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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group
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To: michael97123 who wrote (153480)12/6/2004 5:04:00 PM
From: Win Smith  Read Replies (2) of 281500
 
Personally, in principle, I don't think breaking up Iraq would be a bad thing. Iraq us just another one of those arbitrary post-colonial map-making botches, in this case a remnant of the post-WW1 Ottoman empire breakup administered by the British. They weren't always as smart as they thought they were.

In practice, though, the problem is the ethnic divisions aren't that clean. There are supposed to be 2 million Shiites in Sadr City in Baghdad, and I think Mosul and Kirkuk, in the Kurdish north, have pretty big Arab populations too. You got the historical precedent of the India - Pakistan breakup and the more proximate precedent of the Yugoslavian breakup to show that making new borders can get pretty ugly.
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