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| Iraq |
| One Take on the Fate of Iraq: Let Iraq Die: A Case for Partition |
| 2015-03-16 |
| Moved to Opinion Iraq is finished, an expiring, cancerous nation on life support. Pulling the plug might be merciful. It might be cruel. But either way, it's time to accept the fact that this country is likely to die and that we'll all be better off when it does. The Kurds in the north, who make up roughly twenty percent of the population, want out. They never wished to be part of Iraq in the first place. To this day, they still call the bathroom the "Winston Churchill," in sarcastic homage to the former British prime minister who shackled them to Baghdad. Since the early 1990s, they've had their own government and autonomous region in the northern three provinces, and they held a referendum in 2005 in which 98.7 percent voted to secede and declare independence. The only reason they haven't finally pulled the trigger is because it hasn't been safe; the Turks--who fear the contagion of Kurdish independence inside their own country--have threatened to invade if they did. The Sunni Arabs in the west, who make up another rough twenty percent of Iraq, aren't itching for independence necessarily, but they sure as hell aren't willing to live under the thumb of Shiite-dominated Baghdad any longer. Millions of them live now under the brutal totalitarian rule of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL, which has declared its own state not only in a huge swath of Iraq but also in much of northeastern Syria. ISIS either controls or has a large presence in more than fifty percent of Iraq at the time of this writing. Iraq's Shiite majority, meanwhile, is terrified of its Sunni minority, which oppressed them mercilessly during Saddam Hussein's terrifying rule and which now flies the black flag of al-Qaeda and promises unending massacres. President Obama campaigned on ending the war in Iraq. For years--and for perfectly understandable reasons--he was very reluctant to wade into that country's eternally dysfunctional internal problems, but even he was persuaded to declare war against ISIS in the fall of 2014 when its fighters made a beeline for Erbil, the capital of Iraq's Kurdish autonomous region and the only stable and America-friendly place in the country. But however engaged the US chooses to be, the current war in Iraq is likely to drag on for years. If Iraq somehow manages to survive its current conflict in one piece, another will almost certainly follow. Its instability is both devastating and chronic. Far better at this point if Iraq simply terminates itself as a state and lets its various constituent groups peaceably go their own way, as Yugoslavia did after its own catastrophic series of wars in the 1990s. More at site. Michael J. Totten: World Affairs Journal |
| Posted by:JohnQC |
| #2 Pragmatically, any "partition" or breakup of Iraq into smaller sovereign states is the easy part - I'm more concerned wid the post-ISIS/ISIL + aligned aftermath, whether Iraq stays in federation or not. The US-Allies should NOT see a repeat of SYRIA where, in their zeal to get rid of Baby Assad, they ended up supporting fervently or militantly ANTI-WESTERN, ANTI-SECULAR, ANTI-DEMOCRATIC, ANTI-JUDEOCHRISTIAN/NON-ISLAM/MINORITY, ... @ETC. "MODERATE"-BUT-INTOLERANT REBEL GROUPS??? Save now wid POST-P5+1, GOING-NUKULAAR-WID-US-N-WESTERN-APPROVAL-N-SUPPORT NUCLEAR BOMBEY GOODNESS. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2015-03-16 23:45 |
| #1 I concur. Iraq never made sense, Sykes-Picot agreement be damned. |
| Posted by: Lone Ranger 2015-03-16 23:22 |