Middle East Strategy at Harvard

From Michele Dunne

“Lines in the Sand” (Vanity Fair, January 2008, not online) describes an intellectual exercise in which four Middle East specialists (David Fromkin, Dennis Ross, Kenneth Pollack, and Daniel Byman) are asked to redraw boundaries to reflect the region’s actual social and cultural landscape as opposed to the political borders set largely by European powers after World War One. Egypt is divided into two strips along the Nile (lower and upper) and a third “Western tribal area” combining the Western desert, eastern Red Sea coast, and Sinai.

Admittedly the authors are not recommending an actual political redivision along these lines, but even suggesting that such divisions are as relevant in Egypt today as they might be in Iraq or elsewhere is misleading. It ignores, for example, the significant transfer of population that has taken place between the rural areas of Egypt and major cities such as Cairo and Alexandria, where now about half of Egyptians live. In any case, well over 90 percent (some sources say 99 percent) of Egyptians still live along the Nile. It is also rather strange that Sinai—where there are real problems between the local population and the Cairo-based authorities—is lumped in with tribal areas in the far west of the country where there have been no such problems. Overall, this exercise might be relevant to other places in the region, but for Egypt it is ancient history.

(Editor: See also this critique of the treatment of Saudi Arabia in the Vanity Fair exercise, by Bernard Haykel.)