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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: RetiredNow who wrote (267566)1/8/2006 5:07:37 PM
From: neolib  Read Replies (2) of 1577829
 
I mostly agree but say skip the civil war and help from the final solution as peaceable as possible.

Unfortunately, the US is on record leading up to the war saying our goal was a united Iraq (mostly for Turkey's benefit) and we are opposed to division. Of course it was a goal to show that a democratic nonsectarian Arab state was possible. It is also not in the USA's interest to have another Shia state with significant oil wealth, so IMO, this is the main motivation for the US to slog out the united Iraq approach. A splintered Iraq will have an oil rich Shia state that is not pro American, a Kurdish state which is, and a Sunni state that is impoverished, and hostile to the USA.

I see insufficient glue to hold Iraq together, so why pretend? The Shia have a large enough block that they become de facto rulers under democracy. They want a theocracy. Neither Sunni nor Kurd can live under that. Fundamentally the Kurds just want their own state. The only hope for a united, democratic Iraq is if most Kurds, most Sunnis and all the secular Shia hang together in a block which checkmates the religious Shia. Not a stable coalition IMO, so it will either not happen, or won't last long if it does initially work.

The biggest problem is figuring out how the Sunnis can have a viable country without significant oil. One interesting possibility is that the Sunni regions seem to have the major water sources for Iraq, so this might be used to trade water for oil income. Kurd regions also source water it looks like.
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