It is easy and fun to redraw maps.
It's a fantasy many little boys and girls have had since the time they first stared across a RISK game board and wondered how to build an empire to conquer the world.
As these children grow up, their map drawing fantasies often continue with more sophisticated versions of RISK, such as with board games like Axis and Allies or computer games such as Sid Meier's Civilization. The problem is this dream of redrawing the map doesn't just end when little boys and girls become men and women.
Sure, for some adults the fantasy of redrawing the map continues to be the stuff of fantasy. There will always be the next release of Sid Meier's Civilization (now on its fourth version) or joining the group of gamers hanging around at the back of the hobby shop on Saturdays, carefully rolling dice and redrawing the boundaries, when the desire to reshape the world beckons. Still other adults carefully construct alternative histories of the world and redraw world maps to reflect their parallel earth fantasies. They ask questions such as What if vegetarians ruled the world? What if the Confederacy won the American Civil War? What if the American Revolutionary War was lost at Saratoga?
Other adults, who fantasize about maps and boundaries, might escape into the academic professions of geography and history. Redrawing political lines in terms of watersheds and ecological zones, or reminding us how the frontiers were once drawn.
But for some adults, these fantastic escapes and academic pursuits are not enough to quench their dreams of redrawing the lines on the globe and there in lies the problem. There are map re-drawers such as Tom DeLay and those in the Texas State Legislature that continually redistrict and gerrymander the map of Texas to suit their own political fantasies and not how best to represent Texans in government.
We have world leaders, think tanks, diplomats, and militaries that see lines on a map the same way as children see them on the RISK game board. These real life war gamers do not think of the people, the real humans, who live within the boundaries of these maps. They do not consider the hundreds of thousands of families, refugees from war, who will be torn apart by war to redraw the lines. These people see the world as their own personal RISK board game. Only they are not the ones at risk, it is all the people who live between their shifting lines. They care not about the people and their suffering, because they believe "when the history is finally written, it will be just a comma."
Redrawing the map of the Middle East is the decision of the people of the Middle East and not the progative of the professional war gamers mongers of the United States and the West.
It is time now to put the games away.