Monday, October 01, 2007

Partition is a bad idea for Iraq

There is a loony idea in Pol circles, where most loony ideas originate, that partitioning Iraq would solve all the sectarian violence. Slow Joe Biden has long been an advocate of some sort of partitioning plan. The fact that slow Joe is for it ought to be enough to give thinking people pause.

As it turns out Iraqis are against partition in rather large numbers and the reason is simple. Ever since the Iraq war began the MSM has been telling us that the country is already divided; Kurds to the north, Shiite to the south and west and Sunni in the center east. It’s not so much autonomy and partitioned piece of Iraq that the faction are interested in; they already have that. It’s a fair share of oil revenue that is really the problem, and no amount of line drawing is going to make that problem go away. Some sort of equitable oil revenue sharing plan ought to be priority one.

Besides, let’s say there is universal agreement in the US that Iraq needs to be partitioned. How does one affect that plan without Iraqi consent? Is slow Joe advocating using the US military to initiate a forced partition? If it’s forced how long could such a partition be expected to hold? Absent an oil revenue sharing plan, wouldn’t such a partition just inflame sectarian violence?

We’ve dealt with this issue several times in our own history and in every case from the “trail of tears,” to Japanese internment, to segregation, it’s been an embarrassment. Why would we think it's going to be any different in Iraq?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Why is the senate voting on a "non-binding" resolution to divide another country into three parcels? I thought this typically done by pols to create sweetheart land deals where their cousin twice removed makes $2-3M per deal. Could this lead to 3 heads of government sitting on big lucrative oil fields looking for investors? This has a Harry Reid feel to it. I thought the dems were all over GWB for nation building too! Biden is going for a nation building hat trick here. The Griffin.