Virtually all of Iraq's present troubles stem from one thing: rulers. Not the human rulers who wield political, economic, or military power – although they cause mischief enough – but the humble ruler itself, commonly used by schoolchildren and draftsmen.

As surprising as it may be, the continual fighting in Iraq has little to do with East vs. West, Islam vs. Christianity, or even Shiite vs. Sunni. But it has everything to do with rulers.

Which is exactly why Iraq should be allowed to separate into three distinct nations – one Sunni, one Kurd, and one Shiite. Moreover, none of these entities should even go by the name of "Iraq," which is little more than a colonial sobriquet.

Almost a century ago, rulers – those seemingly harmless instruments of precision – were brandished like swords by European colonial map-drawers, slashing, hacking, and defining the present-day frontiers of not only Iraq but almost the entire Middle East. With a few strokes, this modest yet mighty weapon created not only countries but a host of vexing problems as well.

If you want to discover hot spots on this globe, look for long straight border lines. You'll find them across the Middle East and Africa. Iraq's straight-edge boundaries – slicing through ethnic, linguistic, and religious areas – are particularly egregious. No naturally developed nation-state has such clean-cut frontiers, with the exception of the United States and Canada, but that was another historical process altogether, involving like-minded European settlers rationally dividing a stretch of land, in which the original inhabitants had been destroyed.

Organically developed nations are commonly delineated by deserts, rivers, lakes, seas, mountain ranges, or forests. They tend to be marked by wiggly, curvaceous lines and oddly shaped – Vietnam or Austria, for instance. Such boundaries became established after hundreds of years of settlement and fighting, resulting in similar ethnic, linguistic, cultural, and religious groups binding together because of one basic fact: People want to live among their own. Once they have sorted out their internal and external affairs, they can live in harmony among other nations or chose to make war for their own national reasons and purposes.

Mesopotamia, as the region that includes Iraq was called until recently, had never been a "country" or "nation" in the modern senses of these words. The wise and largely benign rulers of the Ottoman Empire, who reigned over this land for centuries, realized that no outside force could ever rule this area by foisting preconceived notions of nationhood upon the population, whose loyalties lay with family, tribe, linguistic grouping, and religious orientation. More important, the Ottomans understood that these diverse groups simply didn't want to live together.

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