Category: Iraq-2006-Q3

I am unbelievably busy with things in the real world. Back to blogging when I can. Maybe Thursday evening?
Meantime, talk about Iraq here if you want.

The Friends Committee on National Legislation’s website has a great resource page that tells us the specific lobbying steps we should be taking to push for a speedy (and hopefully also total and generous) withdrawal from Iraq. Look in particular at this page there, which tells us that right now, “Congress has one final opportunity in this session to pass legislation barring the Pentagon from spending money to establish permanent military bases in Iraq”
So do go there, explore their great and information-packed website… and get going with the lobbying. They have lots of great ideas for what we can do– on Iraq, and on a whole range of other issues.

I see Juan Cole has blogged today about our debate/discussion Sunday, and he has responded to the complaint I expressed here yesterday when I wrote that I found it “a rather worrying cop-out” for someone in his/our position to look at the situation our government’s actions have created in Iraq and say, as he did Sunday, that he has “no plan.”
I apologize to Juan that I hadn’t found a friendlier way to express and frame that complaint. But I’m really delighted that he has chosen to continue to engage with, in particular, that part of our discussion. Long-time JWN readers will, I hope, be quite aware of the esteem in which I continue to hold Juan and the value I give to our continued friendship. But friends can and do look at some things differently. Hopefully, by exploring those differences we can all come to a richer and more informed analysis of the situation and of our responsibilities within it.
Juan writes this today:

I’m just being realistic. It is increasingly silly to dream up ten point plans to resolve the Iraq crisis. It would be nice to see a multilateral approach, but we should not fool ourselves that the Bangladeshis can succeed in al-Anbar where the Marines couldn’t. It would be nice to see Maliki’s reconciliation program broadened to include neo-Baathist guerrillas and Salafis, as it must if it is to succeed. But that isn’t going to happen because Abdul Aziz al-Hakim and the Kurds would veto it, as would the US Congress. I actually think that offering glib solutions like “Complete US withdrawal in 3 months” is the cop-out, because they seem to offer hope but are no more substantial than a desert mirage and about as likely to quench any existential thirst.
It is better just to admit to people when there are not good options, and be honest with them about the various likely scenarios that would ensue from what realistic options there are. That is what I try to do. It is not a cop-out.

I want to engage with that a bit. I would say:

(1) I believe I am realistic. He believes he is. That’s good. At least we are holding our discussion is in the realm of realism, not ideology.
(2) I don’t have a ten-point plan. He once did. This was the nine-point plan I articulated in July 2005. It actually still looks pretty good to me. Check it out.
(3) I have never argued that, “the Bangladeshis can succeed in al-Anbar where the Marines couldn’t.” Indeed, I do not envision any role for the UN or any other outside forces inside Iraq post- a US troop withdrawal except at the invitation of a duly constituted Iraqi government. When arguing for a leadership role for the UN in the negotiations around a US withdrawal I am suggesting that the UN play mainly a “holding the ring” role, providing the best format within which the negotiations over the modalities of the withdrawal can take place (as in the S. African withdrawal from Namibia, etc etc), and being the organization best-placed to secure and then hopefully monitor the non-intervention of outside forces in Iraq after the US withdrawal. But if there are UN forces, say, along some of Iraq’s borders in the peri-withdrawal phase, then maybe the Bangladeshis could do an excellent job in that blue-hat role, I don’t know. I did find Juan’s reference to them there faintly derogatory.
(4) Regarding Juan’s very firmly expressed prescriptions rgearding intra-Iraqi political matters, this is precisely the area in which I firmly believe the Iraqis must be left to work out their own internal arrangements; and neither the US government nor any US citizens, however well-meaning, have any legitimate standing to issue diktats (or even, really, to express preferences) in these matters. See #5 in my 9-point plan there. This is a deep disagreement between Juan and me.
(5) He writes that he thinks, “offering glib solutions like ‘Complete US withdrawal in 3 months’ is the cop-out, because they … are no more substantial than a desert mirage.” I do not consider making a statement like this– though perhaps, with a time-period a little longer than 3 months– to be either glib or a mirage. (In my 9-point plan, I’d written “4-5 months.”) What I’m talking about here is the total time needed between Date D, the date of the US President’s announcement of a firm intention to undertake a withdrawal that is speedy, total, generous (and orderly), and Date D + X, the date of the last US serviceperson exiting Iraq by boat or truck.
If we’re talking about a speedy withdrawal, what is the minimum value of X? If Centcom is even 50 percent as diligent as it should be, it must have many contingency plans on the shelves in Qatar for contingencies up to and including catastroiphic contingencies requiring a total emergency evacuation of all forces from Iraq. What is the “X” value in those plans? For an orderly withdrawal, you would need a bit more time, because you would not be blowing up the ammo dumps and many of the facilities as you go, but would hope to transport a lot of the materiel as well as all the troops out of Iraq. You also need, at the beginning of that “X” period, rapidly to conclude the negotiations with other relevant parties that allow for the orderly withdrawal. But having a defined value of X from the get-go would wonderfully focus the minds of all those participating in those negotiations.
At the forum Sunday, Juan said the military would need “at least 12-18 months” to achieve this. I still think that with the right degree of focus, a total X value of less than 6 months would be achievable. But okay, let’s say you’d need even 12 months. Does Juan think it would be a bad idea to call for this withdrawal to be initiated right now? I think he does, for the reasons discussed in #4 above. As I said, that is a very serious disagreement. (And in that case, his disagreement with me is not one over the length of the X time, but over something completely different.) But I would be delighted to learn that he thinks a plan for a total withdrawal “over 12-18 months” should be initiated now.
(6) He writes: “It is better just to admit to people when there are not good options, and be honest with them about the various likely scenarios that would ensue from what realistic options there are. That is what I try to do.” To this I would respond as follows:
I have never said at any time since March 2003 that there are any good options for the US in Iraq. They all look highly imperfect. But there are some options that seem significantly more doom-laden than others. Looked at purely realistically, “Staying the course”– e.g. by choosing not to take the quite available path towards a speedy and total withdrawal– looks like a choice that will bring results significantly more terrible than opting for a speedy and total withdrawal. Announcing and then implementing a speedy and total withdrawal is entirely realistic. Staying the course in the hope that things may get better in Iraq looks to me, based on the entire trend-line from 2003 through the present, to be an entirely Quixotic expectation.
However, I note that Juan nowhere expresses any expectation that things will get better in Iraq. Therefore, his position seems to me to be not Quixotic so much as a counsel of deep despair. It seems he sees no way out of the current awful situation. I think that is really, really tragic.

Anyway, let’s continue this discussion…

Reidar Visser’s latest (Sept. 17) analysis of the political decentralization issue in Iraq is really worth reading. I don’t have time to comment on it here. (I’m just off to breakfast at the Carter Center.) But any of you who are interested in the internal dynamics within Iraq should read it with care.
Visser, crucially, doesn’t seem to buy in to what is increasingly becoming the “received wisdom” in much of US discourse– and now, too, I note, from Kofi Annan as well!– about the imminence and almost inevitability of a Sunni-Shiite civil war.
He writes that a path for US policymakers that would be better than their current one would be,

tapping into existing Iraqi nationalist sentiment. Ideas about a possible four-years moratorium on any federalism south of Kurdistan have circulated for some time among Sunnis and nationalist and Islamist Shiites; this could be justified as an attempt at giving Iraq a chance to get up and running again, to function as a normal, oil-rich, bi-national (Arab–Kurdish) federation, without the perversions of the Baathist regime (the move would be constitutional as part of the special revision process). This sort of “restoration of Baghdad” is regularly called for in newspaper interviews with ordinary citizens who think federalism is merely a politician’s tool designed to facilitate the self-aggrandisement of a tiny elite. Tired of militia strife, even the regionalists in the far south – possibly the Shiite pro-federal current that enjoys the greatest degree of cross-party backing locally – might well be mollified by the emergence of a genuinely national government in Baghdad capable of addressing concerns about regional underdevelopment.
If this trend should continue to grow inside the Iraqi parliament, the United States could find a way of supporting it as a policy alternative, without interfering directly. Washington would be able to expect a vastly improved security situation in the wake of serious Shiite–Sunni rapprochement, and should therefore be in a position to offer an accelerated withdrawal of forces in exchange for postponement of the federalism issue. At the very least, US officials could make an honest attempt at spelling out the security implications (and the likely prospect for a reduced foreign troop presence) of a rapid restoration of an effective unified government south of Kurdistan – versus what can arguably be described as the more risky option of devolution, where terrorists could be tempted to interfere at every single juncture along the road to new regions, and where external stabilisation forces might be required in greater measure. By choosing this sort of approach, Washington would be able to communicate with and build on Iraqi nationalist sentiment that is present among Shiite and Sunni Islamists alike, instead of creating further antagonisms through attempts at hypnotising Iraq’s entire population into a pro-federal trance.

I guess I wished I shared more of Visser’s presuppositions about the Bushists’ policies– such as that they are made on the basis of broad knowledge and colly applied reason, or that they are motivated above all by a desire for the wellbeing of the Iraqi people… But maybe they are open to reason at this point?
His observations about and analysis of what has been going on inside Iraqi politics, however, seem to me extremely informative. Just one question, though? After Hakim’s failure to get his decentralization legislation rammed through last week, what is the possibility he’ll be coming back with new attempts in the near future?

I’m in Ann Arbor, MI, traveling to Atlanta today. Yesterday Juan Cole and I spoke at an afternoon gathering at the big Unitarian church here. It seemed like a large crowd– 250? 300? Very friendly and supportive.
Juan and I gave largely complementary presentations– mine, mainly on Palestine, and his mainly on Iraq. But in the question period one substantial (and longstanding) disagreement emerged between us. I had stressed earlier that I still thought we in the US peace movement should work for a US troop withdrawal from Iraq that is speedy, total, and generous— as I’ve been arguing for a long time now. Someone asked Juan what he thought would ensue inside Iraq if that happened. He expressed, mainly, a kind of despair. He has this thing that he says, which is, “When people used to ask me what we should do, I used to tell them I had a ten-point plan. Then later, they’d ask and I’d say I had a five-point plan. But now, I have no points, no plan. I’m running on empty… ” This, as part of a long exposition that involves him painting the many drastic aspects of what, in his view, is almost certain to happen inside Iraq after any kind of a quick US withdrawal.
Well, yes, and no. I agree with him that the present trends seem to indicate that the outlook for a post-withdrawal Iraq don’t look very good. But– and I think this is how I tried to express it yesterday– we really don’t know what will happen after we leave. But what we do know, based on the trend-line from 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2006 is that that the trend there has been that for every year the US troops stay in Iraq, the situation for the Iraqis becomes worse.– and we have no reason whatsoever at this point to expect any change in that trend. Plus, at some point, the US troops are going to have to withdraw, anyway. Might we expect that the post-withdrawal situation inside Iraq will be better if we postpone starting the withdrawal to say, 2008 or 2009 than if we start it today? No. Because we have no reason at all to hope that the “base-line” situation in the country is going to get any better between today and 2008 or 2009. Indeed, the trend-line indicates that, absent a withdrawal or even any announcement of a firm withdrawal plan, things will continue– as they have even since 2003– to get worse.
So surely, it would be better to start now.
Plus, I think Juan was overly pessimistic, indeed somewhat alarmist, in what he said about the prospects in and for a post-withdrawal Iraq. Firstly, there are certainly many things the US can and should do to negotiate with other parties the modalities of the US troop withdrawal. These parties should include– at a minimum– parties within Iraq, Iraq’s neighboring states, and the UN. That negotiation is absolutely necessary, to ensure that the withdrawal is as orderly and damage-free as possible for the Americans. But it is also necessary (or at least, highly advisable) in order to try to have these exact same parties agree on the “rules of the game” among them in the post-withdrawal period. For example, to pin down asurances from all of Iraq’s neigbors that they will respect Iraq’s territorial integrity in the post-withdrawal period– and maybe establish a UN-run monitoring system to ensure that this occurs and dispel any misunderstandings on this score among various mutually suspicious neighbors… Similarly, to have Iraq’s internal parties agree to work under UN auspices in continuing negotiations on their constitution…
But secondly, it’s also important, imho, to point out that there are things the US cannot and should not aspire to do in the post-withdrawal period… Mainly, things to with dictating matters concerning the internal governance of Iraq… At the forum yesterday, Juan mentioned the prospect of a Shiite “super-region” arising in the south Iraq, and expressed great concern that that might act as a pole of attraction/inspiration for the Shiites who make up the majority of the population of eastern Saudi Arabia– which happens to be the part of the Kingdom where most of its oil resources are located… And, and, and… (Disruptions of the global oil market and the de-industrialization of the entire industrialized world were two of the possible consequences he mentioned.)
I said that I found some of these warnings alarmist. After all, as everyone in the world discovered after earlier periods in which nations sitting on large oil reserves nationalized their oil industries, these nations still need to have access to global oil markets in order to gain the revenue from the oil that keeps the rest of their economies going. “You can’t eat or drink oil, after all.”
But at a more fundamental level, it really is none of our damn’ business as Americans, to tell Iraqis how they should govern themselves, and we need to understand that.
… Well, this is an old disagreement between Juan and me, as longtime JWN readers already know. (See, e.g., the Nation Forum from July 2005.) And it’s still there.
Maybe we are headed for an imminent convergence point, though? I mean, if Juan says he has no plan at this point for what the US government should do, then perhaps he could agree with me that the challenge of resolving the whole “Iraq question” would best be handed over to the only other party even remotely capable of handling the many tricky political and diplomatic issues involved– namely, the United Nations?
I should say, though, that I think it’s a rather worrying cop-out for someone– a US taxpayer and a non-trivial member of the US policy elite– to look at the truly ghastly, inhumane situation that our government’s actions have created for the people of Iraq and simply say he “has no plan.”
Me, I have a plan. It likely ain’t perfect, but after considerable thought on the matter it’s still the best I can come up with.

I read the whole of the important piece of reporting that was in The Sunday Telegraph (London) yesterday about the decline of Ayatollah Sistani’s power among Iraq’s Shiites. (Hat-tip to both Juan Cole and Pat Lang there.)
To me, the significance of what reporters Gethin Chamberlain and Aqeel Hussein write there lies not just in the strong evidence they present of a steep decline in Sistani’s power, but also, some equally strong evidence that the militia and political organization headed by Moqtada Sadr– who seems to have gained much of the popular support that Sistani has lost– has indeed turned massively towards participating in revenge killings against Sunnis.

They write:

Hundreds of thousands of people have turned away from al-Sistani to the far more aggressive al-Sadr. Sabah Ali, 22, an engineering student at Baghdad University, said that he had switched allegiance after the murder of his brother by Sunni gunmen. “I went to Sistani asking for revenge for my brother,” he said. “They said go to the police, they couldn’t do anything.
“But even if the police arrest them, they will release them for money, because the police are bad people. So I went to the al-Sadr office. I told them about the terrorists’ family. They said, ‘Don’t worry, we’ll get revenge for your brother’. Two days later, Sadr’s people had killed nine of the terrorists, so I felt I had revenge for my brother. I believe Sadr is the only one protecting the Shia against the terrorists.”
According to al-Sadr’s aides, he owes his success to keeping in touch with the people. “He meets his representatives every week or every day. Sistani only meets his representatives every month,” said his spokesman, Sheik Hussein al-Aboudi.
“Muqtada al-Sadr asks them what the situation is on the street, are there any fights against the Shia, he is asking all the time. So the people become close to al-Sadr because he is closer to them than Sistani. Sistani is the ayatollah, he is very expert in Islam, but not as a politician.”
Even the Iraqi army seems to have accepted that things have changed. First Lieut Jaffar al-Mayahi, an Iraqi National Guard officer, said many soldiers accepted that al-Sadr’s Mehdi army was protecting Shias. “When they go to checkpoints and their vehicles are searched, they say they are Mehdi army and they are allowed through. But if we stop Sistani’s people we sometimes arrest them and take away their weapons.”

Yes, it is certainly also important that they write this:

Aides say Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani is angry and disappointed that Shias are ignoring his calls for calm and are switching their allegiance in their thousands to more militant groups which promise protection from Sunni violence and revenge for attacks.
“I will not be a political leader any more,” he told aides. “I am only happy to receive questions about religious matters.”

You can read a couple of things I wrote about Sistani back in January 2004, here and here. I note that this is not the first time that Sistani has made a demonstrative turn away from intervention in political matters.
I only have time to add a couple of quick further notes here. One is that if Sistani’s political stock in Iraq has indeed been plummeting, then the mullahs in Teheran may indeed be quite happy about this, given that he espouses a view of the role of the Islamic jurisprudent in politics that is very different to, indeed antithetical to, their own. Perhaps therefore we can see here the Iranians playing the same kind of nefarious, destabilizing game among the many different factions in Iraq that the Syrians played for many years amongst the factions in Lebanon? Broadly speaking, that was a role that sought the fissiparousness (splitting) of the factions into as many small grouplets as possible, all the better to turn them against each, keep them perpetually off-balance, and thereby retain one’s own role as “the essential balancer.”
Of course, you can also see this role being played inside Iraq by the US. The poor bloody Iraqis, if they are now having this horrible game played on them by both the Americans and the Iranians…
Another thing I want to note is that our old “friend” (irony alert there!) Adel Abdul-Mahdi has been in Washington. Pro-administration WaPo columnist Jackson Diehl writes coyly today, “Mahdi is now Iraq’s vice president, but he called his meetings with President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and key senators and congressmen a ‘private visit.'”
Diehl seemed not to have read the Telegraph report of Sistani having announced his retirement from politics, and seemed to take at face value– which I don’t– Abdul-Mahdi’s claim to be acting “on Sistani’s behalf.”
Diehl wrote:

Sistani’s message to Bush, Mahdi told a group of reporters I joined last week, was that “Iraqis are sticking to the principles of the constitution and democracy.” But the ayatollah wanted to know if the United States is still on board as well.
“It’s a critical moment. We want to be sure that we understand perfectly what’s going on, and what is the real strategy of the United States in Iraq,” Mahdi said. “We read in the press about different perspectives and attitudes. That’s why we want to be clear — whether there is a Plan B.”
Mahdi said he got Bush’s commitment to stand by the government…
Mahdi, Sistani and other Shiite leaders in the government don’t share Washington’s perception of a downward spiral. (!) They also don’t buy the American sense of urgency — the oft-expressed idea that the new government has only a few months to succeed. Consequently, the many ideas for silver bullets tossed around in the U.S. debate mostly don’t interest them.
You could see this in the conversation I joined at Mahdi’s suite at the Ritz Carlton hotel. We journalists peppered him with questions about why the formation of a unity government had failed to reduce the violence. We asked about all the options usually talked about in Washington — from a rewrite of the constitution to a partition of the country; from an international conference to the dispatch of more U.S. troops.
For the most part, our queries were politely and somewhat laconically dismissed. Iraq is not in a civil war, Mahdi said, and doesn’t need more U.S. troops. It has a constitution and elected government, and thus there is no need for an international conference. As for constitutional reform, the Shiite and Kurd parties that wrote the charter last year are waiting for proposals from Sunni dissidents. Mahdi added: “So far we have heard nothing.”
So what is the solution? “Time — that is it,” Mahdi replied. “A nation like Iraq needs time. The elections for a permanent government happened eight months ago. We have been in office a few weeks. The people who we have in office have never governed. These people come from oppression and a bad political system. We can’t import ministers to Iraq. There will be many mistakes. The Americans made many mistakes, and Iraqis had to support that.”
“Our options as Iraqis are that we don’t have an exit strategy or any withdrawal timetable,” Mahdi said, somewhat bitterly. “We simply go on. . . . It is a process, and brick by brick we are working on it.”

Now, obviously, I wasn’t in the little gathering in the Ritz Carlton, so I don’t know what Abdul-Mahdi actually said. But what Diehl seems to be implying Abdul-Mahdi said– and possibly on behalf of Sistani?– is that the Iraqis are not currently seeking a speedy US withdrawal…
Anyway, in my view Adel Abdul-Mahdi is just a footnote at this point. The much more serious news has to do with the killing and violence that continue to rock many of the ethnic-Arab areas of Iraq, and with Sistani’s reported decision to (once again) pull out from active involvement in politics…
Be worried for Iraqis. Very worried indeed.

I have been appropriately chided that while I’ve been focusing on Lebanon (and Uganda) I haven’t been writing enough about Iraq.
The multiple tragedies there have been well covered, of course, by Juan Cole and by the group over at Today in Iraq. In particular, Matt’s lengthy post at TII yesterday provided an excellent– and extremely depressing– roundup.
One excellent point that Matt makes repeatedly throughout that post that having (or even more so, claiming to have) “good intentions” in any given situation simply is not enough. One needs always to be attentive to the actual effects and results of one’s actions, as well. (This is an argument I’ve also been making, in a different context, regarding the ICC’s prosecutions in Uganda.)
Anyway, given that I’m still deeply inside the writing of my Boston Review article on the 33-day war in Lebanon– and I also have about three other urgent deadlines to meet– it’s clear I can’t promise to post anything particularly substantial here about Iraq for another week or so…
So I’ll leave this thread open for you commenters to engage in your usual courteous and constructive discussion on Iraq here.

Our friend the Norwegian expert Reidar Visser is notably not a supporter of the idea of splitting up Iraq. Now, he has an excellent review on the History News Network of Peter Galbraith’s recent book, The End of Iraq: How American Incompetence Created a War without End.
On his own website, Visser gives his review the title, Divide and Rejoice – Why Are Western Intellectuals so Enamoured with the Idea of a Fragmented Iraq? Sadly, though, that title didn’t make it to the HNN webpage.
He writes this about Galbraith’s book:

Chapter 8, “Kurdistan,” is by far the most interesting part of the book – not primarily for what it says about that area, but for its blunt and autobiographical account of how a US intellectual became deeply engaged in fuelling Kurdish ideas about breaking ranks with the rest of Iraq. In considerable detail Galbraith explains how he personally fostered many of the specific Kurdish demands for federalism, including principles which in one form or another would later find their way into the current Iraqi constitution… Galbraith provides an amazingly frank account of how he himself played a central role in framing the Kurdish elites’ demands on the center, even impelling them at certain junctures when he found them to have “conceptual problems” (p. 160). He sounds distinctly satisfied about the severe restrictions placed on the central government in the final constitution, … and he cheerfully recounts how he himself contributed to upholding the restraints on the center during the tense final stages of the charter negotiations (by warning off British officials who seemingly intended to raise alarms about the limited tax powers of the central government, p. 199, footnote).
… It is on the basis of the pro-Kurdish, pro-partition views expressed in chapter 8 that Galbraith’s general reading of Iraqi history and society as well as some of the oddities in the book must be understood. Galbraith is at pains to render Iraq as an “artificial” and highly fissile construct. Indeed, he accuses his political opponents of “a misreading of Iraq’s modern history” (p. 206). But as soon as he moves beyond his particular area of expertise – the Kurdish north – the narrative becomes less convincing and the arguments more strained.
… Galbraith seems to have scant interest in … examples of ethno-religious coexistence and reconciliation; instead he mocks anyone who shows interest in keeping Iraq unified. He roundly condemns the Bush administration for the heinous crime of trying to secure a “non-ethnic Iraq” (p. 166) and castigates them for speaking of an “Iraqi people, as if there were a single people akin to the French or even the American people” (p. 83). But he fails to provide any historically convincing justification for his own quantum leap from diagnosing a state of civil strife to prescribing territorial, segregationist solutions. That lack of historical perspective is a serious problem, because it precludes the writer from distinguishing between societies that are chronically unstable and those that experience a serious but reversible flare-up of civic violence. It should serve as a reminder to Galbraith that his claims about Kurdish leader’s anti-Iraq attitudes cannot possibly be repeated with regard to Sunni and Shiite elites, and that, despite the ongoing horrific violence, large masses of Iraqis, certainly in the Arab areas, continue to demand a “national Iraqi” army, a “national Iraqi” oil distribution policy, and a meaningful role for Baghdad as capital.
But Galbraith has already made up his mind. His “solution” – the “three state solution” – is covered in chapters 10 and 11 and may be what many readers of this book are really interested in. Such a territorial solution of separating Kurds, Sunni Arabs, and Shiite Arabs may appear superficially attractive to Democratic and liberal audiences in the United States, simply by offering a clear-cut alternative to Bush’s Iraq policy. Instead of semantic fidgeting with “timetables for withdrawals,” “threats of withdrawal” or “deadlines for withdrawal,” partition may come across as an innovative, hands-on approach that can mark a clear alternative to the line of the current administration. (If implemented it could also be trumpeted as ultimate evidence that everything the Republicans ever did in Iraq was profoundly misguided.) In short, after years of Democratic discomfiture over an Iraq situation where criticism of US policy always risked being deemed unpatriotic, partition schemes may now give the impression of being deliciously refreshing. That is also why they are particularly worrying, first and foremost for the Iraqi people who would experience an exacerbation of ethno-religious conflict instead of its reversal, but also as precedents that could lead to the dismantling of multi-ethnic polities elsewhere in the world. What a sad prospect it would be to have a twenty-first century agenda in international politics dominated by an uninspired revival of First World War ideas about ethno-religious self-determination – all as the result of the opposition’s scrabbling around for a vote-winning US foreign policy.

This is a very astutely written review. What Visser describes in that last paragraph there seems like a real and very worrying possibility. I certainly hope that not too many US pols– Democratic or Republican– get distracted from the need to withdraw the US military speedily and completely from Iraq by some imperialistic, “let’s redraw these maps” desire to break Iraq up into separate statelets. But of course, we know already that there are a number of influential people like Les Gelb and P. Galbraith who would love to do just that. And we should also know that there are many, many more people in the imperialistic camp in the US who would like to do whatever they can to try to keep the fires of intra-Muslim competition and hatred well stoked… And the plan to divide Iraq into three mutually warring statelets could certainly serve them well.
Divide and rule, anyone?