Edifice Wrecked

Ah, the Bush Administration is finally abandoning its intellectually vacuous "Stay the Course" rhetoric for a more 'balanced' approach to Iraq, right? Today's NY Times reports that Bush is considering "significant changes" to his Iraq policy after the Iraq Study Group releases their much-chattered about report on Wednesday. Does the release of the report portend a major shift in Administration policy, especially after the 'thumpin' Republicans received in the Midterm Elections?

Don't hold your breath. On Sunday's 'Meet the Press', National Security Advisor Steven Hadley simultaneously tried to advance the idea that Bush has undergone some type of personal glasnost while actually stating that Bush is as intellectually incurious and stale as ever. For example, Hadley stated "that the principal goal of helping Iraq become a self-governing country that can defend itself would remain, and that a withdrawal of troops 'regardless of what was happening on the ground' would not be adopted. 'That’s cut and run, and of course, as the president has said, cut and run is not his cup of tea,' Mr. Hadley said."

It would be prudent for Customs Officials to confiscate Bush's passport to examine what planets he been traveling to in the last, say, month or so. To recapitulate: Moktada al-Sadr has withdrawn his block from the Iraqi Government, and it appears that if the elections were held today, Sadrists would receive a substantially larger portion of parliamentary seats than they currently hold. Baghdad is a war zone, with bombs and kidnappings more common than sustained electricity. The radicalization of the Iraqi public along sectarian lines has created a state that is itself untenable. Iraq is now a fantasy. It is an apparition, the smoke coming off a car bomb that has been ticking ever since the British affixed it many years ago.

The most prescient option would be some variation of Senator Biden's plan to split Iraq into a Kurdish North, Sunni Center, and Shia South with Baghdad run under some kind of UN mandate, at least until some kind of self-government can be established. Turkey will react extremely negatively to a free Kurdistan, but with enough pressure from the EU, they'll live with it, as long as the EU remains serious about admitting them. The Shia south may ally itself with Iran, but this was an inevitability anyway. The Kurds will most certainly let the US have a military presence in the region, satisfying the Defense Department. Meanwhile the Sunni's will no longer fear oppression by the Shia majority--even if it comes at the price of oil reserves, they'll have self-government.

In fact, this situation is the most democratic of all, and should thus satisfy the Bush Administration's drive for democracy in the Middle East. Bush II will then have vanquished the ghosts of Bush I, and Baghdad may perhaps be able to emerge from its smoking rubble. That is, of course, if the President truly accepts the reality of Iraq and fundamentally changes his strategy. Because if Bush doesn't prepare for partition, it may come anyway, and the possibility of an unplanned-for surgical splitting of Iraq into thirds should terrify us all.