Breaking Up is Hard to Do

It's 2007, and we're surging ahead in Iraq, and our options are twofold: total victory-- liberal democracy, capitalism, multinational investment in Iraqi infrastructure (read: oil)--or utter defeat--cuttin' and runnin' ( kind of evokes a street thug snatching your grandmother's purse), theocracy, Muktada al-Sadr victorious, a Shia superstate with a hegemonic Iran sprinkled with Al-Qaeda Salafists in Sunni regions.

It's quite a dichotomy. Lucky for us, the reality, as it so often does, lays outside of the parameters presented to us by most in either major political party.

In The American Prospect, Flynt Leverett argues that the "best worst" option for Iraq is what he calls "soft partition". He notes that to Joe Biden's credit (and I rarely credit Biden for much except bloviating), Biden is the only Democratic presidential candidate to call for the wide degree of autonomy between the three separate regions in Iraq (that means regional control of oil resource), with the administration of Baghdad as a federal zone, policed, at least initially, by international forces, perhaps from the UN or the Arab League.

This seemingly traumatic thought---the breakup of a nation!--would in fact be the correction of a long and painful colonial misadventure by the British. It would give the Kurds the freedom they're going to take anyway. Furthermore, it would allow for the historically oppressed Shia to govern themselves, but also prevent them from exercising too much federal authority on Sunni areas, and thus oppressing their former oppressors.

Let's face it: the situation isn't getting any better, and we need to stop conforming our Iraq policy towards the creation of a fantasy state, begin pragmatically figuring out how to stem the execrable bloodletting, and begin constructing the least traumatic way towards a nominally functional Iraqi nation-state. Because it is going to be bloody, no matter what happens.

Perhaps, in an unintended irony, Condoleeza Rice was right when she called the war in Lebanon and the continued violence in Iraq the "birth pangs of a new Middle East." It looks like the Bush Administration has presided over the miscarriage of a nation.