Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
victims of geography: aircraft can bombard, but they cannot transport goods in bulk, nor
onably close by. Even in an age of intercontinental ballistic missiles and nuclear bombs,
geography matters. As Morgenthau points out, small- and medium-sized states like Israel,
Great Britain, France, and Iran cannot absorb the same level of punishment as continental-
sized states such as the United States, Russia, and China, so that they lack the requisite
credibility in their nuclear threats. This means that a small state in the midst of adversaries,
such as Israel, has to be particularly passive, or particularly aggressive, in order to survive.
It is primarily a matter of geography.
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But to embrace the relief map along with mountains and men is not to see the world ir-
revocably driven by ethnic and sectarian divides that resist globalization. The story is far
more complicated than that. Globalization has itself spurred the rebirth of localisms, built
in many cases on ethnic and religious consciousness, which are anchored to specific land-
scapes, and thus explained best by reference to the relief map. This is because the forces of
mass communications and economic integration have weakened the power of many states,
including artificially conceived ones averse to the dictates of geography, leaving exposed
in some critical areas a fractious, tottering world. Because of communications technology,
pan-Islamic movements gain strength across the entire Afro-Asian arc of Islam, even as in-
dividual Muslim states themselves are under siege from within.
Take Iraq and Pakistan, which are in terms of geography arguably the two most illogic-
ally conceived states between the Mediterranean Sea and the Indian Subcontinent, even as
the relief map decrees Afghanistan to be a weak state at best. Yes, Iraq fell apart because
the United States invaded it. But Saddam Hussein's tyranny (which I intimately experien-
ced in the 1980s, and was by far the worst in the Arab world), one could argue, was itself
geographically determined. For every Iraqi dictator going back to the first military coup in
1958 had to be more repressive than the previous one in order to hold together a state with
no natural borders composed of Kurds and Sunni and Shiite Arabs, seething with a well-ar-
ticulated degree of ethnic and sectarian consciousness.
I realize that it is important not to go too far in this line of argument. True, the mountains
that separate Kurdistan from the rest of Iraq, and the division of the Mesopotamian plain
between Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south, may have been more pivotal to the
turn of events than the yearning after democracy. But no one can know the future, and a
reasonably stable and democratic Iraq is certainly not out of the question: just as the moun-
tains of southeastern Europe that helped separate the Austro-Hungarian Empire from that
of the poorer and less developed Ottoman Turkish one, and that helped divide ethnic and
confessional groups from one another for centuries in the Balkans, certainly did not doom
our interventions there to stop internecine wars. I am not talking here of an implacable force
against which humankind is powerless. Rather, I wish to argue for a modest acceptance of
