Solution: Break Up Iraq; Reality: It's Not So Easy

Here's another idea: Let the Iraqis determine what to do with their country!

we have been trying for a unified Iraq for the last three years and things have only gotten worse everyday.

As long as all three get a fair cut of the oil money this could be very workable.

Just dispense with that trial!

Most countries are multinational entities. Only in Europe (plus Korea and Japan) are distinct nation-states.

It's very easy sitting from here to say the country should be divided, but how are you going to draw the lines? Partitoning the country will result in even more bloodshed and ethnic cleansing. In every other instance when a country was partitioned in order to stem violence, the violence only grew much worse and resulted in poisoned relations for decades.

I'm very much against partitioning countries it is absolutely unavoidable. Witness India and Pakistan, Turkey and Greece (probably unavoidable that one), Ireland, Israel and the Palestinian territories, Yugoslavia, and I would argue even the Soviet Union (most of the constituent states would have been stronger today had most of the republics except for the Baltic States remained in a loose Federation, which is what Gorbachev was trying to do and what Yeltsin wrecked). And the United States has historically been far stronger for having stayed united than it would have been had it split up during the Civil War.

but in fact it has turned out today to be a prime example of how a country at war can be partitioned allowing hostilities to cool, in fact just recently the three countries have re-integrated their national defense programs.

If a unified Iraq was working that would be one thing. If things were getting better everyday that would be one thing. As it is all that we are doing is the same thing and expecting something different to happen. There is a reason it is called sectarian violence, and it is VERY easy sitting from here with our American ethnocentrism to think that we can make them get along when even their own God can't.

Take a look at the score board, a unified and free Iraq is never going to happen. This doesn't mean that the poor people living within the artificial boundaries created by European Overlords years ago can't live free. The first step to freedom is going to be freeing themselves from the colony that england wanted them to be in a time where questions of morality didn't apply to brown people.

... but it was hardly desirable. At the time of the breakup, millions of citizens considered themselves Yugoslavs first. Tensions did break out, but spiraled out of control only once the country split up. Yugoslavia in 1991 was comparable in wealth to Spain and Portugal and was on track to join the EU within a few years - that has been set back by decades, along with hundreds of thousands of dead.

And if Yugoslavia was an artificial state, is the successor state of Bosnia-Herzegovina any less artificial?

The point is that out of all those partitions that I named, in each case the most violent phase occurred AFTER the countries were partitioned. And ultimately, the successor states were less well-off and more embittered. Old economic networks were ripped apart, families were divided, and in many cases relations are STILL bad between the two communities and the successor states. By partitioning a country, the new nations have no incentive to be pluralist or resolve communal or ethnic tensions and what previously were internal disputes became long-term international conflicts.

Moreover, most Iraqi Arabs don't want to see the country split up (although the Kurds would like to go). Iraq may be a creation of the British, but so are a pretty large chunk of countries in the world. Granted, I have not personally spoken to any Iraqis or Iraqi-Americans, but if you read interviews with ordinary Iraqi Arabs and watch documentaries, the striking thing is how much people identify with "Iraq" despite it being a creation of the British. A professor of mine noted the same dynamic in Jordan - a completely artificial state in which the inhabitants nevertheless were fiercely nationalistic. Even in Iraq, during the Iran-Iraq War, Iraqi Shi'ites were strongly opposed to Iran, something which fed a lot of the resistance to Iran in Southern Iraq.

And again, where are you going to draw the lines without creating a bloodbath? What's the largest Kurdish city in Iraq? Baghdad. Mosul, Kirkuk, and Baghdad are all highly mixed, and even in regions where one group predominates, another group often forms a large minority (plenty of Sunni Arabs in the South, millions of Shi'ites in the middle and in Baghdad, Turkmen, Assyrians, and Sunni Arabs in Kurdistan).

But don't take my word for it - read this interview with Robert Schaeffer about the problems with partitioning countries in general:
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040329/cole

Or if you need more convincing that splitting up Iraq would just perpetuate the problems, read this article by Juan Cole: http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040329/cole

seems to me they could have done it. Perhaps they weighed both the pros and cons and concluded that the net was biased towards his heavy handed rule. Prior to DS1, Iraq was progressing on a secular socialist model. Yeah, he spent loads on palaces, but the per capita income/spend were highest for any ME country. Too bad he wanted to control the oil as well as the population...