Only after Iraqi leaders made strenuous objections did the U.S. Embassy in Iraq take issue with an amazing and incomprehensible U.S. Senate resolution that seems to propose some sort of ethnic partitioning of Iraq.
Two of the most sinister suspicions aroused by the Bush Administration’s decision to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam in 2003 were (1) that it’s only about control over Iraq’s oil and (2) that this is also intended to carve up Iraq into three parts (that were only artificially joined together by British administration after World War I) — the Kurdish north, the Shi’a south, and the rest.
(The third most sinister suspicion was that another main aim was to get rid of Saddam, who — having for a time been a main beneficiary — knew too many secrets about Western companies and their government’s shenanigans in the region.)
The U.S. post-invasion policy of “affirmative action” favoring the Shi’a and Kurdish regions has probably inadvertently been in large part responsible for the ethnic bloodletting that it was apparently intended to avoid.
The current revival of partionist policies in the Middle East (in Iraq and in Palestine) is a most unhappy and unwise development. The results achieved from such policies in the aftermath of the Second World War do not, by and large, recommend these awful human experiments. The U.S. policy in the break-up of the Former Yugoslavia, following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the break-up of the Soviet Union, was in favor of “multi-ethnic democracies” and against ethnic cleansing. What has happened since that should recommend such sinister policies? Was it just all too much? Does being exhausted and over-burdened as a sole superpower mean that more people should suffer more tragedy?
Now, Walls are becoming fashionable in many regions…
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