Wednesday, September 26, 2007

The coming three-way partition of Iraq

by Charles Krauthammer from The Kankakee Daily Journal

Iraq is being partitioned -- and, like everything else in Iraq today, it is happening from the ground up. 1. The Sunni provinces. The essence of our deal with the Anbar tribes and those in Diyala, Salahuddin and elsewhere is this: You end the insurgency and drive out al-Qaeda and we assist you in arming and policing yourselves. We'd like you to have an official relationship with the Maliki government, but we're not waiting on Baghdad. 2. The Shiite south. This week the British pulled out of Basra, retired to their air base and essentially left the southern Shiites to their own devices -- meaning domination by the Shiite militias now fighting each other for control. 3. The Kurdish north. Kurdistan has been independent in all but name for a decade and a half ... The Iraqi state may be a shell, but it is a necessary one because de jure partition into separate states would invite military intervention by the neighbors -- Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria.

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