reforms in the name of “nation building.” Yet the newly-installed

reforms in the name of “nation building.” Yet the newly-installed regimes owed their existence to denying freedoms that would rally dissidents to overthrow them. So the democratization America encouraged was doomed from the start. Then came the “abandon.” Time and time again, when the governments America had nurtured and praised faced resistance or rebellion, Washington deserted their leaders, citing the popular excuse that their repressive measures were enslaving their own people. Supporting leaders when they kept the Middle East stable, then dumping them when they failed to adopt Western ideals, was a blueprint for disaster. And it’s disaster that ensued. Many of those strongmen——from Mubarak in Egypt to Gaddafi in Libya——have fallen. Once dominated by repressive but stable nation-states, vast swaths of the Middle East are now borderless, a hodge-podge of territories controlled by warring factions that’s a throwback to its tribal past. The search for a solution to this chaos requires a clear understanding of how we got here in the first place. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire had neutralized the historically rooted sectarian divisions within Islam. Those divisions stem from its ancient political legacy as a “caliphate,” a religious state with united by military might, but with constantly shifting borders. Following the Ottoman collapse after World War I, European colonial powers assumed the role of regional administrator, and colluded to redraw boundaries (i.e. Sykes-Picot) in the Middle-East to create nation states that satisfied competing Western interests. Those newly-created nations, occupying territories defined by legal borders, ignored Arab history and tribal custom. Modern Western notions of distinct nations bound together by geography, language, self-determination or political ideals been relevant in the Arab world. To Arabs, tribe and religion HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031718