Stephen Kinzer Quotes

Historically, the Middle East was governed by Empires. The empires drew the lines between nations without paying attention to the ethnicity of the peoples in the nations. Now, you don’t have a single country that is cohesive in the Middle East. For that reason, you see civil wars all over the place.

The reason there IS a Turkey and there ISN'T a Kurdistan is in all of history no Kurd could ever stand by any other Kurd long enough to hold off all the hungry Arabs, Persians, Turks, Brits and other sand carnivores swimming around the Fertile Crescent.

The country of Iraq is somewhat of an artificial creation going back to colonial days. And so you have the Kurds and then the Sunnis in the north predominantly and Shias in the south.

In a much larger sense, the problem of Sabah is directly influenced by the duplicity of imperial Britain. For whatever devious reason, the dismantling of the British empire created divisions and violence due to ethnic and religious differences.

The more borders we have, the more quarrels, the more wars. That's one way to think about borders - they're trouble.

Initially, before the modern state of Iraq was created, there were three separate provinces here: a Shiite in the south, a largely Sunni one in the middle, and a Kurdish one in the north.

Throughout history, countries have sought to expand ….Today, the goal of most wars is too make countries smaller rather than larger.

Bad neighbors will keep cartographers busy well into the next century.

Any time you see a straight line on a map of the Middle East, Winston Churchill probably drew it.

Japan will oppose any attempt at international control of Manchuria. It does not mean that we defy you, because Manchuria belongs to us by right …Read your history. We recovered Manchuria from Russia. We made it what it is today …. We look into the gloom of the future and can see no certain gleam of light before us … Would the American people agree to such control of the Panama Canal Zone; would the British permit it over Egypt?

An economic version of mutual deterrence is preserving the uneasy status quo between China and Japan.

I never am sure what nationality I am as my village [in Alsace-Loraine] is part of different countries from day to day.

Stability is when the U.K. and U.S. invade a country and impose the regime of their choice.

To be sure, many of the Sykes-Picot borders reflected deals cut in Europe rather than local demographic or historical realities. But that hardly makes the Middle East unique: Most borders around the world owe their legacy less to thoughtful design or popular choice than to some mixture of violence, ambition, geography, and chance.

We are still faced, even in Europe, with the return of imperialist tendencies, attempts to change borders by force, assaults on other states, taking their land, enslaving citizens.

The Middle Eastern states aren't nations; they're quarrels with borders.

Why are we working so hard to preserve Iraq, a fake country to begin with? Why do we care whether this fake country that was drawn on the map 100 years ago remains?

No nation should have the right to simply grab land from another nation.

You cannot rub off the effect of that conference from modern Africa today

...In practice it is found that International Law is always on the side of strong battalions...It is puerile...to apply to the dealings of a nation with its neighbor's territory the morality which would be applicable to two individuals possessing adjoining property, and protected from mutual wrong by a law superior to both.

Look at how the British covered India with railroads, and it is easy to view them as modernisers. Look, however, at the abysmal levels of mass illiteracy in the subcontinent they left behind in 1947, and they appear rather differently.

Our small and peaceful country is threatened daily by covetous and bigoted big powers whose hunger for domination and control of other nations and their resources knows no bounds.

As colonial puppeteer and successful restorer of Russia as imperial superpower, Mr. Putin is Stalin's consummate heir.

As a nation, Kuwait has been, arguably, free of freedom itself. Claimed in turn by Constantinople, Riyadh, and Baghdad, Kuwait has survived by playing Turks off Persians, Arabs off one another, and the English off everyone.

There is a theory that China will tend to push, and if you bend, they will push some more.