So What if Iraq Splinters?

Henry Srebrnik, [Halifax, NS] Chronicle Herald

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has been asking Washington to intervene in his war against Sunni insurgents. U.S. President Barack Obama should take a pass.

I was somewhat agnostic about the American invasion of Iraq in 2003. I wasn’t ready to believe Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons, nor that he was a major danger to the Middle East.

It seemed to me he was more of a caged beast after the 1991 Gulf War.

Still, I thought, there’s no harm in removing such a tyrant, even if, unlike the fantasists who hoped this would bring democracy to Iraq, I was certain his successors would be little better.

All this proved to be true. America’s attempt at “nation building,” in a place where there is no “nation,” failed, of course. It couldn’t have been otherwise.

Now it looks as if no lessons have been learned in the past decade. I’m old enough to remember the endless propaganda during the Vietnam War about the necessity to “save” South Vietnam – from whom? From themselves, it turned out!

Those of us who felt the United States should simply get out were derided as “defeatists” and “simpletons” who “didn’t understand” the intricacies of international politics, and so on. More than 58,000 American (and millions of Vietnamese) deaths later, it turns out we were right.

The U.S. is again “saving” people who don’t want to be saved. For some reason, it has become paramount, for the “best and the brightest” in Washington, to try to hold together an artificial state created by the British after the First World War, incorporating three groups who clearly have little use for each other – and never have. (Read a history book to see if I’m right.)

Do they really plan to use air power against the Sunnis on behalf of a puppet Shi’ite regime in Baghdad that is beholden to Iran, the most dangerous state in the region? Is America about to become Tehran’s air force?

Let us assume the Sunnis in central Iraq regain control of that part of the country, while the Kurds hold the north, and a rump Shi’ite state emerges in the south. So what? There are already numerous states in the Middle East, why would a few more matter? After a few years, no one will remember this was once a so-called country.

Partition is the worst possible outcome – save for all the others! Or do you think Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis would have been better off in a united India, or Arabs and Jews in one-state Palestine? Would you like to put the Yugoslav and Soviet empires back together? Actually, all these peoples would be at each others’ throats.

Good fences may not always make good neighbours; sure, there are still problems between these now separate countries – but having no fences would be even worse.