Pan Islamism?

An intriguing overview of the Middle East in the last hundred years and where it might be headed (Power and Interest News Report). Two key paragraphs:

The US current administration's drive to spread democracy in the Middle East does not envisage the melting away of boundaries and decades-long political sovereignty - rather, Washington seeks to preserve the existing states as they are by bringing democratically oriented governments to power. This policy is driven by a premise that democratic states would not pose a danger to one another, would respect one another's sovereignty within the existing borders and would not easily launch war on their neighbors for a religious, political or ethnic purpose. The collection of pacific but independent Muslim states would allow for unobstructed access to the world's oil resources and would preclude the emergence of a regional hegemon capable of upsetting the existing balance of power.

That is precisely what Iran and al-Qaeda want to avoid. The melting away of artificial Middle Eastern and North African boundaries that were imposed by now-defunct governments of Western Europe would create a massive state with the majority-Muslim population in the hundreds of millions and in control of the crucial oil and natural-gas reserves. Such an outcome would in effect create another superpower in the world arena. There are indications that Muslim states are seeking to move closer to such a reality.

PINR's most recent report, on how a nuclear Iran would affect Turkey and Saudi Arabia, is here.