In 1919, the
world humbly bore the loss of one of its most imaginative diplomats, when 39-year-old Mark Sykes (the “6th baronet”) succumbed to the Spanish flu in his well-appointed Paris hotel room. Sykes died a happy man, having created (with his boon buddy Francoise Georges-Picot), a “
New Middle East”, complete with Octavian-era place names: Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Iraq. The insipidly industrious Sykes had spent his off-hours over the previous years bent over a
map, diligently erasing old boundaries and replacing them with British and French “zones”. His vision was now a matter of international law, having recently been agreed to at Versailles, just down the road from the hotel where he breathed his last. His intentions were to do good–so it is, always, with imperialists–to bring the Arabs (”those poor sots” as he once so indelicately phrased it) into the modern world.
The
great tragedy of the otherwise insufferable Sykes is not that he died at such a young age, or that his great hope — to serve as His Majesty’s Foreign Minister — remained unfulfilled. Sykes’ great tragedy was that he created a map of the Middle East that had absolutely no connection to reality. His “red” British and “blue” French “zones” (as well as his pink “spheres of influence” and purple “condominiums”) were a melange of borderless intentions that took a score of decades and dozens of conflicts to sort through–and have not been sorted through yet. Still, Sykes’ true legacy was not his vision of the Middle East, but the trail of neo-imperialists he left in his wake: wannabe semiologists and high-falutin’ intellectual cartographers who continue to search for a unified field theory of diplomacy–a political phlogiston–that will make the Muslim world explicable, that will explain it all. In the summer of 2004, Washington’s policymaking elites were
breathlessly a-twitter about a new book that continued this tradition. “The Pentagon’s New Map” was passed hand-to-hand among policymakers, appeared on Pentagon reading lists, and was the subject of endless backhall discussions at Washington think-tanks. The book’s author, Thomas Barnett, divided the world into two spheres: the “functioning core” of integrated, democratic and modern states and the “disconnected gap” of poor and poorly run states that are the breeding grounds of terrorism. That is to say, them and us. “The Pentagon’s New Map” seemed a natural follow-on to Thomas Friedman’s “The World Is Flat”, which posited an ever-expanding global economy that would, eventually and inevitably, breathlessly expand (or is it contract?) our horizons. There was, in both of these books, a small footnote of warning. Barnett said that a robust US military was essential to providing the means necessary to bring an end to the lawlessness common among the “disconnected gap”–the US needed to create a “Leviathan” that could
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