Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: "Shiites Push Laws to Define How to Divide Iraqi Regions," by Richard A. Oppel, Jr., New York Times, 7 September 2006, p. A16.

The Kurds basically already have their autonomous state-within-a-state in the north, and now the Shiites are moving in a similar direction, betraying past promises to the Sunnis about not making such a clear move toward federalism.

This is what I wrote in Esquire in early 2005:

Speaking of the triangle, that stinker's going to remain ours for the long term, but with Israel and Palestine off the table and real cooperation from both Iran and Syria in clamping down on all those jihadists with a one-way ticket to paradise, we'll extinguish the dream of the Saddam Baathists who are still fighting hard by effectively killing Iraq as a unitary state. Eventually, Iraq's Sunni population will realize that it can either become the recognized master of the triangle and nothing else (the same narrowing solution we forced on the Serbs in the Balkans), or it can choose to live in the region's new West Bank, surviving on intifada for the rest of its days.

Of course, the Bush administration chose another route on Iran, and got Lebanon for its poor strategic decision-making, so our inevitable draw-down in Iraq, coupled with Iran's rising regional profile, basically leads to the same outcome: Iraq is killed off as a unitary state, and we get the Yugoslavia solution set under--arguably--the worst set of circumstances, because we haven't moved to co-opt Iran whatsoever in this process and we're losing Turkey to boot. Meanwhile, "moderate" Sunni dictatorships like Saudi Arabia can be counted upon... for their usual "strong" support.

We could have managed Iraq's inevitable disintegration process better, keeping it all subsumed under the veneer of a stable, coherent state, giving all three parties sufficient time to come together for real over shared interests (largely economic) that are lost to every side's imagination at this point, given the ongoing violence and the get-your-olive-tree-now! mentality that's fostered (along with our failure to build any sense of a better, alternative economic future of connectivity to the outside world (the "Lexus" stuff)).

If we don't manage the break-up, there is no make-up.

Remember that as this Long War pulls us into Africa...