One problem with partition is that Sunniland would almost certainly be much poorer than Shiiteland or Kurdistan. To go from being the top dogs to the jealous neighbors sounds like a recipe for trouble.

trouble they brought on themselves. Make your bed, lie in it.

Yeah, I know. I'm not feeling a whole lot of love for the Sunnis these days, either.

But look at all the trouble stone-age Afghanistan caused us. We'd be creating another terrorist state.

It may not be very nice to the Shiites and the Kurds, but we basically need them to intermingle with the Sunnis in order to police them. The last thing we want is the Sunnis in charge of their own military, banking system, and intelligence agency, with no oversight.

Problem with your idea, speaking generally, Ace, is that you basically create an incentive for ethnic violence. Start a war, get rid of the undesirables, and get a UN-approved ethnically pure state. Please don't throw them in that brier patch.

One of the goals of the Clinton administration in Bosnia was to see that the existing borders/boundaries were respected. It seems like a funny reason for justifying a war but it makes a certain amount of sense--it's like negotiating with terrorists; if you give in to their demands once to free hostages, they're going to try again.

Ace,

For a number of reasons, any mil action taken against Iran would involve very few of the units on the ground in Iraq. It would be the Air Force and Navy doing the "heavy lifting" on any Iranian action.

Study a topo map of Iran and Iranian order of battle and this will eventually become obvious.

Precedent, sorta: Greece and Turkey.

Possible future precedent, sorta: Canada and Quebec.

The more frightening precedent is India / Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands died during the partition- which left Pakistan non-contiguous (Bangladesh), not to mention Kashmir.

If the Kurds, Shia, and Sunni are not at war (and they don't seem to be) don't impose anything on them.

Israel / Palestine are at war; Sharon's disengagement is actually a sensible idea (which may go horribly wrong).

Purely anecdotal comment follows, so take it for what it's worth:

I just returned from Iraq a few months ago, training/equipping/and deploying Iraqi security forces working under the Minister of the Interior. I had the opportunity to live with and talk to many sort of average joe Iraqis, and sometimes I'd ask about the Sunni/Shia thing. For all but the most hard-core religious types, it wasn't that big a deal. They intermarry, hang out, whatever. Even I learned to quickly tell them apart by how they prayed (holding there hands at their sides or crossed over their chest, etc.), but that was the only clue.

Problem with peaceful ethnic cleansing is that nobody wants to leave their land. Look at Gaza: these folks worked their ass off to make that little piece of fuck-all into a home. They'd rather die than leave it.

You get the UN in to move people, and now you've got officially "dispossesd" people standing around in a strange area wondering "now what?" The dispossed all move into a ghetto somewhere, which breeds resentment, which helps breed radicalism.

I don't agree with our host on this one, rho, but Iraq has the one thing that smooths over a lot of the heartache and resentment: money. And with oil at $60, they're soon going to have a lot of it. Of course, history has shown us that sucking at the oil teat doesn't do much for people in the long term, but as a one-shot deal, it can't hurt.

You don't read much about it, but I'm pretty sure the Gaza settlers are being paid fairly well to relocate. This turns out to be cheaper than policing the area. Could the same thing apply here?

"Iran pretty much knows we can't take on-the-ground military action against them for at least a year after the war in Iraq ends"

What tony said, plus, bear in mind it takes an awful lot of 'police' to maintain your islamic police state. These are resources not available to Iran's military. I suspect we would find out quickly that they are as big of a joke as Saddam's military was. Remember, they couldn't even beat Saddam.

I don't think money enters into it. The Gaza settlers sure couldn't care less, at least the ones who you'd think would care about the money: that is, the less affluent who built their life there from the sweat of their brow.

IIRC, the Gaza settlers received direct payments from the Israeli gov't as compensation for living in such a hellhole. The people who lived there because of those payments are ripe for payola to leave again. It's the ones who went there because they were going to stake their claim and make their own way who are resisting leaving.

As for the Iraq oil, unless it's nationalized (which is always a bad idea, IMO), regular citizens won't see much of that directly, and only the people who live in the oil regions will see indirect oil money. Force relocation is bad, all the time. Sometimes it's the best of a bad lot of choices--evacuation for hurricanes, for example--but not allowing the free-migration of independent-minded people is a recipie for disaster.

I've had fantasies of that happening here in the U.S. based on conservative and liberal, Red State / Blue State. Though it will never happen, I call dibs on Dan Rathers house in Austin.

Turkey is one of our most important allies. We could not start the operations in Iraq until we got Turkey on board & the condition for that was that we do absoultely nothing to assist or enourage Kurdish seperatism efforts.

Also, keeping the Kurds in Iraq gives us a group of friends, albeit small, in the midst of hostile Sunnis & Shias.

Another reason to prevent a Kurdistan: Arabs all over have very little love for the Kurds & would have no qualms about ganing up & harrassing them, thus making the new state another Israel.

"We could not start the operations in Iraq until we got Turkey on board"

Interesting. The way I remember it, Turkey never quite got on board with the Iraq war, and complicated things for us by denying us use of airbases.

So ...Ace takes on den Beste ...at least (to me) semi-successfully (well, I think the counter is persuasive, at least) ...hmm ...you, umm, aren't going to turn this into another all-politics, all-the-time blog now, r u Ace?

I mean, this (and Andrea) is one of the few, er, sane places I make sure to visit thrice daily.

I guess what I'm saying is: "Don't let it go to your head, bucko."

...took on den Beste ...heh.

Day 18 at Camp Casey
The Camp is abuzz today with all of the news going on around the world. The total failure of the Iraqi Constitution has us all feeling vindicated - the war in Iraq had no purpose and now everything's falling apart.

As good as it feels to have one's views backed by cold, hard facts, it's a bit sad to realize that our soldiers were sent to die, and are still dying, for absolutely nothing. These people are no better off than they were before - I mean, just look at those houses! Could you live in something like that? One of the volunteers here was a human shield before the war and said Iraq was rolling meadows and suburban dwellings before the war. It's sad to see a country destroyed by Bush's hubris and recklessness.

We haven't seen much of the Crawford Peace House guys. They've been watching coverage of the Gaza pullout. They stay pretty quiet, but every once in awhile you hear the pop of a champagne cork. I wish they'd come out of their trailer soon, though. Media row is constantly taking pictures of our vigil and I don't want them to get the idea we're diminishing in numbers, because our numbers grow every day.

The outrage that people feel over Bush's war in Iraq is like a mighty wave that will sweep through the country until it reaches Washington and washes away all of the filth and corruption there. Then we hope it takes a detour to Wall Street. That Enron mess still has us all worked up.

Because in the end, you know it's all about oil. The price of gas is terrible these days. You have no idea how much it's costing us to run the generators. We'd love to bring in solar power, but those panels are just too expensive, and we're afraid shotgun guy would find them a convenient target.

And do we need those generators. It's hot here. I know I'm here for a noble cause and should endure, but I think Casey would have wanted his mother to be comfortable.

And that's all that matters in the end.

I think Den Beste was onto something with that Treaty of Versailles comparison. The Allies in 1919 felt no great love for the Germans, and the final treaty was actually less harsh and punitive than it would have been if the French had their way (fill in your own France-bashing joke here). Still, it guaranteed that at some point the Germans would go to war to redress their grievances. That would have been true even without Hitler.

The Kurds are spread out from Turkey, through northern Syria, northern Iraq, and northwestern Iran, and they have very real grievances against just about all those countries. An independent Kurdistan would almost certainly mean ongoing trouble on the level of the Indian partition and Kashmir, which is still a flashpoint sixty years later. The Sunnis may not be wonderful people, but there's no good reason to add more troubles to the region. Trouble and oil are the only things they have in abundance.

"The way I remember it, Turkey never quite got on board with the Iraq war, and complicated things for us by denying us use of airbases'

Worse then that. They denied the 4th ID permission to disembark and stage from Turkey at the onset of OIF, arguably costing American lives. With friends like that, who needs enemies.

You're right df, Turkey, wasn't quite on board, but they didn't oppose us as violently as other Muslim countries. The reason they had the no fly zone was because the Bush admin refused to give them the billions they asked for.

They acctualy did offer to help after we defeated Saddam, to try to control the Kurds, but we wisely(or unwisely) refused.

They still remaine the only Muslim ally of Israel. Not a good ally, but they do recognize the right of Israel to exist. They are also the only Muslim democracy & by the standards of other Muslim countries, is rather moderate.

"A lot of these people can't or won't live peaceably as neighbors. Would it be so bad for the UN to come in and supervise a land-swap which removes most of the minority populations in one area and replaces them with the minority populations in another? I.e., ethnically cleansing the regions to the extent possible, but peaceably?"

Yeah, that worked out soooooooo well in 1948, lets try it again!!!!!!!

NYgirl has Turkey's position on Iraq nailed down pretty accurately. I suspect the Turkish military would have been happy to support us, but the growing strength of the Islamic parties in Turkey made that politically impossible. Turkey was a very solid ally in both Vietnam and Korea, not to mention NATO.

On the downside, Turkey has an impressive record of being prepared to go to the wall to defend its territorial integrity. Everyone knows about the Armenians in 1915. Knemon mentions the mutual loathing of the Greeks and Turks, but it's worth remembering that much of that has its roots in the 1920s, when Ataturk went Slobodan Milosevic on the Greeks of Smyrna and the Pontic coast.

"Would it be so terrible to swap out the Indian and Pakistani populations in the Kashmir so as to create one almost entirely Indian/Hindu region and another almost entirely Pakistani/Muslim region?"

Ace, I understand you're just brainstorming, and I admit this sort of thinking has its allure for me, too, until I remember all these people have "minds of their own." How many armed resisters should the relocators be willing to fight and kill? How many old and sick people should be permitted to die in transit? How many ruined businesses should we countenance? How do we keep people in other countries from seeing the relocations and starting to think what a windfall it would be for them if their neighbors were forced to abandon their homes and livelihoods? "You get more of what you subsidize" is a truth that applies to welfare queens, needle exchange programs, and ethnic cleansing.

And who would undertake something like this? Would anyone dare entrust UN "piecekeepers" with the task of relocating children?

I don't think a lot of people would die in transit. It's not like this is the Trail of Tears or the Bataan Death March.

As for ruined businesses-- some would be ruined. In many cases you can swap out one optometrist for another.

As for the costs-- well, it's a utilitarian calculation. Would the amount of misery caused by such a forced (for some; others would go voluntarily) relocation exceed the misery of constant terrorism and low-simmer civil war?

Actual deaths weight heavily on the scales. Inconvenience and the like are important, but these can be recovered from. But there's no returning from the grave.

The more frightening precedent is India / Pakistan. Hundreds of thousands died during the partition- which left Pakistan non-contiguous (Bangladesh), not to mention Kashmir.

Even the possibility of Iraq becoming more of trouble than it already is should give us pause for thought. Partition may solve some of the problems while creating worse ones. At least there is only one central gov't to deal with, such as it is. Unless we can make them US puppet states why create two more entities to deal with? We believed that the Iraqis would welcome us with open arms once we had liberated them from Saddam, too. Unless very compelling reasons for partition can be found (and I've not seen them) we should ere on the side of caution and at least wait and try to stabilize Iraq, er ... stabilize Iraq more.

After all the blood and treasure we've spent in Iraq it would be a grave mistake if we were to partition the country only to find out that the new states were even more troublesome than the old. Unless we can gaurantee this won't happen, why chance it?

We need to stabilize Iraq so we can turn our attention to Iran and do whatever is necessary to prevent the Mullahs Manhattan Project from becoming the Islamic Bomb. If even the possibility of more trouble from three Iraqs can happen, we can depend upon the Iraqi people to find a way. We need to get their military and police up to the job of stabilizing their own damn country and winning their hearts and minds, a herculean task for Moslems, who don't have much of either.