When Bremer says dividing Iraq risks a civil war becoming a regional war, he has it backwards and inside out. Arguably the Sunni advance IS part of the regional war already in its seventh on-and-off decade, and it's coming to meld with the civil war the Bremeristas unleashed in 2003. Bremer is right, that this is a bad outcome, but he should have thought of that in 2002, when Iraq was stable. After all, if a stable Iraq is in American interests, why destabilize it? Just because "he tried to kill my dad" is a form of medieval revenge-thinking with moderns weapons of mass destruction (ours).
When Bremer says, "Only the Americans can help the Iraqis broker across
these sectarian and ethnic lines. There is nobody else who can do it" -- that SHOULD get at least two big laughs.
Americans, led by Bremer, had the better part of a decade to take an already integrated Iraq and improve it. They failed. They failed utterly, horribly, at great cost of human life, but no apparent cost to self-esteem. The Bremeristas couldn't even get their hand-nurtured Iraqi government to agree to leave American troops in country (not that that was a good idea). Now they blame their failure on the Obama administration. They supported Nouri al-Maliki as Iraq's Premier. Maliki has long been a Shiite pawn of Iran, Maliki put himself in charge of the secret police, now the Sunnis and Kurds seem to have had enough -- and what's unexpected about that?
Saving Iraq is different from saving face for Bush-Cheney thugs
Iraq has never been a real country in modern times. Historically, the region is "the cradle of civilization," which mean that for thousands of years it either spawned empires or was over-run by competing empires, the last of which was the British Empire, that took over for the Ottoman Turks after World War I. The British mandate eventually led to a kingdom of Iraq which became a republic, which is what Saddam ran. During most of that time, roughly 1920-2002, Iraq was probably a more functional state than Mississippi, despite comparable levels of ethnic diversity and official violence.
Like so many borders in the Middle East, the borders of Iraq have little to do with the people living on the ground that those borderlines control. Iraq was more integrated under Saddam, before the vicious ethnic cleansing unleashed by the American occupation broke a civilized society down. But the underlying ethnic areas of Iraq have been in place for a long time (even Joe Biden figured that out, so of course the neocons mock him for having noticed reality).
"Iraq is not a real country and it never has been," said former Vermont governor Howard Dean on MSNBC's "The Last Word" (June 16). He said he'd predicted the obvious split along the obvious ethnic/sectarian lines ten years ago. And then he made a prediction: "now that it's happened, we're not going back" (and by we, he presumably meant the Iraqis, too).
And that seems about right, as long as forces outside Iraq (and inside) allow it to happen. As the Roman general Julius Caesar once said of Gaul that could apply here: "All Iraq is divided into three parts." And that's what the forces on the ground have presently established.
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