What To Do About Iraq

The dream team would have been Peter Galbraith and the Irish scholar of nationalism and human rights Brendan O'Leary, who has repeatedly made the most compelling case for keeping Iraq a single federated state. (For the best compendium on the question of Kurdistan, you might check out the book co-edited by O'Leary, which featured two of Galbraith's dispatches on the subject for the New York Review of Books: The Future of Iraqi Kurdistan.) But Reuel Marc Gerecht, a former CIA analyst and a gifted neoconservative critic of U.S. foreign policy, will do, too.

To partition or not to partition Iraq is one of the most urgent and necessary debates going on in Washington right now, and kudos to The New Republic for giving a forum to these able exponents of either side. Here's Galbraith:

artition is a fact. Do you know of some realistic way to put Iraq back together again? In order to unify Iraq, the United States would have to undertake two military missions that it is not doing. First, U.S. troops would have to disband the Shia militias that have allowed the creation of Shia theocracies throughout southern Iraq and in the Shia parts of Baghdad. Second, they would have to become the peacekeepers in Iraq's Sunni-Shia civil war. Both tasks would require many more troops than the Bush administration is prepared to commit, and, even then, the United States might not succeed.

Here's Gerecht:

The forced and voluntary migration of thousands of Sunnis and Shia from mixed neighborhoods into more homogenous zones hasn't really changed the vast overlap on the ground in the central region of Iraq, where Sunnis and Shia remain in a mélange. Sectarian strife is constantly growing, in part because Sunnis and Shia can still easily strike each other. Baghdad remains at the center of the Iraqi Arab mind, for both Sunnis and Shia (they each see it as their city), and there is no way in hell you are going to divide that town. If you think Moqtada Al Sadr is a problem now, just wait until the United States tries to force the partition of Baghdad, and Iraq, into Sunni and Shia zones. Among other things, Sadr is a rampaging nationalist–hence his constant mocking of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani and many of the moderate Najaf-based clerics around him for their Iranian ancestry. Killing Sunnis and defending the Iraqi Arab nation from infidel invaders have become the rallying cries for Sadr's Mahdi Army and its numerous, even more undisciplined cohorts. Are you suggesting, Peter, that the U.S. Army deploy its troops with the explicit mission of separating the Arab Sunni and Shia communities and devote its firepower and training programs to ensuring that Sunnis and Shia have competing militaries? Led by Donald Rumsfeld and General John Abizaid, the U.S. Army in Iraq can't even make a dent in the Sunni insurgency, and now you are going to add to their mission by taking on much of the Shia community, which has no sympathy whatsoever for the type of rigid separation you envision?

Hate to get all Instapundity on your ass, but read the whole thing.