"Iraq is not salvageable as a unitary state." So writes Peter Galbraith, America's pre-eminent Kurdophile, in the May 13 New York Review of Books ("How To Get Out of Iraq"). Leslie Gelb, formerly an assistant secretary in Jimmy Carter's State Department and subsequently a diplomatic correspondent for the New York Times, made a similar point on the Times op-ed page in November. Ralph Peters, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who writes on military strategy, has been calling for the breakup of Iraq for nearly a year. Reluctantly, Chatterbox is starting to think Galbraith, Gelb, and Peters have a point.
"The Iraq we're trying to herd back together," Peters wrote in July 2003, "consists of three distinct nations caged under a single, bloodstained flag." Iraq was famously invented in 1921 by Winston Churchill, then the British colonial secretary tasked with carving up the recently defeated Ottoman Empire. Churchill's main concern was to consolidate areas containing, or suspected to contain, oil fields. He achieved that at the expense of long-term political stability. From the start, mistrust existed between the country's three predominant groups: the Shiite Arabs in the south, the Sunni Arabs in the middle, and the Kurds, who weren't Arabs at all, in the north. A succession of regimes managed to yoke these three groups together only through varying degrees of repression, with Saddam's the most repressive of all. Short of putting a tanned, rested, and ready Saddam back in charge—a possibility we can surely rule out—government by repression is no longer an option.
