Here it is, by Timothy Noah at Slate:
Should We Partition Iraq?Interestingly, this piece is almost three years old. The partition idea, at least in this form, does appear to have been modeled on Yugoslavia, which I have to say kind of blows my mind, for reasons Noah summarizes below:
"How would partition work? Gelb and Galbraith propose a very loose federation on the model of the former Yugoslavia. (Gelb envisions something akin to Yugoslavia as ruled after World War II by Marshall Tito, a Communist leader who avoided Soviet control; Galbraith prefers the model of Yugoslavia after Tito's death in 1980.) The obvious problem with this model is that the federation unraveled starting in the early 1990s, leading to bloody civil war." It is an interesting piece because it shows you where the idea came from and who's liable to support it, viz., American officials despreately looking for a face-saving way out and Kurds. The Kurds have been agitating for autonomy since before this last mess happened, and just as Chalabi had his supporters in Washington, I'm sure the Kurds have theirs. But here, to me, is what's wrong with the picture this article paints:
"But Galbraith, who was ambassador to Croatia in the Clinton administration, maintains that Yugoslavia's breakup was not inevitable. If Slobodan Milosevic had been willing to settle for 'a looser federation,' Galbraith argues, 'there is every reason to think that Yugoslavia—and not just Slovenia— would be joining the European Union this May.'"Yeah. And if the Iraqis had greeted us as liberators, Iraq would be a democracy now. My argument is that partition creates the incubator in which guys like Slobodan Milosevic are hatched. Use partition to solve a problem now, you create a worse problem later.
Also instructive is the way in which, even three years ago, even an article arguing
for partition doesn't really argue that it's a
good exit strategy, just that it's
an exit strategy:
"But accepting a three-state solution, enclosed inside a loose federation or not, likely means giving up on certain aspirations. One aspiration is to make Iraq a democratic nation. More likely, it would be a two-thirds democratic federation or geographic region, with the possibility of a Sunni democracy down the road. Another aspiration is to establish the rule of law. In the short run, and perhaps even in the long, that would likely happen only in Iraqi Kurdistan. A third aspiration is to stop the killing. But that wouldn't happen in the Sunni territory, though it might happen later. A fourth and final aspiration is to avoid taking a country that was fascist, but not terribly theocratic, and allowing one-third of it to become a theocracy. This hope is not merely idealistic but also, conceivably, related to national security, insofar as the creation of any new Islamic theocracy provides a potential recruiting ground for al-Qaida. But Chatterbox doesn't have any great ideas about how to keep Iraqi Shiites from making that democratic choice. As Galbraith says, maybe they'll hate us less if we let them make that choice sooner rather than later."Maybe. My money says no, though. I think the Shiites' hatred of us has probably just about become complete at this point.
Of course, I don't know whether there is any way
not to make this worse, at this point. As I've said before, I really don't think we can control the outcome. I just don't think partition, historically, has been a long-term solution to much of anything.
The Plaid Adder
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