Friday, November 10, 2006

Now what?

Now that the Democrats are soon to have control of both branches of Congress, it is time to reassess ideas for what the Democrats have been calling "a new direction" for the country that were not likely to get off the ground under Republican dominance. In the case of Iraq, the Democrats have further cause for ambitious planning now that President Bush has seen to the political demise of his longtime Defense Secretary and, in so doing, called for a "fresh perspective" while acknowledging that Iraq "is not working well enough, or fast enough."

One plan that has been floated for several years but never taken seriously, as far as we know, by those in power, is the tripartite division of Iraq. Might it decrease the level of sectarian violence if each ethnic group -- Sunnis, Shiites, Kurds -- had its own nation and didn't feel a compulsion to dominate an entire traumatized country the size of California? Such a plan is particularly likely to be aired again because Joe Biden will in January become the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee; Biden, along with Leslie Gelb, has co-authored a plan for Iraq that proposes this very solution.

One blog, American Footprints, has called for reconsideration of the idea. Peter W. Galbraith, a highly perceptive Iraq observer who has spent a great deal of time there, discussed the idea [$] in the New York Review of Books in May 2004 and mentioned it again [$] there in his (optimistic) dissection of the Iraqi Constitution:

The outcome of the Iraqi constitutional process will therefore very likely be the three-state solution that I described in these pages in May 2004. Iraq is well on the way to becoming a loose union of three separate and radically different states (or more, if the Shiites choose to divide themselves into two regions).

Posted by Evan Hughes at 11:28 AM

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