Armed Forces Journal has an interesting article entitled Blood Borders exploring the notion that the current international borders are at least partly to blame for the ethnic and religious strife in the Middle East:

While the Middle East has far more problems than dysfunctional borders alone — from cultural stagnation through scandalous inequality to deadly religious extremism — the greatest taboo in striving to understand the region's comprehensive failure isn't Islam but the awful-but-sacrosanct international boundaries worshipped by our own diplomats.

It's an interesting article, but the most interesting (and controversial) part is their proposed new map of the Middle East...