’t tell anyone you read that. Before we know it, someone will want to establish a Federal Unified Bureau of Acronym Restructuring (FUBAR).

END SIDEBAR

Al Jazeera had a piece over the weekend which started with the reminder that

“The modern geography of the Middle East was carved out by British and French colonialists whose sole interest was in sharing the spoils of war between themselves and in maintaining their supremacy over the region in the early part of the 20th century.”

Much as we, here at Mullings Central, would like to point out the errors in al Jazeera pronouncements, they have this pretty much right.

But, it occurred to me that, with few exceptions – island nations like England and Bahrain among them – most national boundaries are invisible lines on maps.

The United States , for all its physical size, shares borders with only two countries – Mexico and Canada . Canada ‘s only shared border is with the U.S. Mexico shares borders only with the U.S. , Guatemala , and Belize .

The border with Canada , west of the Great Lakes , was the battle cry of the 1844 campaign of Democratic candidate for President James K. Polk. He demanded that the northern border of the U.S. be at 54 degrees, 40 minutes North, which marked the southern boundary of Russia ‘s Alaskan territory.

Polk won the election but, as Presidents before and since have learned to their chagrin, campaign promises are easier to make than to keep. In the end, we didn’t to go to war for the greater expansion of the Oregon Territory and settled for a very long, very imaginary line on the globe known as the 49th parallel.

This business of territoriality is not limited to humans. Anyone who has ever watched any of the 217 flavors of the Discovery networks or the National Geographic channel has been treated to a whispering naturalist describing a male lion or a female cheetah marking and defending his or her territory.

For the past 500 years, or so, we have taken to marking our territory with ink on maps, but it is the functional equivalent of lifting the national leg.

National boundaries have always been arbitrary; having been drawn by the stronger nation with the desire to lay claim to whatever natural resources, rivers, arable land, warm water ports, or whatever are within the disputed region.

In the 100 years from earliest Victorian era to the inter-War years, many of the European monarchs were related and treated land area like toys in the nursery; substituting men, ships and weapons for crying, sulking and running to Nanny when disagreements occurred.

Nor is this business of drawing lines on maps to demarcate national borders a relic of days of yore. Just two months ago the people who live in the southern portion of the nation of Sudan voted to secede and form a new country. Where the line will be drawn is still in negotiations as there is oil to be had along what will be the border between Sudan and Southern Sudan .

In Iraq , the Kurds have long insisted that, as the largest ethnic group in the region without a country to call their own, the nation of Kurdistan should be carved out of Iraq . There, too, vast amounts of oil make it imperative that the central government in Baghdad not allow a new nation to be formed on the other side of a line, literally, in the sand.

Figuring out exactly where someone’s property – whether a country of a farm – starts and ends was not quite as simple in the early days as it is now that we have global positioning satellites and highly sophisticated surveying equipment.

When I was a city councilman in Marietta , Ohio 45750 we once had to vote on an ordinance to bring a piece of property within the city limits. In tracing the provenance of that property there was a notation, as I remember it, that one of the borders was drawn some number of chains, in a specific direction, starting from “the tree where the cow used to stand.”

 

 

Editor’s Note:  Rich Galen publishes at mullings.com to which you can subscribe.  He is a former aide to House Speaker Newt Gingrich, a long-time public affairs and political professional who has had several tours of duty in Iraq working with the U.S. military’s public affairs operations.