Islamist Militants Aim to Redraw Map of the Middle East — #Iraq

At the Wall Street Journal, "Governments Under Siege as ISIS Seeks to Impose Vision of Single Radical Islamist State":

At an annual security conference in Israel this week, the head of the military showed pictures of two long-dead diplomats.

Mark Sykes, an Englishman, and François Georges-Picot, a Frenchman, secured their place in history by cutting a deal that drew the borders of the modern Middle East.

The point of recalling the men: It suddenly appears those century-old borders, and the Middle Eastern states they defined, are being stretched and possibly erased.

"This entire system is disintegrating like a house of cards that starts to collapse," Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz said.

A militant Islamist group that has carved out control of a swath of Syria has moved into Iraq, conquering cities and threatening the Iraqi government the U.S. helped create and support with billions of dollars in aid and thousands of American lives.

The group—known as the Islamic State of Iraq and al Sham—isn't a threat only to Iraq and Syria. It seeks to impose its vision of a single radical Islamist state stretching from the Mediterranean coast of Syria through modern Iraq, the region of the Islamic Caliphates established in the seventh and eighth centuries.

Governments and borders are under siege elsewhere, as well. For more than a year, Shiite militias from Lebanon have moved into Syria and operated as a virtual arm of the Syrian government. Meanwhile, so many Syrian refugees have gone in the opposite direction—fleeing into Lebanon—that Lebanon now houses more school-age Syrian children than Lebanese children.

And in Iraq, the Kurdish population has carved out a homeland in the north of the country that—with the help of Turkey and against the wishes of the Iraqi government—exports its own oil, runs its own customs and immigration operations and fields its own military, known as the Peshmerga.

The picture is difficult for the U.S., which is deeply invested in keeping the region stable, and the rapidly deteriorating situation in Iraq is setting off alarm bells inside the Obama administration. The U.S. is weighing more direct military assistance to the government of Iraqi President Nouri al-Maliki, the White House said Thursday, and officials hinted that aid might include airstrikes on militants who have edged to within a half-hour's drive of Baghdad.

"There will be some short-term immediate things that need to be done militarily," President Barack Obama said. "Our national security team is looking at all the options." Mr. Obama also urged Iraq's Shiite-dominated government to seek political paths for moderate Shiites and Sunnis to work together against jihadists. "This should be also a wake-up call for the Iraqi government," he said.

Why are the borders of today's Middle Eastern states suddenly so porous and ineffectual?  In short, the conflicts unleashed in Iraq and Syria have merged to become the epicenter of a struggle between the region's historic ethnic and religious empires: Persian-Shiite Iran, Arab-Sunni Saudi Arabia and Turkic-Sunni Muslim Turkey. Those three, each of whom has dominated the whole of the Middle East at one time or another in past millenniums, are now involved in the battle for influence from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf.

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