http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23258792

That VX is some efficient sh1t, and I don't think this can be filed alongside the dodgy dossier either. The rebels have even started on Hezbollah in Lebanon, allegedly.

There was a Radio 4 program about the potential break up of Syria and the impact on its neighbours. It might be a good thing if the borders could be redrawn to allow local tribes and communities to form more stable countries.

So the most worrying terror threat to the UK is that someone will transport a highly volatile, utterly lethal chemical over thousands of miles through a country which is currently in a state of incredibly vicious civil war, across several secure national boundaries and a couple of seas without any of the major intelligence agencies noticing? As oppose to say an incredibly misguided bloke from Birmingham filling a rucksack with fertilizer-based explosive and suiciding on public transport. Because, you know, that's much less likely to happen, isn't it?

Can you save us all the trouble and just say you want to invade Syria? As oppose to all this insulting our intelligence which is, y'know, just wasting everyone's time.

I am not in favour of invading, I was thinking of redrawing borders to give each of the minorities there their own homeland. Only problem would be that an independent Kurdish area would cause problems in Turkey and Iran. How those borders are redrawn and agreed is for the politicians.


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The headline's potentially a bit misleading, I should point out. That's why I was talking about the rebels.

We’ve been there before, and guess what? This is how Iraq, Iran and Kuwait were carved up out of what was Persia. Irrational borders designed to keep the West safe and happy, separate various warring factions and ensure a nice supply of oil. Note that prior to all of this, the peoples living in that part of the world were nomadic and had no real notion of national borders. One day they woke up to find themselves in one randomly defined area or another with sudden restrictions on where they were allowed to move.

It may seem that Syria being carved up may be a good idea today, it may well be storing problems up for the future. It would better to resolve the situation with the map unchanged.

Umm, there's some fairly serious factual errors in that post.

Iraq and Kuwait were part of the Ottoman Empire and had been for a long time before we fannied about with their geography. Persia never was. Most of the peoples you are talking about were settled not nomadic, and they were so when your ancestors were roaming Suffolk or wherever, in search of deer to kill and berries to eat. Are you unaware that the region you are talking about is also known as the cradle of civilisation for this exact reason?

All nations are arbitrary constructs to a certain degree. This is however less true of some than others. Iran far less so than France, Poland or Italy for instance, on the grounds that it did not require the majority of its population to learn a new language in order to participate in the state (in 1860 80% of Frenchmen did not speak French, Italian was similarly rare, and Polish was more of a group of dialects than a language). It is spectacularly true of Syria though.

Genuine nomadic groups (of which there are fewer than you think) are rarely inconvenienced by borders, nobody builds customs posts in the middle of the desert.

The original split of what remained of the old Ottoman Empire after WW1 was organised by Sykes-Picot IIRC and was opposed by Captain Lawrence (aka of Arabia). He suggested borders based on tribes or groups. The government decided to split it the way we know today to allow successful management of the oil industry. They did not think that western oil companies would be interested in an Arab run oil industry. We are dealing with these issues in Syria today.


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