Fractured Lands

No single reason accounts for the way in which the Arab Spring of 2011 blossomed and then promptly shriveled up. But it’s interesting to note that the countries left most unsettled, including Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Libya, as well as Tunisia and Yemen, are all republics – no monarchies. The French and British mapmakers who divvied up the Ottoman Empire during World War I were largely insensitive to the nuances of tribe and clan. To keep the peace, European overlords played groups off against each other. For nearly a century, the system seemed to work, until the Iraq War in 2003, when the American invasion inadvertently set up a vacuum that the Islamic State, or ISIS, would eventually fill – a vacuum that would undermine the very nature of the modern Arab state and at the same time profoundly affect security strategies in Western Europe and America. Vignettes about the lives of six citizens in five Middle Eastern regions illustrate some of the issues:

1. Egypt

Laila Soueif, the daughter of two professors, grew up in the Egypt of President Gamal Abdel Nasser who – until his 1970 assassination – presided over a country that in other hands might have collapsed under the weight...