How Large a Crater Will We Leave? (Iraq powder keg)

[Starfury]

This is a good but depressing article describing the possibilities of civil war in Iraq. It's from a libertarian perspective, but it's worth reading anyway. :)

July 19, 2005
How Large a Crater Will We Leave?
by Scott Horton

(...)

Kirkuk, the capital of Kurdistan, is, according to Cole, "a tinderbox" ready to explode into violence. A traditionally Kurdish city, Kirkuk was the subject of a massive social engineering project by Saddam Hussein, who resettled thousands of Sunni and Shia Arabs there in the 1970s and '80s to dilute the influence of the sometimes loyal, sometimes treacherous Kurdish factions lead by Massoud Barzani and Jalal Talabani, the warlords who are now the president of Kurdistan and president of Iraq respectively.

Now that the U.S. has come and the Kurdistan-for-Kurds types have consolidated their power, ethnic cleansing has begun. Cole says tens of thousands of Arabs have already fled south, and there are an incredible number of property disputes being fought over right now. The Turkmen in Kurdistan have their own problems. Kirkuk is a very valuable oil center <.pdf>, and the distribution of oil money could be a major point of contention in the future. Were Kurdistan to break away completely, the possibility of further violence as Kurdish populations in Syria, Turkey, and Iran try to join them would be tremendous. Perhaps Ahmed Chalabi will be able to work everything out. For some reason, I doubt it. What these folks need is a belief in the individual and his inalienable right to property. Unfortunately, violence tends to reinforce a collectivist, us/them outlook, which only leads to more violence. Bush's "global democratic revolution" has somehow failed to take hold.

(...)

Down south where the Shia live, Grand Ayatollah al-Sistani is just biding his time. The minority Sunni have no foreign power to back their tyranny any more. The majority Shia, who hold the power in the constitution-drafting process, are just waiting for us to leave. The level of violence to come in this situation is hard to predict, depending mostly on the degree of control over the Sunni the Shia attempt to exercise using the new government. The Shia have proposed that their Badr Brigades, and the Kurds that their peshmerga militias, should be used against the Sunni insurgents since the American and Iraqi armies haven't succeeded. The idea has so far been overruled by the U.S., but if the Badr Brigades and the peshmerga are unleashed before or after we leave, the Sunni resistance will be destroyed, along with a lot of innocent people.

According to Cole, if the U.S. leaves now, and an all-out civil war begins, the chances of intervention by neighboring states on behalf of those of their same ethnicity and religion will increase, threatening a catastrophic regional war that could destroy the world oil market. Unfortunately, our time on the radio was up before we had a chance to discuss his proposal for internationalizing the occupation rather than plainly and immediately withdrawing, which I favor, so I will not address that particular point here.

(...)

http://www.antiwar.com/orig/horton.php?articleid=6696

[wli]

1. an enormous one

Hulagu Khan will not be remembered with anything like the kind of dread and apprehension that we will.

Hulagu Khan was competent. He had a goal of transfixing the Ilkhanate, and achieved it with calculating exactitude. Bush was utterly incompetent. The best he could come up with was napalm and depleted uranium.

Hulagu Khan had the mercy to execute his prisoners outright. Bush could think of no better than to unleash the most degenerate of all possible war criminals on the innocents and attempt to sodomize and murder the innocent into submission, which of course failed on scales so unfathomable there is no hope of anything like a recovery before the extinction of all life on Earth. This alone transformed the moderate but understanding and tolerant Iraqi into the ultimate zealotry-inspired rebel against military occupation (and furthermore righteously so)..

In short, Bush is Hitler, and there is no offense a modern-day Iraqi could commit that would be so grave as the atrocities Bush himself commanded.

[Demeter]

2. About 100 Years Deep

Light years, maybe.