Route 66 to Iraq?

Michael Totten's account of his road trip to Iraq is well worth reading, I was struck by this passage:

“From a distance it appears that the biggest problem in the Middle East is Islamism. That’s probably because Islamism is the worst of the Middle East’s exported problems. Up close, though, the biggest source of conflict seems to be ethnic nationalism. The crackup of the Ottoman Empire has still not settled down into anything stable. Arab nationalism, Turkish nationalism, Kurdish nationalism, and Zionism everywhere create bloody borders and internal repression. And that’s just for starters. Lebanese went at other Lebanese for fifteen long years. Arab Sunni and Arab Shia are slugging it out in Iraq right now as you read this.”