For the United States to contain the civil war, we would have to deploy more troops and accept a casualty rate many times the current level as our forces changed their mission from a support role to intensive police duties. The American people would not support such an expanded mission, and the Bush administration has no desire to undertake it.
The administration, then, must match its goals in Iraq to the resources it is prepared to deploy. Since it cannot unify Iraq or stop the civil war, it should work with the regions that have emerged. Where no purpose is served by a continuing military presence — in the Shiite south and in Baghdad — America and its allies should withdraw.
Galbraith, way ahead of this back in 2003 along with Leslie Gelb, who went further than hypothesizing a remaining weak central government with rotating President and actually advocates three entirely separate states -- Shi'ite in the South, Sunni in the Middle (and cut off from oil revenue) and Kurdistan in the North (Kurds are not even Arabs).
This three-state solution has been unthinkable in Washington for decades. After the Iranian revolution in 1979, a united Iraq was thought necessary to counter an anti-American Iran. Since the gulf war in 1991, a whole Iraq was deemed essential to preventing neighbors like Turkey, Syria and Iran from picking at the pieces and igniting wider wars.
Gelb explains how Iraq was stitched together, not by its own peoples, but by the English Empire:
The Ottomans ruled all the peoples of this land as they were: separately. In 1921, Winston Churchill cobbled the three parts together for oil's sake under a monarch backed by British armed forces. The Baathist Party took over in the 1960's, with Saddam Hussein consolidating its control in 1979, maintaining unity through terror and with occasional American help.
Some of Gelb's suppositions, like the Shi'ites being unlikely to fall under Iran's influence, are completely opposite, but that much of that might be due to Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld bungling is certainly arguable. Since Saddam and his Baathist Ruling assholes were Sunni, no one except the Sunni's would be sad should they get the worst end of the bargain. Baghdad gets treated as a mini-version, with autonomous sections.
Ironically, back in 2003 the three-state solution was actually rightwalignedgned, but that was before the full flowering of Bushism. Check out retired Army officer Ralph Peters, author of "Beyond Terror: Strategy in a Changing World.":
The second stage of the division of Iraq would kick in if the Sunni Arabs still refuse to cooperate: We would declare the interim Iraqi Federation dissolved, creating three fully independent states in its place, with the Kurdish and Shi'ite states meeting along the Iranian border to guarantee the Kurds a corridor to the sea for their oil, gas and trade.
Then leave the Sunni Arabs to rot.
Oh, and there just might be a third step down the road, too. We should not miss any opportunity to support the longing for freedom of the tens of millions of Kurds held hostage behind European-imposed borders in Turkey, Syria and Iran. For Americans serious about human rights and freedom, Greater Kurdistan must be a long-range goal.
Mmm, militant! Any wonder why some analysts predict trouble from neighboring Turkey if Kurdistan becomes its own state?
In our U.S. political arena, Sen. Joseph Biden (D-DE) went public advocating the partition plan, co-writing this New York Times Op-Ed piece on May 1st, touting their five point plan:
Mr. Bush has spent three years in a futile effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad, leaving us without a real political settlement, with a deteriorating security situation — and with nothing but the most difficult policy choices. The five-point alternative plan offers a plausible path to that core political settlement among Iraqis, along with the economic, military and diplomatic levers to make the political solution work. It is also a plausible way for Democrats and Republicans alike to protect our basic security interests and honor our country's sacrifices.
What's the countdown to this kind of Iraqi Divorce meme to reach and saturate our mainstream media (MSM)? Six weeks? A month? The 1st?
The tragedy for us is, as Timothy Noah wrote over two bloody years ago:
What's most depressing about the Peters-Gelb-Galbraith scenario is that it would create three autonomous governments or independent states that represented only an incremental improvement on what was there before (except with regard to geopolitical stability). It would make us scratch our heads and wonder why we fought a war in Iraq. But that may be unavoidable, too.
By now, the question has been asked, and frequently.
Break 'em up, bring 'em home.
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