by Dave Gonigam, Daily Reckoning.com:

“Eighty percent of the world’s problems are the fault of British mapmakers,” quipped the late Sen. Eugene McCarthy. Or words to that effect anyway; the precise quotation eludes our best efforts to find it this morning.

And who could argue? The Brits drew arbitrary lines in the sand to create something called “Iraq” in the 1920s. Thirty years earlier, they drew another arbitrary line through some mountains in south Asia that today marks the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The big news today falls into the other 20% that can’t be blamed on the Brits. Blame Soviet mapmakers for the mess in the Crimean peninsula — Russian territory transferred to Ukraine in 1954.

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