Fisk: Mr Bush has one priority for 2004: Get America out of Iraq. Fast.

[reprehensor]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/print.php?sid=14388

Ever since Daniel Pipes -- he of the failed American neocons -- piped up last summer with his plan to install a "democratic-minded autocrat" (sic) in Iraq, I have been eying the Washington crystal ball for further signs of what the designers of this wretched war have in store for the Iraqis whom they "liberated" for "democracy" last year. And bingo, not long before Christmas, another of those chilling proposals for "New Iraq" popped up from the same right-wing cabal. Any predictions for Iraq this year may thus have to be based on the thoughts of Leslie Gelb, a former chairman of the United States Council on Foreign Relations, whose wretched plans for "liberated" Iraq call for something close to ethnic cleansing.

In no less an organ than The New York Times -- the same paper which carried a plea last year that Americans should accept that US troops will commit "atrocities" in Iraq -- appeared Gelb's "Three State Solution", an astonishing combination of simplicity and ruthlessness. It goes like this: America should create three ministates in Iraq -- Kurds in the north, Sunnis in the center and Shiites in the south -- the frontiers of these three entities drawn along ethnic, sectarian lines. The "general idea," says Gelb, "is to strengthen the Kurds and Shiites and weaken the Sunnis." Thus US forces can extricate themselves from the quagmire of the "Sunni triangle" while the "troublesome and domineering" Sunnis themselves -- with no control over Iraq's northern or southern oil fields -- will be in a more moderate frame of mind.

True, the chopping up of Iraq might be "a messy and dangerous enterprise" -- tens of thousands of Iraqis, after all, would be thrown out of their homes and pushed across new frontiers -- but Washington should, if necessary, impose partition by force. This is the essence of the Gelb plan.

Bosnia comes to mind. Or Kosovo. But if it gets us out of Iraq, who's going to complain when we -- the famous "coalition of the willing" -- push those recalcitrant, ungrateful Iraqis into the same kind of "divide and rule" colonial world for which the Americans always used to excoriate the British.

[Kolesar]

1. "Two states" worked well for Pakistan and India, did it not?

Look at how well they have been getting along since 1946 (note: mega-sarcasm)

[ugarte]

2. We have concentration camps already

Instead of lots of smaller ones we'll just make the Sunni area one big Polish ghetto. Starve 'em till they're nice, win collaborators.

It worked for the Nazis.

[wryter2000]

3. Ye gods

What planet do these "people" come from? Can't they recognize human beings when they look them in the face? Aren't Iraqi women and children women and children? Is the whole region populated by sausage meat to these neo-cons?

I've never seen a more disgusting group of individuals in my entire life. How in hell did the land of Jefferson, Franklin, and Lincoln produce these monsters?

[HawkerHurricane]

4. HH has one priority for 2004: Get Bush out of the White House. Fast.

Who's with me!