caveat, this is sort of a political blog entry.
one of the biggest foreign policy mistakes that westerners have made in the 20th and 21st centuries has been to assume that troubled regions are comprised of viable and long-standing nation states.
the united states and canada and italy and sweden and japan, etc, are all viable and long-standing nation states.
so when western leaders look at the rest of the world they assume that they’re looking at countries similar to their own.
but most of the worlds troubled regions are filled with non-viable countries whose borders were relatively arbitrarily drawn pre and post colonialism.
the truth is that there never really was an ‘iraq’ or a ‘yugoslavia’ or a ‘sudan’, at least not in the way that there’s a canada or an italy.
the only solution that will work in iraq is to have 3 states, kurdish, sunni, and shi’ite, just as the only solution to sectarian violence in india in the 20th century was to establish pakistan and bangladesh, and the only solution to sectarian violence in yugoslavia was to allow countries to establish their own independence, largely along cultural and religious lines.
countries like iraq and yugoslavia were cobbled together by colonialists and imperialists, and then when colonialism and overt imperialism came to an end these countries were held together by authoritarian rule. the great mistake that the west(and especially the bush administration, a senior official said on friday that up until 2 months before the iraqi war bush didn’t know that there were sunni’s and shi’ites in iraq…)has made was to assume that in the absence of authoritarian rule the populace of these ‘nations’ would make nice and embrace democracy.
instead, without authoritarian rule, these nations have gone back to hating and killing each other as they did centuries ago.
iraq is in the midst of a civil war. it’s not degenerating into civil war, it’s in civil war.
the solutions are:
a-leave the country and let the civil war burn itself out in 10 years or so(this is obviously not so desirable…)
b-re-establish an authoritarian, demagogic state(might be hard to sell on the world stage…)
c-break iraq into 3 countries(arduous and painful and bloody, but the only viable option).
in the future it might be in the west’s interest to actually study and understand the countries that they’re ostensibly trying to ‘help’, and to possibly understand that boundaries drawn on a map don’t necessarily exist on the ground.
-moby